I was trying to think of a grabbing title, what do you think? Of course he means it, and he doesn’t mean it. Like we all do. Emotional truth right? Capsules of time and spheres of existence and…. Yeah. Anyway, I was flipping through the new New Ohio Review and saw one of Bob Hicok’s lovely long titles in the table of contents: “Having intended to merely pick on an oil company, the poem goes awry” and thought Hmm. I too feel like picking on an oil company, the Deepwater Horizon’s spill still fresh (sadly, even while writing this right here, still gushing).
Also, is it just me, or does the name Deepwater Horizon sound, at least in retrospect, like Event Horizon? About the ship attempting a form of travel (drilling) never tried before, to a place never gone before in space (the ocean) and after a mishap a dark presence is making its way toward our homes. How did we not see it coming?
Anyway, Hicok’s poem begins “Never before have I so resembled British Petroleum.” Of course, British Petroleum is the essential parent company of Transocean, operators of the Deepwater Horizon rig. Now comes the part where I say the ironic tone of the poem perhaps rings even truer in the light of the current gulf spill. The poem is anchored very well in a time not far divorced from the spill (present) with other lines referring to current events such as:
…Isn’t a corporation technically a person
and responsible? Aren’t I technically a person
and responsible?
which seems, at least to this reader, to be very much a comment on the supreme court ruling allowing corporations the rights of citizens, and therefore the right to donate to political campaigns (which gets chosen politicians, law/policy makers in a place of actually deciding law/policy, with a debt of sorts to that corporation).
Hicok critically questions his own actions, his own ineffectualness, at the same time as asking the reader to consider their own global ineffectualness without getting preachy. How? Well, because he’s a magician, mostly, but also by building a strong case of self deprecation before laying into the ubiquitous you with: “How far would you walk for bread? For the flour // to make bread?” And, as promised, the poem goes awry at the end in a very organic way. From destruction to apathy to well, what’s next? I was going to quote his line about how gently BP planned to drill for their oil, but I’ll let you discover that as it was intended, within the poem, which New Ohio Review’s graciously produced not only in their pages, but also on their website as a pdf.
Read Bob Hicok’s “Having intended to merely pick on an oil company, the poem goes awry”
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