Hicok Review

Sorry this is posted late, I don't have the stamina for the K life anymore and everything seems to be falling by the wayside.
Self-taught poet charms K College
Marni Newell



In the room packed shoulder-to-shoulder with Kalamazoo College students and faculty, Bob Hicok, the self-taught poet from suburban Detroit, sympathized with his audience. “If it’s any consolation to those who are here because they have to be,” he told the rustling students. “I hate poetry readings. I can’t focus on the poetry.”
Lucky for the students who had to be there, his poetry was interesting enough to focus on. As visiting professor Glenn Deutsch stated in his introduction Hicok’s short-but-dense poetry is “serious-funny.”
In one poem about and named for the gene that has been linked to cancer, BRCA-1, Hicok describes a woman who has the gene and then imagines she’s had a mastectomy and her ovaries removed, “The faux breasts and egg sacs are gone.” He continues talking about her ovaries, or more appropriately, her “novaries” as she blow dries her hair in the bathroom near where he waits in the bedroom, petting his dog, “I would not dry my hair in such a moment, but I’m bald.” In nearly all of Hicok’s poetry, if the audience is ever unsure of whether to laugh or not, it’s probably safe to laugh.
Hicok succeeded in being just as entertaining in that awkward space between poems by talking about how awkward that space of time is. In another space between poems, he discussed his hatred of the debate about a stimulus package for the country and said of President Obama, “I hope for Michelle Obama, he does have a stimulus package.” An audience member, comfortable with him by now, shouted back, “Oh, he does, Bob!”
His poetry, never pretentious or abstract, utilizes images and metaphors that are accessible without being cliché. He is honest in his descriptions because he isn’t trying to please anyone. In the same poem about a woman’s cancer, his line “I have no reason to use the word cancer while petting a dog” reverberates with simplicity, yet hits a common emotion.
Hicok never extends himself beyond what he can accurately describe, and this leads to concise, sincere poetry that induces both chuckles and serious thought. In his poem, “Lost American in Paris,” he describes following a wandering violin player before exclaiming, “I felt doctors had replaced my heart with a kitten.”
His poem about Michigan was a favorite among the Midwestern audience and perfectly timed for the snowy Wednesday night of his reading. Michigan, Hicok says, has a February that’s fourteen months long, which explains why “‘What did we do?’ is the state motto.”
Unlike most contemporary writers, Hicok rarely writes more than one draft of a poem. As he describes it, his poems are “records of a moment,” and the moment he wrote it in is as important as the subject matter. Hicok’s refreshing perspective on poetry lends itself to poems that are simple yet honest to the complexity of human emotion and never void of humor. It was hard not to be inspired by his quirky poetry as the large crowd filed back out into the 14-month-long Michigan winter.