Bob Hicok's poems have appeared in a wide variety of magazines, journals, and anthologies, including the New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and numerous volumes of The Best American Poetry. His books have been awarded the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress and named a "Notable Book of the Year" by Booklist. Hicok has worked as an automotive die designer and a computer system administrator. He is currently teaching at Purdue University. When asked in an interview "What would Bob Hicok launch from a giant sling shot?" he answered, "Bob Hicok."



It's a pleasure to feature these poems and chat with you a bit, Bob; you're a poet I've admired for a long time. Even though we’re the same age, I kinda feel like you’ve been around forever, you know? I also think we share some aesthetic space as poets. That makes me happy.

Your poems display, on some level, what we might call narrative conventions, but what sets your poems aside from the work of other poets whose work I love and whose poems are as generous with humor as are your own—poets like, say, Stephen Dunn and David Kirby—is the associative, quirkily meditative quality that mark your poems as uniquely yours.  Your mind at work intrigues me, and the unexpected places your poems often end up are often revelatory for me. How did you arrive at this way of writing a poem? I think for me, when I am successful at writing a poem from this neighborhood, it feels like I might owe it to the study of the narrative poets of the generation or two before ours—Kinnell, Hugo, Roethke, Dave Smith and others—with a jigger or two of Frank O’Hara, maybe a splash of Mark Halliday. How about you?

Thank you. I feel somehow I’ve been called an old and tap-dancing giraffe, which I like. I just write what comes to mind, such as “I feel somehow I’ve been called an old and tap-dancing giraffe.” If it interests me—the thing I put down—I keep going. If it doesn’t, I erase it. This morning, sitting at my desk, I felt stuck—not with writing, but with my life. I wrote a few lines that felt labored and boring, clunky, erased them and wrote, “I’m a long way down river/before I realize I’ve left my canoe on top of the car.” Why that showed up, where it came from—I have no idea. It wasn’t intentional, wasn’t based on my reading of other poets or part of a conscious aim I had for the poem. The generative parts of my brain—the parts that write things down on little slips of paper and show these slips to the rest of my brain—I mostly work for them, listen to them when I write. But my conscious mind—the language it reaches for, sifts through—has always trusted my instinctual mind. I write the way I think and talk. In other words, I am myself.


Some of the poems here seem the poems of a middle-aged guy thinking about stuff that other middle-aged guys find depressing. I’m thinking of the concern “Older” seems to have with memory and the reflection in “All in all, a lot has happened,” the half-line in it that reads, “I'm dying not to die . . . “ Maybe, especially, as I wait for my own mother in a nursing home to pass from here, I’m thinking of the heartbreaker, “A medical breakthrough.” Does this worry you as much as it does me? Is there a point where our audience is redefined as a consequence of our changing subject matter? How much of the poems you write are for you and how much for the reader? You’ve said elsewhere that you don’t much think about readers as you find it “presumptuous” and “creepy,” yet there they are. You have a lot of fans, whatever that means for a working-class sorta poet.

Sorry about your mother.

I absolutely don’t think about people reading my poems. I don’t know how I could, especially given my response to the first question. To think of a reader—and I mean while writing—would be to try to pass my mind through a hypothetical mind (or minds) while I’m trying to let my mind come into existence, trying to let it be itself. There’s too much vetting in that, too much stopping the flow of consciousness, and it’s a vetting that’s too conjectural to be of use. I also fear how much we push out, how much we don’t say when we let normative thinking in, as people, let alone poets. I write to meet my mind, give it a chance to wear the body of language, to see it in front of me. I publish to give my mind a chance to go out and live in the world.

Not sure the kind of worry you’re thinking of. But yes—to the audience question—audiences change. I don’t see kids being very interested in these poems, and poetry—at least in this country—is ruled by the young. In my current book, I have poems about erectile dysfunction. I’m not picturing too many twenty year olds saying to their friends, Dude, did you read Hicok’s latest bad-boner poem? Again—that’s nothing I can or should focus on. I’m 56. I can’t write 36 or 26. I hope there’s still and always a kind of zest or verve or shimmery fandango going on in what I do. But I have to—want to—write as close to this second, this right now, as I can.


Another thing I love about many of your poems is that they are irreverent and risky: not in a gratuitous sense but in a way that gets to the marrow and allows the poems to reverberate in a bigger canyon. I’ve told you that one of my favorite poems of yours is the mildly irreverent “By their Works." I think folks can Google that one on Verse Daily. In this group, goodness, you take a great risk by employing a wholly realistic first person online porn aficionado in “A definition of hollow.” Jeez, it really makes a reader feel the speaker knows whereof he speaks: “I spend hours looking for the right combination / of smile and hip, skirt and areola, for eyes / that seem happy, that help me forget / there's a director off-camera saying Faster.” Was research required for this poem? 

None. We swim in porn. In my life, it’s been everywhere. And I’m as stuck on certain shapes, curves, softnesses as anyone. Men really are captured by images. Porn’s addictive because there’s never an arrival, because it’s not real, not love. No one ever finds an image and says, O my god, there she/he is, it’s over, I’ll never go looking again. There’s a psychological mechanism that drives a lot of what we do—we’re addicted to things which give us certain but intermittent and unpredictable rewards. Gambling. Drugs. It’s also known as “fun failure,” because our failures—all the times we pull the slot and don’t win—increase our excitement, our desire for the payoff. Porn falls in this category. There’s something we’re searching for beyond any and all the tits and ass. Some combination that clicks a very particular set of tumblers into place. I’ve recognized this in myself and have fought it as long as I can recall. Indulged it too, but mostly fought it because I think little good comes of it. The objectification of women is also the objectification of men. We all get reduced into something static and lifeless when appearance is confused for—substituted for—substance. Images aren’t what we really want, but certain images remind us of something we’ve had or want to have, a sense of connection or belonging.

And I have to say – as scolding as it sounds—there’s no risk in this. The risk is all in not saying, not being who you are, not being. I don’t know how this got started, us patting each other on the back, high-fiving, when what we’re talking about is doing our jobs. We’re supposed to say stuff to each other that matters. I really am being rude here to you, John, and I’m sorry. But this has long mystified me. Risk is going into a burning building.


This is a great answer, and I don't find it rude at all as I agree. The back patting part especially, as we are privileged to live in a culture where we can write practically anything we want and face no real repercussions. Perhaps that is one reason poetry of the United States doesn't have the same cultural value and gravitas as poetry might in other countries where writing a poem puts one's life at risk. As you say, this is our job and it's largely a somewhat cushy job.

The familiar question of “what’s at stake in a poem” is really “what’s at stake in your life?” Academic American poetry is very insular and still largely white and middle class. It’s often the poetry of settled matters. And while this is changing—the status quo I mean, the demographics of who we are, the nature of the problems that are being given voice in poetry—trouble, which is a generative wheel in art, is largely personal, not social, in most of the poetry I read in magazines and from students. And while I think this poetry can be incredibly vital, if you don’t have or aren’t developing an instinct for how your life speaks to and connects to the lives of others, if you can’t write a self-focused poem that opens into a social act, well, that’s when the “navel gazing” claims ring true.


In a 2007 interview with Matthew Siegel (who graduated from the same high school as me, by the way) in Gulf Coast, you talked about associative poems and revision, identifying a feeling that sometimes happens when something is off in a poem, a feeling you call “jangly”: “I'll feel an almost physical irritation while writing them, as I go back and re-read what I've put down. Like there's no core, no motive evolving among the elements of the poem, no generative momentum . . . When it's not there—when a poem has that jangly, disconnected feel—a line, a phrase, doesn't naturally lead to the next. The poem has to be pushed.” Was there a point in the process of any of the poems represented here where “jangle” was an issue? If so, how did you de-jangle the thing?

Well, the truth is I can’t remember now what you took, and I’m not about to go back and look. I remember being very happy with what you selected, remember liking the poems when I went through them after I got your yes. But the odds are great that if I look at them now, I’ll cringe, I’ll want to give up writing for lumberjacking or professional skeet-shooting, both of which I failed in high school.

That’s cool about you and M.S. going to the same high school. I wonder if you ever sat in the same desks.

In general, though, if a poem has that jangly feeling, it means I’ve lost the thread, the sense of what connects the lines, means there’s no through-put. Usually I can go back and look for the point where I lost that. And the that itself— the sense of what a poem’s about or headed—usually shows up a couple lines in, and is the result of noticing the shape that my mind is taking, the opportunity that’s presenting itself in the images or the nature of the language I’ve happened to put down. To get back on track, I try to remind myself of that feeling, that sense of critical mass. Of course, because we’re writing the same poem or few poems over and over—because we each have a nature—these images and thoughts are usually patterned to begin with.


G.K. Chesterton insisted, “Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.” Here’s your big chance.

While I’ve not written about cheese, I’ve written with cheese. This whole interview was first written out with a chunk of Camembert. I like his hair. From picture to picture, it moves around his head like an itinerant crash of clouds. He paraphrases Heraclitus—You can never step under the same hairdo twice.


Thank you, Bob!

You’re welcome. And thank you, John. For taking the poems, asking the questions, showing interest. I hope your mom’s doing well.