A Review of This Clumsy Living by, Bob Hicok (2007, University of Pittsburgh Press)

Bob Hicok was born in 1960 and is one of the strongest, most ambitious voices in contemporary American poetry. He has written four previous books, all to wide critical acclaim. Before entering academia he owned and operated a successful automotive die design business in Ann Arbor for 17 years. He has won more than his share of prizes some of which include two Pushcart Prizes, an NEA Fellowship, three appearances in Best American Poetry, and the Jerome J. Shestack Prize for the best poems published in American Poetry Review. This Clumsy Living explores the real (though not always tangible) world. The body and its ailments is a recurring theme that comes up not in reference to the poet himself, but those close to him (father, wife). It is not only in this sense that these are poems of the body; the poems are deeply rooted in the physical – they are rooted in being.

In Bob Hicok’s fifth and arguably most ambitious book of poems we see bits and pieces of his previous four books with a strengthened sense of freedom of tone, style, form, and subject matter. With the wild temperament of Animal Soul and the seriousness Plus Shipping and The Legend of Light as well as the sly narratives of Insomnia Diary Hicok pushes up against his own limitations and imagination. He is in no way tied down to himself. In fact, there is a constant push in this book; a push for more gut-experiments, more brain-gazes.

Though not entirely without sentiment, these poems are anything but sentimental. They are present; connected to the gravity of real life. Humor is not the gasoline running this engine – it is the balm soothing reality’s tough skin. Below all the funnyness Hicok employs, there is a strong sense of emotional connectedness.

In this collection, Hicok employs the prose poem and the long poem in ways that he has not in the past. He goes so far with his (arguably) successful experiment “A poem with a poem in its belly” which is literally just that: a (prose) poem with a another poem in the middle of it. One could say he is writing “brain-and-guts poems” or intellectual poems of the body.

In Hicok’s stunning long poem, “My faith-based initiative” he connects his own grappling with faith and love as well as his “shit-eating dog, Hegel” named for eating “a few pages/ of Hegel as a puppy” to checking his e-mail where he finds a message from his friend: “yesterday a rocket, from his stomach he saw a house/ become where a house had been, birth of absence”. This makes for an interesting and very humanistic portrayal of war in many different ways in which it can happen. The only distance between the speaker and the subject is wonder.

He continues in the same poem to say “the true flesh of thinking/ is feeling” – a sentiment that echoes throughout the collection and the majority of Hicok’s work. No matter how far out he lets his mind go, his body is never far behind. Urgency is important as the speaker says “I will insist it is the same time/ everywhere”.

In addition to the risks he is taking with subject matter and tone there is also a certain childlike vulnerability that extends from his willingness to wonder, explore, and dream. These poems are in no way afraid of taking off the poetic body armor and come clean:

Sometimes when I touch my wife I am overcome, I want

to bite her, want no edge, no border between us, I shake.

Is this how You want me to pray, Lord what if everything we do is love, every horrible thing we do is love,
and the tiny gestures of notes beside the phone,
and blowing on soup, what if there are no distinctions

These poems are intensely lyrical while maintaining a significant pseudo- narrative. They might not be stories, but there is plenty going on. The poem “In Michael Robinson’s class minus one” the understory is about a boy swept up by the Chicago River, which is personified, as at the desk of the swept-away student. “I didn’t know a boy had been added to me, the river says/...I have so many boys in me, I’m worn out stroking eyes looking up at the day.” This music is dizzyingly beautiful, he continues to describe

...a girl makes a kiss with her mouth and leans it
against the river, and the kiss flows away
but the river wants it back, the river makes sounds to go after the kiss.

This is the way in which we must go after the poems in this collection; we must allow ourselves to trust this speaker who, it seems, truly trusts us, the reader, to give him everything we can. Whether he is talking about a trip with his father to the doctor’s office or a tender spot on his wife’s breast, Hicok is able to balance emotional tension with his wild imagination and experimentation. In the great poem “Angels of Mercy” he does just this. Through four strophes we see his usual meditative and lyrical narrative techniques in play as he foregoes grammar for a more streamlined feel.

I call my father don’t tell him where I am he says they think his heart now maybe his kidneys now maybe doctors what do they know stay away from doctors son yes dad

As the poem begins to conclude we see the imaginative energy and momentum overtake us the poem enters what seems like an alternate universe filled with a certain youthful exuberance and childlike sense of wonder.

Two doctors come out sit in our laps kiss our mouths
lick our teeth our eyes stroke our heads purr
two doctors in white coats of feathers wearing piles
of snow two doctors speaking Spanish and Hebrew and rap

Unlike Hicok’s earlier work, this book explores what can be done with “prose.” In some respects, it seems to avail the poet from the part of his consciousness that thinks in “poetry mode.” It is almost like he is writing open letters to the world. This is particularly true in his poem “A letter: the Genesis poem.” “I’ve been staring at that blinking cursor

for some time, trying to figure out what I want to say about this book or writing poems or God or the defense department or Eve or my parents or the simultaneous cravings for order and disorder.”

He continues on to address us, the reader, convincingly with the second person. Oftentimes this point of view can become annoying and didactic very quickly, which is a risk Hicok is taking. But I, for one, believe him when he says “...words can change us. If you sit alone with words long enough, it’s easy to believe the mind in its moments of conception, ‘that we might...give light and let birds fly from our living’ that mind doesn’t create a thing but is the created thing”.