Reviewed: The Narrow Circle,
by Nathan Hoks. Publisher: Penguin, 6/13. Paperback $14.64, 96pp.

Home // July.26.2016 // Robert Morris

Absurdity in Poetic Depression

This is a semi-blind review of The Narrow Circle. Blind, in the sense that I've read no other reviews of the book, and have no prior awareness of Hoks' poetry. I haven't, and won't, read the back cover description. It's just me and the poems this afternoon. It's a warm summer day and my music library is feeding me a shuffled stream of songs. Let's begin with surface appearances.

The cover features a porcelain sculpture of an ear, connected not to a head but to a cluster of flowering raspberry branches. This odd objet d'art rests on a bare gray background. The effect is quietly surreal. There's a slip of paper tucked between the pages halfway through the volume, as if to mark a reader's place. It wasn't placed there by me. I don't know how it got there or if it means anything. I'm operating under the assumption that it does not.

Opening now to the table of contents. There are two sections, titled The Interior and The Exterior, with the poems in each section including, for the most part, the words "interior" and "exterior." (The scheme reminds me of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, and of an album, Drum's Not Dead, by the art punk band Liars. The album's songs are built around two characters, Drum and Mt. Heart Attack. Pitchfork named it one of their top ten albums of that year. ) [1]

The collection opens with an epigram from Blake, reminding me that I need to read the Norton Blake my sister gifted me this past Christmas. Let's take a look at the text. [reading . . .] Okay. It's immediately clear that Hoks has a fantastic handle on the intricacies of rhythm. He establishes his register with beautifully contrasting sounds, in lines that blend man and nature. Here are examples from two poems in the opening section:

Finally you feel washed of your self,
Blown into several pieces of sky, transparent
But also a bloblike raindrop
["Flight to the Interior"]

Walk across the couch to the window
Where the raindrops have settled
Into a little pool on the sill. You are
Half of everything you see.
["Birth of the Interior"]

"Half." I am mindful that the book itself is divided into halves. I'm wondering what this halved self signifies. Let's try this for a theory: "The Interior" is the self-creating, self-focusing, self-destroying singularity of a spiraling and deep depression.

As I read through the first half of the book, I detect a pattern. Interactions with other people seems heightens the anxiety manifesting in the poems, a crescendo which in turn summons a depressive crash of that sort that anyone who suffers from depression can tell you becomes all-consuming. Self-absorption and questioning of self blots out all other emotion or thought, like a burning sun from which it is impossible to look away. [2]

Hoks makes this transition subtly and deftly, with interactions leading to anxiety, anxiety to doubt, and doubt to emotional shut-down. The opening poems describe man and nature-self and surroundings-as unified into a cogent whole.

Within this atmosphere of deepening anxiety, there is nonetheless a sharp division between what is outside and beyond control, and what is inside, within reach of control despite beginning to spiral into chaos. The psychology reminds me of Camus' The Plague.

This close, first-person report of the progression of associative symptoms, dispatched as it seems from the depths of depression, is essentially complete. But then there are the interruptions. These quickly grow legion and lend an absurdist bent to the poetry. (With the recent success of Diane Williams' wonderful Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty Hoks certainly finds himself in a receptive environment.) Which is not out of place; if we take rationalism as a neutral starting place, the inexorable descent into depression is the epitome absurd. However, the execution of these non sequitur movements is wanting.

In the least developed points of absurdity, we find ourselves adrift in meandering prose poetry. Intricate constructions of images, in delicate rhythmic superstructures, ordered by Hoks' keen eye for apt enjambment, are masterful but aimless. Self-indulgence becomes ponderous. I could not find self-knowledge, let alone curiosity, in "Chair of the Interior":

My hombre, mi amor, I can't remember life without you. Did I have one? One perhaps, under a brackish master, as to permeate the bread, even the bread subsumed by lifeless vapors.

Evocative, but what are we to take away from this? I was similarly impatient with the contrivance of "Charles Dickens of the Interior":

It was midnight when I heard the voice on the radio. Ice must have been turning into water on the roof for I could also hear a painful groaning coming from above.

I'm guessing these prosey portions, situated among more lyrical moments, are supposed to present us with a scenario that is posed just so, but I end up instead asking: "Is that so?" Every four to eight or so poems is an interlude of two pages on which are photographs titled with a line from one of the preceding poems. Each photo has something vaguely or directly related to the poem from which the title line was taken. This quickly becomes a tiresome gimmick, drained of surprise. After the first few instances, I merely skim the images that follow and move quickly on.

Do I think I detect a hint of Mallarmé in the prose imagery? Perhaps I want too much for that kind of background to be there.

Hoks eventually returns to his original tack with the arresting and most complete piece in the collection, "Spiral of the Interior," in which we witness emotions and bits of humanity, one by one, fall away:

. . . I feel I am holding a poker in my left hand and I must go from house to house to find a fire to tend to. I hate ringing the bells and I ring the bell.

"Infinite Interior" follows with a failed hope:

[...] And as you become
What you are waiting for
What you are waiting for
Becomes what you always were.

It's a chillingly spot-on description of the consuming terror of depression, from which there is no escape through personal transformation. The theme continues through the end of the first part with "Farewell Interior" and "Hôtel l'Intérieur," each an unexcited reflection upon the alien landscape the narrator finds himself within: 'I am so bored with feeling'. In less precise hands this might have seemed anti-climactic, but Hoks makes it the heart of the matter.

The Narrow Circle is a record whose first half has all the hits; the second part is filled with studio experiments and 'shoulda been B-sides'. The groan-inducing "Sandwich of the Interior" reads like someone trying their hand at this wacky absurdist thing for the first time. It tries too hard and goes not far enough. Which isn't to say it is barren; consider this fun exchange: "I asked him, 'Is this where the sandwiches are?' He looked at me and chewed."

"Family of the Exterior" is a subtler piece, a dream description, It follows closely and effectively the structures of dream, starting with jarring, rapidly shifting but oddly cogent images before settling on an ambiguous final scene involving wolves "so loud, so melodic, I called them my nightingales."

"The Architect and the Hat" is a brilliant absurdist creation. The autonomous hat, and the quest of an unnamed "architect" making constructions out of his world in order to find his lost hat, calls to mind Magritte as well as Ibsen's "The Master Builder." The poem is broken into more or less independent pieces as it follows its own obscurely situated narrative and pace. As much as any poem in the second half, it embodies the section's theme: that of working oneself slowly out of the suffocating blanket that is depression.

Reading on through the second half, I was pleased that Hoks had not directly referenced Kafka. Had the collection ended without any sign of that high priest of anxiety, the prominent omission might have caused me to reexamine some of the pieces I'd dismissed. Ah, but then I come to "Animal of the Exterior," a distillation of Kafka's "A Crossbreed [A Sport]" but bereft of that tale's willing whimsy.

In "Heart of the Exterior" Hoks begins cautiously: "I should mention that my heart is a vestibule and that I cannot keep it closed." As I read, I can't help asking the poem, "But should you?"

Satisfaction comes at the finish. The final poem, "Mind of the Exterior," is a brilliant capstone, a Socratic dialogue constructed like an intricate machine where the removal of any one aspect would bring the entire thing to an immediate halt. A lyrical ouroboros, it turns in on itself and reiterates and completes and doesn't absolutely end. This technique wasn't completely unexpected-I'd seen this puzzle-box form here and there earlier-but here at the end if it most full realized.

This book in two parts is half terrifying examination of the heart of depression, half nonsense. [3] In splitting his time between these modes, Hoks is illustrating how easy, perhaps even helpful, it can be to subsume the self in absurdism and associative nonsense as a reaction to finding oneself in the midst of crushing anxiety. Even so, I find myself wishing for a book exclusively of verse pieces, without the prose interludes, without the photographic tableaux. Hoks can write skillful prose poems with, but it was a missed opportunity to not reside entirely in the lyrical register. Here and there among the tactics his poems deploy to distract themselves from a disease are found a few beautiful meditations on the disease. Perhaps the blending of insight and irrelevancy, of hits and misses, is meant to be part of the argument the book is attempting to make. I'd say the argument would be stronger without that point.

Audio tracks that played during the reading of this book and writing of this review: Converge, "Downpour"; Japandroids, "Fire's Highway"; Jeff Buckley, "Eternal Life"; U2, "Is That All?"; Ice-T, "Escape from the Killing Fields"; Television, "Glory"; Baroness, "Couer"; The Beatles, "Piggies"; Mastodon, "Island"; Converge, "Tremor"; Bomba Estereo, "Bailar Conmigo"; Unpersons, "Dry Hand"; Rocket from the Crypt, "You Gotta Move"; JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound, "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart"; The Beatles, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"; Pearl Jam, "Who You Are"; Lamb of God, "Break You"; Mission of Burma, "Nancy Reagan's Head"; Real Estate, "Three Blocks; Echo and the Bunnymen, "My Kingdom" (live); Ben Folds Five, "Song for the Dumped"; Anhedonist, "Saturnine"; The Beatles, "Money (That's What I Want)"; The Beatles, "Roll Over Beethoven"; Nirvana, "Polly"; U2, "Pride (in the Name of Love)" (live); Liars, "Nothing Is Ever Lost Or Can Be Lost My Science Friend"; Julia Holter, "This Is Ekstasis"; PJ Harvey, "The Colour of the Earth"; Tom Waits, "Downtown Train"; Massive Attack, "Five Man Army"; INXS, "Devil Inside"; and The Rolling Stones, Moon Is Up".

NOTES

Editor Zachary Bos comments: "Rob, the associations you bring up here put me in mind of how there are two characters at minimum in any poem: the poet, outside the text; and the persona, within it. You can extrapolate this to any act of artistic expression." //back
ZWB: "Though it is not nearly so difficult to look away from depictions of depression, since as is a subject depression often inspires self-indulgent, unmoving, and inert descriptions. I am reminded of John Gibson Lockhart's words when he reviewed John Keats' Endymion in 1818: ‘To witness the disease of any human understanding, however feeble, is distressing.’ This principle we can agree with, though to be clear we deem Lockhart's attack on Keats to be unkind, unwarranted, and prejudiced by snobbery and self-satisfaction." //back
ZWB: "Louise Glück, in her introduction to The Cuckoo by Peter Streckfus, makes a relevant observation: ‘The case for nonsense is not the same as the case against meaning.’" //back

Banner graphic source: The Golden Age by Joachim Wtewael. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1993.333). In the public domain.