This Clumsy Living
Place on List:
III. Period: 1960 - 2009
3. Primary Texts: Poetry
Bob
Hicok. This
Clumsy Living.
(2007)
Supporting References:
“You Might Have Missed… This Clumsy
Living” Hot Metal Bridge
Posted on November
15, 2011 by Maria
This Clumsy Living by
Bob Hicok
(Pitt Press, 2007)
Mandy Malloy
(Pitt Press, 2007)
Mandy Malloy
On the Rollercoaster
Open any of Bob Hicok’s collections,
and I suspect you’ll be dazzled by poems plumbing the depths of the
self as they skim the fascinating, frustrating surface of
contemporary American life. Using a neo-surrealist net to capture
heart, humor, and the sublime in one cast, Hicok’s best poems do
not merely entertain—they teach my mind to function in patterns I
can only call Hicok-esque for at least an hour or so after I’ve put
them down. In an intimate, chatty tone, I find myself prone to
narrating my thoughts to myself, often surprised by whip-smart
connections between the observed world and my mind’s internal
workings that I suspect Hicok’s poems have trained me to make. Pun,
sarcasm, retort, leaps of logic that at times assume mystical
proportions meet the absurdities of a morning’s passage through a
subway station or a trip to the market. As the effect fades, I know
I’ve experienced the full power of what Elizabeth Bishop termed the
“mind in motion.” I know it’s what I expect out of poetry.
Winner of the 2008 Bobbitt Prize, This
Clumsy Living (2007) stands out among Hicok’s books. Balancing
craft at the level of both the individual poem and the book is a
hard-won achievement for any poet, but it is particularly gratifying
to see a poet of prodigious strength one-up himself. Where Hicok’s
earlier books were less adept at organizing his bountiful energies
into a coherent emotional arc, This Clumsy Living succeeds
beautifully—perhaps, in part, by beginning with an admission of
clumsiness.
A quick read down the Table of Contents
shows the oscillation of Hicok’s energies: “The busy days of my
nights” abuts “A poem with a poem in its belly” and “Waiting
for my foot to ring” with “War story,” all in the
mysteriously-titled first section “Twenty-three windows.”
Real-world narrative flashes chronicle the speaker’s wrestling with
political and social events in everyday life, a drive that springs
from the Whitmanian well of “full report,” even as the speaker
soothes himself by engineering temporary escape via surreal leaps in
time and space that always manage to lead him back to the indelible
fact of “this clumsy living.” “If we could solve that equation,
we’d be happy,” Hicok poignantly suggests.
Yet, what are the chances of solving
such an equation, Hicok’s book seems to ask. In “The New Math,”
math is a rhetorical structure Hicok recognizes not only as
“strange,” but imperfect. We cannot rest easy with a single
solution any more than we can disown our drive to try to reduce our
problems. Poetry’s algebra may be a fraught construct, the poem
whispers to us, but its process just may deliver a bit of happiness
along the tortuous path.
Hicok would probably be the last to say
we shouldn’t have fun with either the world, our psychological
attempts to diminish loss, or poetry. This Clumsy Living
keeps an emotional balance by swinging between extremes of
existential terror and a lively absurdist humor. “Her my body,”
about the inability of poetic thought to soothe a speaker imagining
cancer striking his beloved (“If you are comforted / by this
thought you are welcome / to keep it”), is followed by the zany,
zippy “The busy days of my nights,” where our speaker meditates
on zombie films (“writers struggling with the inbred / mutant
Appalachian cannibal dialogue”), and the aforementioned Elizabeth
Bishop (“remembered the ladybug / walking across ‘At the
Fishhouses’ open on my desk”).
The shifts in tone that occur from poem
to poem are well-matched in a greater variety of forms than appear in
previous books. Hicok experiments with the lengthy stanza shape
typical of his earlier work, a narrative flow eschewing visual pacing
(stanza breaks, etc.) in favor of compact density. While individually
such an effect is excellent, in a book full of such poems I find
myself experiencing the pleasant exhaustion that comes from preparing
for the same rollercoaster ride over and over again. Not, per Jerry
Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with that—Hicok’s earlier
work conveyed a sense and vision of his American moment, most notably
in terms of the dissolution of the working class in his home state of
Michigan and American foreign policy. (May we hope for Hicok’s
response to the labor protests earlier this year?)
Hicok also avoids the over-writing
afflicting his earlier books, whether as a result of an inability to
kill his proverbial darlings or an understandable desire to perform
for his usually-rapt audience. Most markedly, the word “which”
appears much less frequently. (I say this as one also afflicted by
the curse my seventh grade English teacher referred to as “whichery
and thattery.”) Ultimately, how could I not be filled with
admiration for a poet who manages to write a lovely lyric stanza
about shit-eating dogs, thanking deer for their scat at the same time
as he is able to turn a discussion of his mother’s morbid obesity
into a loving paean to mothering in “Documenting a Decision”?
A fat body resembles a pregnant body, resembles hope, start. ( . . . ) This is more the way of the mother than the father. ( . . . ) This is my prayer: Lord, make me round.
Reading poetry is not only about the
pleasure we take in the artifact of a finished poem—it is also
about the journey of the poet. This Clumsy Living witnesses
a gifted poet taking a leap. Hicok’s neo-surrealist impulse pushes
his earnest lyric narrative mode just off-balance, keeping
conversational tones from feeling either tired or disingenuous. The
poems’ speaker is aware he navigates an imperfect world with
imperfect tools, but also sees no other way to go about it—the very
essence, perhaps, of Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
If reading This Clumsy Living feels at times like being on a
rollercoaster—emotionally and visually, tonally and
metaphorically—through Hicok’s mental countryside, we do well to
remember he warned us, and then sit back and enjoy the ride.
Mandy Malloy is a writer and
graphic designer currently living in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate
of Hunter College’s MFA program and a 2011 Norman Mailer Colony
Fellow, her poems have appeared most recently in The Portland
Review.
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