Paul Dickey (born 1948 in Hardtner, KS) is an American poet, author, philosophy instructor, and playwright who has published multiple books of poetry [1][2] and a full-length play, The Good News According to St. Dude, that analyzes and dramatizes the disillusion of the 1960s youth counter-culture.
[8][9] Michel Delville, the author of a major critical work on prose poetry, The American Prose Poem: Poetic Form and the Boundaries of Genre (University Press of Florida, 1998), said of Dickey: "Whether it’s a poem about (or around) Mark Rothko’s painting Yellow Band or a prose poem about 'Mowing the Lawn' that pauses with Husserl’s phenomenology, Dickey’s poetry is grounded in a recognition that, to quote Sherwood Anderson, 'each truth [is] a composite of a great many vague thoughts,' all equally beautiful and disturbing, somber and happy."
[10] Prose poet Nin Andrews (author of twelve poetry collections) writes of Dickey's They Say This Is How Death Came into the World that it is "seductively inventive, charmingly clever and seriously witty.
In the 1970s, while a graduate student at Wichita State University,[11] he published poetry in The Kansas Quarterly, Quartet, and Nimrod.
At Wichita State, he was a student of the American-Filipino poet, novelist, and short story author Bienvenido Santos.