Tom Hibbard (1947-2022) and The Songs of Divine Love

 

Tom Hibbard sent me many of his small press and self-published little books over many years. I liked all of them, but one of them, The Songs of Divine Love, had a powerful effect on my work. The poems in it were tight, imagistic, paratactic, aware of social conditions, vivid in what they said and refused to say. They were experimental and approachable. They taught me something important about how a poem could be brief and still be contemporary, how it was possible to write poems when one had little time for writing. I borrowed some elements of his formal constraints for my collection Belief Is Impossible, which has never been published as a book although most of the poems have appeared in literary magazines. It was a form I returned to more than 15 years later for The End of America, Book 11.

News of Tom’s passing on December 15, age 75, from a perforated ulcer, reached me over the Internet just today (Dec 28).

Tom and I corresponded and traded work over many years. I met him only once in person, in fall 2010, when I gave a reading in Racine, Wisconsin, only the second time in my life I’d ever been in Wisconsin (I haven’t been again since). Tom missed my reading but greeted me outside afterwards. He had, curiously and surprisingly yet also characteristically, been out around town because he was running for office, trying to get elected as (I believe) a Wisconsin state assemblyman, a self-financed campaign he was never going to win but still undertook with his always present combination of generosity and sincerity with very visible touches of irony. I think I still have his “Tom Hibbard for Wisconsin” button somewhere.

Tom was one of an often connected group of midwestern and southern experimental poets first appearing in the 70s and 80s and operating hopelessly outside the narrow worlds of the mainstream poetry of their regions. But like many of those poets, Tom was far from hopeless. He believed in the value of outsider art and poetry, of connecting to others through DIY literary practice. He was friendly and warm yet willing to make insightful criticisms. In reviewing my book Haze, he wanted to see more specific cultural and historical references, a criticism I disagreed with but found slowly seeping into my later writing.

In recent years I’d been having a lot of small scale social media correspondence with Tom. In what will now be “the last few days before his death,” he’d been writing posts that were brief photo essays of moments in the holiday-season behavior of the people around him. As usual, he saw people both generously and sharply, accepting as he was of foibles and eccentricity but not of cruelty or the crueler forms of idiocy.

Somebody should reprint The Songs of Divine Love. It is, I think, brilliant, and stands as unique in the experimental writing environment of its time and place. Its effect on me endures; I have picked it up to read it again and again over many years.

Here is his poem “land of yesterday”:


One child loudly supported nationalism.
One child died of diabetes.
One child was a dock worker.

Injustice manufactures new virtue.
Each insight made is, in turn, covered up.
One only becomes a perpendicular distance
By pretending life is something it is not.
The Fourth of July holiday is again approaching.


And here is “time wound”:

I present proof of my success:
My severed finger to wear on your key chain.
You will wear it when you say goodbye.
They give the impression of knowing what you know.
Inaccuracy of emotion is quite common.
Pickerel is a fish of the Pike family.


I will miss him.