Those who have been paying attention to Bob Hicok’s writing career will find in his fourth collection of poetry, This Clumsy Living, the signature muscularity and flexibility of language that shot Hicok to the forefront of the contemporary American poetry scene, but close readers will also see a deepening of the emotional intelligence, a maturity of tone, and a serious turning inward of the work. Like Melville’s great Moby Dick signaled a shift from storytelling to truth-telling for the artist, and the difficult and often times hazardous subterranean mining that accompanies this, Hicok’s new book explores dangerous territory. Unlike Melville, Hicok’s work has a significant (in the world of poetry) fandom, and his new book will bring more into the fold. However, This Clumsy Living is not a book for the faint of heart; it’s about death, terror, love, family, community, and the interstices within which we find ourselves stranded between them.

This Clumsy Living, from a guy who started out as an automotive die designer and then turned poet and teacher, takes on the scary, the ineffable; the things outside human control. Hicok turns his nuanced eye to what lay before him and doesn’t blink. He laughs a little, but he’s not crying, and he won’t look away. This book will move Hicok to a new level: he’s a master craftsperson, but he’s also a truth-seeker, and he’s not ashamed of it.

Laura McCullough: I’m wondering if your experience in automotive die designing is at all analogous to writing poetry. Both require imagining how one thing can be held by another, how parts connect or come into confluence, the management of positive and negative spaces. Are you a designer of poems?

Bob Hicok: No. There’s certainly overlap. In both, you begin with a blank space and have to fill it with what comes from your mind. But writing is much more of a felt process. The directions a poem takes, the language it uses -- I don’t think my way through these decisions. A die -- which is a large metal object that stamps out parts -- cannot be designed on feel, by instinct. Certainly instinct is part of any creation, but the limitations of the two endeavors are vastly different. The revision process is more akin to the design work I did, but even in that regard, the two are separated by this: what can be thought illogical or wrong about a poem is often what gives it drive, whereas illogic in a die leads to failure.

LM: The poem, “A poem with a poem in its belly,” seems like a great example of a poem that’s analogous to die making. Can you talk about this poem?

BH: The two poems that comprise that one poem were part of a longer poem that didn’t work. I was sticking with the catalysts of poems in a different way while writing this book, coming back to the same feeling or topic again and again and combining those iterations into longer poems. These two poems were accepted by Cutbank. The editor wrote that he liked how one spoke to the other. I was getting ready to e-mail the files when it occurred to me to imbed one poem inside the other. I guess this speaks to my answer to the previous question. Certainly there is a sense of design to this, quite literally. But the idea itself simply arrived. In “A theory of art as respiration,” I wrote “Here is an exact representation of the creative process:

no

no

no

yes.

Whatever engine there is in my mind that generates ideas and images does so unbidden. What I do is sift, decide. I hope that’s the last time I quote myself.

LM: In one view of ecopoetics, poetry that is aware of systems and organizing principles whether they are natural, cultural, familial, or even arising out of a body awareness, all could be viewed through the lens of ecocriticism. In your last book, Insomnia Diary, one thread you followed was about class and work. In the new book, the family, the body, and mortality seem to be interconnected threads. In “Solstice,” the speaker stands, “on the moment the earth begins to change its mind about the sun/when hiding begins, and raised my hand from the hill/into the shadows behind the lovers, and contemplated/…” What are you contemplating, Bob? What is the moment you are in that is at the core of the truths in this book?

BH: I can’t say. Questions like these scare me; they make me feel inarticulate and numb to myself. I know books are often thought of as projects but I don’t experience them that way. While there are certain things I want to do at any given moment -- like right now, I’m writing pairs of poems, the second poem speaking to the limitations of the first or simply taking one of the unchosen paths the first poem might have gone, and these are also sparser poems than I’ve tended to write -- I don’t go into a book thinking I’ll explore the multiplicity of selves that inhabit us, say, or the impossibility of occupying the present moment. Books are more like time capsules for me. I wanted, with this book, to change my approach to poems, and to include a wider range of poems than my last book had. Beyond that…

LM: This Clumsy Living is organized into five sections: Twenty-three windows, Twenty-eight fathers, Twenty-one rivers, Thirty-three skies, and Thirty-two dreams. Windows, fathers, rivers, skies, and dreams are all conduits, can all be seen through, can all be occluded, stopped up, diverted, misused, misunderstood. From an ecopoetics standpoint, they are connectors, channels, vectors of agency. Can you speak about the structure of the book and what you were getting at with this organizing structure?

BH: Those section titles came about as I wrote the last poem of the book, “A letter: the Genesis poem.” I’m aware of some of the words I use incessantly, and it occurred to me one morning that I could count how often they came up in the manuscript. I’d recently enjoyed what arises when I click on [Translate this page] in Google searches, and the weirdness of that language came together, in the moment of thinking about the words I frequently use, with the bible on my desk, which was open to Genesis: I decided, in that instant, to write a poem that spoke to the presence of these words, and in doing so, found myself rephrasing lines from Genesis. The naming of any one section was arbitrary.

LM: The last poem in This Clumsy Living, “My ever after,” opens with a playful riff off the Portuguese word for “paradise.” The penultimate stanza imagines that “…storms could be arranged/in a scrapbook if we’d think of them/as your children and their pictures.” Are your poems like these pictures?

BH: I don’t know. People tell me they like the motion in my poems, the rush and tumble, but I think of them as tame. They’re certainly not my children. My storms? If you think of neural activity, as the mind as a storm, than yes, my poems are pictures of my storms.

LM: That poem closes with an explanation and a kind of plea: “the camera that would do this/would see that it’s not all darkness,/and there’s light hidden in the terror./And not lie about the terror.” This is the closing line of the collection, and it seems a multiverse of meaning: a personal world view, a political statement, an indictment of the state of poetry in a country that believes the political and the aesthetic shouldn’t marry. Is politics, like spam or SUVs or squirrels or cancer, inevitable in your poetry?

BH: I think it is. Less overt political statement than the implied politics of subject matter and tone.

LM: Or is as simple as this old maxim: Nothing very, very good or very, very bad, lasts very, very long?

BH: I won’t ask which category you have in mind for me.

LM: The closing line of the poem, “The new math,” is “Divide any number by wolf, you get wolf.” If you divide a poem what do you get?

BH: Calvino had this notion for a novel that appeared to have been partially burned away. The novel would have been written to be read as a wounded text. It depends on where and how you divide it. Fracturing is one of the most compelling and overdone artistic techniques of the last hundred years or so. I am drawn to the notion of some things being irreducible. Animals seem to be. Relentlessly themselves.

LM: If you divide a Bob Hicok poem by, say, the word “mind,” what would you get?

BH: Brain death.

LM: If you had to choose between cupcakes and bananas, what would you?

BH: Cupcake. This feels like the Inside the Actor's Studio interviews.

LM: Ice cubes or vanilla?

BH: Sassafras.

LM: Being the first off the sinking ship or the last?

BH: As a poor swimmer, I’d say last.

LM: Reason or emotion?

BH: Emotion.

LM: Your poems have great Emotional Intelligence and aren’t afraid of being caught emoting, but they’re smart as hell, too. From “Angels of mercy:” “…two doctors made of lava tell us we will die/but not today we will die but not forever and then/and o they give us suckers I’d like orange please life/is sweet” Your poems go right up to the edge and doesn’t tell us the truth or try to impart wisdom, but it reveals one mind in honest consultation with itself, one moment elucidated. Do you think about the relationship between revelation and restraint? The creative tension this generates?

BH: Because I don’t know where a poem is headed when I start, it seems that revelation has to play a central part in the poem, that what I’m most consistently doing is trying to understand why something is on my mind, why my mind has a particular shape in a particular moment. Maybe writing is nothing more than an inquiry into presences. Restraint has become interesting to me only lately, I’m more drawn these days to an intentional holding back or stripping down than ever before, but restraint of subject matter is impossible for me to deal with.

LM: If you could answer one question that I haven’t posed, what would the answer be?

BH: I’d like it all in hundred dollar bills, please.

LM: Do you have a question you’d want readers of poetry to answer?

BH: Why do poets and readers of poetry tend to be ideological about our tastes?

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Bob Hicok is the author of This Clumsy Living (2007), as well as The Legend of Light, Animal Soul, Plus Shipping and Insomnia Diary. Winner of a National Education Association Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes, he has published poems in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Poetry and Ploughshares, and his poems have appeared in two issues of Best American Poetry. The Legend of Light was an American Library Association Booklist Notable Book of the Year. He is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.

Laura McCullough’s second collection of poetry, What Men Want, is forthcoming from XOXOX Press in January, 2008. Her other work includes the collection, The Dancing Bear, and a chapbook of prose poems, Elephant Anger, online at Mudlark. She’s won two New Jersey State Arts Council Fellowships, one in prose, and one in poetry. She teaches full time at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey.