This week’s podcast episode featured poet and Virginia Tech professor Bob Hicok. We touched on his latest collection, BREATHE.

I wanted to talk to Bob because I ran into his poem “Minimum Wage.” It’s a straight forward poem about how minimum wage does very little for those making it. Above all, it doesn’t create a stable life — it offers little hope in the quest of social mobility.

“Try buying you way out / of poverty,” Bob writes, “lifting yourself up / by your bootstraps. I mean, / have you looked at how much boots cost / these days”.

Not being able to afford anything resonated with me, and I feel, may resonate with many readers these days. Bob was nice enough to read this poem on the podcast. Play the player above or see the current website; find whereever you pack your podcasts.

Bob is extraordinary poet. “Minimum Wage” was mild compared to some of the poems such as “An overdressed yes” or “Baby adult steps.” He can take readers down a tunneled water slide full of twists, turns, and spit you out to a wildly different location compared to the dry platform you started on. “while eating the Oreos and Tostitos and any old frozen pizza / I find dead on the road” is one example. Or say a person standing on a cliff holding a “live wolverine” in one hand and a “burning generator in the other.”

His images and sentences will challenge your logic, but crack open the roof of your imagination and tenderly deal with some of the biggest themes of hope, climate, love, loss, and money.

I loved this talk. Check it out.

Other stuff to check out of Bob’s: See his other books here. Beside BREATHE, I highly recommend the book that put him on the poetry map with ANIMAL SOUL. Also see this Substack dedicated to Bob’s poetry (not created or maintained by him).

Fun fact: Bob was born in Michigan and used run an auto dye design company. He also once quit a factory job after a few hours because of the soul-crushing requirements of needing to do the same thing over and over again. Like many writers, Bob got into poetry business because of a broken heart.

Tiny Craft Lesson: Notecard lay out

This idea is inspired by something Bob said on the podcast.

As he is composing a new collection of poetry, he likes to think about the narrative feeling of a book. Especially when it comes to the location of hope in a book. So he writes the titles of the poems on notecards, lays them out on the floor to map out the journey of a poem. You can’t have too many of the same type of poems in a book, or too many similar poems in a row.

As Bob told me on the podcast, to have a book of just hopeful poems would be like eating cheese burgers again and again if we went to lunch everyday. You need to mix things up for the reader, even if that means throwing in a wad of dread.

It’s also very hard to hold every bit of the book in your head.

Do this:

• If you’re working on a book-length type of work, write out each item, chapter, poem, or section on notecards.

• Lay them out on the floor, spin some tunes, and figure out what kind of journey you want to take the reader on from beginning to end.

• Take a lesson from Bob: insert some dread, and hurt in between the moments of hope. Try to make sections different. Variety gives life the spice.

• Go one step further and get-crime-investigation serious and put the notecards on a corkboard on a dedicated wall. This is especially helpful if you’re writing a novel or a thesis.

Bookshelf Photo

Bob told me he grew up seeing the commercial for these robots and he always wanted them. He never got them as a kid. So, having them now on his bookshelf brings him joy, he told me. Making up for lost time. Perhaps, a lesson on getting the things we want.