Roger Dickinson-Brown

Who is Roger Dickinson-Brown?

Roger Dickinson-Brown is an American poet, author and teacher, born in 1944, who writes in English and French. After studying under Yvor Winters at Stanford University, he published and broadcast poems, criticism and reviews in the 1970s, and now lives in France.

In 1976, Robert Hayden, Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, wrote that Dickinson-Brown "is a gifted poet who has begun to attract favorable attention," and that "he has distinguished himself as a teacher of creative writing and modern poetry." The entire book-length series Jonathan: A Death Miscellany was broadcast over WONO-FM in April 1976. During that broadcast Dickinson-Brown argued that most poets write too much, and indicated that he wished to leave only a small number of poems at his death. At about the same time, he stopped publishing his work in literary reviews and journals, and more or less entirely withdrew from conventional publication.

Dickinson-Brown, who abandoned university tenure and speaks of former academic colleagues as devotees of an obscurantist cult, has adapted his own writing to clear commentary on an “unpoetically” wide range of subjects. Here, for example, is his epitaph for the great economist Angus Maddison, 1926-2010: