Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "Fieldwork" is an exploration of passion, obsession, and the vastness of life’s unknowns. Blending scientific curiosity with poetic wonder, the poem oscillates between the logical and the absurd, the intimate and the cosmic, ultimately arriving at a meditation on devotion—whether to knowledge, experience, or the simple, undeniable drive to seek out what has not yet been seen. The poem’s structure mirrors its subject matter, constantly shifting perspectives, resisting stability, and embracing the unpredictability of both human nature and the natural world.

The poem opens with a sweeping contrast: "There are two kinds of people and five hundred seventy-one thousand, three hundred ninety-six species of beetle but who’s counting?" This juxtaposition—boiling humanity down to two broad types while enumerating beetle species with absurd precision—immediately establishes the speaker’s tone. The joke here is not just about scale but about perception; while science insists on cataloging every detail, human beings often divide the world into simple binaries. The rhetorical "but who’s counting?" undercuts the numerical specificity, winking at the idea that quantification itself is both impressive and ridiculous.

The next lines introduce a key figure: "Technically a small tribe concerns itself with this number and the colors and types of jaws that make up this number, like my friend who returned from months in the treetops of the Amazon with a fever and a jar and a beetle that looked like Jimmy Durante." The friend, a scientist devoted to the study of beetles, embodies one of the "two kinds of people", those who immerse themselves in the details of life’s overlooked wonders. Her return from the Amazon—marked by illness, a specimen, and an offbeat pop-culture reference (the beetle resembling Jimmy Durante, a comedian known for his distinctive nose)—immediately places her within the realm of eccentric dedication.

The speaker, meanwhile, identifies himself as "one of the other," suggesting a counterpoint to her intensity, though not a rejection of it. Their relationship is built on difference but also on a mutual appreciation for the absurd, allowing for both fascination and humor: "so we get along very well providing we don’t tie our bodies into a position that leads to dilated pupils and the shared obsession of a self-cleaning lint trap." This playfully bizarre condition for their friendship hints at the thin line between enthusiasm and mania, between focused curiosity and getting lost in minutiae.

The fever she returns with escalates the poem’s movement, pushing it toward surrealism: "By the time she got off the plane the fever had her saying things about milk and rayon and Mr. Magoo that make as much sense as a harpsichord played with an anvil." Here, illness distorts reason, turning her into an oracle of non-sequiturs, her language unmoored from logic. The comparison to a harpsichord played with an anvil reinforces the theme of misalignment—of things forced together in ways they are not meant to be, creating discordant yet strangely compelling results.

As the poem follows her medical crisis, it takes on a cinematic urgency: "This led to my driving in a way that proved you can be in two places at the same time and to the removal of plastic coverings from innumerable plastic devices the doctors knew reflexively how to use and a few days of her face imitating the maps of clouds they show us each night on TV." The phrase "proved you can be in two places at the same time" plays with perception—suggesting the way emergencies make time feel both hyperreal and stretched. The image of her face resembling weather maps evokes transience and instability, as if her body itself is shifting, unreadable, existing somewhere between clarity and dissolution.

But just as fever had disoriented her, recovery brings a return to focus: "When something like spring came back into her hands and the flower of a sound rose from her tongue it was the word jar, which she repeated until I found the cylinder with its yellow liquid and little tank-body of a beetle floating like Michelangelo painted it on the same day he finished the finger of God as it lazed toward the finger of Man." This is one of the most striking images in the poem—her first word upon recovery is not a plea or a reflection on her illness, but "jar," a direct link back to her passion. The specimen, suspended in fluid, is likened to Michelangelo’s iconic fresco of divine touch, elevating a small beetle into a symbol of transcendence, connection, and the human drive to preserve and name what would otherwise be lost.

The next lines shift from this grand artistic metaphor back to the mundane logistics of scientific research: "And everything that would come later, the taxonomy and papers and extension of her grant, had nothing to do with her gratitude toward the jar and the black and red, the fierce creature inside, which she set on her pillow and touched from time to time to remind her body of its life in the trees." The formal aspects of research—grants, taxonomies, papers—are acknowledged but dismissed as secondary. What truly matters to her is the physical and emotional connection to the beetle, a tangible reminder of where she has been and what she has seen. The image of her placing it on her pillow is both tender and unsettling, reinforcing her intimate relationship with the unknown, with the small, overlooked life she has dedicated herself to.

As the poem nears its conclusion, the speaker reconsiders his earlier certainty: "Maybe there are seven kinds of people and three kinds of beetle and two delicatessens where you can get a fried-tuna sandwich on waffles but only one reason she was back in the Amazon just two months later." The earlier binary of "two kinds of people" is expanded into an acknowledgment of greater complexity. The playful inclusion of "two delicatessens where you can get a fried-tuna sandwich on waffles" reflects the poem’s ongoing fascination with the absurd details of the world, reinforcing the idea that what defines us—whether our obsessions, our hunger, or our need to categorize—is often arbitrary yet deeply felt.

The final lines cement the poem’s admiration for those willing to risk everything for discovery: "And if your sanity’s too highly calibrated or you wear slippers to get to your shoes or need to label the drawer in which you keep your labeler, you’re probably not the kind of person who’ll understand sleeping in the green canopy of frenzied sounds with nets strung about you and a harness around your body because every kind of person eventually must fall but how many get to touch and name and adore a fraction and flutter of life not even the jealous eyes of God have seen?" Here, Hicok suggests that true fieldwork—true engagement with the unknown—requires a looseness of mind, an ability to embrace discomfort and unpredictability. Those who seek total control, who label everything, who require order, will never understand the kind of passion that drives someone to sleep in the jungle, tethered to the trees.

The final question—"how many get to touch and name and adore a fraction and flutter of life not even the jealous eyes of God have seen?"—elevates the work of scientific discovery to a spiritual level. The phrase "jealous eyes of God" implies that there are corners of existence so remote, so hidden, that not even divine vision has registered them. To find and name such a thing is not just scientific fieldwork; it is an act of reverence, a brush against something beyond human comprehension.

Hicok’s "Fieldwork" is ultimately a poem about devotion—devotion to curiosity, to discovery, and to the overlooked wonders of the world. It is about the kind of person who risks fever and madness to witness what others never will, and about the deep, almost mystical connection between the seeker and the sought. In its humor, its vivid imagery, and its shifting sense of reality, the poem not only captures the chaos of scientific passion but also invites us to reconsider what it means to truly see.

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