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Cynthia Hogue
USA
hogue@bucknell.edu
Photo Credit: Elinor Cohen
| Cynthia Hogue’s three collections of
poetry have been praised for
their intelligence, elegant compression, and chiseled syntax. Of her
powerful new collection, Flux (New Issues Press, March 2002),
David St. John observes that "Hogue summons both fable and cultural
dream-life to help address the otherwise precarious nature of a life's
passage. Precise yet expansive, this is an exhilarating collection of
poems." Of her previous collection, Alicia Ostriker writes, "Hogue’s
The Woman in Red (Ahsahta Press, 1990) was very savvy, sharp,
crisp—language with an edge. Syntax experimental, imagery turning
unexpected corners, narratives cropped. They were implicit social
critique. In The Never Wife (Mammoth Press, 1999), the
experiments continue. Hogue is doing a contemporary version of what
Marianne Moore was doing: manipulating a surface that seems hard,
intricate, faultless, lapidary, while in fact dealing with the
formlessness of vulnerability. The poems in the New Orleans series,
"Three Streets from Desire," are quietly heartbreaking."
Also known for her criticism and scholarship, Hogue has
been called one of the few
critics well versed in contemporary theoretical debates who is also a
skilled reader of poetry. Her books and essays on poetry, ranging from
that of Emily Dickinson to Kathleen Fraser and Harryette Mullen, have
explored the possibilities for ethical, poetic subjects and the
transformation of consciousness. Her co-edited, critical anthology of
essays, "We Who ‘Love To Be Astonished’": Experimental Feminist
Poetics and Performance Art (U of Alabama Press, 2001), broadens
the definition of "experimental." It is the first study of the
avant-garde to bring together critical essays on diverse, and
diversely experimental American women writers.
For her work, Hogue has been awarded
NEA, NEH, and Fulbright fellowships. She is a trained mediator
specializing in diversity issues in education. She has lived and
taught in Iceland, Arizona, New Orleans, and New York. She
currently lives in Pennsylvania, where she directs the Stadler Center
for Poetry and teaches English at Bucknell University. |
Till I Have Conquered in Myself
What Causes War
(after a line by Marianne Moore)
acknowledging is--when
that
wasn't what was asked--
Leslie Scalapino
In Raising the Ashes
the documentary montage of now
and then--"Ourself --
behind Ourself"--wasn't
acknowledged though a woman said,
"Faced with genocide, 99% of us
would kill them
to survive ourselves,"
those selves
not surviving
as they were
but had become,
crying, when asked
to admit this, We knew
nothing and will not
bear your ashen blame.
**first published in Antioch Review
In a Mute Season
Questions rail along the field
where winter wheat lies hidden
in snow. (We lie to justify
indefensible behavior, to protect
unprotectable innocence, inhaling
and exhaling with an evenness
of spirit to which we aspire.)
Who calls the sky gray?
or the seasons unsurvivable?
I visit doctors because
my body drives me to them,
beyond my dictates. Ailing,
I am healing before
my mind understands
that the phenomenology of pain
harbors words which refuse
syntax and order, predictable,
eventual inevitability,
until I grasp that order
eludes us, dispersing,
a wall of fog we drive through,
so frugal of speed, spendthrifts
of time. To feel alone is merely
the mind's last defense--
a physiological white-out--
from the spirit's largesse.
**first published in Poetry International
Agape
He emerged from the cave
as from grief. Her waiting
done, the woman gaped. Timely,
she saw how he lay
in a full field, wrapped
still in the winding sheet,
bodied forth. He was buried
but arose; she wrote, burying
herself in words, apocryphal,
unheeded. The man had erred
truly, whether he spoke--
as she said, one last message:
"I like order, things
that go according to plan.
You bring chaos"--
or not. Day one: isolation.
Day two: morbidity. Day three:
He’d think of this change
as peaceful, just walking
on air like earth. She'd
disappear, who stood agape
as clouds changed from dove
to mauve, the sun
a lucent disk above
the hills broken by rose
buttes. And in silhouette,
a soaring hawk.
**first published in New Orleans Review; collected in Flux
(New Issues P, forthcoming 2002)
After the Fact of Loss
What were we thinking
with wry excited praise?
When did we ever
count the hours
or raise
our voices, helpful strangers
at best? Among vivid hedges,
gray-wintered light,
I grew mighty
households, numerous
invisible assets, manifold
ideas about custom
that I could not
countenance
as our eyes met & we
remarked: When you touch my hand
I'm touched, the fact of touch
an event, nonsignifying
but meaningful
communication
shaping a past with loss
to make experience
for ourselves, and some
day, perhaps,
conversation, perhaps.
**first published in The Journal;
collected in The Never Wife (Mammoth Press, 1999)
Your Strange Transcendence
You'll go to Venice for your 40th,
heart large, taking heart from small
remunerations for being an original.
Some claim you're mad but humility
is for the hypocritical. The only problem
is meaning to live by spiritual standards
in the midst of consumerism reborn
as a form of moral admonishment.
These silly folk hear profit
when you speak of prophet, listen
politely as you talk of luminous
visitions! "Sing a song," one croons,
and you pipe tunes for today:
"Nervous Fear Blues," "Jittery Jitterbug,"
"Bipolarity Rag," and everyone's favorite,
"Agoraphobia Mon Amour."
Your husband,
surrounded by enthusiastic Christians,
chatters like Jesus of redemption,
dabbles in mesmerism, and discovers
oxygen, in too great quantities, makes
a body disintegrate. He says, "I have
very little of Mrs. Flake's company;
she is always in Paradise."
This popularity, subtle at first,
progresses until your radical ideas
are exposed. Now everyone gets you
and sales plummet. How bland
to accuse misogynists of misogyny!
And did you think the remark
"that the poor waste their days of Wisdom
in Drudgery for a pittance of scant meal"
news?
Your
lineaments, though never classic,
mirror a restless and kinetic spirit
planning to fact-gather abroad,
make sense of the messianic,
ramble nude along the Mediterranean
magnetically healing with Mr. Flake—
will you ever return from this pilgrimage?
Travelling all night into mortal life,
you cross the main square of a sinking city
toward God's golden dome, the crumbling stair.
**first published in American Literary Review;
collected in The Never Wife
© All Copyright, Cynthia Hogue.
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