BILL MOYERS' JOURNAL: A CONVERSATION WITH JAMES DICKEY (TV)
Summary
One in this series of programs on people and issues in the political and cultural forefront. In this program, host Bill Moyers talks with poet and novelist James Dickey. Sitting on a dock over a small river near his home in Columbia, S.C., Dickey expounds on a variety of topics, including the following: the demise of narrative poetry; the themes of passion, camaraderie, and violence in his verse; the influences on his beliefs and values, including his stint as a fire-bomber during World War II; his novel "Deliverance," which was adapted into a popular movie; premonitions of his own death -- he would prefer to die at the claw of a grizzly bear; his desire for a simple funeral on the riverbank; the powerful and tender sentiments of such contemporaries as Norman Mailer, Hart Crane, and James Agee; the existential propositions pondered in the works of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre; notions of fate and history as they imprint and channel one's personality; the lures of suburban life; the rich legacy of Southern cooking; the fertile musical forms indigenous to the region; the mythology of the South and the contradiction between its tradition of civility and "that skeleton in the closet," slavery. Dickey concludes the program by reading a poem by Robert Penn Warren.
Details
- NETWORK: PBS
- DATE: January 25, 1976 8:00 PM
- RUNNING TIME: 0:58:48
- COLOR/B&W: Color
- CATALOG ID: T:27881
- GENRE: Talk/Interviews
- SUBJECT HEADING: Authors; Poetry; Southern States
- SERIES RUN: PBS - TV series, 1972-1976, 1979-1981
- COMMERCIALS: N/A
CREDITS
- Charles Rose … Producer
- Betsey McCarthy … Coordinating Producer
- Joe Merdin … Director
- Bill Moyers … Interviewer
- James Dickey … Guest
- James Agee
- Albert Camus
- Hart Crane
- Norman Mailer
- Jean-Paul Sartre
- Robert Penn Warren