A Primer - Bob Hicok

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

A Primer
                  -- Bob Hicok (2008)

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.

Comments

[moireach.livejournal.com]

Holy god I love Bob Hicok.

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

I am a big fan -- he seems to find poetry where few others can. I like him more because I feel the sort of things he writes poetry _on_, I could never bring them into my own writing.

Incidentally, are the poems not being tagged anymore?

./w

[moireach.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I really love how his background, the working class, auto industry stuff, plays into his poetry. I wish there was more stuff like it. Doesn't he have one that talks about how people in the ivory tower often don't understand the idea of manual labor or being desperate for work? (I might be misremembering details.)

Ha, I'd actually just tagged this one. Livejournal implemented a cap on the number of tags a community can have, a thousand, which we're at, which means only previously-posted poets can be tagged, not new ones, which is kind of a discouraging blow to the whole system. Also I think people just got lazy about it.

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and I have a feeling this was posted here - now if only we had the tags :P

Thanks for tagging it. Sucks, this tagging cap. Is this a cap for all non-paid communities? If yes, I'd be happy to support greatpoets financially so that we can continue to tag.

./w

[moireach.livejournal.com]

What, the one you just posted, or the one I mentioned? We have thousands of tagged posts, going back six years -- it's just in the past few months it's gotten sporadic.

It's for all communities, regardless of status. We explained the situation and asked for an exception or a workaround and were denied.

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

The one you mentioned. I went back and checked the tags and it wasn't here though. I am probably confusing it with some other lj-community. I know about the six-long-years of tagging, I use it to look for poems almost everyday and am thankful to all of you who've put in so much of their time into this.

I know someone at six-apart (they recently bought LJ) who is sort of 'up there'. Let me see if I can grab some strings to pull at.

./w

[moireach.livejournal.com]

Oh, thanks for the offer! SixApart actually sold LJ to a Russian company, SUP, last December, tho'. They ... do not like LJers or criticism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal#Sale_to_SUP).

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

Lovely. If you have any photographs of the place, please post? It'd be interesting to see how Hicok translates imagery into poems.

./w

[tears-of-nienna.livejournal.com]

There might be more than one mosque on 1-75, but the one I know is north of Cincinnati--here (http://img.groundspeak.com/waymarking/display/30cbebb1-de23-4a16-a870-965accdc5cae.jpg). We visited on a field trip my senior year of high school--it was beautiful.

I think it's only a few miles down the road from the much-less-beautiful touchdown Jesus (http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com/graphics/2005_01_13giantjesus.jpg). And yes, that's actually the phrase I used to google it. ;)

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

Ah, thanks so much. I was in Cincinnati for those 2-3 years in Ohio. I-71/75 was like a second home since I used to drive down to Caesar's Creek (Waynesville) quite often to have lunch with the most beautiful woman I've ever had the fortune of knowing.

./w

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

It _is_ gorgeous. Thank you for taking the trouble of posting this. I should now be able to imagine the corn to complete the 'corn corn corn islam' picture in my head :)

./w

[degram.livejournal.com]

oh, this is so wonderful, mr. wanderer. so wonderful. very, very cool. I just read it to my father.

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

So glad you like it :)

./w

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

I stayed in Ohio for 2-3 years and thought it was very beautiful (albeit xenophobic). Virginia was gorgeous in spring. Michigan always seemed too cold; I've never been there. You have a safe trip.

./w

[andhowever.livejournal.com]

I've driven by that mosque!

I'm an outsider in Michigan because the landscape of my heart is Oregon, but I still appreciate this poem very much.

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

I love how this poem is drawing out Michiganers(?) in hordes :)

./w

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

:)

Well then, this piece is especially for _you_:

Drum
by Philip Levine

Leo's Tool & Die, 1950

In the early morning before the shop
opens, men standing out in the yard
on pine planks over the umber mud.
The oil drum, squat, brooding, brimmed
with metal scraps, three-armed crosses,
silver shavings whitened with milky oil,
drill bits bitten off. The light diamonds
last night's rain; inside a buzzer purrs.
The overhead door stammers upward
to reveal the scene of our day.
We sit
for lunch on crates before the open door.
Bobeck, the boss's nephew, squats to hug
the overflowing drum, gasps and lifts. Rain
comes down in sheets staining his gun-metal
covert suit. A stake truck sloshes off
as the sun returns through a low sky.
By four the office help has driven off. We
sweep, wash up, punch out, collect outside
for a final smoke. The great door crashes
down at last.
In the darkness the scents
of mint, apples, asters. In the darkness
this could be a Carthaginian outpost sent
to guard the waters of the West, those mounds
could be elephants at rest, the acrid half light
the haze of stars striking armor if stars were out.
On the galvanized tin roof the tunes of sudden rain.
The slow light of Friday morning in Michigan,
the one we waited for, shows seven hills
of scraped earth topped with crab grass,
weeds, a black oil drum empty, glistening
at the exact center of the modern world.

[hallelujahlogic.livejournal.com]

<3 thank you for posting. this captures it so accurately.