Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "Sorting of the Entanglements" is a darkly humorous, absurdist meditation on mortality, environmental collapse, and the fragility of human significance. It operates on a surreal premise: a last will and testament bequeathing mundane objects to spiders and plants, treating them as legitimate inheritors. Through this absurdity, the poem critiques human attempts to impose order on a world that is increasingly chaotic, a world in which nature—whether through resilient spiders or genetically deformed wildlife—persists despite human folly. The voice of the poem is wry and self-aware, playing with language to highlight the futility of control while maintaining a deep, if resigned, reverence for the natural world.

The opening lines set the tone: “In my will the basement goes to the spiders. This includes / all the tools and boxes saved for box emergencies.” There’s an immediate collision of humor and absurdity—the notion of box emergencies is a mockery of human tendencies to hoard useless items for imagined crises, yet it also suggests the way we try to prepare for the unknown, even in trivial ways. The idea that spiders will inherit the basement plays with the fact that they already occupy it; this inheritance is not so much a gift as an acknowledgment of their dominance over neglected spaces. The poet’s speaker concedes defeat to these silent, industrious creatures, suggesting a larger commentary on the persistence of nature where human presence fades.

This humor continues with an almost reverential attitude toward the Shop Vac: “The Shop Vac / can kill more spiders per second than any device short / of a bomb.” The exaggerated destruction of spiders introduces an absurd scale—Shop Vacs, after all, are not weapons but tools of cleanliness. The comparison to bombs turns extermination into an act of war, subtly critiquing the extreme ways humans respond to minor inconveniences in nature. This sets up the poem’s underlying anxiety about human power—our ability to destroy far exceeds our ability to create.

The poem then abruptly shifts from spiders to a blind trout, a surreal leap that mirrors the unpredictable nature of thought. “From water / came the trout with no eyes.” The speaker and his friend Tom debate whether cooking and eating a blind trout is ethically or emotionally troubling. Tom is disgusted, but his question—“if I'd intended to eat the eyes”—is hilariously pragmatic, reducing the trout’s disability to a question of culinary preference. The speaker’s decision not to eat the trout suggests a half-hearted morality, one rooted not in a true ethical stance but in queasiness. This small, absurd dilemma mirrors larger ethical failures—our selective concern for suffering, our willingness to exploit the natural world until confronted with its consequences.

The speaker then returns to the spiders: “I'd have to kill the spiders / to discover if they still have eyes.” This unnecessary act of violence—killing to confirm blindness—echoes the logic of scientific exploitation, where observation often necessitates destruction. The line “Because my basement's / a Wildlife Preserve, I'd go to jail for that” extends this logic into absurdity—of course, basements are not official nature reserves, but if nature has claimed them, does that make them protected spaces? The question is ludicrous yet profound, subtly critiquing human arrogance in determining which forms of life deserve legal protection.

Then comes a shift to a broader ecological concern: “The trout's part of a larger sadness including three-legged / elk and impotent sperm whales.” The poem moves from small, personal absurdities to global environmental degradation. The phrase “a larger sadness” acknowledges that these are not isolated cases but part of an ecological crisis, where animals are born malformed due to pollution and human interference. The distinction between “impotent” and “important” sperm whales in the next line plays on the absurdity of language and classification—what makes one creature’s suffering significant while another’s is dismissed?

This theme of absurd human logic continues: “I too feel small / before these facts and prefer a game of Jarts to environmental / activism.” Jarts, or lawn darts, is a dangerous backyard game—banned in many places—suggesting a preference for reckless entertainment over meaningful action. This self-deprecating confession mirrors society’s broader tendency to prioritize distraction over responsibility. “Jarts, while dangerous, can be played without slogans / and bullhorns and placards” implicitly critiques activism as performative, exhausting, or ineffective. Instead, the poem suggests, people engage in simpler, more immediate forms of destruction—throwing sharp objects around, metaphorically and literally.

From here, the poem returns to the spiders, elevating them to figures of wisdom: “I admire the spiders even as I fear them. They knit / their homes straight out of their bodies.” This is a crucial moment—the speaker, for all his anxiety about spiders, recognizes their remarkable self-sufficiency. The contrast between spiders’ organic architecture and human reliance on external materials underscores our deep disconnect from nature. The poet acknowledges this absurdity: “If I did this / I’d have a home made of vomit and piss.” The crudeness of this image makes clear how inelegant human biology is in comparison to the quiet efficiency of spiders. The hypothetical visitors to such a house—people the speaker would “rather not know”—suggest that only the most deranged individuals could accept a world so directly shaped by human bodily functions.

Then, another shift—this time into a meditation on identity and repetition: “Time / and again the pattern of spiderwebs comes out the same. / I can't write my name twice without fooling myself as to who / I am.” The poem moves beyond ecological concerns into a philosophical observation about order and identity. Spiders, despite their instinctive repetition, display a form of stability that humans lack. The speaker, in contrast, cannot even repeat his own name without questioning its meaning, suggesting that human identity is fluid, fragile, and uncertain.

The poem then broadens again, turning toward a grim environmental observation: “In the next county, Herefords give birth to fibroid tumors, / peltless minks are the rage in France.” These grotesque images reflect the ongoing mutations of the natural world under human influence. The phrase “Oops is not a big enough word” reduces catastrophe to an accident, mocking how inadequate language is in the face of irreversible damage. “Sorry is not. Stupid begins to exploit the lexicon.” These lines emphasize the failure of both apology and intelligence—our actions go beyond regret; they are irredeemably foolish.

The final stanza returns to the will and its absurdity: “I enjoy the image of a lawyer reading my will to the spiders.” This closing image merges comedy with existential resignation. The idea of a formal legal reading to creatures indifferent to human law is absurd, but it reinforces the idea that nature, not people, will inherit the earth. The speaker’s final bequests—“my snow tires / to the hyacinth” and “my body to the unfashionable Earth”—further this theme. The juxtaposition of snow tires (man-made, industrial) with hyacinths (organic, delicate) highlights the dissonance between human constructs and the natural world. The final gesture—leaving his body to “the unfashionable Earth”—acknowledges the ultimate irrelevance of human concerns. Fashionable or not, the earth will take him back.

Hicok’s "Sorting of the Entanglements" is a darkly comic reckoning with mortality, environmental decay, and the absurdities of human logic. It critiques both our failure to protect nature and our misguided belief that we control it. By weaving together personal anecdote, surreal humor, and sharp ecological observation, the poem exposes the contradictions of human existence—our simultaneous reverence for and destruction of the natural world, our inability to sustain meaning, and our inevitable return to the soil we so often neglect.

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