Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "Bars Poetica" is a playful yet deeply existential take on poetry’s role in capturing the human experience. The title itself is a clever riff on Ars Poetica, the classical idea of poetry as a reflection on the nature of poetry itself. But here, the word Bars suggests a setting of casual conversation, drinking, and late-night philosophizing—perhaps a more fitting place for truth than a formal literary treatise. The poem unfolds as an off-the-cuff manifesto, embracing the contradictions of existence, the limits of meaning, and the way poetry, like life, is ultimately about love, loss, and the raw energy of creation.

The poem opens with an almost frustrated declaration: "This is the story I’ve tried to tell." This suggests that the poet has spent years circling the same themes, attempting to distill the chaos of life into something graspable. What follows is a reduction of existence to its simplest elements: "Guy exists. Father mother sister brother." This blunt, almost childlike syntax underscores the essentialism of relationships—we are defined by our familial bonds, our place within an ongoing human story.

Then, with an abrupt shift in tone, the poem addresses the cosmos: "Oh pretty stars, oh bastard moon / I see you watching me." The phrasing here is both lyrical and irreverent. The stars are “pretty,” but the moon is a “bastard,” suggesting an uneasy relationship between the speaker and the universe. There’s an implicit tension between awe and resentment, between feeling seen and feeling scrutinized by something vast and indifferent. This invocation of celestial bodies establishes a contrast between the small, personal struggles of human life and the impersonal, overarching reality of the cosmos.

The next lines turn inward: "The trembling / years leading to sex, the trembling sex." This repetition of trembling emphasizes vulnerability—youth’s nervous anticipation of intimacy, followed by the equally unsteady reality of sex itself. There’s a wry honesty in this admission: sex is often imagined as a moment of transcendence, but it is just as often marked by insecurity and uncertainty.

Then, as if unable to stay with one idea for too long, the poem pivots again: "Death as garnish. Death as male lead, / female lead, death as a cast / of thousands." Here, Hicok treats death like an unavoidable feature in every narrative. It is not just the inevitable conclusion, but a persistent presence, showing up in every role—main character, supporting cast, background extra. This cinematic framing of mortality underscores its ubiquity, its inescapability.

The next section introduces God, but in a way that resists definition: "God in, on, as, with, / to, around, because who knows / because." This line is a grammatical freefall, refusing to pin divinity down to a single preposition or relationship. God is everything and nothing, a presence or an absence, impossible to locate with certainty. The repetition of because suggests a futile attempt at explanation—there is no satisfactory answer to the question of why we are here, only an ongoing, self-referential loop of questioning.

Then, the poem shifts into its most explicitly metapoetic moment: "All the while feeling air’s / a quilt of tongues, that spaces / between words are more articulate / than words." This is a striking description of poetry itself—the idea that what is left unsaid, the pauses and silences, often communicate more than the words themselves. Hicok suggests that meaning is found not in direct articulation but in the gaps between language, in the implied, the unspoken, the breath between thoughts.

Yet, despite this insight, he delivers an unsettling realization: "It’s not like you’d hope, / that anyone can make sense." This is a sobering moment. The speaker acknowledges that clarity, understanding, and coherence—things we might expect from life or from poetry—are largely illusions. No one truly makes sense of the world, and the failure to do so is more universal than we like to admit.

Then, as if offering a reprieve from this existential weight, the poem shifts into barroom camaraderie: "Have another drink. When they throw us out / there’s a place down the street / that never closes." This moment grounds the poem in physical, social reality. If life is absurd, if meaning is elusive, at least there’s always another drink, another conversation, another night. The perpetual openness of the next bar suggests a kind of comfort—the search for understanding may be endless, but at least we don’t have to do it alone.

From this intimate setting, the poem leaps once more into the cosmic: "after that / we’ll climb a fire escape and praise / the genealogy of light." The idea of praising light ties back to the opening address to the stars and moon, but here, it feels more celebratory. The phrase genealogy of light suggests that even illumination has an ancestry, a lineage—light begets light, whether in the form of stars, human connection, or artistic inspiration.

This leads into one of the poem’s most striking observations: "The Big Bang / sounds like what it was, the fucking / that got everything under way." This is Hicok at his most irreverent yet profound. He reduces the creation of the universe to an act of sexual energy—raw, generative, chaotic, and ultimately necessary. It is an almost Whitmanian moment, fusing the sacred with the carnal, collapsing the boundary between cosmic origins and human experience.

And then, the quiet revelation: "That love was there from the start / is all I’ve been trying to say." This is the crux of the poem, its distilled essence. After all the musings on death, sex, language, God, and absurdity, the speaker arrives at a simple yet profound conclusion: love is fundamental. It has always been present, from the birth of the universe to the intimate moments of human life.

Hicok’s "Bars Poetica" is a deeply human, deeply restless meditation on what poetry—and by extension, life—is ultimately about. It embraces contradiction, oscillating between cynicism and wonder, humor and gravity, cosmic scale and intimate detail. The poem resists a singular thesis, opting instead for a cascade of thoughts and observations, all leading to the realization that, despite the chaos, despite the absence of clear meaning, love persists. And maybe, in a world where “almost no one” truly makes sense, that’s the only truth that matters.

Copyright (c) 2025 PoetryExplorer

Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!

Other Poems of Interest...