A Chat with Bob Hicok
Bob….I wanted to ask you about cars and why oh why did you change jobs?
I'd likely be out of work if I hadn't changed.
I suppose that what I really wanted to know is if you had a revelation that brought you to make this change. I mean most men do not wake up one day and decide they are going to make a living writing poetry after they already have a career in place. I was hoping that maybe the spirit of Christmas future may have shown up one day in a green 1972 Impala and taken you for a ride. Perhaps the ride of your life. Was this decision magical or was it logical?
Mogical. Combination of fate and my desire, I guess, for a change. I'd been designing dies for about fifteen years, writing poems all that time, and had published, by 2001, three books. I never thought I'd teach because i don't have a bachelors degree. then, out of the blue, or some other inhabitant of the color chart, I was offered a job as visiting poet at Western Michigan University. I took it, figuring, I don't know what — that it couldn't hurt. I basically lied to all my customers, telling each that i had too much work from other customers to take on any new jobs, so I didn't have to close my business down. I liked teaching at Western, applied for a few jobs, landed the job here at Tech, where they didn't care if I had a degree or not, and that was that. if you look at what's gone on in the auto industry, you'll understand why I feel lucky that the opportunities arose when they did. I'd likely be out of work if I hadn't gone into teaching. That's why I mention fate. I really liked the design work, but I was tired of it, tired of keeping two careers going. That kind of work requires 60+ hours a week, and I couldn't do it anymore, not both. So. Fate. Luck. Magic. I'll go with that. And logic in that I could see the end of that way of life, both for me personally and within our economy, our culture.
Do you think our culture is more in tune to poetry now or do you still get the occasional role of the eyes when you tell someone you write poetry?
(roll of the eyes?)
Teaching puts you in a bubble. in that context, poetry — writing it, quoting it, wearing it on your t-shirt — is, if not respected, thought of as normal, as part of what humans do or should do. Elsewhere, not so much. A guy just came by to give me an estimate on changing our conventionally vented crawl spaces into what are called conditioned crawl spaces. When he asked what I do and I told him that I teach creative writing, his reply was, oh. and that, in my experience, has been the norm. Oh. Poetry, creative writing, isn't relevant to most people in this country, isn't something they've ever experienced or haven't in a long time. so, not so much a roll of the eyes as a shrug of the shoulders. As if I've said, I collect shoe strings, when of course, they don't. I've said before I kind of like this, the extent to which we're not seen. We can write what we want.
Bob if you only had one lesson to teach your class what would this lesson be and would it even have anything to do with poetry or writing?
I'm getting ready to teach a graduate workshop after being off six months or so. During that time, I learned to swim, and have thought that the best thing I could do in this class is ask them each to identify something they'd like to do and then ask them to try to do it. :Learn French, build a cabinet — whatever it is. If they want to be craftspersons, the ability to launch their minds and bodies in new directions doesn't matter so much, may, in fact, be detrimental. but if they want to be artists — and I assume they do — this willingness to step into the unknown, with no one's help or insistence, is essential. no workshopping (which my spell check turns into workshop ping), just…sky diving.
I think everyone should learn to swim. I am not a good swimmer and I am terrified of heights. Have you done any sky diving or bungee jumping or plan on doing any extreme sports?
No. I used to drive stoned on too many of the various options, and think I used up all the stupid luck I was allotted at the start. There's a set amount, we're just never told how much. which makes me wonder, what are the units of measure for luck? Once, while in Greece, I found myself climbing cliffs, without ropes. I don't know where that impulse came from, as I too am afraid of heights. Have you ever met someone afraid of widths?
Yes I am afraid of the expanding width of my buttocks. You and I were born the same year so I imagine we have similar memories of the decades specifically our high school years (Class of '78). I was a wall flower and wore earth shoes, bell bottoms and I even had a mood ring. I did not write poetry then. The last two years of the decade I hung out at the Disco. Did the 70's make any thumb prints in your writing?
They are, I think, part of the deep background of my writing, in the sense journalists use the expression. An adolescence shaped by Chevelles and CSNY, the Six Million Dollar Man, by Vietnam and Watergate. To pick one connection, the mistrust I feel for politicians goes directly back to Nixon. and yet I'm influenced to a greater degree by the sixties, which, until King and Kennedy and the riots, was a much more optimistic time, a period when the notion of shaping the culture, of bringing it closer to American ideals, lived in a way that it hasn't since. I'll still throw things at the TV — large things, like lawn mowers or my ego — when the word hippy is used with joyous derision. The openness with which people discussed peace and love, though it makes some cringe now, was, for many, a reflection of a genuine desire to make the world better. As a kid with older brothers and sisters, I absorbed that, I existed around those discussions and within those moods, with no responsibility to shape or perpetuate an attitude or style. It was the air I breathed.
Yes like in the Hollies song "All I need is the air that I breathe and….": Finish this sentence for us ala Hicok please.
…to abate carbon emissions so I might continue, in my wheezing way, to breathe it. Trippingly, dare I say, off the tongue. cripplingly, I meant.
Poems published in MiPOesias December 2008 (The Sexy Issue)
Poems published in O&S Volume 1, Issue 2, 2008
A note on how to use Issuu: You may select the view mode once you click on the layout above. Go ahead and experiment with the cute little icons…Let me know if you get the hang of it. If you are still not sure how to read the poems in "paper mode" for example, let me know and I will walk you through it.