by H.L. Hix
Hanging Loose Press 2009
Reviewed by Bryan Stokes II
Voicing
Rather than describe his latest collection as mere poetry, H.L. Hix positions God Bless as a “political/poetic discourse,” of which he serves as mediator. Such a context, though tinged with hubris, allows Hix to explore a fascinating question: what if George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden engaged in an ongoing public correspondence. Hix melds together an assortment of press releases, executive orders and other public statements into month-specific blocks of fervent, presidential verse. Select lines from the public statements of bin Laden mix with Hix’s own attempts at bin Laden’s stylized form to serve as rebuttals in a series of interleaves.
In execution, the resulting poems are at times smooth-flowing and conversational or disjointed and contrived—sometimes all of the above within a single poem. Hix notes in his brief prologue that “no attempt is made to signal where one quoted passage [of Bush’s] joins another.” This technique yields some rewarding juxtapositions, as in the first poem entitled “January 2001”:
The dogs seem to have adjusted. I worry:
one year, you may test and everything is fine.
I’m going to protect that privilege.
Every child must be taught these principles:
we will build our defenses beyond challenge,
we’ll see how that affects possible arms talks.
In four years, you measure again,
and all of a sudden something isn’t fine.
The capricious range of topics convincingly suggests that Bush has picked up the direct line to the Al Qaeda caves and embarked on a casual conversation with their leader. The resulting effect manages to provoke thought in an unsettling manner without taking itself too seriously. Unfortunately, Hix sheds this carefree approach in later poems, exchanging a successful literary device for hyperfocused propagandizing. In “July 2001,” each stanza ends with the refrain “we’re going to keep the pressure on Iraq,” yielding a disjointed, repetitive verse with a bluntly forced agenda.
Hix further jeopardizes this enterprise in his approach to bin Laden’s responses. The verse from Hix’s own hand often fails to fully engage with the italicized direct quotations used to frame it. While the interleaf following “April 2002” effectively captures the tone of bin Laden’s own speech (“Khaled al-Sa’id, Abd al-Aziz, / Maslah al-Shamrani, Riyadh al-Hajiri: theirs / is the honor the rest of us missed, / to die for following God’s decrees, killing Crusaders.”), others rely upon the quotations as a mere prop, allowing the poet to vent his own political disturbance through a borrowed mouthpiece. The interleaf following “July 2003” particularly falls into this trap, ascribing to bin Laden idioms and ideas that fail to ring true:
But Bush put his own private interests
ahead of American public interest,paying himself and his administration
with no-bid contracts to Halliburton…Al-Qaeda spent five hundred thousand on
what cost America five hundred billion;Bush and his cronies continue to siphon
billions into pointless occupation.
Hix allows his anger to cloud his judgment in these poems, shifting bin Laden’s voice into the voice of a predictable American anti-war activist. Worse, he ignores the premise of this collection, trading a personable dialogue for a didactic diatribe. As the collection progresses, the poems devolve further and further into mishmash of phrases from Bush and unconvincing vitriol from bin Laden.
Despite these flaws, several poems manage to shine. “October 2003” marks a return to thoughtful simplicity and conversational form, noting that “nearly every day / we’re launching swift precision / raids against the enemies of peace.” So too does the interleaf following “November 2001” serve to bolster the collection as a realistic discourse (“Again and again he claims to know our reason, / and tells you we attacked because we hate freedom. / Perhaps he can tell us why we did not attack Sweden.”) Unfortunately for God Bless, such poems are the exceptions that prove the tremendous lost potential of the concept.
Such concerns are foreign neither to Hix nor the reader, however, because the ending pages of the collection make public the pre-publication dialogue between the poet, publisher and others asked to critique the book. The publication of often scathing criticism and counterargument is a groundbreaking concept and redeems some of the flawed execution of the poet’s other grand experiment. Readers become privy not only to criticism from author Robert Mooney that “worse, though, is not just the sense but the absolute certainty on the part of any given reader that language is being manipulated in God Bless to serve a passionately held pre-scribed idea and ideology,” but also the author’s rejected (and not replaced) preface, which claims that the poetry “needs to be justified because it is transparent.”
While it would be relatively simple to castigate God Bless as a failed experiment, it serves a much more useful purpose as a case study on the expansion of not only the poetic form, but on the idea of a text itself. One wishes not, as Mooney suggested, that Hix had been dissuaded from publishing this collection, but rather that he’d taken to heart the very criticism that he saw fit to publish along with it, transforming a first draft with great potential into the great final draft that it potentially could have become.
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