Christian Hawkey
Christian Hawkey Poems
Gender: indeterminate. Age:
ancient. Eyes: undersized.
Nose: broken. Neck: connected.
Hair: mostly air. Chest: at rest.
...
One was tied to a fence post, bawling.
Another was little more than a smudge
left behind by a forehead resting
on a pane of glass. A third
...
Wait a minute. We're not finished with you.
We were discussing the Indefatigable Ones
at a time of Maximum Perforation and Wonders,
the bodies of crows plummeting earthward,
...
Whatever cloud—however charged—
& loud with yellow fingers
was in your brain. There were two clouds.
...
sometimes, when I can't sleep, I drag my sleeping bag
into the meadow's precise center
& crawl inside, head first. Fraulein, there is the stars'
...
sighed, turning their nervous eyes
from the sleeting wind, & then the sleeting wind
formed an ice-helmet around their fist-sized, fluffy heads,
& then their heads were heavy, & hung low on their small shoulders,
...
At the time of his seeing a hole opened—a pocket opened—
and left a space. A string of numbers plummeted
through it. They were cold numbers.
...
must balance; this risk; a tablet; peak plasma; the first alphabet;
with the clinical need; finger-sized; it makes sense; the fingers;
were the first; to make sense; this risk; 31 letters; the flower-visiting species;
as opposed to; dung-feeding; the terminal phase; and the;
...
We dug with our hands & hand shovels.
We dug with our spatulate feet.
& with torsos as our only circumference
we dug a maze. A maze of passageways:
...
At the time of his seeing a hole opened—a pocket opened—
and left a space. A string of numbers plummeted
through it. They were cold numbers.
They were pearls.
...
I was lying on my side, in a ditch,
soaking my flanks in bog water
with my head propped up, on an elbow,
...
Alone in a room with a video camera
means you're not alone, but lonely.
The floor closed around my lips.
I spoke from a knot. All bodies
...
Christian Hawkey Biography
Christian Hawkey (born 1969, Hackensack, NJ), is an American poet, translator, editor, activist, and educator. Christian Hawkey is the author of several books of poetry, including Sonne from Ort, Ventrakl, Citizen Of, The Book of Funnels, and a number of chapbooks. His work has been translated into German Slovene, French, Swedish, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch; and he translates several contemporary German poets including Daniel Falb, Sabine Scho and Steffen Popp, and Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger. He completed graduate work at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he founded and edited the first 10 issues of the poetry journal jubilat. He is an associate professor at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. He teaches in the English department, and the Writing for Publication, Performance, and Media Program. In 2012 he founded, with Rachel Levitsky, the Office of Recuperative Strategies (OoRS), a research-oriented collective of activists that explores new tactics to promote the reuse, perversification, reanimation, and reparation of precarious, outmoded, and correctable cultural phenomena. About Ventrakl, poet and translator Johannes Göransson writes "A contemporary poet more interested in the complications of the translation process and kinds of wounds it opens up is Christian Hawkey. In his new book Ventrakl, Hawkey makes the problems of translation the central concern, rather than something to avoid (you can see it in the pun of the title--ventricle, of Trakl, English and German moving in and out of the book, forcing one's mouth to mispronounce the title, turning the reader's mouth, body into medium). The book is part translation of the iconic World War I poet (of 'witness') Georg Trakl, part study in the problematics of translation; and part seance--a seance that admits the ghost-like, haunted nature of translation, very much in keeping with Pound's reanimation project." His first book was given the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He received a Creative Capital Innovative Literature Award in 2006. In 2008, he was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow. In the Summer of 2010, Hawkey held the Picador Guest Professorship for Literature at the University of Leipzig's Institute for American Studies in Leipzig, Germany. He was selected to judge the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation in 2012. With the collaborative team of Joe Diebes and David Levine he has held residencies at Watermill, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Governor's Island Artist Residency program, and the BRIC Fireworks Residency.)
The Best Poem Of Christian Hawkey
Report From the Undersecretary of Inquests
Gender: indeterminate. Age:
ancient. Eyes: undersized.
Nose: broken. Neck: connected.
Hair: mostly air. Chest: at rest.
Gender: pending. Forehead: dented,
perhaps by stars or star-shaped devices
such as a Phillips head, although
the tongue, twisted, recently located
inside the right cheek
salutes you, clearly
as shadows salute the sun's love
of late afternoons in winter trees
leafless as the word branches.
I'm awake. I'm awake. Minutes
more a few minutes more &
a face the morning twitches into
movement is blinking. Where's
my war bonnet. Birdlessly the sky.
Blue is a hole in my head you
fly into, whispering, questioning.
A cat's feathered tongue. Its patiences.
Spring. Coiled sources. They pulled
the river out of the body
called today, Tuesday,
did you know her wide, flat gaze
& the way it moved
or certain things move, as if
from beneath, unseen the earth, like
a bull's shoulder must flow suddenly sideways
for a fly. Flecknoe
is his name. He lives under the sign
of The Sad Pelicans, which are easy
to find since their leathery,
weather-beaten distensible gular pouches
unfold with a little wind
as gray, overcast skies. & what's with
I lost my thought. You are
a coy mistress. A jade-gray chalcedony
curtains your neck which is long,
& curving, & carries
like a column of flesh-colored liquid
your head through rooms, windows, walls
made of mist, backlit. Can anyone
tell me who Phillips was. Each life
is a tool. We're holding
our own hands. We're turning in slow motion
held together by a few screws,
this wrist, a Tuesday, light
allowing all the patterns
& how they blur into you, as you.
Christian Hawkey Comments
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