Mary Hickman, Rayfish

[…] The water needs to flow down the screen in the right patterns across the pulp. In the same way, when you see a surgeon covered head-to-toe in a white paper jumpsuit, when you see only his eyes through the window of the hood and the window is striped with irrigation fluid, you begin to understand something about time. In the operating room, she’s lying on her side, hip pocket exposed, and there’s water on the floor. The surgeon keeps the water flowing to wet the bone dust rising from the only visible flesh. I bring a cup sewn from rags. She arrives in a self sewn from pulp. Saw touches bone. Her cup fills. We begin to speak. We expel ourselves. I don’t find this tragic. The woman on the beach wears a glass eye, a solar flare shaped like a horn. And farther out to sea, whipped whites, lilac-tainted whites woven into waves on white screen, cut from this single white page. (“Total Hip Replacement”)

Following her first trade collection, This Is the Homeland (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2015) [see my review of such here] comes American poet Mary Hickman’s Rayfish (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2017), winner of the Academy of American Poets’ 2016 James Laughlin Award. Composed as fifteen prose poems set in two or three poem sections (six numbered sections in all), the poems in Rayfish exist in an intriguing contrast to the poems in her first collection, having shifted from single stanza lines with line breaks and breath to individual blocks of prose. With the shift to prose, the musicality of her lines are given more prominence, and the exhalation of breath comes as a rush, pausing only slightly through grammar. Weaving biography, history, film, medical concerns, visual art and other elements, the weave of her prose poems provide a series of intimate spaces on biology, biography, self-invention and how the creation of any kind of art can’t help but change the artist. As she writes: “If I could make my image of you do anything, what could I imagine myself becoming?” Hickman’s poems explore creation through the act itself, writing out inquiries into the implications and spiritual aspects of being and making. As part of an interview conducted by Rusty Morrison included with the press release, Hickman responds:

In the beginning, to get at this fevered voiced quality that I was interested in, I’d included a lot of verbal fillers throughout the poems like “you know” and “well…” At the time, I was really interested in the modes of the artist’s statement and the interview as models for how to rehearse thinking about what I wanted to do in my own work. Those voices were something I was interested in bringing into the poems, but I also wanted a conversational, transactional tone, one rooted in the idea that the encounter with a work of art is also an address and a conversation on the way to a real encounter—that it’s not one-sided but back and froth, mutually lacerating in the way that Jean-Luc Nancy describes it in the epigraph. I was also interested in the tension between the voice of mastery and authority of the interview and artist statement and the lyric, which is more mutable and vulnerable, less schematic and didactic. I wanted to preserve that tension in the book, so that the poems could comment with authority but not become preachy or proscriptive. There’s pleasure in describing an encounter that leads to genuine insight—in clearly articulating a moment of actually seeing a work and its potential.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mary Hickman

Mary Hickman is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she received an Iowa Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Boston Review, Colorado Review, jubilat, the PEN American Poetry Series, and elsewhere. She is the author of This Is the Homeland (Ahsahta Press, 2015) and teaches creative writing at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Nebraska.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
It has been really wonderful to be able to give the book to the poets I most admire and whose work directly inspired the poems. There is a poem in the book that I wrote in response to a poem by the German poet Anja Utler after I had come across her poem online and been floored by it. A few years later I got to meet Anja, to give a reading with her, and I even managed to convince her to blurb the book! She is also translating a section into German. I’ve been able to participate in these kinds of exchanges much more now that I have the physical object of the book to trade and give.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
My father is a poet. He doesn’t publish but he did once take a class with Bill Knott when he was still St. Jerome. When I was a child, maybe six or seven, he worked nights and I didn’t get to see him much. But he left little poems for me on post-it notes that I found when I woke. And I began to leave him poems in return. Poetry has always been an act of correspondence for me and comes out of a desire for connection.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
So far it seems that I’ll write a lot of material quickly in a burst and then revise it for a decade. It’s a slow process for sure.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I’m never working on a book from the beginning. I’m mostly just writing a lot of terrible stuff and cursing the muses for deserting me. Then something clicks—I’m there, it’s happening. I don’t know how I got there but I’m there, I’m on the vein. Which of course makes it feel like it will never happen again. The idea of having a larger project really appeals to me but it just isn’t how it has happened so far. Poetry continues to feel like magic. Maddening, maddening magic.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I like hearing poems out loud—mine and others—and being in a room of people with a shared investment in the revelatory work of poetry is usually pretty great. Most of the readings I’ve attended in the last decade have been at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, Iowa. If you haven’t been, you’ve got to go! Even Obama has been to PL.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I continue to write about injury, loss, and recovery in terms of the relationship between time and material, the endless involutions of representation in art, and what might be said of possession or resurrection in our passing, material world. As the painter Jenny Saville says, “I paint flesh because I’m human.”

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I’ll defer here to a quote that sums up the ethos of the International Writing Program, a place where I have had the good fortune to meet fierce, brilliant writers from all over the world: “Only connect.”

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential! Homeland benefitted immensely from the keen editorial eye of Janet Holmes. And many of the very best edits and even the title came from the generous efforts of Eleni Sikelianos. The book would not be what it is without the work of many amazing “outside editors.” 

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
When I was first entering my MFA program, a good friend advised me to try to hypnotize myself into not thinking about status, career, publishing, etc., and instead to hold onto the mysterious thing that makes me write—to pay attention to that. She said that if I did get freaked out and stop writing, not to worry, to just talk poetry and read read read and think and I’d write again. This advice has made a huge difference in my life.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
I’m in the middle of writing my dissertation right now and it is difficult! But there is also some comfort in having an outline and following it. And when I can synthesize a pool of ideas and nail an argument, it’s a little like getting a line just right.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Anyone who knows me knows I am always searching for the perfect routine. The only constant so far has been coffee.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Interviews. Pretty often I’m reading a book of artist’s interviews. David Sylvester’s book of interviews with Francis Bacon is very good. And I just started reading Talking in Tranquility: Interviews with Ted Berrigan (O Books, 1991).

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Pine trees.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Visual art and dance.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’m very Spicer-focused right now as I’m writing about his fantastic first editions. He’s always a major influence and touchstone for me.

“Going into hell so many times tears it/ Which explains poetry.”

“Tell everyone to have guts/ Do it yourself / Have guts until the guts / Come through the margins / Clear and pure / Like love is.”

I’m also reading Cole Swensen’s beautiful new book Landscapes on a Train. Her ear is flawless!

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Finally become really fluent in Mandarin.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I am tempted to say surfer. But really I do think I would make a decent therapist.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
When I did try something else (medicine), it made me write even more!

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I mentioned her before but I’ll emphasize her amazingness here. engulf--enkindle by Anja Utler, trans. Kurt Beals (Burning Deck).

A sample (from “counter position: an interweavement in nine parts”)

– perceive: furrow –

II

just at the opencuts: set free
to stand, sense, to drift now am: pitching to you through the: fissures hear – you speak of
waste heaps, of scree of: implanting, the
windrose, -wheel speak of: rotating, glistening
rotor blade you say – it: pitches, now, pitch, as a veined arm, a wing plows: its back, engraves furrows through earth-smoke through dead nettle fields
and at last: on the shoulder blade dulls down

20 - What are you currently working on?
I’ve been finishing up edits for my second book, which will be out in 2017, and have been working on some more landscape-driven poems. I spent last year driving back and forth between Iowa and Nebraska and all that road and space has begun to enter my work in a prominent way.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Mary Hickman, This is the homeland

Rub it all over the forearms     whitepush then red.

Sandalwood explains the crane nested in the mountain.

Her wild hips, jagged beak.

Body lumps & chest-hole. What land is this? (“Territory”)

I’m quite taken with the precision of the poems that make up Iowa City poet Mary Hickman’s first trade collection, This is the homeland (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2015), a book that “consists of eight poetic sequences written over a ten-year period, begun when she worked as a surgical assistant in open-heart surgeries.” As she writes in the poem “Territory”: “This is the way to the steel table. / This is the homeland.” The press release informs us that:

The homeland of the title sequence is the body, open upon the steel surgical table; the sequences are linked by an attention to the visceral elements of language and by an exploration of the themes of health, transformation, desire, and identity. Hickman charts the precarious and ecstatic response of consciousness surrendering itself to language and experience, a vertigo in which the self is called back to itself and the world through losing itself. These poems are as much about love as loss, therefore—elegies to times, places, and people whose presences sear and haunt the poems.

Part of what intrigues about the collection is in the way that the “eight sequences” aren’t set side by side but occasionally weave through and between each other, creating very much a cohesive unit over an assemblage of sequences composed over such an extended period. “My desire immense / domestic, she says.,” she writes, in the poem “The Locust II.” Her poems are scalpel-sharp, insightful, bone-dense, attentive, unapologetically heartfelt, and savagely beautiful. As she writes in the poem “Remembering Animals,” a poem composed after the death of her brother-in-law: “I’d like to think / I could solve the problems of / love lives, libraries, wildlife, / obfuscating / griefs.” Given her professional experiences, one can easily read the meditative aspects of the body throughout, writing a series of questions of the physical body and how it relates to living, identity and death, stretching an intricate and intimate range of concerns relating to, and even separate from, that same body. If Robert Kroetsch once asked, “How do you grow a poet?,” Hickman’s poems, in their own way, might actually be showing exactly how at least one poet came to be, emerged through this first remarkable collection of poems on grief, live and love. Hickman is writing the most intimate of our concerns through poems that expand outward toward all else, writing out basic, human lines of questioning in an entirely original cadence.

I don’t want my name. He has hidden his own fair name in a clown, in the dark corners of my crown my feet my handkerchief. Your name is strange: Lapwing. You flew, Seabedabbled lapwing, because you know.

I am anticipating what you have to say. I am asking too much, tired of my voice. Lapwing. The voice that makes love to the seacoast. Or his last written words.

You are a delusion. You, brought all this way, do you believe?

Write! Visit! Help me believe. I called on the birds. This will end. I shall be there, laughing into a shattering daylight.

And scribble nightly, unwed. (“Joseph & Mary”)