John Hodgen is the kind of poet who will mystify and amaze most readers. That is, one of substance, imagery, and humor, somehow sharp-tongued, gentle of spirit, and culturally keen all at once. The balance itself mesmerizes, the poems both brimming and contained, unfettered but oddly formal, electrified but poised.
Heaven & Earth Holding Company (Pitt Poetry Series)
Brand: University of Pittsburgh Press
72 pages
$18.00
In his fourth volume, Heaven & Earth Holding Company, Hodgen marches across centuries and continents much like he strews colloquialisms, pop-speak, similes, metaphors, end-rhyme and internal rhyme across the wide page. He treads newly upon the most promising topic of all, the human condition. Let me say here that even though Grace, his previous volume, was awarded the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, I find his voice in this book by and large even more assured.
The volume’s first poem, “Undiscovering America,” serves both as a strong opener and example of the style and tone to follow. It depicts an outlandish group of explorers assembled for a photo shoot, offering a humorous catalogue (“Cabot saying cheese … dodgy DeSoto … coon-skinned Zebulon Pike peeking out”) but nuanced, too (“and lonely Vespucci at the end of the row, mumbling to himself his mother’s regrets, Amerigo, Amerigo“). In the second stanza, there’s an exodus of the explorers, “going back, going home,” as if a film of several centuries is being rewound and they’re all “sailing backward … in their tall ships,” sailing, in the four final rhyming lines, “past the Pathfinders and Explorers backed up on their way to the mall, / till their ships look like toy boats, toy boats, till their ships are so small ,/ till they sit at the edge of the world, till they fall, / saying this is not what we were looking for, this is not it at all.”
Hodgen adds emphasis and texture to the implied dismay and disgruntlement here by borrowing from Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant, at all.” Here and elsewhere in the volume, Hodgen is doing what poets have been charged with doing, giving us a fresh way to grieve, or delight, or reflect. And Hodgen’s real feat is in prompting readers to do all three, often at once. The poems in Heaven & Earth Holding Company feature slender, compelling narratives which underwrite their meatier lyric meditations. This, too, is a rather stunning hybrid effect, and Hodgen seems to further push stylistic boundaries by running his lines out long, often right to the edge of the page, but using internal and end rhyme as well as alliteration and other sound-rhythm techniques, rendering the long lines definitively poetic. (How do we know for sure? They don’t read like prose.) He also deploys lists and piles up descriptions rooted in a single phrase: in “Undiscovering America,” not only does he list the explorers but also their ships; he uses the phrase “past …” four times in three lines and “till …” four times in two lines. The effect is a burst of momentum, highlighting what’s at stake, which is, in part, articulating what might possibly be wrong, how we got here, why we stay. It leaves one nearly breathless, the hyper-naming having achieved at least one strange irony: you will want to hold still, to sit with the havoc and ponder, even if there isn’t sense to be made of it.
Hodgen writes about a Vietnam vet who now teaches peace studies; Alexander Bell’s obsequious Watson; the sleepless and slightly insane Mary Todd Lincoln; Bob Dylan in 1959; a trickster on Bourbon Street wearing a cap that says FEMA, My Ass. With these and a dozen other figures as leaping-off points for focusing on and evaluating the human condition, Hodgen has a strong sense of the culturally bullied, those oppressed by what’s typical: we are a confused and troubled people, we always have been, domestic luxuries notwithstanding. We are chagrined and beleaguered, even as we bully and oppress others (unawares or perhaps not so). And so it is that Hodgen resists easy answers to our predicament—those on offer from screaming street evangelists, for example, or the unbridled consumption of resources and pleasures.
Even as Hodgen questions what is glib, unexamined, or plain old lousy, he does not, to his credit, take his own vexation too seriously. His is not a wholly bemoaning, didactic poetic. Both in content and form, Hodgen leavens heavy matter with whimsy, weaving in allusions, puns, rhyme, and playfully prolix lists. So in a poem like “Killing Mice, December,” after detailing different ways to kill the mice in his home (“I do not use the Hav-a-Heart …. Lord knows I do not have a heart”) and lauding the traps he’s selected (“the tiny Gericault Medusa raft”), we find these lines:
I have read The Plague, know my rats, ersatz, my mycenaeum, know Hamlet’s Mousetrap,
prologue-less, his knavish piece of work. I know my Mickey, Minnie, Mouseketeers,
my beastie Bobby Burns, my Piper Pied, my moles, voles, my knee-jerk, Wolf-Trap-
going, sleeve-a-heart friends, who dutifully carry their living mice, boxed, amazed,
Plato-caved, out to the woods, the airy light, release them, to have them come back in again ….
The jocular, tongue-twisting, reference-festive style makes the end of the poem—”We’re all in traps ,/ or heading into one …. We’re all going to die. Just make it quick”—seem less stern or dour, more expansive, clever, true.
Hodgen does have a tendency to toss these pithy generalizations , as if out the back of a truck going 60 mph, at the end of his poems. In fact, in many poems, there’s a distinct linguistic or syntactical revving up, peeling out, a great swath of speed, and then this beautiful, heartrending truth like one of those little white-silk parachutes that pops out, trails behind, lands next to you in the grass. This is achieved in part by his Whitmanesque embrace, drawing some particular principle from an object, figure, or event in the poem and broadly applying the metaphoric bottom line to our nature, our plight, our lot, shifting the personal (pronoun) to a grander collective. In “History,” the “we” at the beginning of the poem is the speaker and his/her spouse, watching through a window the reunion of their neighbors, two women, after a break-up. But the “we” at the end is, surely, all of us, from all ages, all places. Everyone, everywhere who’s ever struggled with belonging or loving or believing:
… and some bird high above all of us now, the yellow-tailed hawk of our history,
the bird that has watched us every day of our lives, and which at night we think is a star,
lazily circling with each loop, with each scree, with each caw, the bird inside the husk
of the bird, the bird we carry in the blood of our hearts, our hearts that we lug
from one place to the next, the lost luggage of our lives, always moving, being stored,
the word that was in the very beginning, the host of our bodies in the mouth of the Lord.
Hodgen can get away with wordplay that would make most of us groan (lug, luggage—mild compared to “rats, ersatz”) by thinking clearly and yet circuitously about who and what we are as human creatures, our flaws and joys—and vice-versa. He also plays with spiritual imagery, speaks of spiritual questing, of saviors and saints. God’s an optometrist in “A Tranquil Darker”; Elvis serves as a messiah in one; in another, Hodgen asserts, “I say there are saints in supermarkets, angels in malls. / I say there are thousands of Peters and Pauls.”
Speaking of, Hodgen draws from such uncanny, spanning sources for his reflections that they’re a propellant all their own; though seven poems use “Upon Reading” in the title, several more have an implied material source, and the variance in tone and content—contrast “Upon Reading that a Noisy Cloth Factory Separated the Family Homes of Sandro Botticelli and Amerigo Vespucci” with “Upon Reading on a Flight from Atlanta the Latest Slang Term for the Act of Defecation”—keeps the titular template (and what follows) from becoming stale. My favorite of these happens to also have the longest title of any poem in the book, or any poem I’m aware of, period: “Upon Reading that Abraham Lincoln Spent His Summer Nights as President at a Cottage on the Grounds of the Soldiers’ Home on the Outskirts of Washington rather than at the White House, and that He and Edwin M. Stanton, His Secretary of War, Spent the Better Part of One Evening in 1864 Freeing Two Peacocks that Had Become Entangled in a Tree.” Again, at the end, though he’s speaking of a family of tourists, Hodgen implies that most of us are like the “brightly colored birds in the dim shadows of the evening … as if they’ve tried to fly away so many times / that their hearts are permanently tangled in the trees now, each day growing more frantic, / more alone.”
If I have a complaint, it might be that Hodgen seems to take his stylistic cues, perhaps subconsciously, from that vein of poets who over-exhibit themselves as well-read, well-traveled, irreverent sophisticates and sprawling erudites; one reviewer says of Albert Goldbarth’s 1991 volume, perhaps not coincidentally titled Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology, that it “straddles the ages, one foot on the big bang and the other on last Saturday, a quark, a Rembrandt, a woolly mammoth.” Hodgen himself is not as showy or cynical, but the breathlessness, the word-infectiousness, the constant allusions and eclectic content teased into philosophical reflection might push him toward Goldbarth’s non-categorical camp. That said, Hodgen is often able to tone down the hyper-intensity when he needs to; he may pile up lists of descriptors and metaphors, string his lines out long with odd end-rhymes, work over sounds and syntax into paronomasia, but he does so to balance out (or even, in some sense, echo) his gritty foray into the strangeness and darkness of human behavior and tendency. Heaven & Earth Holding Company ultimately reads like some professorial uncle who sees you misbehaving, pulls you by the elbow from your troublemaking, then winks and hands you his kazoo. It’s equal parts conviction and forgiveness, a parade of foibles and laments and jokes, simultaneously life-stuffed and world-weary, somehow both august and ordinary in turn.
Susanna Childress has a second collection of poems, Entering the House of Awe, forthcoming from New Issues Press.
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