Christian Hawkey. Citizen Of. Wave Books, 2007.

Review by Mathias Svalina

Within a limited set of parameters, with a limited way of defining this & at the risk of courting hyperbole I want to tell you that Christian Hawkey is a superhero. Christian Hawkey can do things in poems that normal humans can not do. Witness:

…some creatures move

a few inches every time they blink

I opened my eyes you were my wife

hand a little lower on my spine

although always the smell of tire

burning through the night some creatures

move a few inches each time they flinch

Witness:

At night the jaws of turtles creak open

to collect rain, heat lightning

reflected in their wide, sad eyes.

A tear falls. A turtle tear! Two musk deer

shiver across a meadow, dusk

a brief firefight, our names

appear & disappear, like that.

Alison I stored in a bottle in the ground.

I’m standing on a love song. I can hear it tick.

Witness:

Then she removed

her Donald Duck

mask &

lay with me,

down, in the

field from which

my mind was waving

to her.

If you’re not Christian Hawkey you simply cannot do that. I know. I know that you think you can, but you can’t. I’m sorry. You do not have the super powers.

All three of these are dazzling displays of evocative leaping, yet they do not flail, no strings dangle from their seams. They are gemlike in their precise refraction of ecstatically wild associations. They create a world in which anything is possible, so long as it stays close to the skin & immediately accessible for an individual speaker.

But these are hardly isolated incidents of poetic heroics. Open Citizen Of to any page & randomly drop your finger down. You’ll find another one & it will clutch you & invite you to continue reading. It’s a bibliomantic divination process, but rather than auguring the future it ostends toward poetry that jumps off the page & squirms through your sheets.

Much of Hawkey’s surreal dazzle is predicated by the individual’s emotional experience. The sentimental functions as a tether to keep the surreal from clambering off to go roll around in something stinky. Yet this is a book that focuses us from the title to the role of the individual within a state. It is a book that refuses to ignore politics while at the same time remaining aesthetically unwilling to engage in a traditional kind of political debate.

So to me as a reader the fundamental question of this book is how a surrealistically radical poetry, which seems so focused on the renegotiation of an individual speaker’s sense of emotional self, can engage the world ethically. It seems ridiculous to me for any art coming out right now to show ignorance of the cascades of international politics. There is a war on, but many poets are still writing about a world in which someone forgot to invent words like war & country.

In the poem “Birth of a Nation” Hawkey turns this surrealistically combinational world-view toward the definitional notion of what comprises a nation, appositioning the act of a nation coming to be with both the famous movie and the epigraph from an NPR reporter announcing “We are witnessing the birth of a nation.” It is a poem of questions, of pure possibility but it is also the most focused poem in the book, the only one that ends with the same subject as the opening. In a characteristic move he turns from the directly bodily to the conceptual: “Did the world squat down & push out / a nation? Was it a nation before the world / called it a nation?” He slips in a cynical notion of nationhood that implicates American culture: “If someone says ‘soda jerk’ will another think of a / large, possibly obese child / attacking a coke machine with a crowbar?” He turns toward the playfully surreal: “Do they articulate panic by squeezing air / through their tear ducts?” And winds the poem into closure with a gesture so magnificent I’m going to quote it here so that you may read it & be all “damn, that is good”:

Do they teach their children the delicacy of inhaling

low-flying clouds? Do they worship herons, or long

to break their legs? Do they worship, upon waking,

the first object they see—even if it’s themselves—

or do they move through the day as if it were another day,

not the one they’re living, the one with cars

shining quietly in parking lots, an infant sleeping

in a chrome shopping cart, a man hurling

his cell phone against a brick wall

and the clouds opening up, draining the sky blue,

starlings unwrapping a sycamore tree,

the long migrations about to begin?

This is an important poem for the book—it arrives nearly halfway through & it picks up the thread of the title in the first direct way. After this poem there are more references to the state, to government to a citizen’s participation in a social structure. “Birth of a Nation” begins to extend the book’s title into Citizen of __________, asking you to fill the fragmented title in with your own answer. It is through this poem that Hawkey begins to define the ethical engagement of his poetry.

It is an inclusive, relational ethics of citizenship shaped not by adoration of a given standard but by the formulation of itself in progress & process. It is not a kind of ethics that speaks toward people in order to spread ideas, rather the ethics is in the reforming swirl of the surrealist vision—much of which is grounded not only by sentiment, but by a cynical view of the figurehead of politics—all mentions of things political establish a pretty easy equation of the political = bad.

That is not to say that this is Hawkey’s “political book” but that his engagement of the world does not stop at landscape, image & individual engagement. In Citizen Of he allows his sprawling, rhizomatic poetics to include more. And ultimately this is the ethics of the book, one in which the poet does not look at an idea & comment on it but, through the rhetoric available exclusively to poetry, finds the spots where the distant becomes part of the immediate & personal.