Laura Adamczyk
Howard Wilson Submission
K-255, 2 E. South St.
Galesburg, IL 61401
309-341-8591
April 29, 2003
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
—Walt Whitman
“Appetite for even the breaths between the spaces”: Desire for Silence in Bob Hicok’s Animal Soul
The poet’s desire for silence is not a new one. Often speakers of poems express
their failure in connecting emotions and ideas—the subject of their poems—to language, the very medium through which these emotions and ideas are conveyed, so that by a poem’s end its speaker admits he or she prefers silence to language. In Bob Hicok’s collection, Animal Soul, the poems’ speaker begs for silence. The roots of this desire are found not only in his admitted failure to achieve purity through language—the very thing that moves the poem to meaning—and his own reverence for silence, but also in the oppressive clamor of sounds in his contemporary commercial world. Ironically, Hicok delivers his prayers for silence in a loud voice and often at a maddening speed, incorporating the speaker within the “we,” as one of the many culpable for such noise.
The speaker in Animal Soul first expresses his desire and reverence for silence in the opening poem of the collection, “Whither Thou Goest.” Not only does Hicok plant the seeds for themes of loud, muddling sounds—both in his use of repetition and proper nouns—he also establishes his voice as a type of moralist, stating what “we” should do. Here though the focus will be Hicok’s introduction of the desire for silence:
[…] I don’t
believe in god but trust that pushing
veneration through my body makes god
exist if only for a second
within the chambered nuances of breath.
(Hicok 3, 28-37)
Here, the act of veneration being pushed through his body defines the creation of poems themselves. How, if no other way, is the poet showing reverence to silence if not through meaning in words and the breaths in his poems? This may seem contradictory, but the poet can only create silences with words, by building words around silences. Indeed, often is the case throughout the collection that this loud voice and image combines with sparse punctuation to create such breathless noise, that the silence found in the pauses is held with, if not reverence, then at least appreciation. Interestingly, it is the speaker that, in creating silences in “chambered nuances of breath,” also creates his own feeling of god. The speaker holds silence in such a state of worship that he believes it creates the holy. Hicok builds these contradictions throughout these poems with the idea of the holy running alongside such unholy noises or objects. In this poem we encounter mad cow’s disease and Komodo dragons playing in the NBA. Planting these images in poems that ask for sublimity in silence makes that silence even more necessary in comparison to the very unholy nature of the images.
In addition to “Whither Thou Goest,” purity in silence is often compared to holiness throughout other poems in the collection. For example, in “A Small Blasphemy,” the speaker depicts a negative consequence to the absence of quiet: “If God prefers/ we whisper and rend…our souls will be scattered like wrens/ inside the appetite of the sky” (48, 21-24). Depending on how these lines are read, the speaker may be stating that “our souls will be scattered…inside the appetite of the sky,” in a manner similar to the way wrens are scattered in the sky. The speaker may also be stating that “our souls will be scattered,” not in the sky, but in a manner similar to wrens “inside the appetite of the sky.” If the former interpretation is taken, the speaker is saying that we may occupy a place in the sky, or heaven, despite the blasphemy committed, but given the phrase that follows these lines, “Yet we kissed/ again,” the latter is a more appropriate reading. In this the speaker explains that because we have not whispered, our souls will become displaced, thus asserting the holiness of silence, or at least quiet. Ironically enough, those few lines hold certain quietness in the sounds of the words themselves with “whisper,” “rend,” and “wrens,” (here, with the silent “w”). Perhaps Hicok is depicting the “we” as culpable for loudness in a more subtle way. He shows how we can be quiet, but then (as demonstrated in other poems in the collection) clearly illustrates that we are not.
Though not always raised to heights of the sublime, like the previous two poems discussed, silence is continually described as pure and beautiful. In “Monograph on the Walkers,” the speaker observes and admires a quiet pair:
[…] if
they’re a number it’s zero, perfect
clasp of nothing: if they comprise a song
it’s so thin no one hears it, not even
a whisper, not even the rustling of a leaf:
(56, 58-62)
It is not only that silence is beautiful in this poem, but specifically, silence in language is beautiful. It is not that this pair is merely quiet in their walking or specific, physical movements, but it is that they are not talking. It is not to say however, that they are not communicating, but simply that they are not communicating with words. This distinction works in a couple different ways here. First, this lack of verbal communication suggests something particular to this pair. The speaker infers that this is an elderly couple with: “if they’re dying which of course/ they are.” From this, though not expressly implied, we can assume that perhaps this couple has been married for many years, and their intimacy through silence is not necessarily their own aversion to language, but that they do not always need language to express themselves to each other, both because of their great familiarity with the other, and quite possibly their love. Second, and this is where the speaker’s feelings about silence become most entangled with his observation, the couple’s silence is shown as a more effective alternative to speaking, using their own manner of communication: “Because they never talk I infer telepathy/ across the short distance…as if tethers,/ as if invisible arteries connect their bodies/ in a better way, with greater infatuation/ than speech” (55, 1-7). Here, it is not simply that silence is beautiful, but it is also a beautiful substitute for language. Hicok reinforces this idea in the last lines of the poem:
[...] this couple who pass every day
saying nothing to each other I can hear
but of course between them passes an eloquence
not encumbered by breath not stunned
by the indecency of words.
(56, 69-73)
Indecency of words is found in this poem alongside the beauty in silence much in the same way unholy objects are found alongside sublime silence in “Whither Thou Goest.” Along with Dennis Weaver, Clint Eastwood, and Hallmark, Hicok places Wayne Newton in this particular poem to build a contrast between the Las Vegas idea of love, “a few words in German,” with his own idea of love, communicating in silence (56, 57). The indecency of words is not only found in the pop culture references of Wayne Newton and the cheap, artificial world of Las Vegas, but in the actual words that Wayne Newton claims to be love, all of which leads to the effect of Hicok’s frequent proper noun use.
There aren’t many poems in this collection that do not include one or more proper nouns, whether everyday, banal pop culture references such as Froot Loops and Brute in “A Little Science” (68, 25) or more somber references like Auschwitz and Stalin in “Critique of Pure Unreason” (39, 17). Here we’ll focus on the more contemporary, commercial references and how they not only move both speaker and reader further away from the meaning of words, but also act as a catalyst for the speaker’s desire for peace. In “Birth of a Saint,” Hicok incorporates a proper noun, on average, once every three lines, ranging from beef jerky to a fast food chain. This use of proper nouns not only creates a continuous line of capitalist noise running throughout the poem, like the sound of repeated commercials on television, but they also separate the speaker and reader from the significance of the words themselves. For example, instead of saying “car,” Hicok says “Impala” (11, 11). Instead of using “bubble gum,” Hicok writes “Bazooka Joes” (11, 40). The specificity of the proper nouns may seem like an advantageous switch, detailing the poem with more care, but in many of these instances, “Beemens” instead of simply “cigarettes,” adds an extra signifier that the reader and the speaker must work their way through in order to find meaning. Disconnection also exists between the two people in this poem. Within the commercial world of the convenience store, human interactions break down to a lack of courtesy, which leads to a supposed violent scenario:
If there’s a gun in her theory of Heaven it’s unloaded,
[…] the confidence
of her palm radiating to the man
behind the counter and converting sullen
to smile, making him wet,
making him stammer
(11, 1-6).
Here then, it seems Hicok’s asserting that a failure in human interactions is a result of the failure to connect words to meaning.
At the very least, these proper nouns muddle the movement from words and their significance. Although, their use is reminiscent of the “indecency of words” in “Monograph on the Walkers,” in “Birth of a Saint,” the indecency of the pronouns, combined with the fast pace, transforms this indecency to a loud, manic voice, increasing the speaker’s need for silence. Occupying sixty-three lines, the poem actually only has six sentences, the longest being twenty-eight lines long. Hicok uses both repetition in words and increasingly less punctuation (commas are last used in line twenty-five) in the twenty-eight line long sentence to create, along with the proper nouns, this manic voice:
if she didn’t do something wrong if there isn’t
something cataclysmic in her face something
offensive in the architecture of her nose
makes her a saint a stupid saint a saint
who’ll get no holiday no entry in the Emerald
Book of Saints so you and I must agree
on a name that she’ll be known
as the Stop-n-Go Saint the Burger King
Saint […]
(12, 48-56)
With the repetition of “saint” and lack of punctuation, the reader is left breathless by poem’s end. Here, whether or not the reader desires silence after the muddling commercial sounds, and then the repetition and quick pace, they must pause, for at least a moment anyway, in order to catch their breath. Then, it could be said that by not putting the grammatically correct punctuation in the poem, creating an out of breath speaker and reader, Hicok has made the want for silence even stronger. He has made silence necessary.
Another source of the speaker’s desire for silence stems from his failure with language. In “Birth of a Saint,” Hicok’s use of repetition not only succeeds in creating rhythm, but also functions in producing a linguistic stutter. Perhaps it is the speaker’s working out of the subject or his lack of originality that causes this repetition. Becoming excited, the speaker talks faster and wants to place added emphasis on what is being said, but perhaps does not know how best to say it. For example, in the above passage, “saint” is repeated six times in six lines. Whether or not this is due to the speaker simply not having other names for “saint” or if he wanted to put emphasis on “saint,” (leaving rhythm aside), its use still shows a lack of variety. Interestingly though, this failure in language reinforces this desire for silence not only by creating an out-of-breath feeling, as stated earlier, but also by showing an unoriginality.
Like the abundance of “saint”s in the final lines, the repetition of “we” not only adds to a driving rhythm towards the end of the poem and shows unoriginality of language by the speaker, but it also has the speaker admitting he needs help. No longer taking sole responsibility, the speaker asks for aid from the “you,” becoming the “we” that decides the fate of this woman: “so you and I must agree/ on a name that she’ll be known/ as the […]” (12, 53-55). Note that the speaker not only admits that he needs help, but he needs help with language, with the naming of the woman. The speaker feels so passionately about naming her that he does not give her a definitive name himself, as though he feels his language alone would fail. Through the end of “Birth of a Saint,” the speaker continues to use the “we,” opening responsibility to others: “give me the goddamn burger now we’ll say/ please we’ll chant thank you we’ll pick up/ our condiments […]” (12, 60-62). Although the speaker feels that language nearly always fails, the speaker (at least momentarily) demands that language be used to collectively name this woman for what she has come to represent, a modern-day martyr.
By placing himself within the “we,” the speaker admits that he is not exempt from their sins, one of which is creating the very thing he speaks against: excessive noise. Whether it’s the popping of Rice Krispies and “more evolved gunfire” in “Neither Here nor There” (21, 2 & 6) or the “puck-wheeze-puck” of hospital machines in “Everyday Commerce” (13, 8), “we,” are the creators of this noise. Interestingly enough, this incorporation into the “we” does not take place as a result of a gradual realization on the part of the speaker, like one might expect, but takes place by means of an open declaration in the first poem of the collection:
[…] I’m not
ashamed to admit my prayers are no longer
unconscious but loud and practiced