Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "Goodbye in the Shape of a Knot" is a meditation on loss, grief, and the irreconcilable ways the mind moves between beauty and horror when confronting death. The poem spirals in and out of thoughts that refuse to settle, much like grief itself—restless, associative, and unwilling to adhere to a linear narrative. Hicok’s voice is fragmented, self-conscious, and intensely personal, layering intimate domestic details with the grotesque and surreal, as if trying to wrestle with the mind’s inability to stay in one emotional place.

The poem opens with the declaration "I am stuck," a phrase that functions both as a literal admission of writer’s block and as a metaphor for the paralysis that comes with grief. What follows is an immediate juxtaposition of imagery: "Everything I want to say about the flowers massing for attack, black-eyed Susans and something blue and frilly, about my mother’s gallbladder sitting lonely in the surgical tray…" The flowers, usually symbols of beauty and renewal, become militarized ("massing for attack"), while the gallbladder, an unremarkable bodily organ, is rendered lonely, anthropomorphized in its isolation. These two contrasting images—the natural world and the surgical removal of a body part—establish the poem’s central tension between life’s aesthetic beauty and its physical deterioration.

The next image—the "hum of frogs over my head at night when I walk the familiar loop so my dog can sniff the urine-text of grass"—introduces another layer of routine and continuity. The act of walking the dog, normally grounding, is disrupted by the overwhelming weight of historical atrocity: "the kids of Smolensk who used frozen German corpses as sleds during World War II because they had snow and nothing else." This moment exemplifies how grief disorients, forcing the speaker’s mind to latch onto something horrifying yet vivid. The detail is deeply unsettling, as the image of children using frozen bodies as sleds collapses innocence and brutality into one act. This is not just a shocking historical footnote—it is a reflection of how the mind, when confronted with loss, fixates on the unthinkable as a way of making sense of suffering.

Hicok then shifts gears, adopting a wry, almost sardonic tone with "Step one is to admit I have a problem." This allusion to the language of addiction suggests that grief, like substance dependence, is something to be managed rather than resolved. It also acknowledges the compulsive nature of the speaker’s obsession with dark history—how the weight of loss forces him into fixations beyond his control.

The poem takes another detour into an experimental moment where Hicok reads an interview with jazz pianist Keith Jarrett "sideways, across the columns of his thoughts." The fragmented, nonlinear way the interview is presented mirrors the speaker’s own mental state, where meaning is found through unexpected juxtapositions rather than traditional logic. Jarrett’s words, distorted and rearranged, become a meditation on improvisation: "Keep going somewhere… the only way someone can… find a way to get off the earth… music is being played… I am burned by flame." This section is chaotic, mirroring both the disorienting effects of grief and the improvisational nature of thought itself.

Then comes the confession: "Mean to show from my head the happiness of dark things…" This line is both an apology and an admission of how pain and beauty intertwine. The poem acknowledges the paradox of being drawn to the darkness, of trying to extract something meaningful or even joyful from suffering. This thought extends into an imagined scenario of death ("to have a body under you very fast or with empty stomach and bombs going off in your mother’s hair"), in which laughter and horror are again fused, reinforcing the poem’s obsession with contradictions.

As the poem progresses, Hicok’s grief becomes more direct: "Because you are is why I bother, dying and better than me, faster to the point of soon doctors say, make a promise to you of my obsession, this comfort you must think sideways to feel." Here, the person being mourned is addressed directly. The speaker is struggling to articulate a promise—that he will carry this person’s life forward, that he will remember and make use of their existence in a meaningful way. But even in this promise, there is uncertainty, as though the nature of grief itself resists clarity.

The closing lines—"That when you’re gone I’ll use your life to good ends, be the first to jump on your grave and admit there was no everything other than love to call it ecstasy, or aiming this arrow at living and breathing, at the event I’m divorcing the same moment it happens, call your face to others as a shape to live within, your smile a quest for the pure improvisation of things."—are a final attempt at resolution. The phrase "be the first to jump on your grave" is jarring, suggesting an impatience to move forward, but also a desperate need to honor and validate this person’s existence. Ultimately, love becomes the only certainty ("there was no everything other than love") in a world where meaning is elusive. The phrase "your smile a quest for the pure improvisation of things" connects back to the jazz reference earlier, suggesting that life, like music, is something we must navigate in real time, without a predetermined score.

Structurally, Hicok’s poem reflects the erratic, nonlinear nature of grief. Thoughts are fragmented, ideas cut into each other, and the poem resists a clear narrative arc. Instead, it circles around themes of death, memory, and the mind’s tendency to oscillate between the personal and the historical, the intimate and the grotesque. The title, "Goodbye in the Shape of a Knot," is particularly apt—grief is not a straight line but a tangled, looping experience, one that resists unraveling.

Ultimately, the poem is an exploration of how we process loss through language, history, and the disjointed nature of thought itself. Hicok does not offer resolution—because grief does not offer resolution—but he does offer an honest depiction of how memory, love, and obsession intertwine in the human experience.

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