by Christian Hawkey
Wave Books 2007
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman

“There were no stars”

Christian Hawkey is clearly a genius.  Try this:

             The code word, he whispered, just before
              letting go, was code word.  Asshole,
              I thought, watching his head
              get smaller and smaller until it ended
              in a puff of dust.

Or this:

We exchanged looks—all three of us—
& mine was totally better:  it had rose-colored sequins
glued along the hemlines & the word sneezeweed
in one pocket…

He has the perfect hipster sense of language, the way to turn the phrase and turn the image so that it continually unfolds along its opposite edge, bringing the idea back onto itself before moving forward again.  He can flip his tonal register at any moment by sliding quickly along a new linguistic thread.  His writing is not narrative or linear, but rather (dare I say it), rhizomatic—each phrase, clause and word offering a new branch of exploration. Of course he can start talking about his look as though it were a garment—that little pronoun “mine” is the chute shooting off—and aren’t you glad he did?  The poems have the ability to continually revise themselves, and it’s fun, playful.  This is what the New York School was all about, right?  Being able to engage in meaningful play—and it’s not all surface.  Try this one:

When I touched you
you crumbled

into a mound
of soft, cold bees.  There

was a hole in the roof.
There was no roof.

It’s stunning.  This sense of the body’s collapsible boundaries and modular pieces forms the most exciting component of Hawkey’s work—he’s able to use the body as its own landscape, pulling it apart across his canvases before putting it back in compelling new arrangements.

So why four stars?  In large part, because the vast majority of the poems do not to live up to their initial promise.  What starts out as a compelling reversal is repeated and turns sour in its repetition—it becomes a device or an engine, rather than a necessity or a virtuosic turn.  It begins to feel narcissistic and formulaic, and it becomes harder and harder to see the gems for the rough.  Immediately following “there was no roof”:

I saw something flit
between two stars.

There were no stars.

Hawkey’s press release comes with praise from John Ashbery:  “What emerges is a portrait of a medium like the one we live in, with all its unexpectedness.”  And I will say that my experience of the poems changed dramatically when I read them on the subway.  They were in fact the perfect counterpoint to a loud subway preacher, the screeching of the tracks, a couple of breakdancers, and the guys selling bootleg DVDs in English, French and Spanish.  But do I really want poems that don’t want my full attention?  The lines do come wonderfully in isolation in the midst of distractions—it’s a bit like flipping through film stills rather than watching a film. 

The bulk of the poems seem curiously self absorbed, and I say “curiously” because the poems seem generally opposed to the idea of a coherent self (there’s even an epigraph from Foucault:  “I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face.”).  One of the most charming quotes of the book: “Gender:  pending.”  The self is never whole or stable or even reliably human.  “I was on mute,” begins one poem.  The first quarter of the book features a number of transformations into birds.

The one explicitly political poem, “Birth of a Nation” begins with an epigraph from NPR about East Timor, but the poem begins by taking the word “birth” literally, and then enters into surreal questions about the place—the fact that East Timor is a real place seems entirely unimportant, or at the very least uninteresting.  The poem is made entirely of questions:

Do they speak in clicks & soft exploding accents?
Do they sound, at large gatherings, like a popcorn machine?
Do they communicate with their strangely powerful shoulders?
Do their articulate panic by squeezing air
through their tear ducts?  Does this cleanse their
national language? 

Is this a meditation on American self absorption—the inability to know the other?  Or is this a demonstration of American self absorption—the preference for one’s own fantasy over research or encounter.  Similarly, I find it odd that the film “Birth of a Nation” finds no traction in the poem.  It’s almost like the moment when Liza Minelli refers to finding the “final solution” for getting people to pronounce her name properly in her introduction to “Liza with a Z.”  Does she not know what that means?  Or does she just not care?

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