Bob Hicok
Bob 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.
“Then I felt up silence. Then silence and I went all the way.”
“I had no business trying to see you leave, see death arrive, I owe you an apology, an elegy, I owe you the drift of memory, the praise of everything, of saying it was the best decision of my life, to hold you full, hold you empty, & live as the only bond between the two.”
“I love how intimate I've become with failure.”
“My life the only thing that has been with me my whole life”
“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.”
“In other languages,you are beautiful- mort, muerto- I wishI spoke moon, I wish the bottom of the oceanwere sitting in that chair playing cardsand noticing how famous you areon my cell phone- picture of your eyesguarding your nose and the fireyou set by walking, picture of dawngetting up early to enthrall your skin- what I hateabout stars is they’re not those candlesthat make a joke of cake, that you blow onand they die and come back, and youyou’re not those candles either, how often I realizeI’m not breathing, to be like youor just afraid to move at all, a lungor finger, is it time alreadyfor inventory, a mountain, I have threeof those, a bag of hair, box of ashes, if youwere a cigarette I’d be cancer, if youwere a leaf, you were a leaf, every leaf, as faras this tree can say.”
“Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love PoemMy left hand will live longer than my right. The riversof my palms tell me so.Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finishat the same time. I thinkpraying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I thinkstaying up and waitingfor paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension thisis exactly what's happening,it's what they write grants about: the chromodynamicsof mournful Whistlers,the audible sorrow and beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge.I like the idea of differenttheres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,a Bronx where people talklike violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehowkind, perhaps in the nookof a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayedanyone. Here I havetwo hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your backto rest my cheek against,your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.My hands are webbedlike the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezedsomething in the wombbut couldn't hang on. One of those other worldsor a life I feltpassing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother's bellyshe had to scream out.Here, when I say I never want to be without you,somewhere else I am sayingI never want to be without you again. And when I touch youin each of the places we meet,in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dyingand resurrected.When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life,in each place and forever.”
“Making it in poetryThe young teller at the credit union asked why so manysmall checksfrom universities? Because I writepoems I said. Whyhaven't I heard of you? BecauseI write poemsI said.”
“Here, when I say I never want to be without you,somewhere else I am sayingI never want to be without you again. And when I touch youin each of the places we meet,in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dyingand resurrected.When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life,in each place and forever”
“I like the idea of differenttheres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,a Bronx where people talklike violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehowkind, perhaps in the nookof a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayedanyone.”
“I think clapping is how mourn.”
“Let us all be from somewhere.”
“i can't prove this but i can't prove you're a good person though i suspect you're a good person.”