Cassandra Voices

Tag: Haley Hodges poetry

  • A Tender, Provocative Interweaving of Earthly and Divine

    Review: Eros Rex, poems by Haley Hodges, Orison Books.

    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.

  • JACK GILBERT WAS TOO HORNY TO BE A METAPHYSICAL POET

    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.

  • Poem: Teacher

    TEACHER

    I know I’ve made a christ of you
    the way I gather up the crumbs
    beneath your table, the way I bathe
    your feet with my hair.

    But this blind worship
    won’t do, and I must take and eat
    new prayer. Teacher! It was not given me
    to sit at your right hand or your left.

    Thought you saw me under the fig tree,
    but it was just a trick of the light
    cleft between branches.

    Feature Image: Pasquale de’ Rossi:School Teaching, a Teacher with Four Pupils c. 1700.

  • Poem: ‘Calling All Angels’

    Calling All Angels

    Leaves fall like secret prayers—
    calling all angels

    September’s having her best
    orgasm in a century. Everything lingers
    in climax, the character of the light, earthy
    fragrances, a whole heaving calendar week
    with an arched spine.

    Here’s how I know the world
    is ill and absurd: a dead fawn stares up
    from the roadside, spots unsullied, perfect
    and gone. Most days I choose to forget, but

    entire families explode in Palestine. Cascades
    of leaves now. Calling all angels yes god yes

     

    Image: Vico Rock, Dalkey, County Dublin, Ireland.

  • Poem: ‘They Have Gained An Audience’

    THEY HAVE GAINED AN AUDIENCE

    with the divine. The plumbline is vertical
    as the resulting verse, so that neither agony
    nor ecstasy travel horizontally but curl and rise,
    sweet smoke from the swung thurible. Perhaps

    these are the only prophets left to us, still able
    to loop the loose thread of heaven through earth’s
    needle-eye, a tremendous feat because her heavy lid
    cannot stay open, closes now even on a clear day.

    I imagine a bird and the bird is language, the bird
    encircles the head of the most high and does not
    flinch or burn, does not hide itself in a cleft of rock
    that the holy might pass by. It cannot land. The point
    is that the bird approaches—the point is flight. We need

    only send our winged words through the needle’s eye,
    the poets tell me, as though it’s easy, as though handfuls
    of heaven are there for anyone to pattern, Dante or
    the old woman at the end of the street who drives out
    alone to check her spring calves. And yet to see her
    returning at dusk, you’d swear she has covenantal
    rainbows on her face, in her white hair.

    Image: Daniele Idini

  • Poem: ‘Year of The’ by Haley Hodges

    Year of The

    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


    Feature Image: Vlada Karipovich

  • Poetry: Haley Hodges

    Belshazzar

    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?

    Feature Image: Rembrandt‘s depiction of the biblical account of Belshazzar seeing “the writing on the wall“

  • Advent Poem by Haley Hodges

    Advent

    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.

  • Poetry: Haley Hodges

    Faking It

    When Cleopatra rolled
    Out of the rug, she thought:

    Don’t worry! Even if
    I do not enjoy your performance,
    You will enjoy mine—a lot.

    I’d like to credit myself
    As an actress, but the truth
    About men is: I’ve yet
    To meet one unwilling
    To believe he is a singularly
    Exceptional lover—yeah, baby.

    I am your captain aboard the Beguile,
    Cruising down that long denial
    With no wish to make things
    Worse by undeceiving
    You—mm, hail Caesar—
    I offer half-lidded eyes and
    All the right sounds at all
    The right times and rely
    On the fact that truly
    What you pay close attention to
    (Unduly) is yourself. You’re watching
    Me, but it’s astounding—genuinely—
    What you won’t see, though you should—
    There, right there, that’s good.

    Charming, cunning queen, lay the tracks,
    Set the stage and land the scene. He’ll believe
    Because he wants to—oh, I want you—
    And yet you’ll wish that you’d stayed home—
    It wasn’t worth the trip to Rome.

  • Poetry: Haley Hodges

    Kyrie 

    Rotten fruit, rotten root. Hands up
    Don’t shoot. Kyrie eleison.
    By the waters of Columbine, of
    Blacksburg, of Newtown, by the
    Waters of Parkland and Uvalde,
    There I sat down beneath my desk
    (Don’t shoot) to weep.
    Christe eleison. My soul to take.
    Kyrie eleison. My soul to keep.

    Gloria 

    There is no
    No utterable Gloria
    In excelsis Deo—there is
    Only the unutterable.
    There is He, qui tollis
    Peccata mundi, but also
    He that brings them, and
    Brings them so
    Unutterably.

    Credo  

    “Of all things visible and invisible
    The rifle is king. I believe
    In one gun, in One Gun Almighty.
    How fast can you run?” Thus
    Spake Death, and these, even
    These are the conditions in which
    Expecto resurrectionem mortuorum.

    Sanctus 

    Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus
    Dominus Deus Sabaoth!
    And precious in His sight the
    Little children He bid come.
    Stop of the mouths of your
    War machines this hour—
    Strike them dumb. Let
    Heaven and earth be full
    Of their silence, lest every
    Hosanna perish in violence.

    Agnus Dei

    Agnus Dei, who takes away
    The sin of the world, what
    Can it profit the Most High
    If you take our sin but leave us
    To die? Miserere nobis. Lord
    Of the cellar, (hide!) Lord
    Of the attic, let it be mercy
    Falling semi-automatic.

    Dona

    Dona nobis pacem.
    Lead us beside quiet
    Waters, no more to bury
    Our sons and our daughters.
    Peace. Grant us ceasefire.
    Grant us peace.

    Feature Image: A memorial set up outside Robb Elementary school for the victims of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, US.