Bob Hicok

Poets & Writers has an interesting profile of poet Bob Hicok. Hicok is a self-taught poet, without an MFA or even a bachelor's degree, who was an automotive diemaker before getting into writing. He didn't even grow up in a literary household--his father was also a diemaker, and "there weren't even many books around the house. I've come to believe the desire is biological, that there is no other reason than this is what I was going to do." Hicok's lack of pretension is quite refreshing: even after having one of his books be named as a Booklist Notable Book of the Year, he contacted a fellow writer and "asked, basically, if I should be excited about this. He said yes, so I was."

(Huzzahs to Virginia Tech for hiring him to teach in their creative writing program, recognizing quality of work over years of formal education accrued.)

Hicok had some interesting thoughts on the creative process:

"Once the poem hits some sort of critical mass, what I intended to write no longer matters...It's almost like a collaboration between my past--all those things I thought the poem was going to be--and the future--all the things it might become. If I get too wrapped up in what I thought the poem should have been, it will never reach one of those possible futures."

"If you sit down to write only fifty times in a year, versus someone who has pretty much gone at it every day, their one year would be seven years for you. A work ethic is incredibly important to people in the arts, and yet we tend not to think of that way. Particularly poets. We are so much taken with this idea of inspiration. Many of us don't get used to the idea that we have to make these things happen, that they are acts of will."