I don’t recall where I came across Bob Hicok’s poetry, only that it immediately struck me as something I wanted to more fully explore. I had the chance to hear Hicok read a couple of years ago, around the time of the publication of his collection, Insomnia Diary. What I loved about Hicok’s poetry was that it was funny while making a point. There was wry social commentary going on here, the humor a bit of sugar to help the medicine go down.

As an untrained writer of poetry and fiction, I also appreciated Hicok’s background. He was a laborer who wrote poetry. He had no MFA, no academic pedigree. He proved that a guy with talent and wit and a way with words could succeed in a world dominated by academics.

When I picked up his latest collection, This Clumsy Living, I learned that some things had changed. Hicok now has degrees and teaches at Virginia Tech University. Though he initially came from the outside, he has been taken into the fold somewhat. The other thing that I noticed is that humor is not the first thing I detect about these poems. There is wit here; it seems to come too naturally to Hicok for him to simply turn it off. But there is a depth and seriousness to these poems; the wit seems incidental, or tactical – pulled out to drive a point home with a subversive laugh.

It is clear that at least one major factor in this change is the war in Iraq. Hicok seems fed up and has found inventive ways to convey his disgust, dismay and disappointment with the effort. “Happy Anniversary,” with the date noted as “March 19, 2006, the third anniversary of the beginning of the war, begins with the lines

There is a war.

This is a brand of minimalism: there are many wars.

Whenever you are reading this, this is the case:

people running and screaming and sharp things and dull pains.

In “A letter: the Genesis poem,” Hicok offers a short personal essay about the book, writing “We’re at war as I write. In Iraq, in case we’ve moved on to Iran by the time you read this. Most of the talk right now is about gas prices and illegal immigrants. Many people here don’t want elsewhere people to become here people.”

Elsewhere, however, Hicok seems to be coming to grips with the shift in his own life, from working guy who wrote poems to poet who used to be a working guy. “My last factory job” is a poem that details his job “pushing a rod. Steel rod/in a v-channel with a stick.” In “Beasts,” he writes a meeting with a former co-worker where he finds himself trying to explain tenure, “to convince him that the six weeks I have to myself/ between semesters isn’t a layoff. ‘I gotta get me some of that,’/ he says again, lighting a smoke with a smoke.” Later, “I long ago gave up/ trying to explain poetry to people like Carl,/ and have recently given up trying to explain people like Carl/to professors.”

At the same time, life just seems to have given Hicok a kick in the pants in the past few years, and he is challenging himself to find new ways to express these new feelings and sentiments and thoughts, unwilling to let the same old tactics express these new subjects. It makes for a book that was different than I expected – and I’ll admit, differed from what I initially wanted – but one that is obviously Hicok’s best.

Labels: books, poetry