Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "After Looking Up Into One Too Many Cameras" is a surreal and deeply unsettling meditation on surveillance, personal autonomy, and the existential dilemma of visibility in the modern world. The poem enacts a struggle between exposure and secrecy, between the desire to escape and the necessity of remaining present, balancing between the symbolic and the visceral. Using an extended metaphor of bodily disassembly—of bones being emptied and reinserted—Hicok constructs a disturbing but strangely graceful image of a man becoming weightless, hovering in the liminal space between existence and erasure.

The opening line immediately disorients: “When the bones of my arm were emptied I began / to hover, a man becoming his own kite.” The act of emptying bones suggests both a physical and metaphysical transformation, as if the speaker is hollowing himself out, shedding the weight of his structure. The phrase "a man becoming his own kite" is particularly striking—rather than being grounded, he becomes something controlled by external forces, floating at the mercy of unseen currents. This image of hovering is crucial to the poem’s central tension: the speaker is neither fully grounded nor fully gone, existing in an ambiguous, precarious state.

The next lines, “Along the street I flew my arm above myself, / reached toward stars if night and stars / if day,” reinforce this state of hovering, but also introduce a strange duality—"stars if night and stars if day." This phrase suggests a reality in which even the concept of night and day has blurred, where artificial light and natural light are indistinguishable, hinting at the all-pervasive presence of cameras, screens, and surveillance that collapse temporal distinctions.

The poem then shifts toward the central anxiety of exposure: “I can imagine it appeared / that my arm was trying to pull me / free of something, something like drowning / but there was no water.” The gesture—an arm pulling its body upward—suggests both self-rescue and a desperate escape from a force that cannot be seen. The absence of water makes the drowning metaphor all the more chilling, as it implies a suffocation that is not physical but systemic, atmospheric. What the speaker is drowning in is not water but visibility, a world where privacy no longer exists: “I was trying / to say there are no secrets left.” The speaker’s predicament is not just personal—it is a statement on a world where everything is watched, recorded, and known.

However, rather than simply stating this loss of secrecy, the speaker embodies it in a grotesque, methodical ritual: “The idea of removing one bone at a time / and emptying it and putting it back / felt like a crime, a kind of burglary.” This act—of systematically hollowing oneself out—becomes a form of protest against the loss of personal space. The description of this self-inflicted dissection as “a kind of burglary” suggests that the invasion of privacy is not something external but something internalized, as if the speaker himself has been forced into the role of both the thief and the victim.

Hicok sharpens this paradox in the next lines: “Every night a new bone and every night / I kissed the things I removed, an estuary / from my hips, violin from my clavicle.” The act of kissing the removed body parts suggests both reverence and farewell, as if the speaker mourns what he is losing. The metaphors—“an estuary from my hips” and “violin from my clavicle”—transform his body into something fluid, musical, something no longer rigidly human. This erosion of physical form continues as he attempts to hide himself: “all of which I hammered and bulldozed / until it fit under my tongue.” The final resting place for these removed bones is within the mouth, the space of speech, implying that language is the last refuge of secrecy—what cannot be seen might still be spoken.

Yet even speech is under threat: “so cameras couldn’t point the guns / of their eyes and computers couldn’t listen / to the words of my fingers.” The comparison of cameras to guns is a stark indictment of surveillance as an act of violence, an assault on existence itself. Meanwhile, the phrase “the words of my fingers” suggests that even nonverbal communication—gestures, typing, movement—is subject to scrutiny. In a world where secrets "can’t be secretly shared," flesh itself becomes “prison.” The speaker’s body, once a private vessel, has become a site of confinement, a space where nothing remains unobserved.

As the speaker becomes increasingly weightless—“Slowly I floated more, / floated better in that region / between ground and ghosts.”—he begins to slip into a liminal space, existing neither fully in life nor fully in death. The lines “The feet of the dead above me, / the commencement of night below” suggest an inversion of the usual hierarchy—the dead are not buried beneath but hover above, and the night does not descend but begins below him. The poem presents a world where conventional spatial relationships have collapsed, reinforcing the sense of disorientation and detachment.

A key turning point comes in the realization that there is a limit to this disassembly: “The trick was to know when to stop, which / part of me I had to keep to keep / from disappearing.” The speaker faces a fundamental existential question: what is the minimal self? At what point does self-erasure become total erasure? This struggle between “refusal and suicide”—between resistance and annihilation—becomes the speaker’s central dilemma.

The next section shifts toward a longing for connection: “I’d like to believe there’s something / we have for each other that has nothing / to do with what we can give.” This is a crucial moment—after all this dissolution and disembodiment, the speaker still desires a human bond that is not transactional, not dependent on visibility or exchange. He questions the ways we measure connection, as if longing for something intangible, something immune to surveillance.

Then, the poem turns toward a sharp critique of hyper-exposure: “I don’t need / all the details of your crotch / to feel safe.” This could be read as a comment on oversharing in the digital age, on the ways bodies are exposed—willingly or unwillingly—through technology. The poem argues for a different kind of presence, one that does not rely on total visibility.

The closing movement of the poem returns to the struggle between submission and resistance: “Let them take all the notes they want. / I’m here to correct the mistakes in the file / I’ll never be shown.” The speaker resigns himself to being watched, but not passively—there is still defiance in his desire to correct the file, to reclaim his own narrative even though he knows he will never see it. This leads to a final assertion: “These are not subversive thoughts / but the taste of my marrow and the most / dangerous words are the ones we never hear.”

The final line is devastating—the true danger does not lie in what is recorded, but in what remains unheard, what is silenced before it can be spoken. In a world where every action is watched, the real violence is in what is missing—the thoughts that are never expressed, the voices that are suppressed, the truths that are lost in the static of relentless surveillance.

"After Looking Up Into One Too Many Cameras" is a masterful exploration of self-erasure, hyper-visibility, and the desperate desire to retain something private in a world that refuses to allow secrecy. The poem enacts its own themes formally—its syntax hovers, its metaphors strip away the body, its images dissolve the boundary between the physical and the conceptual. Ultimately, Hicok does not offer a resolution; instead, he leaves us suspended in the space between refusal and disappearance, between the desire to escape and the necessity of remaining, however fragmented, however seen.

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