Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "Building a Painting a Home" is an imaginative, surreal meditation on creation—of barns, paintings, homes, landscapes, and the act of making something livable from the ephemeral. The poem operates in a dreamlike space where physical structures blend seamlessly with artistic vision, where the practical act of building merges with abstraction, and where personal fears and desires shape the construction of a place that may or may not exist. Hicok crafts an architecture of imagination, exploring the fluid boundaries between reality and art, between the act of seeing and the act of making.

The poem begins with a conditional: “If I built a barn I’d build it right into the sky.” This immediately sets the tone for a piece where logic bends, where construction is not limited by gravity or traditional materials. The barn is not grounded; instead, it reaches into the sky, challenging the very nature of architecture and physical space. The windows—"twice as large as walls"—suggest a structure that is more openness than enclosure, more light than solidity. This framing establishes an opposition between the expected function of a barn (a place for storage, containment, protection) and the speaker’s vision, which prioritizes expansiveness and exposure.

The next lines—"ringed with theoretical pines, clumps of green on simple sticks"—highlight the constructed nature of this world. The trees are not real but theoretical, evoking the simplified aesthetics of a painting or a child’s drawing. This suggests that the speaker is not merely designing a barn but composing a visual space, where objects exist as representations rather than tangible things.

Hicok then introduces an element of dynamic instability: “doors cut from the ocean, doors that wave and doors that foam.” This image transforms the notion of entry and exit into something fluid, something shifting and uncontrollable. Doors, which traditionally function as boundaries, here become permeable and unpredictable, mirroring the fluidity of artistic process itself.

The surreal logic of the poem deepens as the speaker confronts a personal anxiety: “and shadows inside to eat / every cow I own because I’m afraid of cows.” This confession introduces an intimate, almost absurd fear. The barn, which would typically house livestock, instead contains shadows that consume the cows, as if the very purpose of the barn is to erase them. The humor here is sharp but also revealing—fear and creation are intertwined, and the speaker constructs a world that actively eliminates what unsettles him. His paranoia escalates into conspiracy: “two stomachs imply that aliens are involved, / moo is what the brain-washed say.” This playful distrust of cows—framing them as alien-like due to their multiple stomachs—further fractures the poem’s logic, showing how perception reshapes reality.

The next section shifts into an agrarian fantasy: “my fields would be green until yellow and yellow / until white, acres of albino wheat for the manufacture of weightless bread.” The phrase "albino wheat" emphasizes a kind of unnatural purity, reinforcing the theme of artistic manipulation of reality. The weightless bread, in turn, suggests a world that defies gravity, where even sustenance is ephemeral. The speaker consumes only what floats, suggesting an asceticism or a desire to detach from earthly concerns.

This theme of weightlessness continues in the next lines: “in a house that spins as the weather vane turns, / a house that follows / a rooster in love with wind.” The house is not static but reactive, oriented not by human will but by the whims of the weather. The rooster, typically a stationary ornament on a barn’s roof, becomes an agent of movement, guiding the house in pursuit of something it cannot possess. This reinforces the fluid, dreamlike nature of the poem, where even home is unstable, always shifting.

Hicok then expands the scale of his creation: “the sky and my barn are blue and the sky also floats, / there’s nothing to hold anything down, even eternity’s loose.” The lack of anchors—physical or metaphysical—suggests a universe unmoored, where time and space do not adhere to conventional limits. The phrase “eternity’s loose and roams the erotic / contortions of space” introduces an almost cosmic sensuality, as if the infinite itself moves freely, twisting into unexpected shapes.

The speaker then brings in his children, suggesting a generational shift in perception: “even my children recognize tomorrow better than they remember / today.” This line speaks to a certain kind of modern experience—where the future feels more tangible than the present, where anticipation overshadows memory. This notion aligns with the broader themes of the poem, where construction is always in flux, where nothing is fixed long enough to be fully grasped.

The poem’s conclusion explicitly links painting and building: “if I built a barn I’d build the land and the sun before that.” This reversal of cause and effect suggests that the speaker’s act of creation does not take place within an existing world—it brings the world into being. The land and the sun are not given but made, positioning the speaker as both artist and godlike architect.

The final lines deliver the poem’s most explicit statement on artistic process: “I’d spread the canvas flat / with my hands and nail it to the dirt, I’d paint exactly what I see and then paint / over that until by accident something habitable appears.” Here, Hicok presents creation as iterative, as a layering process in which meaning and form emerge through revision. The phrase "by accident something habitable appears" is crucial—it suggests that a home, a world, is not built through strict design but through exploration, through erasure and rewriting.

The last images—"until the kettle screams on the stove, / until the steam is green and the sound is gold"—bring the poem back to the domestic, but in an altered, heightened way. The kettle, an ordinary household object, takes on sensory transformation: steam turns green, sound turns gold. This final shift suggests that even the most familiar aspects of home can be reimagined, reinterpreted through an artist’s eye.

"Building a Painting a Home" is an exuberant, surreal meditation on creativity, fear, and the instability of meaning. Hicok constructs a world where barns float, doors foam, and even the sun is painted into existence. The poem operates in the space between artistic vision and material reality, suggesting that what we build—whether homes, paintings, or lives—is never fully planned, but emerges through layers of imagination, revision, and accident. It is a declaration that home, like art, is something we must continuously create, something that only becomes habitable once we allow it to take unexpected shape.

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