CUTTY SPOT

[words on INSOMNIA DIARY by BOB HICOK]

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I love Bob Hicok

he was one of the first ‘big’ contemporary poets I got into

he takes risks

leaps

he leaves the impression that one can use anything to spur a poem

he’s often hilarious & often frighteningly insightful

he weaves sadness & humor w/ a clarity all of his own

I have 3 of his books

he’s been publishing books since the early 90s

he’s been in the New Yorker & Poetry magazine & other ‘huge’ places

but that fact by itself doesn’t intrigue me

in fact, there are many poets in those magazine s I’d rather not read

Hicok, though, is a writer whom I thoroughly enjoy & who doesn’t jeopardize his own ‘weird’ yet still has ‘established’ himself in the ‘big league’

like Dean Young or Russell Edson or James Tate or Gertrude Stein

I don’t think it’s necessary for a great writer to aspire to be included in these types of publications

& the Internet is causing another, ‘alternative’ culture of writers to manifest, who are sub-creating its own desires & its own shape, who somewhat rejects the abovementioned ‘big league’

who takes itself a little less ‘serious’ (but does not, in my opinion, as a whole, have any less quality or interesting work {who has more interesting work usually})

but Hicok is a bit older & is still somewhat connected with the ‘bigger’ poetry culture

I’m convinced he’d still be exciting to the alternative community

that’s why I am interested in him

he too does not ‘take himself too seriously’ as a poet

for example, on the ‘Acknowledgment’ page of Insomnia Diary he writes:

‘I’d like to thank the editors of the following publications for reading my crap and everyone’s crap yet remaining determined and (somewhat) sane’

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he starts this book w/

‘At least once you should live with someone / more medicated than yourself’

an apt way I think to introduce the tone throughout

his work offers what seems to be ‘autobiographical’ curiosities & moments as catalysts for ‘stretches’ of intense imagination

I have an interview w/ him coming out soon in THE BELIEVER (super stoked abt this)

out of anyone I’ve ever interviewed, he gave the most fantastic answers (you shld read it when it comes out)

in this book he is brutally honest & sincere (& sometimes jarringly heady)

‘I saw he was looking for a place / in his brain to hide / his brain’

he writes abt being ‘in love with’ & asked to parties by ‘fireflies’

the word ‘spoons’ pops up like 8 times throughout the book

he talks abt ‘going’ bald

he talks abt doing drugs in his ‘former life’

he surprisingly uses the word ‘soul’ throughout this book

he writes a beautiful poem about BIG SUR (one of my favorite places ever) called ‘Sur Coast Diary’

Big Sur is on the Pacific Coast

if you haven’t been there or seen pictures, go there or google pictures of it

it is truly ‘other worldly’

seals bark on the rocks

they spend hours working w/ and against the brutal force of the water to perch themselves on the rocks for reprieve

the water is shockingly turquoise

Henry Miller lived there for a long time

Jack Kerouac wrote a book abt it (one of his most interesting abt his post-fame & alcoholic tremors)

I camp at a campsite there on a dirt road that ‘nobody’ knows abt

I met a man named Mock there that reminded me of an insane wizard – he said my car was just another piece of the ‘biosphere’

when I go there I feel scared & in awe

the Pacific Ocean moves w/ such conviction

the mtns there jut into the water

the mtns are covered in yellow flowers

Bob Hicok’s poem abt Big Sur says:

‘I was torn in half with the speed a fingernail / grows, / I heard the jaws of the earth at work, / the mountains rose, the ocean swallowed […] it stared at me / with the charisma of the dark side of the moon, / I told it my name, / I collected its breath on my humid tongue, / our confusion was the understanding we shared’

yes

he ‘nailed’ it

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he has a poem called ‘Echo’ that uses recursive language – he recycles his own language throughout the poem

kind of like a ‘pantoum’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantoum)

he references outer space throughout this book

he speaks about himself as a poet in this book

his limitations (‘I can’t be in the avant-garde / because I cry when dogs die / in movies’)

‘My contributions / to the common good is playing / with the alphabet in a little room / while world goes foraging / for food. I’m a better poet than man / and it’s well known how little / my verbs are worth’

here are other moments I like in the book:

‘That was the day I learned you can sit / with someone who’s on the bottom / of the ocean and not get wet’

‘When I said / I have to lay you off / a parallel universe was born / in his face, one where flesh / is a loose shirt / taken to the river and beaten / against rocks’

‘How to say yes like a river / jumping off a cliff’

‘the suspicion that what we watch / watches back’

‘I can’t have a life any longer / that doesn’t include recreational hours / under pal fronds with a woman / who speaks fluent ocean, syllables / that begin a thousand miles away / and arrive at my ear’

‘I want to remember / the first time I heard music and knew / I was hearing music, and the first time / I heard music and had no idea what it was’

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find this book here:

http://www.amazon.com/Insomnia-Diary-Pitt-Poetry-Series/dp/0822958422/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348547977&sr=8-1&keywords=bob+hicok+insomnia