âWhatâs amazing about having a twin brother is that if you canât do something, he will,â said poet Michael Dickman to the crowd at Benaroya Hall last night. Michael began a poem called âCanopic Jarsâ years ago, and his brother, Matthew, not only finished the poem, but published it in his forthcoming Mayakovsky's Revolver, and dedicated the poem to Michael at last nightâs reading. âThis whole book is like the first one [I wrote],â Matthew said later on, after a reading a piece about a dead sibling. âItâs all, like, super âup.ââ In an untucked shirt and open jacket, Matthew looks just like his poetry sounds: casual and free. Lines stream together like spoken word, packed with imagery and lacking in punctuation. His poems are full of drugs, death, gravestones, whiskey. Matthew writes about experiences that are not â not known, not existing, not tangible. He couldnât be more different from his brother.

The brothers do share an infectious sense of humor and a new book of poems called 50 American Plays, their first collaborative work. The collection contains âfull-lengthâ plays about each state in the US (plus one each for Guam and Puerto Rico). Each play ranges from a few lines to a page and are full of ridiculous characters â llamas, mountains, cockroaches. The stage directions, which Matthew deemed âimpossible and aloof,â are characters unto themselves. The twins called two volunteers up on stage to help read several plays. The four performed nonsense scenes taking place in the fields of Idaho and the bathtubs of Hawaii. In between pieces, the brothers grinned and joked about how none of it made any sense.