Bob Hicok Quotes

#1. I like the idea of different
theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook
of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed
anyone.

Bob Hicok

#2. I love how intimate I've become with failure.

Bob Hicok

#3. Then I felt up silence. Then silence and I went all the way.

Bob Hicok

#4. Let us all be from somewhere.

Bob Hicok

#5. I think clapping is how mourn.

Bob Hicok

#6. You might think and be so marvelously right about praise that you open your door one day and the day walks in and stays for years.

Bob Hicok

#7. The dead have no ears, no answering machines that we know of, still we call.

Bob Hicok

#8. Furiously and gorgeously write your ass off.

Bob Hicok

#9. I can't prove this but i can't prove
you're a good person though i suspect you're a good person.

Bob Hicok

#10. Making it in poetry
The young teller
at the credit union
asked why so many
small checks
from universities?
Because I write
poems I said. Why
haven't I heard
of you? Because
I write poems
I said.

Bob Hicok

#11. When I say my name

I hear a burned-down church.

Bob Hicok

#12. My heart/ is whatever temperature a heart is/ in a man who doesn't believe in heaven.

Bob Hicok

#13. I had no business trying to see you leave, see death arrive, I owe you an apology, an elegy, I owe you the drift of memory, the praise of everything, of saying it was the best decision of my life, to hold you full, hold you empty, & live as the only bond between the two.

Bob Hicok

#14. My life the only thing that has been with me my whole life

Bob Hicok

#15. I will beg, will take to my knees, will listen to snow
stroking air, a sky of gasps, will open my mouth,
swallow, somewhere else the sky is falling,
somewhere else it gets back up.

Bob Hicok