Brimming over with desire, Haley Hodges’ collection Eros Rex reverberates ‘like the plucked string of a lute’ (‘Innocence’) with stark, sensuous questions about Christliness and control.
Hodges’ poems insist upon the reader’s attention in much the same way as the poetic voice demands attention from those who spark her desire, insisting upon an external authority to which power can be ceded. The headiness of many of Hodges’ poems stems from her depiction of the power within the giving up of power; the paradox of maintaining control by choosing to yield control. Again and again, the poetic voice issues commands – to religious authorities (‘Come climax / Christ, come Eros Rex’ in ‘Eros Rex’), to figures of amorous interplay (‘Make me your illumined cave / of wonders. Make me your clever girl’ in ‘Sapiosexual’) and perhaps to the reader, to the self, or both at once (‘Just try’ in ‘Maybe welcome it’). ‘Give me / the collar. Give me the crown,’ the voice commands in ‘Two Takes’, one of many images in which the wielding of control through the issuing of instructions is couched behind a veneer of subservience. And among the many imperative commands given to others, there are just as many expressions of internal desire, from the physical to the metaphysical. Perhaps the most evocative of these is found amidst the snow-covered world depicted in ‘Blizzard’, in which the poetic voice wishes for ‘snow Jesus / not acid Jesus’. As with many of Hodges’ most arresting phrases, the complexity of meaning brought forth despite the simplicity of the immediate image hits the reader as sharply as ‘Corrosive Christ’ (‘Blizzard’) eating away sin.
There is an enjoyable purposefulness to the rather jarring juxtaposition of earthly and divine woven throughout the collection. The reader is immediately made aware that we will be oscillating between the grand and the everyday, the lofty and the mundane, through the contrast between the first and seconds poems. After the titular poem’s delicious portrayal of all-encompassing desire, extending beyond the mental and the physical to the realm of the spiritual (‘spasm / of the panting soul’), over the page we find ourselves among ‘plastic mustard packets’ and ‘five-/dollar duo deals’ – we have transitioned from the realm of Eros Rex to that of a different monarch, found much closer to home (‘Burger King’). This is one example of many in which Hodges seizes the control her poetic voice so clearly enjoys offering to others through her ability to keep her reader guessing, wielding her wit and unreserved boldness to great effect.
Eros Rex oscillates between self-assured yielding in the name of pleasure and vulnerable exposure of the uncertainties of a soul adrift in a dark, unrecognisable ocean. While the likes of ‘Sapiosexual, ‘Master, Master’, ‘What was the best you ever had?’ and ‘Between the jaws’ confidently offer up a knowing eroticism with a certain glint in the eye, these are counter-balanced by the quiet stillness of ‘Heart Talks’, ‘Drifting’, and ‘What is memory, if not testament?’, each of which delivers its own sucker-punch ending. Of course, the sensual and the poignant are not divorced from one other – even amidst the eroticised religious imagery of ‘Master, Master’, there is a sudden heartfelt sincerity as the voice proclaims, ‘my love of you has been / the death of artifice’. Nevertheless, it is when the voice is not engaging in erotically charged power plays, but instead turns its focus inwards, that the single-minded confidence, unapologetic demands, and fiery sharpness of the more carnal poems are eroded like sea-glass. What remains is fragile, tender, and achingly poignant. When the satisfying and pleasurable sense of self-certainty is stripped away, we are left looking inwards with a quiet contemplation of isolation, purpose, and need.
Many questions are put forward over the course of the collection, some more explicitly than others.
Implicitly, the collection asks: Who are we when we are left alone?
And explicitly: What is memory if not testament?
Whether any reader believes that the answers can be found within these pages or not, we will surely find ourselves with much to contemplate in seeking them, buoyed by the ample richness of imagery and sound that makes up Eros Rex.
It’s very possible that Renee Nicole Good reasoned, as I would’ve, that her whiteness would protect her when she put her Honda Pilot, dog in tow, in the path of ICE vehicles on a Minneapolis street less than a mile from where George Floyd’s last words were, just six years before, “I can’t breathe.” Unfortunately for Renee—a poet, wife, and mother of three—neither the historically privileged color of her skin nor her citizenship were sufficient to shield her from three shots fired at point blank range by an ICE officer after a brief and startling confrontation. The officer was briefly hospitalized and released the same day.
Ordinary Americans can add this outrageous bloodshed to a growing list of Orwellian events prompted by the Trump administration, which includes both the killing itself and subsequent state-propagated lies seeking to style Good as a ‘domestic terrorist’ and ‘professional agitator.’ Today, I woke to news of a flurry of resignations from top prosecutors: four senior leaders in the division that investigates police killings have resigned in protest, and six federal prosecutors in Minnesota have jumped ship, not to mention the FBI denying local MN authorities any access to their investigation.
David Langwallner’s recalls encountering judgments of monumental absurdity, involving ill-informed credibility assessments in the Irish refugee tribunal system.https://t.co/ISmEN7H5xe
Our times (and our enforcement officers) are trigger-happy, and the socio-political hot buttons have long since boiled over. There is palpable temptation—on all sides of the American partisan spectrum—to give into violence, or despair, or both. Reaching into an exhausted rattle-bag of the faith in which I was raised, “love thy neighbor as thyself” – a Levitical commandment echoed by Jesus of Nazareth—sits like a cold stone in my palm.
Christ was an effective radical because he knew when to flip a table and when to restore a sword-shorn ear lopped off in protest of his own arrest. Angry Americans flip tables with zeal. It’s the cathartic part, the part that soothes our sense of wounded moral dignity and our desire to see immediate justice. But I fear that until we understand the counterintuitive nature of this rattle-bag text – counterintuitive because we do not get to pick and choose the identities of our neighbors, and because we are completely entrenched as a society in ‘othering’ those outside our given and (especially) our chosen ‘tribes’ – we will continue to see blood in the streets and lies on the screen.
POTUS is set on besmirching the name and legacy of Renee Nicole Good—who died standing up for her neighbors. I’m certain we will not see these calumnies retracted any time soon. A closeted melancholiac, I’m left mourning Renee, a fellow artist, and imagining what it means to bring up my young son in such turbulent, hate-stricken times. I know I’m not the only one.
We might finally start living when we learn to kill each other with kindness. Until then, we seem doomed to proceed without the last two words and suffer the consequences.
SOMETHING GOOD by Haley Hodges
Sky, road, rain, one great
grey. Into this toothless homogeny
come fanged questions—
must we raise our children
in a police state? Was the grey,
say, two generations back
(grand grey to this grey)
softer, somehow? Fault fate
if you must. How to return
to iridescence—to joy—
despite this—despite all—
before we return to dust:
that’s our operation, our
immutable mandate. Let
slates be wiped and crammed
with this endeavor. Light,
it’s time. Come like cream
to the top. Crown each
seeking life, lives going
to the lengths men with guns
and covered faces go—
but oh, finally gently. And
for something good.
Feature Image: Uniformed HSI SRT agents in Los Angeles
JACK GILBERT WAS TOO HORNY TO BE A METAPHYSICAL POET
not that sex and metaphysics cancel each other out—
his was good news for Linda Gregg, until it wasn’t.
Interviewer: Did you and Linda ever collaborate?
JG: We were intertwined. We read each other’s poetry,
appreciated each other’s poetry,
discarded each other’s poetry.
(Quick shout-out to the procreative urge.
Are you gonna tell me the world doesn’t hinge
and turn on it? I don’t think you are.)
That desire is ungovernable produces—
or should I say begets—fear. Also verse; some good,
some not. Either way, learn to love that twinge
in your loins. I don’t mean make it lord, I just mean
bless it. Whatever else may be true,
it has plans to prosper you, wants
fruitfulness, wants multiplicity
at least as much as God does,
maybe more.
I’ve inherited Jack and Linda’s lettered
children. If you’re reading this,
you have too.
Naked for you, beneath
some moon somewhere, which sounds
like an ending, unless you begin
with it. White as a page, as a unicorn’s
horn, some skin—all of mine. So stare
down—star-down is how I want to lay
with you. Come further up. Go
further in. Night is falling with us.
Night, the witch’s sweet-tooth craving—
she can’t stop biting it, can’t stop licking
out the hours. Don’t think about that
just now. Don’t watch her. Watch me.
Feature Image: Two Nudes in a Forest, Frida Kahlo 1939
Confessional poetry has had a haunted reputation from its post-war onset. The literary legacies of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and W. D. Snodgrass—widely considered ground zero for the entire confessional school—are crucified at least as frequently as they’re praised, and a healthy allergy to what contemporary teachers of writing pertly refer to as ‘trauma porn’ has seeded in the DNA of most graduate-level writing programs.
When in 1959 Robert Lowell published Life Studies (the book of Genesis as far as confessional poetry is concerned) the idea of a poem’s author unambiguously self-identifying as the first-person ‘speaker’ was unthinkable. In intentionally shattering—and the method of shattering was simply ignoring—the public/private barrier, Lowell had done something truly new, setting off an irreversible trend in American poetry. If one wrote, before this, from autobiographical experience, it was duly air-brushed and sanitized for public consumption. Taboo subjects like mental illness and sexuality were no-fly zones. One did not say, for example,
I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat. . . . I myself am hell
Robert Lowell by Elsa Dorfman.
The dominant and ongoing beef with confessional poetry is not entirely unreasonable. At its worst, (or I should say, perhaps, when it fails) readers are startled and not led into a world they didn’t ever wish to explore, trapped in the speaker’s garishly personal agonies and ecstasies with no window looking out, and no resonant ‘me too’ chime.
When confessional poetry germinates exclusively at the level of the individual—meaning there is no bridge, on-ramp or springboard to universal human experience, some place of wider echoing beyond the speaker and confines of the poem—it devolves into drudgery, if dull, and trauma porn, if shocking. In this sense, confessional poetry is always a tightrope walk, a precarious style with precarious risks. But I digress.
Fast forward to the twenty-first century. Confessional verse needed a new hero, a lone voice powerful enough to lift it from the ashes of ceaseless academic squabbling and into the hearts and ears of eager culture-consumers. When Taylor Swift released her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, in April of 2024—she confirmed (with a moody noir photoshoot and a perfect cat-eye) what I’d long suspected, namely that she’s the all-American GOAT of contemporary confessional writing. Taylor’s entire deck of cards is comprised of aces. She mines herself and her experiences, writing from her own lifeblood in a way that *never* fails to merge with the shared experiences of women—indeed, of people—everywhere, and her level of celebrity has successfully inoculated her against the most common affliction ailing the Confessionals: the event of people really not wanting to know.
Now, I personally contend that with a sufficient level of ingenuity and craft people will stomach just about anything, whether they should have to is another question entirely. Sexton in particular is often out-and-out lurid, but her syntax is so surprising, so fresh and deftly handled, that her brilliance is rarely the disputed thing. The disputed thing is that whatever Sexton’s level of creative prowess, readers don’t necessarily resign themselves to (let alone rush to devour) accounts of dysfunctional sexcapades or manic episodes, preferring on the whole to be spared. She never overcame, in life or death, the miasma of ‘ick’ generated by gutter content, specifically, however immaculate the form. Of course, defiant exposure of the quote unquote gutter may well have been the point, and every exhibitionist needs more than a little pluck, but you see the problem.
If only there was someone so fascinating, so simultaneously winsome and relatable and fun and clever and coy that society’s desire to really know absolutely everything was utterly frenzied. This is precisely the empire TS half-inherited (by being a young and beautiful woman reared in the public eye) and half-created (by being a confessional song-writer so savvy it amounts to legitimate genius)
Swift on the Speak Now World Tour in 2011.
It must be said that Taylor has not historically descended to the Sextonian depths of genitals, slime and latrines (see “Angels of the Love Affair”) as such. Or if she DOES go there she makes it, well, hot (see in the middle of the night//in my dreams//you should see the things we do) Even her punchiest lines, say “fuck me up, Florida” are always a little sugared by a sprawling pop foundation. I do firmly believe that even if she did descend to darker depths, everyone would want to come along for the ride. Taylor’s gargantuan appeal means, literally, that everyone WANTS to know, all the time. Fan appetite is insatiable. And TS knows how badly we want to know, which brings me to her other confessional stroke of genius—
Taylor deliberately toys with us. Despite the morally dubious efforts of the tabloids, we plebeians have no real access to T’s lived life, let alone her inner life. She offers us the private portraiture we long for on her own terms. A long-confirmed tradition of writing songs about herself, her thoughts and relationships notwithstanding, we are frequently given over entirely to speculation regarding which songs are indeed autobiographical and how precisely autobiographical they are. In this regard, Taylor is wonderfully ballsy, unafraid to have an unambiguous go at men who did her dirty— (see “Dear John”) many Swifties make riddling out her more nebulous lyrics and mapping them onto her actual history a full time job.
Taylor always leaves sufficient room for us to step into her music, inhabiting our own adjacent experiences more deeply for knowing—dare I say vibing—with hers: this is her triumph, and also the confessional jackpot. She manages to showcase every emotion unapologetically—heartache, bitterness, yearning, envy, the lot. She can be minxy (handsome, you’re a mansion with a view//do the girls back home touch you like I do?) She can be nostalgic (I knew you//leaving like a father//running like water) She can be melodramatic and vengeful, (You caged me and then you called me crazy//I am what I am cause you trained me) and she is rarely—however widely lauded she is—given enough credit for being a military-grade confessional tactician. Taylor’s extended metaphors are breezy, memorable, and open to myriad interpretations. Let’s take a look at the recent smash hit “Down Bad,” a single representative example. In it, Swift is (nominally, and never to the point that it actually gets too weird) a humanoid cast off the mothership by her lover. At the song’s climax, she croons:
I loved your hostile takeovers Encounters closer and closer All your indecent exposures How dare you say that it’s –
Four lines of dazzling ingenuity. “I loved your hostile takeovers” – you once took powerful initiative with me/this relationship. “Encounters closer and closer” – things got intimate and vulnerable. “All your indecent exposures” – I personally understand this line ‘thanks for the sexts,’ but of course I don’t know. “How dare you say that it’s—” and the song’s speaker (Is it Taylor!?!? Did someone leave THE QUEEN HERSELF down bad?!?!) cannot bring herself to say the word ‘over.’ We have four lines of a single extended confessional metaphor explode in a Molotov cocktail of relatability and alien-core cheek. Been there? I’ve been there. Almost everyone has been there, and that’s why the song soared immediately to the top of the charts and was ensconced there for weeks.
Let’s recap. When Confessional Poetry emerged in the 1950s, its most zealous defenders insisted it would humanize us to each other, offering tender glimpses at tender subjects in a way that engendered compassion and deeper understanding. I believe good confessional poetry does this, even if the truth it tells is wildly dark. If we cannot call her a poet in the strictly traditional sense, no one in a hundred years has harnessed the staying power of confessional writing like Taylor Swift, and no one possesses her unique, precise vaccination against the disease of over-sharing. Aspiring confessional writers would do well to take a page (or many pages) from the Swift Gospel, unifying introspection with an outward gaze generous enough to the human condition to compel readers in, make one’s own head an inviting (or interesting or evocative or profound) place to visit. I began with Confessional Poetry’s founding father Robert Lowell, and it seems fitting to close with him, too:
Sometimes nothing is so solid to me as writing—I suppose that’s what vocation means—at times a torment, a bad conscience, but all in all, purpose and direction, so I’m thankful, and call it good.
Restless at the kitchen table, year of our Lord
twenty twenty-four, year my words marched
backward into my mouth and forward only
when forgotten, year of the idiotic Stanley tumbler,
year of the subtle but far reaching machinations of
neo-Marxism depending on who you ask, year of
our lady of fuck around and find out, year of pundits,
year of Doja Cat, year of royal family tabloid drama, year of
literal and figurative warfare, bloodlust year, year of desire
year of frustrated desire, year of gradually excruciating
guided identification of desires, year of my father
unable to discuss that which is not the village
council, year of the child, the laughing year of the wailing
child, the domestic year, the exotic year, the year
of everything turning to poetry, the year of poetry
turning to nothing, the year of your turning to
everything, the year of totality, the lost and found
year, the year of the late bloom of the heart’s silent
madness, year of attending to various screens, year
of continual scrolling, the unchurched year, the year
of tallying ecclesial Latin absorbed by the body, the
pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua year, the irreverent
year, the year of tabula rasa and later perceptions
of time, the year of the timely year, the seasonal
year, the calendar year, the yearly restlessness
at the kitchen table year of annual infinity
the year of the erotic diminuendo, the yearless
pleasured year of self, the wanton year, the may be
out after hours year, the year of slow staircase
ascents, the year of our Lord not yet come
again, the year lavished on a boy, the year wasted
on a man, the unmanned barely manageable
one-woman year of kitchen table restlessness,
the year of being trapped in a word document
the year of being trapped in a word
Love does keep a record of some things—
your solitary walks in Coln Saint Aldwyn’s,
a precise curl of Virginia Creeper tendrils,
vermillion in autumn, the way you carefully
smelled horses’ necks beneath the mane back home,
velveteen crushes of cornhusks lashed to lampposts
Love notes you’ve yet to find a Petoskey stone,
have not managed to secure passage
in a hot air balloon at dawn. Love traces
those scars left by its own sweeping hand, marks
your fevered night-sky relish, your strange enfolding
of language in language and the red-winged blackbirds
enfolding themselves in blue-green marsh
Love keeps a record of you singing to yourself,
tallies your tears. Love folded a page corner
the day your shoulders sank like the horizon,
from a grey-salt schooner, love knows how
you should be touched.
No seeker of wrongs will read
love’s record, nor ask for it
let love’s book be freely shown
I never knew myself to have a Persian beard, now,
This is odd, this will need some explanation
So too the crown and concubines and all these
Half-drunk vessels from the house of God
Isn’t it 2023 or 2022—was I not, just now,
Pulling up in a Subaru or whatever it is I
Get myself around in? In fact I’m quite certain
My father was born in 1959 and hardly Nebuchadnezzar,
Though it is his second term as village president
(He ran unopposed this time) for the Most High God
Set him over it. TEKEL
Says the writing on the wall of my lordly mind, haunting,
TEKEL—you have been weighed in the balance
And found wanting
God I am always wanting
Wanting wanting wanting I am
Always wanting in or out of the balance,
And there is no wisdom in these Chaldeans
I have summoned to advise me, these useless
Fuckwitted Chaldeans with parlor tricks who break
My words with sticks and hurt me thus. How many more,
(I wonder!!) how many more misdeeds before my kingdom
Is divided, and given to the Medes?
We have endured long in the dark.
It is a burden (A magic? A madness?) particular
To us. Long endurance of darkness is not light,
But speaks of a belief that light’s radiance
Merits enduring long in the dim we know—
In the dusk we are.
The world is a bone
Full of Christ-marrow; its sun a merely
Mortal star, spending itself to lighten
What it can, just as the Godman upon
Entering our long dark did, except
In his mortality—no mereness.
He will put flesh again on this
Old bone, the world, his own
Milk-fed flesh in the great
Stable dark, a holy darkness:
All the void
Is not.
This is, and has been,
And shall be.
What Mary treasured up
In her heart was Death
Leaving the carcass of the world
At his arrival. She treasured up
The world alive, all alive
With a brightness
That turns the noble sun
To pitch.
Feature Image Advent and Triumph of Christ by Hans Memling, 1480.
