It is most appropriate that Jim Hoggard begins by correcting Plato – and that he does it with an oblique reference to myths that begin both “testaments” of the religious tradition that, with Plato, has come to be inextricably identified with “the West.” For a poet, as for a philosopher, it goes without saying that the word is in the beginning. But for a poet who sings the music of pumpjacks and rivers we wear in layers on clothes and skin, it is essential to begin with a “God from the first / being partial to things” (3). Thunder is the first word, “a celebrative / explosion of noise / echoing off / newly made matter” (3).
There is a philosophical sweep to this collection that makes the whole a response to Plato in four movements – a direction Ion might have taken had he been a poet as well as a performer of poetry (and had he not come to us as a character formed entirely by Plato with an end in mind). The movements are named “Graven Imagery,” “Different Kinds of Wilderness,” “Distant Homes,” and “Wind Bursts.” Hoggard’s take on graven imagery is an ongoing play with form – especially the sonnet, which flows through the entire collection, but also the pantoum, which gets the last word. The play with form is in the aniconic tradition of Hebrew prophecy – shaping things to see through them, finding words to speak silence: “the drama / of the voice / is the meaning / of the voice” (3). And the drama of the voice, like the thunder of the first poem, is notable for being partial to things – or, perhaps more to the point, being face to face with them.
In “Caught in the Drought,” one line stands on its own as a stanza in the familiar form of a fourteen line poem: “There’s nothing to do this year but wait” (10). Not to wait for, but simply to wait. And that carries us through a variety of wildernesses – the Louisiana bayou Jack Kerouac described as a manuscript of night we could not read, rattlesnakes, lovers, sycamore leaves that don’t decompose. Still correcting Plato: the world is a world of words, and in it there is a world of ideas; but there is no world of ideas above or beyond the world of things. This is it.
This “thatness” of things, the celebration of being immersed in them, makes Hoggard a nomad in the Deleuzian sense, at home on the road in the variety of places he sings in the book’s third movement – Vienna, Florence, London, Seville, Mycenae, Chihuahua, Cuba, Mosul. And in the end, the wind, like a spirit moving on the face of water: “We should stop getting lost in ourselves / We should know how to read the world / yet we look at it blindly or indifferently / Listen: the wind here blows insistently” (76).
Read the world, Hoggard says. Divide at the joints, Socrates might add. A world of words to the end of it, yes – an explosion of noise still echoing off matter still newly made – a music in the wind’s insistence that gives us something to sing, for which we as poets, as readers of poetry, as listeners are grateful.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
James Hoggard. Wearing the River. San Antonio: Wings Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-916-72717-8.