10-28-2013

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TR Hummer 

 

Corrosive Lyric

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The fly that dissolves in the carnivorous pitcher
     of the bog plant; the bog, which breaks down
Tigers' bones but tans and supples their hides;
     the lump of ore wasted to sand by acid rain;
And the old man smoking at his corner desk
     who has burned himself alive with poetry.

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About half a lifetime ago (mine, that is) I began to glimpse the possibility of a model of writing poems that it has taken me a long time to even begin to bring to real fruition. Perhaps I’m not there yet. Much of the model comes in fact from Whitman—a poet whom people often claim to emulate without even playing in the same concert hall. Whitman wrote out of the mind of the body politic. His “I” is not an “I” at all in the usual sense, even though it sometimes says “I am Walt Whitman.” For him, this process was a celebratory hymn, though it darkens over time, especially after the Civil War. We live on in that darkness Whitman began to discern on his horizon, but the need of the citizen in his or her tiny body to speak to, and out of, and for, and against, the big body that is the aggregate of the nation, or of the human race itself, is still with us. I speak as a single cell, or maybe one chromosome in the DNA of humanity, but I do so with the conviction that, done right, such speaking matters to the body of the whole. Metaphorically, I try to help inject dopamine into the synapses of humankind.

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Poet, critic, and editor T.R. Hummer was born in 1950 in Macon, Mississippi. He holds degrees from the University of Southern Mississippi and the University of Utah, where he earned a PhD. Though his early work is reminiscent of Southern writers such as James Dickey, Hummer’s poetry considers a range of experiences and ideas. His interest in class, sexuality, music, and metaphysics shape collections such as Lower-Class Heresy (1987), The Eighteen-Thousand-Ton Olympic Dream (1990), Walt Whitman in Hell (1996), The Infinity Sessions (2005), and Ephemeron (2011).