Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "Sur Coast Diary" is a poetic meditation on landscape, time, and the human presence within the natural world. The poem unfolds as a series of observations and interactions—between the speaker and the geologic forces shaping the coast, between the speaker and a deer, between the speaker and the lingering presence of the poet Robinson Jeffers. Through its fluid structure, Hicok collapses distinctions between past and present, human and non-human, thought and sensation, constructing a space where the physical and metaphysical coexist in tension.

The opening lines immediately establish a dynamic landscape, "where the earth turned itself inside out like a sock at the end of the day." This metaphor signals a geological and existential inversion, a setting where time is visibly at work. The reference to "mottled rock and grey rock, slate and conglomerate" situates the speaker on the Pacific Coast, likely along Big Sur, a place where the earth’s crust is literally in motion. The Pacific and North American tectonic plates provide not only a geological reference but a metaphorical one: "I was torn in half with the speed a fingernail grows." This line compresses time, juxtaposing the human scale of growth against the imperceptible but relentless shifts of the earth’s structure.

The poem then moves to a direct encounter with a black-tailed deer. "I saw my reflection in the eye of a black-tailed deer, we stood five feet apart." The moment is rendered with an almost mythic intensity, as the deer’s "charisma of the dark side of the moon" suggests an unknowable presence, a being at once familiar and alien. The shared confusion, "the astonished seconds before panic," underscores the fragile connection between species. Though they exist in proximity, the poem acknowledges an unbridgeable distance: "before we remembered it was impossible to touch." The deer embodies nature’s inscrutability, mirroring the speaker’s own search for understanding.

The act of urination in the poem serves both as a gesture of defiance and communion: "I peed against a tree twice as old as the Magna Carta… peed against the hegemony of indoor plumbing, peed against the idea that I am flesh, to prove I am made of steam, to prove I am good as gold." The act is primal, a rejection of modernity’s constraints, an assertion of the speaker’s place in a continuum older than civilization itself. The tree, older than "steel-hulled ships, than steel itself, than cities hived with light," stands as a witness to the passage of human history, a silent recorder of the fleeting ambitions of empire and industry. Hicok aligns the self with natural processes, dissolving boundaries between body and landscape.

A shift in perspective occurs when the speaker observes a condor, an endangered species that becomes an emblem of both survival and loss. "I opened my mouth to the shadow of a condor, swallowed the Pleistocene, swallowed the memory of the first hominids." The condor, a relic from an ancient world, moves through the sky without "wing beats," its presence a haunting reminder of extinction’s encroachment. The line "when they’re gone a noun will disappear, a sound will leave our throats" mourns not just the loss of a species but of language itself, the erosion of meaning as the world’s lexicon is diminished by human negligence. The phrase "we’d be more attractive parasites if we could fly" is both self-critical and elegiac, positioning humanity as a destructive force that lacks even the grace of the scavenger.

The poem’s final movement turns to the legacy of Robinson Jeffers, the poet whose home, Tor House, still stands in Carmel, California. Jeffers, known for his fierce environmentalism and rejection of human-centered perspectives, becomes an unseen presence in the poem. The speaker observes that "the makers of heavier tyrannies have added a fence," an implicit critique of how Jeffers’ vision of wildness has been constrained. The ironic sign, "You are required to clean up after your dog," trivializes the vastness of the landscape by reducing human responsibility to the management of domestic animals, an absurd contrast to the scale of geological and ecological concerns explored earlier in the poem.

The poem ends in an act of submission to the landscape, a relinquishing of ego: "I’ve come here to shout into the pliant machine of the swell, to grow small, to wake in the night and retune my breath to this black lung." The "pliant machine of the swell" suggests an ocean both mechanical and organic, indifferent yet responsive. The phrase "to grow small" encapsulates the speaker’s desire to dissolve into the natural world, to surrender the anthropocentric perspective in favor of something vaster and less defined. "Retuning my breath to this black lung" suggests an alignment with the earth’s rhythms, an attunement to forces beyond human control.

Hicok’s "Sur Coast Diary" is ultimately a meditation on transience, the impermanence of human presence against the backdrop of geological time. The poem oscillates between awe and lament, between connection and alienation, as the speaker navigates the shifting terrain of memory, history, and ecology. Through its fluid and associative structure, the poem resists closure, mirroring the unresolved relationship between human civilization and the natural world. The poem’s final gesture, the "black lung," evokes both the vastness of the ocean and the suffocation of environmental decline, leaving the reader suspended between reverence and dread.

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