Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Bob Hicok’s "How Origami Was Invented" is a wry, introspective meditation on solitude, human connection, and the ways in which language—like paper—can be folded and reshaped into meaning. The poem moves in a characteristically Hicokian fashion, veering between humor and melancholy, the absurd and the profound, as the speaker wrestles with the paradoxes of aloneness: how it is both a comfort and an affliction, a space of clarity and a source of estrangement. The poem doesn’t follow a strict narrative but instead accumulates ideas and images in a way that mimics the act of folding—taking disparate thoughts and pressing them together into something new.

The poem begins with a confessional tone: “The last I went to confession was to whisper I like being alone.” This introduction is both ironic and sincere—solitude, a preference rather than a sin, is treated as something that requires absolution. The choice of whispering this confession suggests an awareness of its social deviance, a reluctance to admit what should be harmless. The penance the speaker receives—singing Stayin’ Alive one hundred times—is both a joke and an oddly fitting punishment. The song, with its disco-driven insistence on perseverance and social energy, stands in direct contrast to the speaker’s preference for solitude. Singing it repeatedly, an act that forces engagement with sound and rhythm, becomes a kind of forced reintegration into communal life.

The next few lines establish the internal logic of the poem, where solitude allows for strange, private perceptions: “Solitude almost tastes like grapes, of course not but alone I can think such things, there’s no one to counter strawberries.” The phrase “of course not” acknowledges the absurdity of the thought, yet the speaker revels in the ability to entertain it without interruption. The absence of contradiction, of external input, allows for imaginative freedom, an unchallenged space where thoughts can expand unchecked. This moment sets up one of the poem’s central tensions—solitude as a space for uninhibited creativity versus the possibility that such unfiltered perception leads to detachment from reality.

The speaker then extends this idea to the world around him: “Particularly the Big Holidays are a good time to have a conversation with buildings, everyone’s gone, to talk with buildings you merely lean against them, they do the rest.” This personification of buildings reflects the way solitude transforms perception—without human distraction, even the inanimate becomes communicative. The act of leaning against a building as a form of conversation suggests a deep, physical relationship with space, where connection happens not through words but through presence. The rejection of marble—“so haughty”—adds humor, implying that even materials have personalities, that solitude allows for a different kind of socialization, one with the physical world rather than people.

As the poem continues, the speaker’s thoughts shift from personal experience to a broader, almost philosophical reflection on loneliness and human invention: “Cities need to be alone and oceans and the moon gets too much credit let’s leave it out of this.” The assertion that vast entities—cities, oceans—also require solitude reconfigures loneliness as something natural, even necessary. The offhand dismissal of the moon, “let’s leave it out of this,” humorously rejects the expected poetic trope, signaling that the speaker wants to chart his own metaphoric territory rather than rely on celestial clichés.

Then comes a sudden acknowledgment of social perception: “Did you know the face of someone who thinks you’re a loser slash psychotic looks like a photo of Nixon lifted from newspaper with Silly Putty and stretched?” This striking, grotesque image captures the way judgment distorts human connection. The mention of Nixon—synonymous with paranoia and disgrace—deepens the feeling of alienation, as if the speaker sees the disapproving faces around him as stretched, exaggerated masks of suspicion. The self-awareness in this moment is sharp—while solitude offers creative freedom, it also invites misinterpretation. The speaker is not just alone; he is seen as strange for wanting to be alone.

The next section offers a kind of justification: “If I was not alone sometimes I’d all the time not want to be with people.” This line distills the speaker’s dilemma into a paradox: solitude is necessary in order to make companionship tolerable. The logic here is simple but compelling—without time alone, interaction would become overwhelming, suffocating. The contrast between solitude and socialization is heightened through humor: “This because we invented spandex and chit chat.” The inclusion of spandex—a material associated with discomfort, artificiality, and forced compression—alongside chit chat—a form of shallow, obligatory conversation—suggests that the modern world has constructed both physical and verbal constraints that the speaker finds oppressive.

The poem then briefly turns outward, contemplating how other species navigate their existence: “Other species invent beehives and asexual reproduction and spots on wings that look like eyes but are just spots.” This passage reinforces the idea that solitude, invention, and deception are intertwined. Nature, too, creates illusions—spots that resemble eyes, survival mechanisms that mimic something they are not. This connects to the speaker’s own experience of solitude, which might appear one way to others (as loneliness, dysfunction) but is actually something else (a form of creative and mental survival).

The transition into the poem’s title metaphor comes unexpectedly: “Sometimes I wish the mouth looked like the mouth but was just the mouth being kissed.” This cryptic statement captures the conflict between presence and absence, reality and illusion. The mouth—usually a site of speech, communication—becomes something purely physical, something that “presents and works against solitude”. A kiss is both connection and disruption, a breaking of aloneness but also a silencing.

Then, the origami moment arrives: “If that idea was origami I’d refold it into a heron.” The speaker imagines transforming this paradox—human connection as both desirable and disruptive—into something else, something more elegant, distant, free. A heron, a solitary bird, embodies the very isolation the speaker craves, but it is also something shaped by human hands, an object made from something pliable, fragile. The speaker’s admission that he “can’t, not yet” signals that he is still working through this, still trying to reshape his understanding of solitude and connection.

The final lines are perhaps the most poignant: “but I’m alone this weekend and there’s paper everywhere on which I’ve tried to write a clear path to you.” The speaker, despite his defense of solitude, is still reaching outward. The act of writing—of crafting words, of attempting to communicate—is his way of navigating the contradiction at the heart of the poem. The “clear path to you” suggests that, ultimately, the speaker does want to connect, that even solitude is not an absolute state but something that must be negotiated.

Hicok’s "How Origami Was Invented" is an intricate exploration of solitude as both refuge and dilemma. The poem folds and unfolds its ideas like paper, shaping moments of humor, alienation, and longing into a complex structure of thought. The speaker’s insistence on being alone is never quite convincing; his awareness of social judgment, his reference to kissing, his final admission of trying to write a path toward someone—all point to a deeper desire for connection, even if it comes in unconventional ways. In the end, the poem leaves us in that liminal space, neither fully alone nor fully with others, still folding, still searching for the right shape.

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