The Popular. The Practical. The Purposive.

For a few years now, I've been trying to hate Bob Hicok. This attempt at hatred has been based not on jealousy (though that'd be easy to justify, right?) but the ubiquity of his work in the publishing world. For a while I wanted to call Bob and say, "Uhm, excuse me, Bob...do you think maybe now that you've published all of those great books you could stand being featured in three less journals this year (despite the solicitations)? Because you see, Bob...the rest of us are trying to get on those pages you're hogging up." And for a few years, my hatred was coming along quite nicely. Until today, when I parked my ass and crossed my legs in the rocking chair out front--waiting for a storm that threatened but never came--, opened the most recent issue of POETRY to a random page, and read this poem:

"Unmediated experience"

She does this thing. Our seventeen-

year-old dog. Our mostly deaf dog.

Our mostly dead dog, statistically

speaking. When I crouch.

When I put my mouth to her ear

and shout her name. She walks away.

Walks toward the nothing of speech.

She even trots down the drive, ears up,

as if my voice is coming home.

It's like watching a child

believe in Christmas, right

before you burn the tree down.

Every time I do it, I think, this time

she'll turn to me. This time

she'll put voice to face. This time,

I'll be absolved of decay.

Which is like being a child

who believes in Christmas

as the tree burns, as the drapes catch,

as Santa lights a smoke

with his blowtorch and asks, want one?

There I was, simultaneously laughing and holding the heft of the words and the music that delivered them, when the cover of Animal Soul flashed through my mind, and I thought, shit--I don't even have to look back a couple of pages to know that this is Hicok. Try as I might, I can't hate Bob for doing so well what the rest of us strive to do half as well (or maybe I'm just speaking for myself). So, kudos to you, Bob Hicok. Damn you!

AND, because I'm interested in this (though I'm probably even more interested in the hanging boy or the felled pope), I'm also interested in this.

What do we make of the refrigerated granny or the interview double or the gallery guy made to wear the cock&balls bunny suit? And if we try to speculate as to the cause or effect of such "art," are we just silly asses who have fallen into the circularity of Maurizio Cattelan's jokes? Or worse, have we become the jokes?

In any case, I was glad to see one good literary cause today, too, even if the man responsible is living on air and peanuts. I wonder what Maurizio hauls-in on any given year...

Anyway, sorry for my link happiness here, but I'm wondering a lot today about my own conception of art/literature and these variances as I see them: the popular; the practical; the purposive (or maybe I mean the prolific, the pompous, and the powerful?). Either way, I concede that each has its place and worth in the arts, but when I grow up, where do I want to fit in? Do we think it's possible to have a foot in each of these worlds? Is even one of these men anchored in each world (am I missing something)? What do people think about these artists who seem to have similar agendas yet seem so disparate by form? Talk about intention, talk about elitism, talk about the endless ways that I'm wrong...I'm open to it all...

*****