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Elegy Owed
National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. "What Hicok's getting at [in Elegy Owed ] is both the necessity and the inadequacy of language, the very bluntness of which (talk about a paradox) makes it all the more essential that we engage with it as a precision instrument, a force of clarity, of (at times) awful grace."— Los Angeles Times "[A] fluid, absorbing new collection. . . . Highly recommended."— Library Journal , starred review When asked in an interview "What would Bob Hicok launch from a giant sling shot?" he answered "Bob Hicok." Elegy Owed —Hicok's eighth book—is an existential game of Twister in which the rules of mourning are broken and salvaged, and "you can never step into the same not going home again twice." From "Notes for a time capsule": The twig in. I'll put the twig in I carry in my pocket
and my pocket and my eye, my left eye. A cup
of the Ganges and the bacteria from shit
in the Ganges and the anyway ablutions of rainbow-
robed Hindus in the Ganges. The dawnline of the mountain
with contrail above like an accent in a language
too large for my mouth. A mirror
so whoever opens the past will see themselves
in the past and fall back from their face
speaking to them across centuries or hours
or the nearnevers . . . Bob Hicok 's worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator before becoming an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.
and my pocket and my eye, my left eye. A cup
of the Ganges and the bacteria from shit
in the Ganges and the anyway ablutions of rainbow-
robed Hindus in the Ganges. The dawnline of the mountain
with contrail above like an accent in a language
too large for my mouth. A mirror
so whoever opens the past will see themselves
in the past and fall back from their face
speaking to them across centuries or hours
or the nearnevers . . . Bob Hicok 's worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator before becoming an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech. He lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.
- GenresPoetryNonfiction
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
15 people are currently reading
374 people want to read
About the author
Bob Hicok
52 books94 followersBob Hicok was born in 1960. His most recent collection, This Clumsy Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), was awarded the 2008 Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. His other books are Insomnia Diary (Pitt, 2004), Animal Soul (Invisible Cities Press, 2001),a 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. A recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, Guggenheim and two NEA Fellowships, his poetry has been selected for inclusion in five volumes of Best American Poetry.
Hicok writes poems that value speech and storytelling, that revel in the material offered by pop culture, and that deny categories such as "academic" or "narrative." As Elizabeth Gaffney wrote for the New York Times Book Review: "Each of Mr. Hicok's poems is marked by the exalted moderation of his voice—erudition without pretension, wisdom without pontification, honesty devoid of confessional melodrama. . . . His judicious eye imbues even the dreadful with beauty and meaning."
Hicok has worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator, and is currently an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.
Hicok writes poems that value speech and storytelling, that revel in the material offered by pop culture, and that deny categories such as "academic" or "narrative." As Elizabeth Gaffney wrote for the New York Times Book Review: "Each of Mr. Hicok's poems is marked by the exalted moderation of his voice—erudition without pretension, wisdom without pontification, honesty devoid of confessional melodrama. . . . His judicious eye imbues even the dreadful with beauty and meaning."
Hicok has worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator, and is currently an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.
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September 29, 2022When I discover a new writer or poet, I'm not one to dive into their oeuvre and read every last vowel (v and r notwithstanding). I will, however, dip into a second book by same before moving on to that good night called variety in life. You know, before death makes off with all the variety, leaving us with humdrum sameness (the hallmark of nothingness, which took forever to crawl out of before birth).
But where was I? Oh, yeah. Goodreads. Reviews. At 5:45 a.m. when I have the energy for them. And Bob Hicok #2, if you will (or even if you won't). Kind of an uncanny poet walking the tightrope between wordplay and serious poetry. Not that serious poetry cannot be playful (see Bard comma Bill). Here, for instance, in a poem called...
Obituary for the middle class
This whole thing, this way of living beside a can opener
beside a microwave beside a son beside a daughter
beside a river going to college, you get up
and kiss the mortgage and go go go with coffee-veins
and burger-fries and pack your soul on ice
till sixty-five, when you sit down with a lake
and have a long talk with your breath
and cast your mind far away from shore, fish nibbling
the mosquitoes of your thoughts: they will whisper of this life
a hundred years from now to children before sleep
who will call them liars, "Once upon a time,
they had two and a half bathrooms and tiny houses
for their cars and doctors who listened
through tubes to their fat hearts, they named
their endeavors and beliefs four-wheel drive,
twenty-percent-off sale, summer vacation, colonoscopy,
variable-rate loan, inheritance, and we will be
as gods to them in that they don't believe in us,
and we will be spared the eternity of their worship
as they will be spared money, the counting
and the having and the memory of the middle share
of what gets harder and harder to call pie.
Well, OK. Maybe a missed landing at the end, but before that, a rather fun ride, don't you think? And I like Hicok's affinity for Dylan Thomas's affinity. Namely hyphenated adjectives. I keep a store myself, in case one of my waiting-to-be-written poems needs pizz or zazz or both.
More, Jeeves? OK. My fingers are still limber at this hour, doing coffee-mug-handle lifts and all. One, two, three, five. This one's called...
Leave a Message
When the wind died, there was a moment of silence
for the wind. When the maple tree died, there was always a place
to find winter in its branches. When the roses died, I respected the privacy
of the vase. When the shoe factory died, I stopped listening
at the back door to the glossolalia of machines.
When the child died, the mother put a spoon in the blender.
When the child died, the father dug a hole in his thigh
and got in. When my dog died, I broke up with the woods.
When the fog lived, I went into the valley to be held
by water. The dead have no ears, no answering machines
that we know of, still we call.
This one does nail the landing. And it utilizes the "Buy Again" item that is always in my Amazon cart (or would be if I shopped there), anaphora. Can't get me enough of that stuff. Sounds like a Grecian urn. Sounds like it should be a more pedestrian Greek urn. Sounds like it doesn't make any noise, like a poem that falls in the woods while all the lumberjacks and jills are at the shore reading novels.
Novels like Medusa's gaze, I guess. Spellbinding. Stoned as a stoner getting high on life and on the munchies. Novels run the crime syndicate of literature, all right.
But you were asking (before Keats coughed and distracted you with his ode-ious urns) what glossolalia means. The cardinal rule, my friends -- right behind the bluebird one -- is to look up words you don't know in a poem. According to Merriam and her good bedfellow Webster, and I quote:
1. Fabricated and nonmeaningful speech, especially such speech associated with a trance state or certain schizophrenic syndromes.
2. The gift of tongues; the ability to speak foreign languages without having consciously learned them. This power is asserted to be sometimes present in somnambulistic persons.
3. The gift of tongues. Farrar.
Farrar? I have no idea. And I sense glossolalia crawling into this review like a ninja lizard, fabricating with its slithery tongue, reinforcing definitions with its scaly-dry skin. And I need another coffee. Which means this review is over. Not just overrun with glossolalia, but with its will to go on. Even if my reading of Bob Hicok books is not. For now, it is. But forever -- before the BIG forever -- no.
No sirree, Bob (Hicok).
But where was I? Oh, yeah. Goodreads. Reviews. At 5:45 a.m. when I have the energy for them. And Bob Hicok #2, if you will (or even if you won't). Kind of an uncanny poet walking the tightrope between wordplay and serious poetry. Not that serious poetry cannot be playful (see Bard comma Bill). Here, for instance, in a poem called...
Obituary for the middle class
This whole thing, this way of living beside a can opener
beside a microwave beside a son beside a daughter
beside a river going to college, you get up
and kiss the mortgage and go go go with coffee-veins
and burger-fries and pack your soul on ice
till sixty-five, when you sit down with a lake
and have a long talk with your breath
and cast your mind far away from shore, fish nibbling
the mosquitoes of your thoughts: they will whisper of this life
a hundred years from now to children before sleep
who will call them liars, "Once upon a time,
they had two and a half bathrooms and tiny houses
for their cars and doctors who listened
through tubes to their fat hearts, they named
their endeavors and beliefs four-wheel drive,
twenty-percent-off sale, summer vacation, colonoscopy,
variable-rate loan, inheritance, and we will be
as gods to them in that they don't believe in us,
and we will be spared the eternity of their worship
as they will be spared money, the counting
and the having and the memory of the middle share
of what gets harder and harder to call pie.
Well, OK. Maybe a missed landing at the end, but before that, a rather fun ride, don't you think? And I like Hicok's affinity for Dylan Thomas's affinity. Namely hyphenated adjectives. I keep a store myself, in case one of my waiting-to-be-written poems needs pizz or zazz or both.
More, Jeeves? OK. My fingers are still limber at this hour, doing coffee-mug-handle lifts and all. One, two, three, five. This one's called...
Leave a Message
When the wind died, there was a moment of silence
for the wind. When the maple tree died, there was always a place
to find winter in its branches. When the roses died, I respected the privacy
of the vase. When the shoe factory died, I stopped listening
at the back door to the glossolalia of machines.
When the child died, the mother put a spoon in the blender.
When the child died, the father dug a hole in his thigh
and got in. When my dog died, I broke up with the woods.
When the fog lived, I went into the valley to be held
by water. The dead have no ears, no answering machines
that we know of, still we call.
This one does nail the landing. And it utilizes the "Buy Again" item that is always in my Amazon cart (or would be if I shopped there), anaphora. Can't get me enough of that stuff. Sounds like a Grecian urn. Sounds like it should be a more pedestrian Greek urn. Sounds like it doesn't make any noise, like a poem that falls in the woods while all the lumberjacks and jills are at the shore reading novels.
Novels like Medusa's gaze, I guess. Spellbinding. Stoned as a stoner getting high on life and on the munchies. Novels run the crime syndicate of literature, all right.
But you were asking (before Keats coughed and distracted you with his ode-ious urns) what glossolalia means. The cardinal rule, my friends -- right behind the bluebird one -- is to look up words you don't know in a poem. According to Merriam and her good bedfellow Webster, and I quote:
1. Fabricated and nonmeaningful speech, especially such speech associated with a trance state or certain schizophrenic syndromes.
2. The gift of tongues; the ability to speak foreign languages without having consciously learned them. This power is asserted to be sometimes present in somnambulistic persons.
3. The gift of tongues. Farrar.
Farrar? I have no idea. And I sense glossolalia crawling into this review like a ninja lizard, fabricating with its slithery tongue, reinforcing definitions with its scaly-dry skin. And I need another coffee. Which means this review is over. Not just overrun with glossolalia, but with its will to go on. Even if my reading of Bob Hicok books is not. For now, it is. But forever -- before the BIG forever -- no.
No sirree, Bob (Hicok).
April 16, 2014
This is something against the idea that poetry should sing or poetry should trouble or poetry should deconstruct or poetry should...should...defenestrate?
What I mean is, three weeks after hearing the author read, I still remember something about his wife's feet the day I heard the reading. I can not say the same about my own feet, or my own (well I don't have a wife). And I can say the feeling I associated with his wife's feet, at say sometime between 8-9 pm on that Monday evening: tenderness, want, some warmth that was maybe the warmth of the crowd at the reading but more likely something else, like the resurrection of something, something I'd rather not admit to.
I mean, Hicok does poetry of affect, but with objects, strangeness, his wife, his father, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches: real, mundane things, things you wouldn't think twice about over the course of 24 hours, drive by things --
and that's sort of amazing.
What I mean is, three weeks after hearing the author read, I still remember something about his wife's feet the day I heard the reading. I can not say the same about my own feet, or my own (well I don't have a wife). And I can say the feeling I associated with his wife's feet, at say sometime between 8-9 pm on that Monday evening: tenderness, want, some warmth that was maybe the warmth of the crowd at the reading but more likely something else, like the resurrection of something, something I'd rather not admit to.
I mean, Hicok does poetry of affect, but with objects, strangeness, his wife, his father, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches: real, mundane things, things you wouldn't think twice about over the course of 24 hours, drive by things --
and that's sort of amazing.
June 28, 2019
Play some of them Mahler funereal jams. I like the one in 1 where he puts that french nursery rhyme in a minor then throws in some klezmer for the sake of it. That scherzo's alright.
Yakka, the play of language supreme. Like savant gymnast tykes taking a playground to its furthest limits. A line with such a dash, us audience readers are like, “wow, such pretty words, and juxtaposed too.” And it's nobel enough to poet and do that.
And I don't like to grunge, but after so many poems, the poet's talents begin to look like tricks. Maybe if this collection wasn't so damn long he could have made it in-out, his act revealed after too many acts. His use of repetition begins to tire.
These effects take effect perhaps sooner, and perhaps with more sigh due to the very upfront foreground frontage. Poems tell you exactly what they are. There's no confusment here, no mystery.
To rope the poet some slack, perhaps the kind of bereavement these poems moan to, care not for obfuscation. The immediacy of death scatters such pretenses. Maybe. Just how will the talented gymnasts can dance dirges has yet to redifferentiated in the old Processing Plant (my mind)
I shall give the book 4 stars even though I only gave it 3 in the thing.
Yakka, the play of language supreme. Like savant gymnast tykes taking a playground to its furthest limits. A line with such a dash, us audience readers are like, “wow, such pretty words, and juxtaposed too.” And it's nobel enough to poet and do that.
And I don't like to grunge, but after so many poems, the poet's talents begin to look like tricks. Maybe if this collection wasn't so damn long he could have made it in-out, his act revealed after too many acts. His use of repetition begins to tire.
These effects take effect perhaps sooner, and perhaps with more sigh due to the very upfront foreground frontage. Poems tell you exactly what they are. There's no confusment here, no mystery.
To rope the poet some slack, perhaps the kind of bereavement these poems moan to, care not for obfuscation. The immediacy of death scatters such pretenses. Maybe. Just how will the talented gymnasts can dance dirges has yet to redifferentiated in the old Processing Plant (my mind)
I shall give the book 4 stars even though I only gave it 3 in the thing.
September 12, 2015
I liked best that Hicok's poetry is quirky. Just looking at the cover showing a photo of himself with an ear to the ground listening for the dead Hicok below puts you in the right frame of mind. Inside you discover it's an appropriate image for poems which seem to be about mourning. There are elegies here, and odes, and they segue into an elegy ode and finally to an elegy owed before they say goodbye. These poems are both funny and sad.
July 19, 2015
I can't believe I didn't review this already. It was my introduction to Hicok and my favorite out of all the poetry I read for poetry class last semester. It's the only one I bought and kept and plan to re-read.
August 28, 2013
This book of poems was devastatingly beautiful. No other description is suffice. Just read it if you dig excellent original poetry.
December 19, 2017
Elegy with lies
This lost person I loved. Loved for a hundred years.
When I find her. Find her in a forest. In a cabin
under smoke and clouds shaped like smoke. When I find her
and call her name (nothing) and knock (nothing)
and build a machine that believes it’s God and the machine
calls her name (nothing) and knocks (nothing).
When I tear the machine down and she runs from the cabin
pointing a gun at my memories and telling me
to leave, stranger, leave, man of hammers.
When I can’t finish that story. When I get to the gun
pointed at my head. When I want it to go off.
When everything I say to anyone all day long
is bang. That would be today. When I can’t use her name.
All day long. Soft as cotton, tender as kiss. Bang.
O
I’m thinking I watched a man and his son holding hands as they crossed a parking lot
last night, thinking I was moved by the root or lifeboat or ladder of the father’s arm
into the life of the son, the root or labyrinth of his arm as they moved at the pace
of the child, whose walking still bore signs of the womb, of being wobbly water and I wanted
to reverse my vasectomy on the spot and have a child with the moon, I wish there were a word
that was the thing it was the word of, that when I said sun I could be sun, all of it in my mouth,
burning, you might think and be so marvelously right about praise that you open your door
one day and the day walks in and stays for years
Elegy to hunger
There’s a strain of cannibalism
I admire. A beloved has died. A hole
has been dug to be filled or a boat dragged
across a mile of silence to burn
upon the forgetfulness of water. One person
or twenty stand at the hole or the boat
& the body stares through closed eyes. The body
turning gray, filling with clouds, with a rain
that will last until flood. One person
takes a bite and means it, not a nibble
but a devotion, we are locusts
after all. Then the others,
until the body is clothed
with unspeaking ghosts
of mouths, the body an absence
bearing absences. The bite. The soul.
The swallow. Eating the hours
she filled, the shadow she cast. And I.
I should have.
This lost person I loved. Loved for a hundred years.
When I find her. Find her in a forest. In a cabin
under smoke and clouds shaped like smoke. When I find her
and call her name (nothing) and knock (nothing)
and build a machine that believes it’s God and the machine
calls her name (nothing) and knocks (nothing).
When I tear the machine down and she runs from the cabin
pointing a gun at my memories and telling me
to leave, stranger, leave, man of hammers.
When I can’t finish that story. When I get to the gun
pointed at my head. When I want it to go off.
When everything I say to anyone all day long
is bang. That would be today. When I can’t use her name.
All day long. Soft as cotton, tender as kiss. Bang.
O
I’m thinking I watched a man and his son holding hands as they crossed a parking lot
last night, thinking I was moved by the root or lifeboat or ladder of the father’s arm
into the life of the son, the root or labyrinth of his arm as they moved at the pace
of the child, whose walking still bore signs of the womb, of being wobbly water and I wanted
to reverse my vasectomy on the spot and have a child with the moon, I wish there were a word
that was the thing it was the word of, that when I said sun I could be sun, all of it in my mouth,
burning, you might think and be so marvelously right about praise that you open your door
one day and the day walks in and stays for years
Elegy to hunger
There’s a strain of cannibalism
I admire. A beloved has died. A hole
has been dug to be filled or a boat dragged
across a mile of silence to burn
upon the forgetfulness of water. One person
or twenty stand at the hole or the boat
& the body stares through closed eyes. The body
turning gray, filling with clouds, with a rain
that will last until flood. One person
takes a bite and means it, not a nibble
but a devotion, we are locusts
after all. Then the others,
until the body is clothed
with unspeaking ghosts
of mouths, the body an absence
bearing absences. The bite. The soul.
The swallow. Eating the hours
she filled, the shadow she cast. And I.
I should have.
September 17, 2017
Scarecrow overhears himself thinking
I love crows, so midnight at noon. Me,
a suit stuck on sticks
that no longer suits your life. As if this aways
who you are, your self-imposed
supposes: suppose this is it -- this field,
this light? What does, anyway, fill you
if not sun up or down, if not harvest,
yield? We should switch, I'll hop off
and gimp around, you'll hang
among scavengers for company,
for keeps, your straw-thoughts pecked
by wind. Are you me alive or am I you
dead? I lied: I hold my arms wide
not to shoo but greet, to say
to plunder, "feel free, dig in."
I love crows, so midnight at noon. Me,
a suit stuck on sticks
that no longer suits your life. As if this aways
who you are, your self-imposed
supposes: suppose this is it -- this field,
this light? What does, anyway, fill you
if not sun up or down, if not harvest,
yield? We should switch, I'll hop off
and gimp around, you'll hang
among scavengers for company,
for keeps, your straw-thoughts pecked
by wind. Are you me alive or am I you
dead? I lied: I hold my arms wide
not to shoo but greet, to say
to plunder, "feel free, dig in."
May 10, 2013
Musings on death and loss and aspects of enduring
Bob Hicok surprises us on every page of this latest collection of his poems. He deals with death and mourning in his own language, his own perspective and the result is some of the more initially tough and yet beautifully constructed poems we are finding at the moment. Some background: Bob Hicok is an American poet, born in 1960. He currently is an associate professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech. He is from Michigan and before teaching owned and ran a successful automotive die design business. Gritty, complicated, and earnest, Elegy Owed breaks--then salvages--the rules for mourning. While poet Bob Hicok remembers the departed as ephemera or skin cells, fog is invited to tea and the beauty of dandelion fluff is held for ransom. Hicok's language is so humid with expectation and fearlessness that his poems create a clandestine manual to survival.
According to the Poetry Foundation, `Hicok's poetry is known for its accessible, meditative style. Narrative and associational, his poems are at once funny and wry, poignant and silly, smart and sad: they offer varied portraits of the lives and stories of working people, violence, pop culture, unexpected beauty, and trenchant observations on human nature. Over the course of his career, Hicok has evolved into one of contemporary poetry's most popular poets.'
Some examples of Hicok's poetry follow:
THE ORDER OF THINGS
Then I stopped hearing from you. Then I thought
I was Beethoven's cochlear implant. Then I listened
to deafness. Then I tacked a whisper
to the bulletin board. Then I liked dandelions
best in their afro stage. Then a breeze
held their soft beauty for ransom. Then no one
throws a Molotov cocktail better
than a Buddhist monk...
from NOTES FOR A TIME CAPSULE
The word terror
I'll bury the word terror
to be free of the word terror......
If terror is said
seven times in a row, it loses meaning becomes
humdrum, a mere timpani of ear.
If terror is said seven hundred
thousand million trillion times, I am being raped
by a word.
ODE TO ONGOING
I'm driving along,
or painting a board or wondering
if we love animals because we can't talk with them
more intimately that we can't talk with God
and the whole time there's this background hum
of sex and devotion and fear, people telling
good-night stories or leaving their babies
in dumpsters but mostly working hard
to feed the future what it needs to grow strong
and prefer sweet over sour, consonance
to dissonance, to be the only creatures who notice
the stars or at least use them metaphorically
to go on and on about the longing we harbor
in such tiny spaces relative to the extent
of our dread that we're in this all alone.
This is a book of powerful, exquisitely crafted poetry, poems that we can't ignore if we are to find a meaning to existence when all else is contradicting our attempts at positive thoughts. Bob Hicok is a major poet.
Grady Harp
Bob Hicok surprises us on every page of this latest collection of his poems. He deals with death and mourning in his own language, his own perspective and the result is some of the more initially tough and yet beautifully constructed poems we are finding at the moment. Some background: Bob Hicok is an American poet, born in 1960. He currently is an associate professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech. He is from Michigan and before teaching owned and ran a successful automotive die design business. Gritty, complicated, and earnest, Elegy Owed breaks--then salvages--the rules for mourning. While poet Bob Hicok remembers the departed as ephemera or skin cells, fog is invited to tea and the beauty of dandelion fluff is held for ransom. Hicok's language is so humid with expectation and fearlessness that his poems create a clandestine manual to survival.
According to the Poetry Foundation, `Hicok's poetry is known for its accessible, meditative style. Narrative and associational, his poems are at once funny and wry, poignant and silly, smart and sad: they offer varied portraits of the lives and stories of working people, violence, pop culture, unexpected beauty, and trenchant observations on human nature. Over the course of his career, Hicok has evolved into one of contemporary poetry's most popular poets.'
Some examples of Hicok's poetry follow:
THE ORDER OF THINGS
Then I stopped hearing from you. Then I thought
I was Beethoven's cochlear implant. Then I listened
to deafness. Then I tacked a whisper
to the bulletin board. Then I liked dandelions
best in their afro stage. Then a breeze
held their soft beauty for ransom. Then no one
throws a Molotov cocktail better
than a Buddhist monk...
from NOTES FOR A TIME CAPSULE
The word terror
I'll bury the word terror
to be free of the word terror......
If terror is said
seven times in a row, it loses meaning becomes
humdrum, a mere timpani of ear.
If terror is said seven hundred
thousand million trillion times, I am being raped
by a word.
ODE TO ONGOING
I'm driving along,
or painting a board or wondering
if we love animals because we can't talk with them
more intimately that we can't talk with God
and the whole time there's this background hum
of sex and devotion and fear, people telling
good-night stories or leaving their babies
in dumpsters but mostly working hard
to feed the future what it needs to grow strong
and prefer sweet over sour, consonance
to dissonance, to be the only creatures who notice
the stars or at least use them metaphorically
to go on and on about the longing we harbor
in such tiny spaces relative to the extent
of our dread that we're in this all alone.
This is a book of powerful, exquisitely crafted poetry, poems that we can't ignore if we are to find a meaning to existence when all else is contradicting our attempts at positive thoughts. Bob Hicok is a major poet.
Grady Harp
May 5, 2014
You know how people always ask a poet who their favorite poets are? Well, I have an easy enough answer there. Bob Hicok has been on my list for years. I first heard his work at an off-site reading at AWP Chicago and I was instantly hooked by his intelligent yet emotionally charged poems. As I've said before, there's no reason we all can't have a little fun even though we are writing/reading poems. I adore Bob's sense of humor.
He does things with poems that are equivalent to magic tricks--he surprises me in ways I never thought poems could. Almost every line is a turn of phrase that delights me. That I wish I had written. It’s hard, even, to make a list of my favorite moments in this book because there are so many.
Some of my favorite moments:
“My heart is cold,
it should wear a mitten.”
“Each poem a breath
nailed to nothing.”
“When everything I say to anyone all day long
is bang.”
“You open your door
and the day walks in and stays for years.”
“my life the only thing that has been with me
my whole life.”
“The rain is pregnant with a shape
exactly like you.”
“Women are more likely to wear gardens.”
“ Where else could you fit the sky but the sky?”
“the sun is doing meth on the other side of the world.”
“When the wind died there was a moment of silence
for the wind.”
“Then I buried a phone.
Then the ground rang. Then I answered the ground.”
“when you stand before a painting
in a museum for as long as you hope
says something good about you.”
“I thought the tree had climbed the boy.”
“I have been the calendar called Monday Monday Monday.”
“I have treated the afterbirth better than my child.”
“No more apologizing for the rudeness of bombs.”
“In all other skies, this cloud is a lie.”
Years ago, Bob was even kind enough to send me some work to publish in Superstition Review.
He does things with poems that are equivalent to magic tricks--he surprises me in ways I never thought poems could. Almost every line is a turn of phrase that delights me. That I wish I had written. It’s hard, even, to make a list of my favorite moments in this book because there are so many.
Some of my favorite moments:
“My heart is cold,
it should wear a mitten.”
“Each poem a breath
nailed to nothing.”
“When everything I say to anyone all day long
is bang.”
“You open your door
and the day walks in and stays for years.”
“my life the only thing that has been with me
my whole life.”
“The rain is pregnant with a shape
exactly like you.”
“Women are more likely to wear gardens.”
“ Where else could you fit the sky but the sky?”
“the sun is doing meth on the other side of the world.”
“When the wind died there was a moment of silence
for the wind.”
“Then I buried a phone.
Then the ground rang. Then I answered the ground.”
“when you stand before a painting
in a museum for as long as you hope
says something good about you.”
“I thought the tree had climbed the boy.”
“I have been the calendar called Monday Monday Monday.”
“I have treated the afterbirth better than my child.”
“No more apologizing for the rudeness of bombs.”
“In all other skies, this cloud is a lie.”
Years ago, Bob was even kind enough to send me some work to publish in Superstition Review.
June 9, 2013
Quite possibly Hicok's best book yet. I've always admired Hicok for the way his poems are always surprising, always unexpected, the way they make connections that seem bizarre until they turn out to be exactly right. Combine that kind of lyrical wit with an exuberance of language and you have one of the finest comic poets writing today.
In Elegy Owed, however, Hicok channels his considerable gifts into darker currents, creating poems that, while still fluid and sparkling on the surface, are tugged at by a deep tide swell of loss. The result is a collection of poems that are at once joyous and heartbreaking, that convey, in their weird, off-kilter beauty, a sense of mourning more authentic for being so far removed from cliche. Here, for instance, is an extract from 'Elegy to hunger':
"One person
takes a bite and means it, not a nibble
but a devotion, we are locusts
after all. Then the others,
until the body is clothed
with unspeaking ghosts
of mouths, the body an absence
bearing absences. The bite. The soul.
The swallow. Eating the hours
she filled, the shadow she cast. And I.
I should have."
It's an unforgettable image, and one that achieves its power by being simultaneously so far outside our commonplace experience, and yet so mesmerisingly vivid. It's passages like these that make Elegy Owed one of the finest new collections I've read this year.
In Elegy Owed, however, Hicok channels his considerable gifts into darker currents, creating poems that, while still fluid and sparkling on the surface, are tugged at by a deep tide swell of loss. The result is a collection of poems that are at once joyous and heartbreaking, that convey, in their weird, off-kilter beauty, a sense of mourning more authentic for being so far removed from cliche. Here, for instance, is an extract from 'Elegy to hunger':
"One person
takes a bite and means it, not a nibble
but a devotion, we are locusts
after all. Then the others,
until the body is clothed
with unspeaking ghosts
of mouths, the body an absence
bearing absences. The bite. The soul.
The swallow. Eating the hours
she filled, the shadow she cast. And I.
I should have."
It's an unforgettable image, and one that achieves its power by being simultaneously so far outside our commonplace experience, and yet so mesmerisingly vivid. It's passages like these that make Elegy Owed one of the finest new collections I've read this year.
October 1, 2015
Bob Hicok very well might be my new favorite poet. I've taught his poem, "Alzheimer's" in my class for many years, admired his work, but never gotten my hands on one his collections.
Hicok's poetry exhibits almost everything I want my own work to do. He is funny, accessible, quirky, deeply profound, surprising, surreal, philosophical, and irreverent---often all in the same poem. For instance, in "O," watch how Hicok swerves between sacred and profane, high and low but always with the promise of saying these old things anew: "the child, whose walking still bore signs of the womb, of being/wobbly water and I wanted//to reverse my vasectomy on the spot and have a child with the moon,/I wish there were a word//that was the thing it was the word of, that when I said sun I could be/sun, all of it in my mouth."
Hicok is concerned throughout this work and his work in general with the inability of language to say what he wants it to say; yet he is stuck with it and that's where all of his surreal brilliance becomes, not just cutesy intellectual trickery, but real and deep attempts to find ways for language to contain the energy of what the language says.
If you like poetry at all and haven't read Hicok, this is a must read. I know I'm off to order his other books as soon as I complete this.
Hicok's poetry exhibits almost everything I want my own work to do. He is funny, accessible, quirky, deeply profound, surprising, surreal, philosophical, and irreverent---often all in the same poem. For instance, in "O," watch how Hicok swerves between sacred and profane, high and low but always with the promise of saying these old things anew: "the child, whose walking still bore signs of the womb, of being/wobbly water and I wanted//to reverse my vasectomy on the spot and have a child with the moon,/I wish there were a word//that was the thing it was the word of, that when I said sun I could be/sun, all of it in my mouth."
Hicok is concerned throughout this work and his work in general with the inability of language to say what he wants it to say; yet he is stuck with it and that's where all of his surreal brilliance becomes, not just cutesy intellectual trickery, but real and deep attempts to find ways for language to contain the energy of what the language says.
If you like poetry at all and haven't read Hicok, this is a must read. I know I'm off to order his other books as soon as I complete this.
June 1, 2013
I'm becoming quite a big fan of Bob Hicok. I first came across him via this poem he wrote about the Virginia Tech shooting (he teaches there).
I've now read his latest poetry collection, Elegy Owed, and realized he writes some really terrific poetry on the subject of death and loss. The important thing to note is that it is not writing about death in a depressing or self-pitying way. That would be boring. This poetry is honest, powerful, and thoughtful. Also, he's very accessible for those of you who are poetry averse.
Some highlights:
-“Inanimate’s the one word / I’d execute by guillotine / to excise the lie / of lifeless, since bite into any bit of dirt / or dust and you’ve got a gob full of electrons / and quarks, the whole menagerie of matter’s / in there, pinging and swooping, steel’s got a pulse / as far as I’m concerned.”
-“The word terror. I’ll bury the word terror / to be free of the word terror. / … If terror is said / seven times in a row, it loses meaning, becomes / humdrum, a mere timpani of ear. / If terror is said seven hundred / thousand million trillion times, I am being raped / by a word.”
-"the dead have no ears, no answering machines / that we know of, still we call."
I've now read his latest poetry collection, Elegy Owed, and realized he writes some really terrific poetry on the subject of death and loss. The important thing to note is that it is not writing about death in a depressing or self-pitying way. That would be boring. This poetry is honest, powerful, and thoughtful. Also, he's very accessible for those of you who are poetry averse.
Some highlights:
-“Inanimate’s the one word / I’d execute by guillotine / to excise the lie / of lifeless, since bite into any bit of dirt / or dust and you’ve got a gob full of electrons / and quarks, the whole menagerie of matter’s / in there, pinging and swooping, steel’s got a pulse / as far as I’m concerned.”
-“The word terror. I’ll bury the word terror / to be free of the word terror. / … If terror is said / seven times in a row, it loses meaning, becomes / humdrum, a mere timpani of ear. / If terror is said seven hundred / thousand million trillion times, I am being raped / by a word.”
-"the dead have no ears, no answering machines / that we know of, still we call."
November 24, 2013
I have been putting off finishing this book, wanting to elongate the reverberation of each poem through my consciousness.
I woke up at 3am, my body rattled by its hypertrophied stress responses, mind looping back and again to the two sides of a particular coin: together, separate.
I read the last three poems of this book, and felt their integration. They are neither and both, everything and nothing. I cried, and it was good.
(last lines of the collection below--do not read them, nor think of a white bear):
"This is where I get self-conscious about language,
words are love affairs or seances or harpoons, there isn't a sentence
that isn't a plea.
This is where I don't care that I'm half wrong when I say everything
is made entirely of light.
This is where my wife and I hold hands.
Over there is where our shadows do a better job."
I woke up at 3am, my body rattled by its hypertrophied stress responses, mind looping back and again to the two sides of a particular coin: together, separate.
I read the last three poems of this book, and felt their integration. They are neither and both, everything and nothing. I cried, and it was good.
(last lines of the collection below--do not read them, nor think of a white bear):
"This is where I get self-conscious about language,
words are love affairs or seances or harpoons, there isn't a sentence
that isn't a plea.
This is where I don't care that I'm half wrong when I say everything
is made entirely of light.
This is where my wife and I hold hands.
Over there is where our shadows do a better job."
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 24, 2015
The simple review is that this was a great collection of poetry. It was enchanting haunting, and interesting. A wonderful collection for those interested in poetic expression and artistic views on death and life and the living of one's life to death. I actually dog-eared the pages, which goes against everything I was ever taught about books. It will be fun to poke around it again in the future for sure.
Overall: It's a great collection with a great deal of rereading potential, but I'd only give it to those willing to face the concept of death with maturity mixed with a sense of jocularity. And a well balanced mix at that.
Overall: It's a great collection with a great deal of rereading potential, but I'd only give it to those willing to face the concept of death with maturity mixed with a sense of jocularity. And a well balanced mix at that.
January 13, 2014
I came at this collection already heavy, wanting a good wringing out. This delivers. Man this delivers. Hicok's works are always such a strange mix of easy conversation, and the inscrutable dream-logic of symbols. This collection seems on a plane even more inscrutable than usual, as it weaves and bobs through death and other losses. Heavier fare than past collections, but losing none of its wit and whimsy. Very sweet and very alive. I keep meaning to read other poets but keep coming back to Bob.
June 17, 2017
His best book yet. The poems are devastating and brilliant.
"In other languages
you are beautiful — mort, muerto — I wish
I spoke moon, I wish the bottom of the ocean
were sitting in that chair playing cards
and noticing how famous you are
on my cell phone — pictures of your eyes
guarding your nose and the fire
you set by walking, picture of dawn
getting up early to enthrall your skin —"
"In other languages
you are beautiful — mort, muerto — I wish
I spoke moon, I wish the bottom of the ocean
were sitting in that chair playing cards
and noticing how famous you are
on my cell phone — pictures of your eyes
guarding your nose and the fire
you set by walking, picture of dawn
getting up early to enthrall your skin —"
June 21, 2013
"... Hicok’s new collection, Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon, 2013, 111 pp, $22), sets about that essential business of telling each other everything we can. ..."
You can read my full review at Wake.
You can read my full review at Wake.
July 24, 2013
Sometimes I get nervous when I begin a new collection by a favorite poet, afraid of being disappointed. Elegy Owed is Hicok at his best, though. Whether tackling the personal or the political, each poem is a surprising combination of whimsy and insight.
October 11, 2015
This is beautiful - one of the best books of poetry I've read in a long time, one of those books that truly makes you marvel at the possibility and music of life and language. I slowed down intentionally and rationed it to a few poems per day to savor it, and it was worth it.
March 18, 2014
I put birds
in most poems and rivers, put rivers
in most birds and thinking, put the dead
in many sentences
blinking quietly, put missing
into bed with having, put wolves
in my mouth hunting whispers, put faith
in making, each poem a breath
nailed to nothing.
in most poems and rivers, put rivers
in most birds and thinking, put the dead
in many sentences
blinking quietly, put missing
into bed with having, put wolves
in my mouth hunting whispers, put faith
in making, each poem a breath
nailed to nothing.
February 25, 2014
Hicok's ability to combine humor with discomfort, and with pain, and then also wrap those things in with beauty is remarkable, and very enjoyable, and often uncomfortable in the best way.
June 23, 2019
Bob Hicok is a genius in a way you start looking at things, things you'd rather call trivial in your everyday life, differently, once you're done with his poetry.
Short collection yet these poems and the metaphors for death were deep that you'd feel stranded in a way death actually leaves you with.
Sad yet with a tinge of humor, that's some excellent work from Bob Hicok.
Leave a message
When the wind died, there was a moment of silence
for the wind. When the maple tree died, there was always a place
to find winter in its branches. When the roses died, I respected the privacy
of the vase. When the shoe factory died, I stopped listening
at the back door to the glossolalia of machines.
When the child died, the mother put a spoon in the blender.
When the child died, the father dug a hole in his thigh
and got in. When my dog died, I broke up with the woods.
When the fog lived, I went into the valley to be held by water.
The dead have no ears, no answering machines
that we know of, still we call.
4.5 for sure!!
Short collection yet these poems and the metaphors for death were deep that you'd feel stranded in a way death actually leaves you with.
Sad yet with a tinge of humor, that's some excellent work from Bob Hicok.
Leave a message
When the wind died, there was a moment of silence
for the wind. When the maple tree died, there was always a place
to find winter in its branches. When the roses died, I respected the privacy
of the vase. When the shoe factory died, I stopped listening
at the back door to the glossolalia of machines.
When the child died, the mother put a spoon in the blender.
When the child died, the father dug a hole in his thigh
and got in. When my dog died, I broke up with the woods.
When the fog lived, I went into the valley to be held by water.
The dead have no ears, no answering machines
that we know of, still we call.
4.5 for sure!!
July 23, 2017
Bob Hicok is not for the faint of heart, or intellect.
He'll stretch you, and occasionally--if you're me--
even piss you off. There is more than one poem
in this book that made me say out loud--
because no one else was in the room--
"What the hell are you doing, Bob!"
That said, the number of poems
in this book that have crazy stars
all over the margins, and underlines
to the point that I had to stop underlining
because it was ruining the look and feel of the page,
by far outweigh the ones that pissed me off. So...
what can I do but tell you...
especially if you're a poet who wants to be a better one...
Yeah... you prob'ly outta read it...
He'll stretch you, and occasionally--if you're me--
even piss you off. There is more than one poem
in this book that made me say out loud--
because no one else was in the room--
"What the hell are you doing, Bob!"
That said, the number of poems
in this book that have crazy stars
all over the margins, and underlines
to the point that I had to stop underlining
because it was ruining the look and feel of the page,
by far outweigh the ones that pissed me off. So...
what can I do but tell you...
especially if you're a poet who wants to be a better one...
Yeah... you prob'ly outta read it...
January 27, 2023
I'm pretty picky about poetry, but I love Bob Hicok's stuff almost without exception. My gateway Hicok poem was "Oh My Pa-Pa," which I read in some journal somewhere, immediately becoming a fan for life. Ordinarily I read poems here and there rather than in discrete volumes (like Baby Doll, I'm a Reader of Magazines), but I decided last year that this year I would read more poetry books. This is a good one!
August 16, 2018
"on a rock a Roman stood on and thought,
I could conquer this, I could teach this wind
to bow. It would be beautiful to be the wind
saying, fat chance."
I could conquer this, I could teach this wind
to bow. It would be beautiful to be the wind
saying, fat chance."
September 5, 2018
Some of my favorite poems are in this book.
July 23, 2021
2.5 stars
May 1, 2025
fluff and fluff and fluff. but then, rare moments of truly original beauty. which is more than most.
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