“Purpose in our dervished days”:
Bob Hicok and the Art of CollageReading a selection of Bob Hicok’s poems is to grip your hands next to his on the slippery hemp rope of an epistemological tug of war. You may not know it, dear reader, but you’re in for a ride. Because he’s yanking, you yank too, hoping to pull the yellow flag of the known through the muddy waters of unknowing onto your side, our side, the here and now of us wrestled free of the never. This work, his and ours together, issues from the beneficent chaos of Hicok’s poetry, say, this characteristically supple mélange from the poem “E nough” linking The Lawrence Welk Show, the circus’s bearded lady “giving herself a trim,” and a dying father’s heaven envisioned as a “laundromat where all the dyers work.” His poems pull the world in, and tug us into it as well – kinetic, wide-armed, and embracing the variousness of the lovely mess known as you and me.
It's worth noting that “poiêsis” in the Greek means “making,” and in the Renaissance “poesie” served as an exact equivalent for “makers.” In this regard it’s also worth asking what’s being made and how? As redemptive as it is quirky, as comforting as it is unsettling, Hicok’s poetry often thrives on the associational. There’s a “mind” in there, as the speaker of “Forecast” says, “seeking the unity it craves” by enacting associatory leaps. These are not fraught vaults from tangible reality into an ethereal Jungian unconscious, not the mode of “leaping poetry” Robert Bly both identified and exalted in the work of Neruda, Lorca and others in the early 1970s. Instead, these jumps take off from palpable things like the humble snow globe and nose-dive into what’s embedded in the idea of that thing burdened with all its thorny personal and cultural implications. What’s sought is a dollop of immanent knowledge, a revelation occasioned by riffing the trinity of intelligence and imagination and thing, this riffing itself a mode of poetic ultrasound.
The best collage art is simultaneously seamless and disruptive. One real allure of collage, then, is this: That what would at first reading appear to be mere surface is something deeper indeed, the way a human arm appears stolid until an ultrasound unveils hidden arteries connecting what pulses unseen (but felt) within us. Collage may also reveal – but often less to our liking – what’s broken or missing inside us, those interstices and absences as much a part of life as what’s actually there.
That Hicok muses on the “futility of figurative language” suggests he also values alternative means to reach ecstatic knowledge. His fondness for the art of the joke, for instance, is rooted both in the redemptiveness of humor and in its revelatory surprise. The purposeful word-play misdirection of a joke underscores there’s artifice going on, there’s cobbling underway – and it enlists readers as nimble participants in that making. How else regard the way the speaker sets us up at the start of “Literature,” the punch line delivered with the keen timing of a standup comedian? Turns out, the word the speaker has trouble spelling is “snowman” not “abominable,” wink wink – a gag I just accidentally doubled by mistyping “abominabal.” The larger joke, I’d wager, is the knowledge that even via vaunted “[l]iterature” we’ll likely try but never get to the it of it, never secure that “unity the mind craves” sprawled knowingly before us as a field blanketed with unbroken snow.
Hugo Von Hofsthanmal describes the noblest poet as one who ventures through life as if his “eyes had no lids,” his gaze wide open and attentive. This notion fairly represents Hicok: The one who’s always looking, hankering to see, hoping to see seeing itself – unwilling to blink at the horrors and unable to turn away from our magnificent human carnival.
Kevin Stein
Literature
Abominable snowman was the answer to seven across.
I have trouble spelling that word:
snowman. The theme of the puzzle
was cryptids, animals people think exist
though they’ve never been found,
such as the wise man. I rewatched Little Women –
the Gerwig version – this weekend and cried
a little several times. When the sister died,
but also when Jo kept the copyright for the book
that became the movie I was watching about the book.
That was wise. Has anyone ever thought of planting wisdom
like that where the sun will find it and make it grow
into a village with a shop that sells only whispers
to put in the ears of children while they sleep
to help them remember their dreams as the best friends
they will ever have? Twelve across: Loch Ness Monster.
Nessie, some say, as if they’re pals with our fear
that we’re alone. How much of the stupid shit we do
is born of loneliness? Science says “a ton.”
Thank you, science. Thank you, Jo. Thank you,
Louisa May Alcott, for all the love.
The book of life is better than the movie version.
Harder too. And the poem of life isn’t this one
but is out there waiting to be found.
Forecast
Can you imagine a hurricane globe, drought globe,
climate change globe, nuclear winter globe, a “sunny
with intermittent chance of self-doubt” globe?
Nope. It’s snow globe or bust for us.
I was trying to explain this telepathically to the deer
as snow fell on their efforts to eat the grass.
No luck. They munched and munched without seeming to mind
anything at all. I mind everything at all
more than I like to admit. While it’s snowing, though,
life dreams a fresh coat of paint, the sky obliges,
and trees prove once again they can take anything
standing up except axes and bulldozers, etcetera.
Snow transforms our love of symmetry
into the erasure of the need for it
by giving the mind the unity it craves. That’s my theory
of the aesthetics of snow, anyway. Maybe the fact
that so many of us feel shaken so much of the time
makes shaking a snow globe therapeutic,
as if there’s secretly beauty in not knowing
what’s going on or where to turn, purpose
in our dervished days. COULD NOT LEAVE WELL ENOUGH ALONE
will be carved into the gravestone of our species
for no one to read. Some epitaphs deserve footnotes
or footnovels. How about a joke: a snow globe and atom bomb
walk into a bar. A snow globe, atom bomb, and religion
walk into a bar. The bartender asks, Which of you
has killed more people? Religion and the atom bomb
point at the snow globe, which shakes its head.
Everyone is transfixed by the manic splendor
and forgets the question. A few hours later, drunk,
they stumble into the snow and go their separate ways.
The bartender closes up, sticks out his tongue
and tastes the winter of his youth. In the morning,
he makes snow angels with his daughter.
Later that day, in the sun, both angels fly away.
MLK day
Archaeologically, his voice can be found
at the bottom of my self-consciousness,
at the start of me knowing
there was a me, that my face was a question
mirrors could raise but not answer.
No voice goes deeper or feels more like thunder
being rolled into a cigar. I’m pregnant
with that voice, with the idea that dreams matter,
because I was a child when he spoke
in front of Lincoln to the world,
and the resonance of his hope
got into my cells and thrived. I feel lucky
that my first memory of the public space
is him, and there, and then. And on this day,
when that speech is played and played,
his voice is still a fire I hold my hands to,
a room of a hundred windows, a ship
moving calmly through a storm. Even more
than Cronkite’s, it’s the voice
I imagine god needing
to pull the rabbit of light
out of the hat of darkness. If America
has a conscience, its voice is King’s. If democracy
has a chance, his dream must be ours.
E nough
We’ve brought a hospital bed into the house for my father,
and to balance the universe, taken his lawn mower
to the hospital to live. He’s terrified
we’re trying to kill him and send him to hell.
The fire, boiling skin, endless reruns
of The Lawrence Welk Show – he believes in all of that,
suddenly or for longer than any of us knew.
If you want, you can think of him as a circus
when all the poles have been removed and the big top’s
on the ground, waiting to be folded up, the elephants
are loaded and the bearded lady’s in her trailer
giving herself a trim. The difference here
is there’s no next town. He’s closer to a puddle
than a person, more like a ninety-three-year-old jigsaw puzzle
with thirty two percent of the pieces missing
than the man who conspired with my mother
to create seven human beings. To say goodbye to him
now is to say goodbye to someone else, an echo
of the shadow of the gesture of a hand in a dark room.
But what else is the word goodbye for if not futility?
So goodbye, I say to the ear I always liked best,
and he smiles as if I’ve just said something
about puppies or ice cream. That’s the thing – one second
he knows he’s dying and the next he’s an expert
at being a child again, happy over the littlest things.
Or think of his mind as a deck of cards
shuffled for a game of 52 pick-up, then exploded
into the air and all over the floor. Is this a rough draft
of his eulogy? A study on the futility
of figurative language? Am I burying him alive? These
and other questions have question marks at their ends,
else how do you know to raise your voice slightly
as you read? Not in anger but wonder, not in the future
but now, whatever now you’re in when this now
is the past and he’s gone, meaning you’re looking back
at someone looking forward to loss. Forward
in several ways, temporally and yes, I want him to die
and go to whatever heaven is. Karaoke. Silence.
A laundromat where all the dryers work. But enough
of this. Of his un-humaning. How much
of a thing can be taken away
before the thing isn’t the thing
but an else, an other, a stick
whittled down to wood chips on the floor?
Thirst
A glass of water is light
years away in the kitchen.
I need someone to invent
the wormhole, to bring me
a wormhole, to rename
the wormhole. And time.
More time. Infinite time
to explore the universe
of your face.
Art history as I have practiced it this morning
My impression of Impressionism
is the term was first used by a critic
who didn’t like Monet’s Impression, Sunrise
and wanted to stab it in the heart,
though imitation ultimately killed the style
with the flattery of thousands of bad,
shimmery blotchings, under which the revolution
of treating light as the subject of art
is buried. And all the reproductions everywhere
on everything, from raincoats to coffee cups
to colostomy bags, give us art imitating capitalism
and numb us to Monet’s efforts to put his fingers
on the wrist of sunlight and take its pulse
by standing before a cathedral and painting it
forty times, forty times, forty times. And sixteen views
of Waterloo Bridge are sixteen Waterloo Bridges
I’ve crossed in all kinds of weather, going nowhere
except the London of my mind. I’d like to travel to the sun
and rest my head upon its kindness for making life possible,
but Chicago, New York, Boston, Paris, and Amsterdam
have proven slightly more practical, cities
that have been considerate enough to let me breathe in
the sunshine of his brushstrokes. Most of all, the dude
loved flowers, which paint the air by eating light
and giving it flesh, just as he wanted to. I suspect
if you’d have asked Monet what or where god is,
he’d have walked you to a garden and shown you
how even shadows have color.
Bob Hicok's eleventh collection of poetry, Water Look Away, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2023. His seventh, Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon, 2013), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. This Clumsy Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), was awarded the 2008 Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and published in a German translation by Luxbooks in 2013. His other books are Red Rover Red Rover (Copper Canyon, 2020), Sex & Love & (Copper Canyon, 2016), Words for Empty and Words for Full (Pitt, 2010), Insomnia Diary (Pitt, 2004), Animal Soul (Invisible Cities Press, 2001), also finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Plus Shipping (BOA, 1998), and The Legend of Light (University of Wisconsin, 1995), which received the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and was named a 1997 ALA Booklist Notable Book of the Year. Recipient of nine Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim and two NEA Fellowships, his poetry has been selected for inclusion in nine volumes of Best American Poetry.
The Hamilton Stone Review
Issue # 50 Spring 2024
The Bob Hicok Special
HSR
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Edited by Kevin Stein
Photo: Bob Hicok “making” a bathroom shower.