This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Bob Hicok, whose poetry collection Breathe is out today from Copper Canyon Press. Early in the collection, in a poem titled “The current zeitgeist,” Hicok describes a surreal political scenario that makes “everyone I know / feel like a kite // flown from a jet.” At times, this visceral sense of vulnerability threatens to overwhelm the characters who move in and out of Breathe; as Hicok quips, “No wonder sales of Oreos are up.” But consolation and purpose can be found in what the poet calls “baby adult steps”: “You eat an orange, / take a dog for a walk, think of irises / as a manifesto.” And within moments of tenderness, Hicok observes a world still bound by commonalities: “Even the universe is trying to make it back home.” Bob Hicok’s eleventh collection, Water Look Away, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2023. A two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and recipient of the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress, he has also been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and eight Pushcart Prizes.
Bob Hicok, author of Breathe. (Credit: Denise Royal)
1. How long did it take you to write Breathe?
It’s hard to say. I write on a very old computer that gives every file the same date: 01-01-1990. So by that measure, one day. Three years is probably closer. Or sixty-four years—my age when I was done.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The writing wasn’t challenging because I love to write. Not writing—the time I spend not writing—is the challenge, most of all believing in the value of what I write. So books, including this one, are an immense struggle, given my distaste for my finished poems. I love love love making them and pretty much can’t stand them after. Good thing I don’t have kids.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
In an upstairs room in a house in Blacksburg, Virgnia, which is in the Blue Ridge Highlands. Early, usually around 4 or 5 AM every day. I like knowing there’s a mountain out there in the dark.
4. What are you reading right now?
After about forty years, I’m rereading Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (Harper & Row, 2003). A book by Mark Strand about Hopper. And poems by Gwendolyn Brooks and Max Jacob.
5. Which poet, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
Shakespeare. Guy can’t catch a break. Or Russell Edson. I guess it’s a tie between those two. Russell Edson would have turned Shakespeare into a shoe. Shoespeare.
6. What was your strategy for organizing the poems in this collection?
No strategy. The main thing I’ve learned about putting a book together is to read it—to dip in—when I don’t expect to. So, heading out the door or going to make breakfast, I’ll grab the manuscript and read some. Humans are endlessly and pretty much immediately judgmental, but we often hide or run from our reactions. I’m looking for my honest response when my eyes first fall upon a poem. By repeating this over and over, I sift out the stuff I’m least comfortable with. After doing this a while, I spread the poems on the floor and see which ones want to hang out together and which ones don’t get along. Then do it all again. If that doesn’t sound like fun, we agree.
7. What is the earliest memory that you associate with the book?
COVID. The dread, confusion. Being afraid of the air and even people on the other side of the street.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Breathe, what would you say?
Stop eating potato chips late at night.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Breathe?
I think I was still listening to Satie like he was smack and I was a junkie. So the heroin of that guy’s imagination? Here are two examples of instructions he wrote to go along with his music: “without your finger blushing” and “like a nightingale with a toothache.” I’ll have to ask my dentist about the second one.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It always feels glib to say this, but write. Write more. Write again. Reps. Nothing beats them, in any endeavor. Put your ass in the chair. Or I guess in the air if you use a standing desk. Doesn’t that sound as if the desk is standing? Take a load, off, desks. Please, sit down. Second best: DO NOT THINK ABOUT RESULTS. Yes, my fingers (my blushing fingers) were shouting just now.
