[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4SfpugTCBI?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

Bob Hicok

[Poet]

When I first discovered Bob Hicok, I felt empowered. His fearlessness to explore seemingly unpoetic content – working mundane jobs, screaming at an old dog – was refreshing. He also reminded me that humor and gravity could exist in the same space. After moving to San Francisco a few years ago, I read that Hicock would be reading at the Bookshop West Portal. Unfamiliar with the city and its bus routes (and without a smart phone), I ended up walking four miles to see him read. Below is an excerpt from our full-length interview that will appear in an upcoming issue.
-Matthew Sherling

BOB HICOK: The mind is generative. If you look at it, listen to it, it offers, it wants to be engaged, used. It’s like a dog in that dogs want to work, to do something. I think the biggest part of writing is noticing what’s appearing before you with some shine on it, what’s exciting or compelling, and simply picking it up. I sit down and see what’s there and start making decisions. Put a few lines down and see if I’m bored by or curious about them. I almost never begin with a sense of what I want to write about. If I’m not curious, there’s no reason to proceed. Ever watch cats? Show a cat a pencil and most of them will do the cat equivalent of shrug. Show them a pencil then cover it with a piece of paper, and oh my they come to life, many of them. When I wrote the poem above, you had supplied the first line, in a sense: what’s your process? I was curious about that, if I could write my process in a way that contained my process. The line I’d stress here is “remember I would like to exist.“ I think this is what happens to me when I write, I exist in the fullest, most engaged way I have discovered. It’s performative, in that I’m trying basically to record who I am, what I feel/think in the moment I am writing. Because of that, editing for me is also largely performative, kinetic. I read the poem over and over as I write, and change what I don’t like as I write. If, later, I don’t care for the poem, either I throw it out – the most common outcome – or take a new angle into the poem, a new step toward whatever that shiny bit was. I think I’ve tried to make the “first word, best word” philosophy breed with the “a poem must be revised eight hundred times" perspective. I’m trying to watch myself as I come into...