Harvey Lee Hix

Harvey Lee Hix Poems

Harvey Lee Hix Biography

Poet H.L. Hix was born in Oklahoma and raised in the south. He earned his BA from Belmont College and PhD in philosophy from the University of Texas. His collections of poetry include Perfect Hell (1996), Rational Numbers (2000), Surely as Birds Fly (2002), Shadows of Houses (2005), Chromatic (2006), God Bless: A Political/Poetic Discourse (2007), Legible Heavens (2009), Incident Light (2009), First Fire, Then Birds: Obsessionals 1985-2010 (2010), and As Much As, If Not More (2014). His prose works include Spirits Hovering Over the Ashes: Legacies of Postmodern Theory (1995), As Easy As Lying: Essays on Poetry (2002), and Lines of Inquiry (2011). He has co-translated the work of Estonian poets such as Eugenijus Alisanka, Juri Talvet, and Juhan Liiv. His editing projects include the anthologies Wild & Whirling Words: A Poetic Conversation (2004), New Voices: Contemporary Poetry from the United States (2008) and Made Priceless: A Few Things Money Can’t Buy (2012). Hix’s honors and awards include the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Grolier Prize, and the Peregrine Smith Award. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kansas Arts Commission, and the Missouri Arts Council. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas-Austin and Shanghai University. He currently teaches at the University of Wyoming.)

The Best Poem Of Harvey Lee Hix

Better that any arc he sees confound than that it confirm his protestations.

It swallows all it swallows, mass mistaken for mass,
swallows it all as storm surge swallows swaths of shoreline,
offers for the finding after only slivers of glass,
deflects off weathered edifice, trickles through tumbledown.
Deflects barely, a swallow off the surface of a farm pond.
Even on cold nights, not all brilliance mimics the crystalline.
Not all wisdom waits, not all that winters winters underground.
Unspoken, any summons to silent predation.


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I name it Forsakenness Knob, that ridge where wind and loss merge,
where what I see looks like something beyond what sight can prove,
frost figured as so many bare branches. And omens,
my god, so many, like animal tracks, but they merge,
blown over by another snow. Body they once were, mind
they may since have melted into, omens may they prove.

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