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Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained | |||
Bob Hicok’s "So I Know" is a deeply unsettling, fragmented meditation on guilt, responsibility, and the inadequacy of language in the wake of mass violence. The poem directly engages with the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, in which a student, Seung-Hui Cho, killed 32 people before taking his own life. Hicok, who taught at Virginia Tech, grapples with his own connection to the event—not as a direct participant but as someone who, like many others, is left wondering whether he could have done something to prevent it. The poem’s structure, tone, and imagery reflect the speaker’s struggle to articulate the weight of this tragedy, mirroring the disorientation and helplessness that such events impose on both individuals and society. The poem opens with an eerie detail: “He put moisturizer the morning he shot / thirty-three people.” The omission of “on” before “moisturizer” immediately creates an emotional distance, as if the grammar itself is breaking under the weight of the subject. The contradiction in this image is disturbing—the act of applying moisturizer, an intimate and mundane gesture of self-care, is juxtaposed with the enormity of mass murder. The next sentence reinforces this tension: “That stands out. The desire / to be soft.” The word “soft” here carries unsettling implications. Is it literal—hydrated skin—or does it hint at something deeper, a final attempt at normalcy before committing violence? The fact that this detail “stands out” suggests how the human mind fixates on small, incongruous moments in the face of incomprehensible horror. Hicok then shifts into the realm of media and public discourse: “I could tell the guy from NPR / that’s what I want, to be soft, or the guy / from the LA Times, or the guy from CNN who says / we should chat. Such a casual word, chat.” The repetition of “guy” flattens the distinction between journalists, reducing them to interchangeable voices in a media machine that seeks commentary, not necessarily understanding. The word “chat” is particularly jarring in its casualness—mass murder is not something to chat about, yet this is how public discourse often processes tragedy, reducing it to sound bites and narratives. The poem’s confessional tone intensifies: “I’m chatting to myself now: you did not / do enough about the kid who took your class / a few buildings from where he killed.” This is the speaker’s central anguish—his proximity to the shooter and his inability to prevent what happened. The shift from “chatting” to self-recrimination suggests an internal spiral, where casual reflection gives way to overwhelming guilt. The phrase “a few buildings from where he killed” underscores the nearness, the way the event has physically and psychologically reshaped the speaker’s sense of place. The next section of the poem captures the breakdown of communication: “This is my confession. And legs, I think / the roommate said, moisturizer in the shower, / I don’t know what I could have done / something.” The abrupt transition to “And legs” reflects the way trauma distorts memory, how certain words or details stick without clear context. The mention of the shooter’s “roommate” alludes to a secondary account, as if the speaker is piecing together fragments of information. The phrase “I don’t know what I could have done / something” collapses language under the pressure of grief—there is an attempt to articulate responsibility, but the syntax fails, mirroring the speaker’s helplessness. The poem then interrogates the limits of language itself: “Maybe we exist as language and when someone dies / they are unworded.” This statement reframes existence as a linguistic phenomenon—if life is expressed through words, then death is a removal from language. The phrase “unworded” is haunting, suggesting both silence and erasure. This idea is reinforced by the speaker’s brutal self-questioning: “Maybe I should have shot the kid / and then myself given the math. 2 < 33.” This stark calculation transforms guilt into a cold numerical equation—if stopping the shooter meant taking his life (and possibly the speaker’s own), would that have been justified? The equation “2 < 33” is devastating in its simplicity, reducing moral complexity to an arithmetic of loss. The speaker immediately backtracks: “Mom, I don’t mean the killing above.” This sudden address to the speaker’s mother injects another layer of vulnerability. It suggests that, despite the weight of these thoughts, there is still an impulse to reassure, to explain that this is not an actual confession of homicidal intent but a way of grappling with the enormity of violence. The following lines attempt to distance the speaker from literal meaning: “It’s something I write like, ‘I put my arms / around the moon.’” This metaphor underscores the difficulty of articulating pain—some things can only be approached through indirect, poetic language. Hicok then offers a devastating reflection on sorry: “Maybe sorry’s the only sound / to offer pointlessly and at random / to each other forever, not because of what it means / but because it means we’re trying to mean.” This passage encapsulates the futility of words in the face of tragedy. Sorry does not change anything, but the act of saying it—of trying to mean something—is all that remains. The phrase “trying to mean” speaks to the speaker’s own struggle with the inadequacy of language to contain grief, responsibility, and the weight of the past. The poem then shifts to self-justification and defiance: “I am trying to mean more than I did / when I started writing this poem, too soon / people will say, so what. This is what I do.” Here, the speaker anticipates criticism—writing about tragedy too soon can be seen as opportunistic or insensitive. But the bluntness of “so what” rejects that concern. Writing is an act of survival, a way of processing. Without it, the speaker loses identity: “If I don’t do this I have no face.” The image of the “apple for a face” suggests a surreal distortion, perhaps referencing Magritte’s The Son of Man, in which a bowler-hatted figure’s face is obscured by an apple—an emblem of hidden identity and unknowability. The final movement of the poem expands outward, moving from personal guilt to an existential meditation on time and death: “Come with me from being over here to being over there, / from this second to that second. What countries / they are, the seconds, what rooms of people / being alive in them and then dead in them.” This passage highlights the fragility of time—each second is its own nation, its own world, filled with people who may be alive in one moment and gone in the next. The comparison of seconds to “countries” suggests both distance and division, as if moving through time is an act of crossing borders. The closing lines fuse beauty with horror: “The clocks of flowers rise, it’s April / and yellow and these seconds are an autopsy / of this word, / suddenly.” The juxtaposition of “April” and “autopsy” recalls The Waste Land’s famous opening—“April is the cruellest month”—linking rebirth to death. The final word, “suddenly,” is devastating. It captures the abruptness of loss, the way life can be rewritten in an instant. The poem itself is an autopsy of suddenly—a dissection of the moment when everything changed, when language failed, and when the speaker was left searching for meaning in the wreckage. Hicok’s "So I Know" is a raw, fragmented exploration of grief and responsibility in the aftermath of violence. It resists easy answers, exposing the limitations of language while still insisting on the necessity of speaking. In the end, it is not about certainty, but about the desperate human need to try—to speak, to remember, to mean.
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