The Freedom to Strike without Warning

Close Encounters

By David Havird

“‘Can you see me?’ he asked before opening the book, holding it up for me to study; and sure enough, there he was amid the variously green-tinted kudzu on the cover—a ghostly headshot of him beneath a superimposed photograph of leafy vines, grinning with long front teeth, and ‘Kudzu’ became for me right then an iconic Dickey poem. A spectral image, yes—as if, as I now see it, the poet’s ‘own green, mindless, unkillable ghost’ has become incarnate and, by ‘smothering’ him, rendered him incorporeal.”—David Havird

SHREVEPORT Louisiana—(Hubris)—March/April 2026—“Japan invades,” the poem begins. The line continues with a new sentence, which itself begins, “Far Eastern vines,” thereby sandwiching “Japan invades” between the poem’s title, “Kudzu,” and a phrase that not only defines the proper noun but also clarifies the nature of the invasion. But given that the poet, James Dickey, saw action in the Pacific during World War Two, your first thought, which a close reading will mostly verify, is likely to be that here’s a poem from the perspective, maybe, of a young GI (in Dickey’s 1964 collection Helmets—a suggestive title, that) about the war against Japan—that the provocative, two-word declarative sentence at the very beginning isn’t merely a figurative way of describing the proliferation in the poet’s native Georgia, indeed throughout the rural South, of a vine that is native to Japan and boasts a “tremendously fecundating root system.”

That phrase about the root system belongs to Dickey, though not to the poem. In a 1977 16-minute Academy Award-nominated documentary by Marjie Short, a Japanese botanist has just informed us that kudzu “was first brought into the United States” in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, and now Dickey is explaining the “idea . . . on the part of government people” behind its rapid, programmatic introduction (during the Great Depression, as a retired representative of the Soil Conservation Service subsequently points out) to the rural South. The thought was that this “self-proliferating plant from Japan,” when planted alongside highways and railroads, would keep the cut banks from eroding, the region’s soil being “extremely sandy.” In the poem, however, whose opening lines we’ve already heard in a voiceover of Dickey, those “Far Eastern vines/Run from the clay banks they are//Supposed to keep from eroding.” Clayey or sandy the soil, no matter: “Kudzu,” Dickey’s incredulous voice affirms, “now covers the entire South,” while green dots on a crudely drawn map, in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, spread across the region.

About that film, which is both informative and, more often than not, tongue-in-cheek funny, I should say in passing that whether or not it casts light on Dickey’s poem, it’s an interesting cultural artifact, featuring as it does Jimmy Carter (not to mention Martha Jane Stewart Wilson, who was, during the 1930s, Hale County, Alabama’s “queen of this beautiful kudzu”) as well as Dickey. I observe also in passing that in this film, the man himself looks exactly as I remember him from my student years, 1971-1976, at the University of South Carolina, hair brown, though graying at his temples, halfway down his ears and thick in back, curling under to wrap an earlobe, the ludicrous comb-over starting right above his right ear—exactly, except for the off-white (or is it pale blue) guayabera shirt, as I’ve discovered is the proper name for a style of shirt that I’d hear referred to smilingly, which is to say condescendingly, as a “barber shirt.”

“Kudzu” (1977) Academy Award Nominated Short Film.

The first assignment in the second of Dickey’s two-semester graduate seminar in “verse composition” was to write three things in prose: accounts of an actual dream and a daydream fantasy and a free association set in a physical locale—the aim of which was to free our imaginations from rational constraints. These, such as elements of formal versification, the subject of the fall semester’s seminar, would come later, as the semester-long process of revision unfolded. 

Reminiscent of Ted Hughes’s famous poem “The Thought-Fox,” in his first book, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), Dickey’s poem “A Dog Sleeping on My Feet,” in his 1962 collection Drowning with Others, implies just such a process. The poet is writing late at night in his notebook when he becomes aware that his feet have gone to sleep beneath the sleeping dog—as good as died into the dream that the dog is having of chasing a fox—a sensation that prompts him to “turn the page/Of the notebook, carefully not//Remembering what I have written,” the dog’s dream having become the subject of the poem that now begins “to move/Up through my pine-prickling legs . . . Taking hold of the pen by my fingers.” For a while his hand “speaks in a daze/The hypnotized language of beasts”; the dog, however, will wake up and he, himself, will go to sleep and there, in bed, “Assembl[e] the self I must wake to,/Sleeping to grow back my legs,” becoming, in other words, a translator “into the human tongue” of the “hypnotized language of beasts,” a maker, however inspired, of verses. Fine poem, this.

It sometimes puzzled me, given Dickey’s pedagogical emphasis on dreams, how few of his poems frankly embraced the dreamlife. “Kudzu” is one of these. But how many of his poems, being nocturnal, as I came to see, relate analogous states and, complementarily, pattern themselves after the archetypal journey of Joseph Campbell’s “hero”: “a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return”—a subject, this would have to be, for a far longer essay than this one. Incidentally, that quotation from Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces appears as the epigraph to “The Strength of Fields,” where, as Ward Briggs notes in his edition of The Complete Poems of James Dickey, Dickey misattributes it. 

Early in the film, as I’ve already observed in passing, a minute and a half in, to be precise, we hear Dickey in voiceover reading the poem’s first eight lines:

Japan invades. Far Eastern vines
Run from the clay banks they are

Supposed to keep from eroding,
Up telephone poles,
Which rear, half out of leafage,
As though they would shriek,
Like things smothered by their own
Green, mindless, unkillable ghosts.

Not only do these lines introduce the dominant metaphor, while also defining the proper noun that is the poem’s title and both identifying and dramatizing that kudzu’s practical purpose: an invasion by Japan as represented by the proliferation of kudzu, vines native to East Asia whose official purpose is to prevent erosion—they also convey the speaker’s stance by revealing a psyche scarily haunted by Japanese imperialism, or so I infer from the terrified look of those telephone poles and the disturbing figurative depiction of the coiling vines as their “own ghosts.” 

“Far Eastern” also places the speaker. A colonial, Eurocentric designation, it had begun to lose academic favor by the end of World War Two. “Oriental,” which some lines later describes the portentous silence after nightfall once the kudzu “has/Your pasture,” becomes offensive as an “othering” designation many years after the poem’s composition in 1962. As used in Dickey’s poem, the word reflects a cultural stereotype of modern-day Japanese soldiers as ninja-like embodiments of an almost supernatural stealth, which empowers them with “the freedom to strike without warning,” a freedom that is liable to arrogant misuse. Whatever Dickey’s own racial attitudes may have been (as regards the Japanese), the speaker’s use of those race-specific designations throws into relief, by highlighting the foreignness of the invader, the discovery by the occidental “you” of his innate capacity to exploit the freedom that also comes with “the huge circumstance of concealment” as afforded by the kudzu—a discovery at which he marvels. 

You’ll have already observed, by the way, that the poet is writing here in the second person. The speaker, whom I do not presume to identify as Dickey, is in effect addressing himself. He is also addressing a plural “you,” you and me, however different we may be from the poem’s singular “you,” a white farmer, after all, in the American South who is haunted, as I’ve said, by threatening memories of imperial Japan. The disconcerting effect of this rhetorical strategy is to implicate us in the central, moral drama, which occurs while “you sleep like the dead” and dream and thus is psychological. In general, my use of “you” in this essay, when paraphrasing the poem and summarizing, reflects Dickey’s.

That discovery of your capacity to exploit that freedom dawns, as I’ve just implied, at night. “In Georgia,” the poem continues after those eight lines of efficient exposition, “the legend says/That you must close your windows//At night to keep it out of the house”—the kudzu, that is. “The glass is tinged with green, even so,” the poet observes with wry humor, while describing the tendrils’ seizure of your pasture, which occurs when you’re asleep. We hear in a voiceover those lines as read by Dickey. He does not, however, read the lines that follow, lines describing a dreamscape in which “Your leg plunges somewhere/It should not, it never should be,/Disappears, and waits to be struck” by some snake or other, whose body you cannot distinguish from a vine nor head from leaf, while your “cows stumble in,/Drooling a hot green froth,/And die, seeing the wood of their stalls//Strain to break into leaf.”

In the film a woman, explaining its attraction for “kids,” describes kudzu as a “haven for green snakes,” while a man, speaking with the cautious elderly in mind, complains that it “harbors snakes.” “Snakes love kudzu,” Dickey declares. “Sometimes you can hear them out there at night,” he reflects in a rapturous tone, gazing heavenward, “singing the praises of kudzu. It’s kind of a strange”—he mumbles, fumbling for words—“singing,” he says, “in a minor key,” gesturing as if to illustrate a change from major to minor, “rather like Elizabethan music.” Setting aside the threat felt by the aged, the kudzu’s benign green snakes and that cartoon-like kudzu-worshipping choir of vipers throw into relief the fable-like quality of the poem’s exploration of that Georgia “legend”: the humorously grotesque, while nonetheless scary, depiction of the snakes as the embodiment of godlike caprice and lightning-like lethality and the similarly amusing description of the deployment of hogs, “Head down in their hairy fat,” against them. 

In the poem, as not so much in the film, it’s important to root them out. Come dawn, “with the vine//Tapping your window like lightning,/You remember what tactics to use” against the snakes, whose sneak attacks make them rather more lightning-like than are the intrusive vines, and those tactics require “meaty troops” for their execution: hogs. As someone who came of age during the Vietnam War, I’ve wanted to relate these hogs to “grunts,” a term for foot soldiers, which I expected to have originated during World War Two. Perhaps it did, the Internet informs me, as an acronym for General Replacement Unit, Not Trained. Regardless, the term gained currency during the Vietnam War—in the late 1960s in fact, while “Kudzu” dates from earlier in the decade. Nonetheless, foot soldiers these hogs are (as you are not and, more crucially, weren’t when, during the night, the kudzu occupied your pasture and snakes wove themselves “Among its lengthening vines”), and with that infantry you win against the snakes, if not the kudzu.

Where it’s concerned, as lines heard in Dickey’s voiceover in the film explain, you “wait for frost”: 

When, at the merest touch
Of cold, the kudzu turns
Black, withers inward and dies,
Leaving a mass of brown strings
Like the wires of a gigantic switchboard.

With that simile likening the leafless kudzu to a telephone switchboard (a now obsolete piece of equipment, which for us baby boomers Lily Tomlin as telephone operator Ernestine is forever manipulating), the poem completes its circle, recalling as it does the telephone poles entwined by green-leafed vines at the beginning—the 20-odd lines that follow composing an epilogue of sorts.

This epilogue relates the effect of the kudzu’s occupation of your land on you when seemingly sound asleep. First, “the vines, growing insanely, sent/Great powers into their bodies,” the bodies, that is, of the snakes, and then “From them,” those snakes, “such energy also flowed//To you”:

It was as though you had
A green sword twined among
The veins of your growing right arm—

I am just home after two weeks in Italy where a statue of Asclepius (Aesculapius), the god of medicine, at the Borghese Gallery in Rome, brought those lines to mind. While a snake is not entwining the arm of Asclepius, it does entwine a club, as if it’s climbed from underground, its head just below the god’s right thumb, which steadies the club upright against the forearm—a club, by the way, that does look more like a weapon, thick as his arm, than any staff. (I take that word “club” for the Italian bastone from the English version of the Borghese’s online description of this second-century statue.) 

I suspect, however, that Dickey has in mind not the snake-entwined rod of Asclepius but rather the winged caduceus with its two entwining snakes, which Hermes (Mercury) carries in his left hand. A symbol, as the Internet informs me, of commerce, still it’s been the US Army Medical Corps’ insignia since 1902. A representation of your ever-growing, seemingly superhuman martial prowess, Dickey’s image, which swaps the winged staff for a viper-like sword (resembling, maybe, the Pacific islands’ green pit vipers), the twining snakes for vine-like veins, perverts by weaponizing that putative symbol of the art of healing. 

Several lines earlier, the poet condemns “the mistaken, mortal/Arrogance of the snakes,” thereby indicting you for your hubris as well—you who have marveled at and apparently relished the physical might that derived from the presence of those snakes and the “freedom,” thanks to the “concealment” afforded by the dark of night as well as the vines, “to strike without warning.” That freedom properly belongs to lightning as the poet’s later observation discloses: the figurative rooting out of the snakes by the hogs together with the apparent death by cold of the kudzu has “restored” the lightning “to the sky.” By implication your arm has returned to its normal size and weakened. That sky is at once the sky itself, from which may come surprise attacks (as on Pearl Harbor and later Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention in the meantime the Japanese ground and air targets of night fighters such as Dickey’s Black Widow), and a metonym for God. For until then, as that reference to lightning implies, you took as your own the “terrible swift sword” whose “fateful lightning” God “hath loosed” in “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”; or better, you arrogantly saw yourself as having “an arm like God,” as Job’s interlocutor puts it: “Hast thou an arm like God?” the Lord scornfully asks, “or canst thou thunder with a voice like him”—that almighty arm being the lightning, whose slash or stab precedes the boom.

The first part of the Lord’s question to Job (40:9) serves as the second of the two epigraphs to “The Firebombing,” which introduces Dickey’s next collection (after Helmets), Buckdancer’s Choice (1965), a poem that explores with empathy, at some length, the struggling psyche of a suburban husband and father who 20 years earlier, during World War Two, piloted a night fighter in the Pacific Theater of Operations. As Dickey, who was himself a navigator, explains in a 1973 interview, the “danger facing pilots” like the one in “The Firebombing,” who is, in the words of the poem, “fulfilling//An ‘anti-morale’ raid” on civilians, is not a sadistic “love” of “burn[ing] up children” but rather “the feeling of power it gives them to do these things and not be held accountable for the carnage and the terror and bloodshed and mutilation. To not even see it,” but instead, again in the words of the poem, to “sail artistically over” town and farms while “Flinging jelly” (napalm, the “apotheosis of gelatin”) “As in a chemical war-/fare field demonstration”—the godlike power to do which is “evil.” 

It was, by the way, Dickey’s depiction of this pilot as an artist of sorts, whose medium is chemical weaponry, that Robert Bly in his 1967 takedown of Dickey judged to be morally reprehensible. Interestingly, the aesthetic dimension of the remembered experience, its “picturesque” quality, to use Bly’s word, parallels an observation by the Welshman David Jones in his introduction to In Parenthesis, his account of trench warfare during World War One: “It is not easy in considering a trench-mortar barrage to give praise for the action proper to chemicals—full though it may be of beauty.” Jones would likely have recognized the courageousness of Dickey’s stance. 

While that erstwhile pilot contemplates, as if aloud, in his pantry what all he did with “The greatest sense of power in one’s life,” exactly what you’ve done in “Kudzu” with your unbelievable strength and freedom while asleep is withheld by the poet. Whatever it may be, it was, as you implicitly acknowledge with wonderment, an act or a series of acts of “mistaken, mortal arrogance,” hubris, done under cover not only of darkness, which is psychologically the “cauldron” of the id, but also war (as if again against Japan), which freed you “to strike without warning.” Allegorically, the cover of war is what the kudzu represents. 

At the end of the poem, with the once “knee-high meadow” become again “a proper/Shaved field,” thanks to a bush hog as well as the cold, you “think, in the opened cold,/Of the surface of things and its terrors,” that hot war, which you fought, having been succeeded by the Cold War. Until then, as the last line pounds home, the “energy” that “flowed” to you (through closed windows and sound sleep) from the snakes, whose own “Great powers” stemmed from the kudzu—that energy, arming you as if with a snakelike sword, “prospered, till rooted out” by the hogs. (Perhaps that portentous phrase “great powers” hints at the poem’s geopolitical implications.) 

However, neither the cold nor the bush hog (whose rotary cutters shave) has uprooted the kudzu. A perennial, it merely looks dead. As the kudzu appears at the beginning of the poem to have burgeoned from within the telephone poles, which look to be enwound by their own “ghosts,” so does “the wood of their stalls” appear to the snake-bit, dying cows to “Strain to break into leaf.” There is in natural things, these lines imply, an untamable urge, as made abundantly manifest by kudzu, to fructify, however changed their look and function have been by human hands. Similarly, kudzu endures, much as the amoral id endures—creatively libidinous or destructively so—however moral your life appears when you’re awake and the winter sun is watching.

Less than a minute into that film, a little boy says of kudzu, “it’s fun to play hide ’n’ go seek in”—an assertion that recalled for me a moment with Dickey sometime in spring 1975. I had gone to New York right after Christmas and while there bought, at Strand Book Store, a hardback copy of his Poems 1957-1967, which I subsequently asked him to sign. “Can you see me?” he asked before opening the book, holding it up for me to study; and sure enough, there he was amid the variously green-tinted kudzu on the cover—a ghostly headshot of him beneath a superimposed photograph of leafy vines, grinning with long front teeth, and “Kudzu” became for me right then an iconic Dickey poem. A spectral image, yes—as if, as I now see it, the poet’s “own green, mindless, unkillable ghost” has become incarnate and, by “smothering” him, rendered him incorporeal. (Right after the boy talks of playing hide and seek, Dickey laughingly describes kudzu as a “vegetal form of cancer.” It also occurs to me that the superimposition depicts a sort of exophytic manifestation of a morbid psyche.) 

That grin, however, reveals that he’s already plotted his deliverance, much as his persona in a somewhat later poem, the telephone lineman in “Power and Light” (in the “Falling” section of Poems 1957-1967), plots his resurrection. At the tail end of every day, this lineman (whom Dickey apparently modeled after his sister’s husband) climbs down as if from poles to home and into the basement where, “among the roots/That bend like branches[,] all things connect and stream/Toward light and speech” and he recharges himself (by “drink[ing] like a man//The night before//Resurrection Day”) so that when it is “time to rise / And shine” and up he climbs, he’s as good as “holding a double handful of wire // Spitting like sparklers.” Thus he enacts exactly the archetypal journey, as described earlier in this essay, of Joseph Campbell’s hero. 

This has also been the plot for you in “Kudzu” with its telephone poles (in need of a lineman to cut away the vines) and switchboard: the speaker’s nocturnal, oneiric return to the scene, as evoked by the proliferation of an invasive Asian vine in his section of the South, a jungle whose psychological equivalent is Freud’s “cauldron full of seething excitations,” of his attainment, in early manhood in combat against Japan, of his utmost, so far as he knows (there being no occasion since his discharge to test it), in bodily strength and mental endurance—a troublingly empowering dream that steels him for such proper, mundane work as bush hogging pastureland for farming, which finds a metaphor in revising text, itself the godlike work of creation: letting there be light where there were chaos and darkness.