Noam Chomsky illustrated category error with the grammatically correct but semantically absurd sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” With the title O, and Green, Paul Hoover plays an elegant trompe l’oeil trick in poetic diction. His new book slips a great many things, including zeros and the idea of nothing, into categories where, if they will not stay there for all time, will at least remain balanced there in a shivering equilibrium as long as they do.
One day in 1976 (August 29 to be precise) on an excursion from Chicago with friends, I swam in Lake Michigan off the shore of the Indiana Dunes. I opened my eyes underwater and saw, through murky brown, constellations of glittering mica-like shards. I knew right away they must be particles of dross from the heavy industrial plants nearby, reflections of our fallen world. But there might be molecules of canoes and pirogues in there, too, and even of their occupants, and of Augie March’s straw boater though Augie exists only in imagination. I knew I had to celebrate as well as lament.
Paul Hoover’s O, and Green: New and Selected Poems makes for an eyes-wide-open deep dive into our condition in recent decades. Representing his books since 1999 and including a dozen new poems, O, and Green illuminates with sustained brilliance the murky circumstances we’re living in — and persuades me that he is among our most virtuosic poets.
Born in Virginia in 1946, Hoover moved to Chicago in 1968,where he was Poet in Residence at Columbia College from 1973 to 2003 and helped to found the Chicago Poetry Center, where he served as president. (In a well-known Norris McNamara photo of the founders and inaugural board, Paul is at the top, flanked on his right by Paul Carroll and on his left by Michael Anania.) For some years a professor at San Francisco State University, he lives in the Bay Area. In his essays and interviews, he shows himself to be one of the most knowledgeable, nondoctrinaire, and diplomatic poets and editors of these times.
I remember the Paul Hoover of readings in Chicago in the 1970s — and his poems in the Yellow Press anthology 15 Chicago Poets (1976) and The Banyan Press Anthology (1977) — as not quite one of the harum-scarum iconoclasts of that vibrant era in Chicago poetry (akin to the Hairy Who in the visual arts), but as a somewhat gentler and more insouciant voice. Although one of his poems in 15 Chicago Poets is addressed to the notorious proto-surrealist Isidore Ducasse, Hoover’s characteristic tone is audible in the comic first lines of “A Civic Autobiography”: “How funny you are today, Chicago, like Howard Keel in Showboat / singing to a dress form,” more New York School than school of Lautréamont.
The first poem in Hoover’s Somebody Talks a Lot (Yellow Press, 1983) begins, “Hi! I’m Paul Hoover of 7021 North Sheridan, / Chicago, Illinois. / My phone number is in the book / and calls are welcome …”, surely one of the jauntiest and most disarming intros since “I celebrate myself.” “I’m Surrealist in apathy” he also writes on page 1, which isn’t quite an oxymoron, but drolly mingles categories and jostles the reader. This book mingles Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch tropes with the kind of shifting syntax and sinuous thought, as in “One thing was another, was ease / of in-between as day is night for a moment and that / is given a name” (“Description of a Mechanism”) that Hoover will cultivate in his future work. In Idea (The Figures, 1987), Hoover engages in antic wordplay and comically fractured quotation, another line he’ll follow: “’Harms / and the man,’ they [the gods] sing, tattoos on both arms” (“After Juanita Garza”); “(‘Spouse of the boarder, down lexicon way’)” (“Sunlight in Vermont,” which title is itself a variation on the standard song, and maybe on Captain Beefheart’s version, too). At this point Hoover has absorbed enough Mike Royko wiseacre Chicagoese to give a Sweet Home tang to his diction, and his growing erudition allows him a wide range of allusion, of which he makes generous use.
After Idea, Hoover writes a novel set in Chicago, Saigon, Illinois (Vintage, 1988), edits Postmodern American Poetry (Norton, 1994, 2013), and publishes several books of poems, seven of which are represented in O, and Green.
The color green appears often in Hoover’s poetry, though not in the title poem (from the volume Winter (Mirror)), an absence that provides an instance of the irony and para-paradoxical nature of many of Hoover’s compositions, which often play with the words and ideas “presence” and “absence” and “something” and “nothing.” We find green in “American Ruins”: “The / mind’s green debris / and Turtle Creek // are packed with silt and party / goers.” Hoover’s lines and enjambments can take us from linguistic theory to a Gary Snyder fastness to a festive social scene just like that. In “Lisbon Story,” “A shadow on a yellow wall / is singing about time, / and a man like time is leaning / against a blue wall,” from which the reader is at liberty to combine the yellow and blue to get green. In section 35 of Edge and Fold, “one can imagine / the unbuttoned present // with its ripe interjections / and swerving cars // the way green mold / covers a lemon.” Green mold, green grass, green trees, green shade, carry the ambiguity they bear in the legends of the Green Knight and The Flower and the Leaf. In the poem titled “Why they call them leaves,” we are led along a garden path:
death is always taking
a busman’s holiday
alone like a fuse
I becomes you
finally, it’s just me
a crowd of one gaping
. . . .
all green men are mortal
The allusions to Death Takes a Holiday, Dylan Thomas’s “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” Rimbaud’s “Je est un autre,” Jeeves’s “dignified procession of one,” and the play on “all men are mortal” in this small detail of an extensive procedural poem sequence illustrate the range and repletion of Hoover’s verse. The sequence, Desolation: Souvenir, uses as poem titles single lines, sometimes with slight variation, from other poems in the sequence; for instance, “why they call them leaves” appears (with “we” for “they”) in the poem “a crowd of one gaping” (which title echoes the sixth line quoted above):
Thought: the miniseries
All sequels wait in line
Why we call them leaves
Remains an intuition
Hoover is a champion of intuition in its many forms. While his early poems tend toward a Whitmanesque garrulousness, the poems in O, and Green tend toward Dickinsonian terseness and “telling it slant.” He seems to believe that intuitions have their own intuitions, as in the droll observation “oblique is too direct” (section 19 of Edge and Fold). The facetiousness of some of the early poems becomes high comedy.
Hoover’s lines are saturated with Harold Bloom’s “Western canon,” such that every “peach” evokes Prufrock, every “gate” evokes Blake’s “Father, the gate is open.” When Hoover writes “bent frame,” this reader veers to Jerome Sala’s “Teen angel, can you make my bent frame straight.” When he quotes Sun Ra declaring “All these things the creator told me in Alabama” as the epigraph of “The World as Found,” I’m not surprised that the poem ushers us into a world where wordless sound transcends the irksome “traffic of the world.” Hoover still has room for amiable facetiousness, as in “the schlock of the new,” playing on Robert Hughes’s Shock of the New; in “overflow of powerful grammar,” playing on Wordsworth’s “overflow of powerful emotions”; in “What the answers ask,” playing on Whitman’s being badgered by “askers”; and in “there’s no signing the rain,” playing on Gene Kelly’s dance in a downpour. In such verbal play and cultural irreverence, Hoover shows a kinship with another wry Chicagoan, the novelist and onetime editor of Poetry Peter De Vries.
Hoover toys with the idea of defining poetry as a particularly observant cat enjoys toying with an especially fascinating object. “The science of the irrational, / poetry knows what time is feeling / in the language we speak” (“Rehearsal in Black”); “poetry is the playing / of an almost secret music, / gestures in winter darkness / for the living and the quick” (“The Innocent Eye,” which surely isn’t). And the Chicago coffeehouse tone gets into it: “how’s this for a thought / poetry tears the cloth / even as it repairs it” (the poem “children pretend to die”). A few pages on, in the poem “one size fits all being,” we’re skirting Language Poetry territory: “poetry stands alone / cellphone on roam / counting down to none / no one, noon,” in which the prosody reminds me of Tom Raworth’s.
Depending on how theoretical or reductive you care to get, one way to think about Paul Hoover’s oeuvre is as a Rolodex of primary concerns — green breaking down to yellow and blue, or aging to red and brown; the nature of language and poetic use thereof; the optics of mirrors; the philosopher’s chair; the transactions between science and math and intuition; and so on. It would not surprise me to learn that Paul has read the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli’s books and considered his conviction that reality does not equal energy plus matter, but that everything is events; happenings; processes — or that Paul arrived independently at such a position and spins the Rolodex accordingly.
Attitudinally, many of his poems seem to me to oscillate between those of his neighbors in that 1974 photo, that is, between Paul Carroll’s bravado, which I associate with Claes Oldenburg and Red Grooms, and Michael Anania’s sprezzatura, which I associate with Bill Evans and Milt Jackson. In a poem early on in O, and Green, “American Gestures,” the 100 dazzling lines constitute a cento assembled with amazing bravura. As the poem’s epigraph from Jacques Roubaud says, “Poetry is the memory of language.” As Emerson maintained, “Language is fossil poetry.” We would all do well to keep digging and carefully brushing, without expecting to establish a final “truth” amid the antinomies and circularities of our experience, and while aspiring to the wit and humility shown in “American Gestures.”
The dozen new poems — like apostles — in O, and Green’s closing section are given the collective title “Gravity’s Children.” I can’t help but hear Gravity’s Rainbow and Childhood’s End and “grave” in that choice of title, nor avoid thinking of Einstein’s identification of gravity as a curvature of space-time and thinking of the way our words gravitate around our thoughts and feelings as Hoover so adeptly shows that they do. In the 12 poems in this section, Hoover explores the relationship between the absurd modern world of machines and confusions and the Old Testament world that we imagine as one of authenticity and prophecy. I think I hear echoes of Samuel Beckett’s tramps here. I know I hear an adroit variation on Rimbaud in the section’s title poem: “— It is another,” where the antecedent is “nothing itself.” In the following poem, “Public Life, Private Breathing,” Hoover uses the traditional anaphoric “there is a time for … a time to … a time to” in a mordant litany that includes “a time to Facebook” and “a time to Twitter” but manages to combine disgust and despair with muted affirmation. I don’t believe Hoover would mind whether his readers garnered from his lines here reverent irreverence or irreverent reverence. He is a witness among us other witnesses. That he is an uncommonly acute observer and listener allows him insights that, shared, sharpen and refresh our own powers of bearing witness.
The penultimate poem in the book is titled “God’s Promises,” and it indulges in straight-up parody: “I, the Lord, will make barren / your fields and your fairways.” Here writes a poet composing in the shadow of Don Van Vliet’s God’s Golfball Productions and “Gimme that old time religion” in “Moonlight on Vermont” — and who is conversant with Matthew Arnold’s chapter “Hebraism and Hellenism” in Culture and Anarchy. Hoover’s fantasia of images and language contains multitudes and, quite possibly according to contemporary physics, distributes multitudes among dimensions we can’t see.
I have lived since 1985 on Iowa City’s Rochester Avenue, which road has another name: the Hoover Highway. That the road was named for President Herbert Hoover, who was born in the next town east, poses no impediment to my preference for regarding it instead as the Paul Hoover Highway. Via a few connecting ramps, a person can go east to Chicago and New York City and west to Omaha and San Francisco by this route and reach anyplace north or south. We live on this Hoover Highway whether we’re aware of it or not. Those of us who have the benefit of reading Paul’s work are grateful for his companionship along the way.
[Published by MadHatPress on October 10, 2021, 274 pages, $22.95 paperback]