Hugh's “Poems”

by Andre Spears

I remember walking down 6^th Avenue in Manhattan talking to Hugh about some poems he had sent me in an email. I mentioned having liked one in particular, and he seemed keenly interested in knowing to which poem I was referring. So I told him it was the poem about different types of poems. Soon after, in 2005, that same poem appeared in a Festschrift dedicated to Clayton Eshleman on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.

Thirteen years later, in 2018, in the collection Status of the Mourned, that same poem reappeared, thoroughly re-worked. Invited to say a few words about Hugh at his memorial in January 2024, I turned to this poem, in its two versions, to remember my friend. Truth is, in the thirteen years between the two “Poems,” I had become close to Hugh. We trained at the same karate school, held the same rank, went through the same promotions and were in the habit of walking home together, after training, down to the West Village where we lived, with dinner (usually sushi) and conversation along the way. Maybe twenty times a year, in those thirteen years? I might add that in that period we (and our wives) were also part of a Shakespeare reading group that included a number of mutual friends.

So I take the two versions of “Poems” as the measure of a historical moment that extends, say, from the aftermath of Bush’s invasion of Iraq to the aftermath of Trump’s election—a period of time in which Hugh and I got to know each other well. And it’s because I got to know him that trying to reconstruct what might have gone on in his head, as he rewrote “Poems,” is a fun way to remember him, to be with him again.

Both “Poems” list different “types” of poems: the first (2005) unfolds as a series of separated couplets, opening with “There is…” (“There is the dream poem, / which all poems envy, and connive to become”), followed by couplets introduced with the coordinating conjunction “And” (“And the naked poem, / lacking underwear…”); the second version (2018) presents itself as a list, where every line, starting with the first, opens with “And” (“And the dream poem, which all poems envy and connive to become. / And the naked poem, lacking underwear…”). From the first line, then, the two “Poems” are similar, but not the same.

A comparison between the fourteen couplets and thirteen types of poems from “Poems” (2005) and the fifteen lines and fourteen types of poems in “Poems” (2018) shows that only two sentences are repeated word for word… the first, fourth in the series:
…the second, penultimate in the series:
At some level, what these two “Poems” have in common is that they are meditations (“pure poem”) on the poem-to-be (“absent text”)  as an occasion to excavate or mine (“diamond lyric”) the “newborn caterwaul.” In other words, what Hugh may be suggesting, by way of an image that likens a newborn infant to a cat in heat, is that poems are the lament,  the wailing that is also love cry, the  call of desire, the yearning for connection.

The similarity and the difference between the two “Poems” extends to a number of couplet and lines that address the same types of poem with slight variations. These include: 1) “the naked poem,” second in both series; 2) “the love poem,” seventh in the 2005 series, tenth in the 2018 version; 3) the last line, where “the tortured poem” becomes “the anonymous poem” while, conversely, “signed anonymous” becomes “signed under torture,” leading to the final revision of “blindfolded like Justice” into “blinded like Justice”:
In building towards its last line, “Poems” (2018) aims to be leaner and meaner in declaring poetry’s lasting importance in a politically unjust world. A first indication of the poet’s intention appears in “the naked poem,” the second type of poem in both “Poems”—where “lacking underwear, with its bared body” becomes “lacking underwear, thrusting hard abs.” Similarly, in “the love poem,” “loading its bullet lipstick, or its Buddha kiss” becomes “loading its bullet lipstick, detonating its Buddha.” Both these changes  are signs of a larger reworking of “Poems”(2018) that culminates in the streamlining of the last verse.

Where “the tortured poem, signed anonymously” of “Poems” (2005) marks the jarring culmination of an otherwise seductive list—the sacred poem, the moral poem… the vanguard poem, the final poem, the mythic poem, the fun poem, the famous poem… the tortured poem—“the anonymous poem” that closes “Poems” (2018) brings a similar, but more ambiguous, more perplexing list to a close—the project poem, the prize poem, the prayer poem, the avant poem, the failed poem… the famed poem, the conceptual poem, the forgotten poem… the anonymous poem—while projecting, through an act of signing, the violence and trauma of torture onto a notion of Justice as no longer “blindfolded,” but “blinded.”

In other words, as encapsulated in its last line, the political charge of the poem—the outrage, the commitment to poetry as an act of resistance—is heightened, as the poem becomes more compact, intense. It is as if the poet, re-working his poem, in view of reinforcing and underscoring the political-historical thrust of the “newborn caterwaul” that instigates his lists(s) of poems, wants to tighten his grip on the poem in response to a tortured world where Justice seems forever elusive.

In this reading, however, if the poem’s political aim is to be more forceful and succinct in expressing the poet’s understanding of poetry’s place in the order of things, why then the added poem? What’s new and necessary to the re-written list?

A comparison of the two “Poems” shows that various elements from virtually every type of poem on the first list are recycled in the second, like parts of a machine, even as the names of poems disappear from the first version, and new types of poems appear in the second. Yet, at the same time, the poems that disappear from the first list and the new ones that appear on the second list are fewer than may seem. While “the dream poem,” “the naked poem,” “the pure poem,” and “the love poem” figure in both versions, so too “the wise poem” is renamed “the great poem,” in that its attributes are the same in both “Poems”: “stitched from husks, from high-pitched wings.” Similarly, given their proximate meanings as poem-types, “the sacred poem” resurfaces as “the prayer poem,” just as “the vanguard poem” points to “the avant poem,” and “the famous poem” to “the famed poem”; so too “the fun poem”—“rainbow-tuxed, lobbing dada bon mots”—can be identified, through the reference to dadaist Marcel Duchamp (“ideal purge—Mutt’s soiled urinal”) as re-presented in “the conceptual poem.”

In effect, what a comparison of the two “Poems” reveals is that there are three types of poems that drop from the old version—“the moral poem,” “the final poem,” “the mythic poem”—and four new types poems that emerge in the second version: “the project poem,” “the prize poem,” “the failed poem,” and “the forgotten poem.”

As noted, however, in the process of refining his list, the poet literally recycles elements from all the types of poems on the first list, and re-uses them on the second list, in a loose but pervasive network of cross-reference. Thus, at the point where the two lists start to part ways—after the fourth, “pure poem”—the reader finds that “non-stop skulls,” from the fifth, “sacred poem” of the first “Poems,” is reconfigured as “outpacing skulls” in the eleventh, “famed poem” of the second version; by the same token, in the corresponding fifth, “project poem” in the second “Poems,” “booting its laptop” reprises “coding laptops” from the eighth, “vanguard poem” of the first version.

The list goes on: from the old version’s sixth, “moral poem,” “thrilled with its luck” becomes “guffawing at its luck” in the seventh, “forgotten poem” on the new list… “Stoned on hope,” from “the final poem” in the earlier “Poems,” becomes “smug as hope” in the later version’s eleventh, “famed poem”; “Mother” in “the mythic poem” gets re-purposed as part of “Mother and Father” in “the failed poem”; the “blood” in “Mother blood” becomes the “blood” in “bloody samurai” from “the avant poem” ; “conduit to God” from “the famed poem” returns as “stuttering God” in “the prayer poem.”

The result of this cross-referencing between the two versions of “Poems” is that one new type of poem, with no apparent connection to the first list, seems to stand out on the second list, “the prize poem”:
No doubt this line can be read as a jab against a contemporary American poetry scene, “fleshy with ego, stinking of zoos and sex,” in which the Poetry Prize serves to control poetry, normalize it, inscribe it in a system of commodity exchange that serves the needs of a creative-writing community that has poets competing for status, under an academic and institutional regime to which they are beholden.

The larger purpose of the new line of course is to underscore a view of poetry that runs contrary. It advances the type of poem that can listen to the wail of a newborn infant (“fleshy with ego”) and hear the caterwaul of a cat in heat (“stinking of zoos and sex”). Like “Poems” itself, it is the dream poem within the pure poem as text-to-be-prized, crying out against the brutal travesty of justice in the world, while giving voice to a yearning for connection and love.

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Poems [2005]        

Poems [2018]
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André Spears, Ph.D., is an experimental writer and a scholar of comparative literature. He is the author of Xo: A Tale for the New Atlantis (1980, 2020) and Shrinkrap: Litany in Quadraphony (2020). His “deep space” epic, From the Lost Land: Schizo-poem is currently at press.