T.R. Hummer’s two new books of poetry, After the Afterlife and Eon, complement each other with desultory human themes: philosophy, the beloved, domestic minutiae, and the deaths of friends and mentors. While these two books point intermittently toward the beyond with eloquent resignation, they also testify in their witness to the immense particulars of daily life and sublime relations to others — both animal and human. Hummer devises an abiding dialectic in both books, demonstrating masterful balance on the high wire of his serious subjects — loss, the “flower at the end of the world,” whiteness, the beloved, deceased mentors and family members, and “the black boat.” He reprises Heraclitus’ terse wisdom throughout these two volumes with both heartfelt and backhanded homages that adumbrate many of his philosophical conceits. These lines from “Letter to Heraclitus” in After the Afterlife capture Hummer’s bittersweet perception of the impossible task that any peripatetic venture in poetry or philosophy involves.
…Those little bits of Heraclitus that you can find
scattered all over the library were always just that: little bits.
Here’s one now: Not knowing how to listen, they know not
how to speak. Not a word in there about writing.
You didn’t publish. You perished. That’s why you’re not around
to clean up the mess you made. The brilliant, glorious mess.
With a prodigious knowledge of both poetry and philosophy, Hummer ventures courageously into personal subjects in these two books with the gumption of contributing his own memorable updates on the oldest subjects. Rarely does one feel in reading the lyrics that he isn’t up to this task. In poem after poem, the personal crosses over to the universal; particulars grow immense, irony disarms sobriety, erudition underpins inspiration, and pathos infuses narrative.
In After the Afterlife, a title which serves as a kind of koan for the poet’s ornery, postlapsarian imagination, Hummer engages in overhearing himself muse about the significant minutiae in his life: his dog, the morning mail, his daily constitutional, solitaire, “everyday metaphysics,” lost socks, music, and other subjects that rise up from their quotidian ground to metaphorical heights. With the Socratic conceit of claiming to know very little, he reflects risibly on just what his ironic failures in “Mysticism” and his “D- in religion” have taught him about the “poor but necessary substitute” of music as “the horizonless sphere” that’s as “empty as resignation, bloody and naked and pure.” This confession that appears in “Fugue in D Minus,” the first poem in the book, serves as a primer for the sagaciously lyrical poems that follow. Hummer’s humility endows him with not only a self-effacing voice that both enlightens and entertains, but the courage to stare at mortality with a cold eye, as in this conclusion to “Sky Burial”:
I shore the sulfurous fragments
By the curb for the bulk-trash pickup and strap my wrists
to the wreck, waiting for the clash of gears and the great
White vultures of suburbs, here in the Land of Alikeness,
to circle, whetting their carrion beaks, wanting to pick me
Slick, bone by alabaster, under the obsidian dome: O
make me clean for the new life, Masters, break me whole.
In “Anger Management,” Hummer finds humor in the loss of this favorite philosophy book, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, to his dog’s appetite. After finding fragments of such lines as “We are noble, good, beautiful and happy” and “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” and “Each of us is farthest away from himself” on the lawn, Hummer resigns himself to the consequences, or perhaps he would say, fate, of owning a beagle with a nose for delicious axioms. Hummer humbles himself before Nietzsche at the end of the poem, and, like his dog, lies down before his master with this wisdom and ultimate pleasure:
I could not punish the dog for only doing
The same thing I had done, but more quickly and completely.
This satisfied Nietzsche, who scratched my belly,
Threw a ball across the room, and stood with his hand out, waiting.
An accomplished jazz saxophonist, Hummer has been as influenced as much by music as by poetry, finding a common aural nexus between the two in bittersweet notes, although he would be the first to admit that “the unsayable” beckons in each of his poems, perhaps especially in the title poem which appears at the end of the book and ends with these humble, archetypal lines that are reminiscent of Qoholeth’s wisdom in Ecclesiastes: “I can hold a pen with only bones for hands, but who / will I say is writing in the blank where I should be?” By equating himself with “the blank where [he] should be,” that is, the inscrutable unsayable, he both erases and acknowledges himself at the same time as a poet who must leave a blank in place of his name in deference to the muse whose specific name he cannot write and also, as Whitman would say, those “poets to come.”
In the final poem of After the Afterlife, “The Flower at the End of the World,” the speaker takes a metaphorical ride in a 1954 Ford pickup with — who else? — Heraclitus. In breezy, intrepid language, Hummer chronicles the nature of his mortal ride as much as mortality itself: “
…You’d think the end of the world
would be that obvious. The problem is, the road
Is your life, and your life is a secret. I drove
for hours on the Autobahn, the Mercedes
Was a dream.
When Hummer and his vatic passenger arrive at the end of their journey in this poem, only a diachronic sensibility is essential for understanding the journey to its end. The world is more real than ever “there” with particular things: jonquils, a rat, cheap mobile homes, sand boxes, a dented blue bicycle, and voices from the past: St. Francis admonishing “You should have paid more attention to the birds,” the eternal rat declaring, “Humans make such a big deal of it,” and Heraclitus, finally, saying nothing, only pointing as he stands “by the open door.”
While Hummer employs just the right amount of levity in After the Afterlife to lighten the metaphysical weight of his lyrics and short narratives, he adopts a more spare style in his follow-up book titled Eon. Still aware of the danger of infusing his poems with too overt and prolix philosophy, Hummer avoids what the poet James Merrill said was the aesthetic problem with philosophy, namely its dearth of lyrical language, a quality that inspired him to comment that reading philosophy was like “staring at a naked grandparent.” One senses from Hummer’s humorous treatment of sober subjects in After the Afterlife that he could quite adequately write humorously about his grandparents’ nakedness if he wanted to, but he’s clear, especially in his poems in Eon, that he wishes to divine just the right balance of humor in his self-overhearing.
He divides the book into three sections titled “Murder,” “Urn” and “Eon,” and a moving coda dedicated to Philip Levine titled “Cheap Glass Vase at the Jazz Singer’s Grave.” The short lyrics in the first section haunt with a desultory array of images and conceits that focus on the forces and landscapes of death. Moribund metaphors abound. In many of the poems, Hummer blurs the line between death itself and murder, assaying death’s manifold character as an inscrutable presence in life. In poems that alternate between elegy obituary, autopsy, witness, and hyperbole, he covers the figurative charnel ground of accident victims, scientists, poets, philosophers, pets, and the legions of those James Agee called “famous men,” along with a host of others, each with specific identities and fates. Most of these poems conclude epigrammatically, as if Hummer is elaborating a bit on his subjects’ epitaphs. I found the conclusion of “Profession” particularly memorable:
…. Stay awake, the elm mutters
The woodcutter, its disciple. You’ll forget the judgment
Of smoke and ash soon enough. You’ll stumble
Over the threshold, distracted by your own axe.
The second section, titled “Urn,” is comprised of elegies for poets, family members, a family dog, and even himself, about whom he writes with a unique distance from his own isolation as an old soul:
I was born at the age of sixty, and I come into this new world
with a bouquet of scars and old questions
From to long spent in the womb.
Hummer continues with a paradoxical conceit about his “too-long-in-the-womb” gestation, and then provides an opinion about what death should really be like in contrast to the ersatz existence of his prenatal “life.” These lines betray a ghost-like quality not unlike the lively specters that haunt the purlieus of New Orleans.
… Buried alive, I was more dead than you
can imagine, and I rattled my chains in rhythm
to bad music on a radio. The afterlife should be otherwise,
other, wise, and after. Next time timelessness.
This poem borders on the cynical, which makes for a curious self-elegy and lacks the pathos one finds in most of his other poems. Hummer is especially self-effacing when his overhearing detects his own voice, as if to imply that authority emanates ironically from deep humility, and even brutal self-criticism.
In the third and last section of the book, Hummer writes about “the beyond” with an awareness of the here and now. The poems here are painfully nostalgic, clear-eyed, and hieratic, an apt capstone to the heuristic journey in both collections.The lines below from “What is a soul” are particularly evocative for their imagined post-life existence in which the view of the poet’s former life coruscates as soulful knowledge and wisdom:
…I was the child with no answers.
We stood in the middle of each other’s lives while the wind
Of the great world burned us, while the wind of the great world claimed us.
while the soul of the great world sang to us, and we listened while we drowned.
And this from “There is house”:
Stay with me beloved other: we are made
To break and break and break until the dust of us is forgotten
and peace descends on the hills, the plain, the house, and we start again.
In the last poem of Eon, “Cheap Glass Vase at a Jazz Singer’s Grave,” Hummer finds himself in the form of a ghost beside a black woman’s white grave. He sees himself with metaphysical clarity as still present on earth, as if heaven were earth and the music here, particularly jazz music, continued to play in the temporal, material world. Hummer beholds himself revealed by the jazz singer’s grave: “Now that the light reveals me,” he declares, “I remember my own / gravestone still crystalizing in a raw cliff beside a lake / Where one silent raptor glides, dancing over the water, hearing me sing.” This poem, which Hummer dedicates to Philip Levine, echoes one of Levine’s last poems titled, “Call It Music,” which is an homage to Charlie Parker’s “glad music.” Levine’s poem concludes on a note that’s strikingly similar to the final lines of Hummer’s tribute:
Music, I’ll call it music. It’s what we need
as the sun staggers behind the low gray clouds
blowing relentlessly in from that nameless ocean,
the calm and endless one I’ve still to cross.
It is rare for two books with such transcendent wisdom and strong poetry as After the Afterlife and Eon to appear in the same year by the same author. The poems are no less than sublime for the beautiful terror they strike in the reader. Hummer deserves not only accolades for these companion volumes, but a wide enduring readership as well.
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[After the Afterlife, published by Acre Books on January 15, 2018. 72 pages, $18.00 paperback
Eon, published by Louisiana State University Press on April 18, 2018. 106 pages, $19.95 paperback]