Vox Populi
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Barbara Hamby: The Word
In the beginning was the word, fanning out into syllables
like a deck of cards on a table in Vegas,
litigious leafy parts fluttering into atoms and cells,
genus and phylum, nouns, verbs,
elephants, orangutans, O Noah, you and your philological
filing and filling of arks, gullets, daughters.
In the beginning was the word and it was as big
as Aretha Franklin after “Chain of Fools,”
long as your mother’s memory of all your misdeeds,
wide as Jerusalem, a fat-lady-in-the-circus word,
a Siberia, a steppe, a savanna, a stretch, a Saturnalia,
the party at the end of the world.
In the beginning was the word and we knew which way it went:
left to right in English, right to left
in Hebrew, an orientation so profound that sexual climax
is coming in all right-moving languages
going in those advancing left, though in the moment
we rarely know whether we’re coming or going.
In the beginning was the word, small and perfect,
a Hans Holbein miniature, a dormouse,
a gnat, a bee, a blink, a breath in the lungs
of Jehovah, Brahman, the Buddha, Ra,
because all the big kahunas of the universe surfed
in on the crest of that first wave,
and Thomas Edison said let there be light
and the dinosaurs groaned in their graves,
and there was Albuquerque, late-night roadhouses,
blues, cigarettes, fish-net stockings,
high-density sodium street lights that blot out the stars,
cars, diners, the neon urban carnival before Lent,
and Marie Curie said let there be more light,
and there was radium, radiant thermonuclear
incandescent explosions, Herr Einstein’s dream,
Herr Oppenheimer’s furnace,
London burning with Hitler’s fire, Dresden cremated
in the answering flame, Hiroshima mon amour.
I ask you, what is this world with its polyglot delirium,
its plain-spoken, tight-assed, stumble-bum euphoria?
Explain time, for I am fretting on the outskirts of Odessa,
with Chekhov, with Eisenstein, with ten thousand
martyrs of unremembered causes, and we are cold, hungry,
tired of playing Hearts.
Where are you, my minister of informazione, Comrade Surgeon,
Mister Wizard, Gino Romantico?
Can you in your lingo ferret out the first word? Inspect
your dialect for clues, my Marlowe, my Holmes,
your patois for signs, your pagan vernacular, your scatological
cant, your murmuring river of carnal honey,
for in the beginning there was darkness until you came,
my pluperfect anagram of erotic delight,
my wild-haired professor of vinissimo and mayhem,
emperor of Urbino, incubator of rhythm, bright-eyed Apollo
of the late-night bacchanalia, and there was music,
that heady martini of mathematics and beauty.
For I am empty, I am full, I am certain, I am not,
for in the beginning there was nothing
and it was blank and indescribable,
a wave breaking on the north shore of the soul,
but as every canyon aches for its sky, I burned for you
with a fever, with a frenzy,
I was a woman craving a blaze, a flame,
a five-alarm fire in my heart, in my bones,
my hair red as a hibiscus, like a burning bush,
I was Moses screaming at God,
filaments of flame eating my eyes,
my sex, the hard sweet apple of my mouth.
From On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (Pitt, 2014). Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author and the University of Pittsburgh Press
Barbara Hamby is the author of many collections of poetry. She and her husband David Kirby edited the poetry anthology Seriously Funny. She teaches at Florida State University where she is distinguished university scholar.
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What everyone else has said! My nomination for VP poem of the year (not that we get to make nominations!). A glorious riot of a poem!
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Holy moly! What a poem! Another one knocked out of the park (and it knocked my socks off too)
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Yep, that’s our Hamby.
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A whole universe, the whole motion and ocean go into the hopper of a Hamby poem, from Edward Hopper to a hopeful version of the Dickinson “no-hoper,” plus Aesop’s ant v. grasshopper. Cornucopia, plethora, as the most natural thing in the world. Like Mae West, she’s been things and seen places.
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Ah, Barbara. So much to love here, all these comings and glowings.
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There’s an unending list of lines one wants to savor and quote here–just WOW. I, like the rest of the readers, am in utter awe of this poem.
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Hamby is the best!
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It was crazy fun to write. Finally, I could use my time in my parent’s religious gulag for my own devices.
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OMG!! What a poem. ❤️❤️❤️
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The JOY & AWE I feel when reading Barbara’s poems! How I love the noise they make, the images they bless us with, those tumbling, wild, absolutely original and right lists of images and things the poems come up with! The blessed breathlessness of her lines! How they travel, move, taking us along , and never losing us! I had read this poem in On the Street of Divine Love, but heard it again for the very first time this morning. Joy, I said, joy in reading those poems of hers!Thank you, Michael, thank you Barbara!
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Barbara’s poems are divine forces of nature, aren’t they?
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Laure-Anne, you are the best poetry friend. I love your quiet strength on the page. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve had too much loud-mouth soup. I’m blaming it on the King James Bible and Walt Whitman. Why did it take me so long to fall in love with Emily Dickinson?
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oh. em. gee. RARELY am I speechless, but when I read a poem that truly says it all … I come close. Thank you, Barbara Hamby (and Vox Populi) for this monumental feast of a piece. For me to single out a favorite phrase would do an injustice to the poem as a whole, which left me breathless.
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Yes, Barbara truly is great.
M
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It was so much fun to write. I just followed the music.
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What a feast of a poem!
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From the first grunt, to the auroch chalked up on the wall, to Barbara Hamby’s Taste-tested Gourmet Cookbook of Vocabulary (with its luscious array of succulent dishes), we create our own word-souffle, then hope it doesn’t fall. But if it does, we’ll never say.
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This poem leaves me fully satisfied and speechless. Now I am going to read it again. And again. And fill myself some more with the most amazing thoughts and images. And I remember one of our top physicists (I am old, I forgot his name) who said, scratching his head (this part if poetic license): Perhaps, at the beginning, there was just an idea.
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A breath that became an idea that became a word.
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In her poems, Barbara Hamby always achieves the right balance between wackiness and profundity, a cross between Lucille Ball and Wittgenstein. Her poems are a national treasure.
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” a cross between Lucille Ball and Wittgenstein” Yes!
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hahahahah!! Perfect!!!
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I think I once said I wanted to write an opera with music by Donizetti and lyrics by Groucho Marx. I like this better, because Lucy is a woman and I’ve been delving into Wittgenstein’s ideas on language. Though he didn’t start out that way, he ended up thinking of language as play, which is right up my alley.
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My hair red as a hibiscus! It takes an entire Universe to contain a Barbara Hamby poem! You better plan ahead if you intend to ride that verse where its going, make reservations, pack a lunch, leave a forwarding address and set your navigator (if you can), you’re fixing to wind up somewhere you’ve never been.
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Coming from a redhead, this is a rich compliment. Doesn’t everyone want red hair?
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More likely those who don’t have it. It consigns a child to the same status as Kosinski’s “Painted Bird.” It wasn’t nearly as fun as you might imagine, and I was dreadfully shy and farm-raised to begin with.
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And your light shines through the wounds, Sean.
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