The Book of Funnels

by Christian Hawkey

John Ashbery “Christian Hawkey’s poetry is landscape poetry in the true sense of landscape—not a segment of the Earth’s surface posing for its picture, but an open, undetermined space in which all kinds of crazy mental and physical things are going about their business simultaneously. What emerges is a portrait of a medium like the one we live in, with all its unexpectedness. The Book of Funnels is one of the strangest and most beautiful first books of poetry I have read in a long time.” Christian Hawkey was raised on Pine Island, Florida. He is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at the Pratt Institute in New York City. In 2000, he co-founded the poetry journal, jubilat . He lives in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn.

Genres: Poetry

75 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Buzz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This man is insane but a genius. He visited my poetry class in 2006 and kind of blew my mind. He told this story about how he leaves a dictionary out on his backyard table in brooklyn and he responds to the way the birds peck at words, and watches the way the weather tears at the pages. He went on about this for like 20 minutes.

[Mackenzie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Calling Christian Hawkey’s The Book of Funnels “strange” and “beautiful,” as John Ashbery does on the book jacket, is like calling the Artic “chilly” or the speed of light “quick.” Hawkey’s poems evoke a new order of time, space, and reality, yet they try to convince readers that Hawkey’s world exists concurrently with the real world if only we look a little closer. His poems mesh realities by combining images of everyday with images that are bizarre and impossible. Giving his readers a glimpse of this other world, both literally and figuratively, fuels Hawkey’s images and drives his narrative.

Funnels opens up with “The Isle of Monapia,” a poem indicative of the form of several others in the book. It has quatrains with lines that shorten with each line break until the stanza break, narrowing at the bottom like a funnel itself. The form proves to be quite tight and mechanically sound, and images work best when enjambed before a stanza break. Lines like “There is a photograph// of a photograph of you, submerged in a blue aquarium,” and “we jump back// under a purple beech, the last place we want to be” allow the image to be stilted by the stanza break yet unfold gracefully in the next stanza.

The image we are left with in “The Isle of Monapia” is that of a periscope which “breaks the surface,/ looks around, withdraws.” This initial image of perspective transforms into later images of moose eyes (“Night without Thieves”), goat pupils (“Because we are Starved our Entrials Spark”), to a fully conscious “seeing moment” in “Slow Waltz Through Inflatable Landscape” where an unnamed character “tried to close his eyes/ but they were no longer his. . .were never his to begin with: this was the time of his seeing.” Hawkey has opened up a portal for the reader from our world to his speaker’s through the periscope, moose eyes, etc, while not allowing the real world to fall away completely.

The image plays a central role in Hawkey’s book and especially in the book’s title poem. The poem opens with an image of an overturned and rusted wheelbarrow, which seems to be nothing more than a heavy-handed attempt to re-vise the image by “overturning” perhaps the most famous image in American poetry. However, Hawkey’s use of the image is far from revolutionary. Just because his images are bizarre and other-worldly does not make them innovative. Fresh, yes. Ground-breaking, no.

Another failed attempt in the title poem is the strange and seemingly arbitrary form; while every other poem in the book is written in block form, quatrains, tercets or couplets, “Funnels” is thirteen separate pages with bizarre spacing and alignment, though each page is identical to the last. This form does not function nearly as well as the narrowing quatrains used elsewhere; they seem an attempt at a postmodern gesture that doesn’t quite pan out.

Hawkey’s most beautiful moments occur when his poetic guard is down and the language follows its own delicate angles. “Since Judgement is Also a Storm” is one of the most compelling poems in the collection because of the precision of the images and presence of the speaker. He is demanding, perceptive (a place where the portal truly works), and convincing. The most beautiful images in the book occur in this poem:

or high over the Gulf of Mexico the infant tornadoes
reaching out of the clouds, fingers of a slate hand
feeling for something dropped
down the grate of this world

golden—yes, to pull the eye—and retrieved by a child
years from now with a piece of string, pink gum,
humming a song we have yet to hear,
softly like thunder.

The funnel is present, both literally and figuratively, and the two realities overlap beautifully. The hugeness of the world juxtaposed against the humming child is torrential yet strangeness is still preserved in the gum/string image.

[Paul Toth · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's almost impossible to describe these poems, but here's the best I can do: Landscapes bleed into emotional states and vice versa. Don't even bother being influenced by this collection; doing so may induce suicidal ideations.

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

the first part which was so great and soaking and the next part which was probably hard coming out but not quite right.

[Mattilda]

This book makes me so grateful for used bookstores -- Green Apple Books in particular -- because I just picked it up randomly and oh my is it gorgeous with such blow-me-away images -- fairy tales clash of civilizations deep breath the end of breath, time, a flashlight, intimacy forget it the sun and the shadow and the moon all at once a wave, waving, nature poetry without nature and the end of the wind the wind the wind give me more!

[Zack]

i loved this book. i loved the images. i loved how the way the stanzas looked on the page often mirrored each other in the same poem. i think it is largely about the experience of striving for individuality in a world of conformity. I don't know, maybe you'll think something different. i think it's a good book to read very quickly, then look back on.

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

quick, while we're gods




he's brilliant