WRITTEN ON THE WIND: H.L. HIX

Out of the blue, on the wings of the jetstream perhaps, through the clouds of the pandemic, comes a package from Laramie, Wyoming—a pertinently windy place, as I shall soon come to learn. The package contains three new books by H.L. Hix, one of the most generative and interesting minds working in poetry today. It is Seedhead-Swept Semicircle, a thin, 5.5 inch by 5.5 square, though, that first prompts me to rip off its glassine wrapper. I wonder if it’s a map or graph, since it seems as if it will fold out; on its cover, further, are regularly appearing semicircular lines and small, blue-filled circles that trace the segment of a semicircle. Out of the upper left corner protrudes a light-green leaf edge pointing to one of the circles.

I’m relieved to find that the object isn’t the fold-out of something. (The fold-out poems Poetry magazine often publishes, for example, tend to irritate me.) Instead, Hix has sent me a chapbook, cool and smooth to the touch. Inside, I find brief bursts of prose on the verso pages and, on the rectos, frequently striking watercolor images on circular geometric outlines penciled in on a stonelike background. The twelve images individually suggest mandalas, bathyspheres, a whirling telescope apparatus or a space ship firing at interstellar enemies, a solar explosion, a trapped leaf, the diagram of a flower. I search for mention of an illustrator. Unable to find one, I’m led to deduce that Hix may be nearly as talented a visual artist as he is a poet.

But the visuals are in the service of a broader poetic project for this most project-driven (projective?!) poet. This particular aspect of the project consists of short reminiscences, which he insists are “not flash fictions, but “gust memoirs” of encounters with the wind. At first they register as Zen-like meditations. Here is “Trunk,” which for me resonates potently with the effects of a tropical storm that hit our environs last week:

“Trunk

Wind downed the sixty-foot pine across the street, but right into the house’s narrow strip of yard, so it damaged nothing but one gutter. You should have heard the crack, though, when that trunk snapped.”

While the sounds of that crack and its rhyming snap in the poem, the first in the collection, leave the impression of an impersonal natural force, Hix’s wind gusts grow more intimate and literary. Here’s a sad one, just two sentences long.:

“House

The house stood out at the edge of town, exposed to wind that set it shuddering and shouting. My ex didn’t leave me while we had that ramshackle, but it’s where she decided she would.”

Stop for a moment to listen to the many alliterating “sh” sounds, which together amount to a windlike hush.

Because Hix’s reminiscences are so spare and specific, they suggest a much wider wider perspective hovering over them. Small as the scope of the single sentence poem “Bird” is, it’s able to wrap itself in the grandeur of its precursor, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover”:

“Bird

I got it, how Hopkins’ windhover gave onto God, because as a kid I’d often seen, from the back seat of a Catalina station wagon crossing Missouri, that same bird shivering over furrows.”

I mentioned earlier that the mind you can see working through Hix’s poetry is one of today’s most interesting, and it’s fascinating to learn that the poet regards the observations recorded in this chapbook as not precisely his own. Instead, he says in a kind of preface-poem that he wants us to imagine the poems being written or spoken by a doppelgänger known as “Glasswing,” a name borrowed from a marvelous butterfly with transparent wings. “I purport to listen to Glasswing, and allege that Glasswing speaks through me,” the poet writes. The reminiscences…have for me that feel of hearing an experience recounted by someone else who was also there and saw things differently.”

Odd as this reference point seems, it can be seen as one of the ways poets commonly deploy to tell the whole truth but to tell it “slant,” in Emily Dickinson’s famous line. Indeed, Hix’s slant/self is also the voice of The Buffoon, another book of art and prose the poet included in my care package. (The third book, Counterclaims: Poets and Poetries, Talking Back, looks fascinating. For the book, Hix asked more than 150 poets and critics to respond to two daunting, evergreen statements about poetry: W.H. Auden’s “Poetry makes nothing happen” and Theodor Adorno’s “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”)

Viva Glasswing!