Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "In Michael Robins’s Class Minus One" is a haunting elegy that transforms grief into a conversation between the living and the inanimate. It grapples with the absence of a student—one who is conspicuously missing—through a surreal dialogue with the Chicago River, which has taken him. By anthropomorphizing the river, Hicok allows it to become both the agent of loss and the vessel for remembrance. The poem explores themes of mourning, memory, and the persistence of presence even after death, using fluid, circular imagery that mirrors both the nature of water and the looping, recursive process of grief.

The opening lines set the scene: "At the desk where the boy sat, he sees the Chicago River." Immediately, there is an act of substitution—the absence of the student is filled by something vast, moving, unknowable. The classroom, a space of learning and order, is disrupted by the presence of the river, a force of nature that exists outside human control. It is not merely a backdrop but a presence, a participant in the unfolding loss.

Then comes the first unsettling shift: "It raises its hand. / It asks if metaphor should burn." The river, now personified, engages in the rituals of the classroom, becoming an eerie stand-in for the absent student. But its question—“should metaphor burn”—introduces something deeper, a contemplation of destruction and transformation. Fire, like water, is a force of change, but where water erodes and carries away, fire consumes. In this way, the river is asking about the nature of poetic expression, about whether loss should be confronted with metaphor or obliterated by it.

The teacher responds, defining language itself through an elemental force: "He says fire is the basis for all forms of the mouth." This line connects speech, poetry, and grief to something primal. Fire is breath, is warmth, is creation—but also destruction. The implication is that to speak of loss is to invoke fire, to burn something into memory.

Then the direct accusation: "He asks, why did you fill the boy with your going?" The river is confronted as the agent of the boy’s death. The phrasing—"fill the boy with your going"—is devastating; it suggests that the boy was consumed not by the river as a thing but by its movement, its relentless flow. The river does not respond with guilt but with unawareness: "I didn't know a boy had been added to me, the river says." The indifference of nature is apparent here—water does not choose what it takes, it simply takes. This echoes the way grief often feels arbitrary, how loss resists reason.

The teacher presses further: "Would you have given him back if you knew?" The river’s answer—"I think so, the river says, I have so many boys in me, / I'm worn out stroking eyes looking up at the day."—is both tragic and surreal. It suggests that the river holds many lost lives, that it carries with it a burden of drowned boys who remain beneath its surface, looking up but never returning. The phrase “stroking eyes” evokes both tenderness and eerie permanence, as if the river is constantly running its currents over the faces of the dead, keeping them suspended in a state of almost-being.

Then, in an extraordinary turn, the river becomes a poet: "Have you written a poem for us? he asks the river, / and the river reads its poem." The idea that the river can speak in poetry reinforces its role as both destroyer and memorial. Whatever it says, the students recognize something in it: "and the other students tell the river / it sounds like a poem the boy would have written, / that they smell the boy’s cigarettes / in the poem, they feel his teeth / biting the page." This is an incredible moment—the river, which took the boy, now carries something of him, his presence infused in its words. The sensory details—cigarettes, biting the page—evoke the boy’s physicality, his habits, his mark on the world. This is what memory does: it transposes the missing into objects, sensations, echoes of what they once were.

The river, in turn, asks a question that deepens its mystery: "Did this boy dream of horses? / because I suddenly dream of horses, I suddenly dream." This is a moment of eerie transmission. Has the river absorbed something of the boy’s subconscious? Is it becoming a vessel for his unspoken thoughts? The mention of “dreaming” suggests a liminal space between death and life, where the lost boy’s presence has not entirely faded but exists in a different form.

The students, still present, try to respond to the river’s grief: "And a girl makes a kiss with her mouth and leans it / against the river, and the kiss flows away / but the river wants it back." This is one of the most heartbreaking moments of the poem. The kiss, a simple human gesture of comfort, cannot be held. The river—so capable of taking—finds that it cannot keep something as delicate as a kiss. The idea that the river wants it back introduces a sense of longing, of regret. This is a rare moment in which the river is not indifferent; it desires something it cannot possess.

The final lines enact a communal ritual: "And they all make sounds for the river to carry to the boy." Here, language itself becomes an offering, a bridge between the living and the dead. But the most poignant promise comes from the river itself: "And the river promises to never surrender the boy’s shape / to the ocean." This vow suggests a refusal to let the boy be entirely lost, to keep him from being dispersed into something larger and more untraceable. The river, which has taken so much, finally becomes a guardian of memory.

Hicok’s "In Michael Robins’s Class Minus One" is an astonishing elegy that refuses closure. The river, initially indifferent, becomes both the keeper of the boy’s essence and a figure capable of grief itself. The poem’s fluidity—its shifting speakers, its dreamlike logic—mirrors the nature of mourning, how the presence of the lost lingers in ways we do not always understand. The poem does not seek to reconcile death; instead, it carves out a space where the missing remain, not surrendered to oblivion, but held in the current of memory, carried forward, always just beneath the surface.

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