Cincinnati, OH: Acre Books, 2017. 72 pages. $16.00.
“You can’t step into the same river twice,” Heraclitus tells us, a famous bit of philosophizing that feels eerily relevant today. Facebook’s newsfeed is a river; films now stream. Still, it is the rushing current of any here and now that Heraclitus refers to: perception’s a river, and the world never sits still. The image lasts because it captures epistemological mutability in all its forms. It’s also the silent motto in T.R. Hummer’s new collection After the Afterlife, a book that opens with another Heraclitan fragment (“I searched myself”) and marks its sections with two more. Heraclitus adjusts Hummer’s toga; later he masquerades “[a]s a Mongolian shaman.” He gets mail and holds open a door. He’s the defining figure in a book defined by lyrical erudition.
This makes sense, as T.R. Hummer is an inherently Heraclitan poet. You can’t step into the same book twice. “As a poet, I’ve been a lot of people,” he recently wrote in Plume, a statement that won’t surprise readers who’ve followed his remarkable career. From the formal aptitude of his first mature volume, The Angelic Orders (1982), to the bombastic stride of Walt Whitman in Hell (1996), Hummer revels in self-change. His best-known poem, “Where You Go When She Sleeps,” marries form and content, classical myth and touching conceit. The poem compares a man, his lover’s hair swirling in his lap, to a boy drowning “in a silo full of oats.” It also rewrites two pop song clichés: we fall in love; love takes our breath away. But Hummer will grow to mock such tactics, later referring to lovers as “wrapped in the cliché of someone else’s arms” (“Philadelphia Sentimental”).
Other collections draw on Heidegger (Useless Virtues, 2001) or jazz (The Infinity Sessions, 2005). A capacious book of essays, The Muse in the Machine (2006), includes must-reads on Vachel Lindsay and the NEA. His recent project is a trilogy of books—Ephemeron (2011), Skandalon (2014), and Eon (2018)—that meditates on eternity itself. A few years ago, I published a selection from that last book in Mantis. The work in After the Afterlife, though, surprised me. I recognized the subject matter—Hummer continues his inquiry into metaphysics, language, the afterlife—but not the setting. These poems tackle the grandiose through “the usual small turmoils / of the day” (“Fossil”). Houseflies and solitaire, lost socks and loose change: these are the talismans of this haunting, insomniac collection. I count just a few living people: a daughter, two cameos by a wife.
This is all to say that After the Afterlife might be Hummer’s loneliest collection—the poet does laundry; the poet washes dishes; the poet finds a book—and readers could be forgiven for wishing that he’d occasionally throw open the curtains or phone a friend. Thankfully, his mind roams wildly, probing a question he’s struggled with for years: what constitutes a self? Memory? Books? “For years I shunned the first person,” Hummer writes, “[b]ut now I come back to it as I dust off my good shoes” (“First Person”). In the poem, he’s preparing for a funeral, two neckties “laid out / On the bed like a pair of Roman numerals,” but the death contemplated is also his own. One tie, like the deceased, becomes an “[a]bandoned pronoun putzing around in the world.” I read the other as a noose that he’ll wear for a day. But what, pray tell, does it encircle?
The pleasure of After the Afterlife is in watching a masterful American poet try to answer this most American of questions—who am I?—in various ways. He’ll meditate on his name, which “[i]n German means lobster” (“Recovered Lives”), and on walks where he counts “the change / In the pocket of my psyche” (“Constitutional”). He’ll examine identification (“My Daughter’s Passport”); dreams (“The Flower at the End of the World”); and childhood reading (“Didactic,” “Heraclitus”). He’ll even try to trace his self back to its infant start, as in the opening to “Prehistoric”:
Of the time before I could speak, I cannot speak.
I was prehistoric, doing the dinosaur lurch
Across my crib. The world was there, worlding away,
and I was in it, being worlded. Now I mourn
Everything between my birth and the first word I spoke
I admire Hummer’s playfulness here, how parallel constructions and verbifications (“worlding away”) give way to straight grief (“I mourn”). I like how baby T.R. does “the dinosaur lurch.” It’s his focus on speech, however, that tells me the most about After the Afterlife’s project. For T.R. Hummer, language makes the man, not vice versa, and this poem ends with the image of logos, that famous Greek word for “reason” or “word,” returning to Hummer’s own hands: “I became the librarian of my own / Mechanical logos.” In a later poem, his voice is “an avatar of the Logos” until he pawns it off in New Orleans (“My Voice”). Hummer is most himself when most able to curate his language. Isolation reminds him how to hear himself speak.
This in turn reminds me of Wordsworth’s doubts about The Prelude (1850), his epic autobiographical poem on the formation of his mind: “it is a thing unprecedented in Literary history that a man should talk so much about himself.” In the United States in 2018, that’s hardly a concern, but Hummer’s exploration of self and speech is striking for a poet who long ago rebelled against his Romantic roots. One of his own long poems, “Walt Whitman in Hell,” ends with old Walt suffering—in Dante-esque fashion—from his lifelong sin of self-regard: “I go on / Sounding my doomed eternal bodiless goddamned // I, I, I, I, I.” Is Hummer, who speaks at length about speaking, guilty of the same?
If so, he atones with comic self-mockery. His voice is “[u]seful for hailing cabs and torturing cats.” His deathbed playlist should be “a killer / soundtrack, a susurrus of reeds” (“Playlist”). It helps, too, that his poetic speech is so good. This book consists almost entirely of single stanza poems, rich in periodicity. Hummer moves through this syntax smoothly, the reins loose in his hands. He caps long, free verse lines with winking enjambments (“killer / soundtrack”). The poems pulled me down with an almost gravitational force. They are deftly written, and I would point readers to “Kerf,” “Everyday Metaphysics,” and “As for the Housefly,” which Hummer reads aloud for the New Yorker. Here is “Water,” a shorter poem, in full:
The water is not the shape pressed on the tense meniscus
by wind, nor the scene revealed beneath it
Wherein the constant thrash of fish distracts me
from the stillness of the drowned child
And my own shadow staring up through her eyes.
Somewhere in between, the water hovers—
Undefinable, older than pain, mindful in its absence
of my presence, I who remember
The child I was, how I desired, how I went under.
This terse lyric is emblematic of the book: beautiful, philosophical, elegiac. It alludes, of course, to the Heraclitan fragment noted above, but imbues the image with a deeper sense of loss. It isn’t just that the world’s in watery flux, but that the flux carries our old selves away. You can’t step into any river without drowning a little, too. Thus the water “older than pain”; thus the poet’s own drowning as he follows a childhood self into the deep. It’s that last line that returns me again to Romanticism and one of its rhetorical forms in America: the self-elegy. Like Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral, in My Brain,” or Merwin’s “For the Anniversary of My Death,” Hummer mourns others by mourning himself.
It may be that T.R. Hummer is in flux again, returning in his later years—he’s sixty-eight—to the self by way of ancient philosophy. It may be that he has never given it up. It may be that I’m reading—in this expansive, allusive poet—my own Romantic predilections. Whatever the case, self-elegy returns, or a version of it, in the book’s final poem, “After the Afterlife.” It begins:
Wherever I return, it won’t be Paris,
though it will probably be raining,
A late afternoon in February when everyone
is in despair. Eternity will have passed
In seconds, a brief blackout like a hot
seizure in the brain. A fogbank
Is rolling in off the river. Cannons fire
from invisible ships: they are looking
For the drowned man, but he is clever,
his death is a cloak, and he is hidden
In the labyrinth of his own impervious dreaming.
If a posthumous speaker and an eternity “like a hot / seizure in the brain” feel Dickinsonian, they should not distract us from this scene’s other literary influence: Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. It’s in the eighth chapter of that river-bound text that Huck—who also fakes his death—watches his family float by on the Mississippi. There, too, the cannons boom. There, too, the living “are looking / For the drowned man” whose “death is a cloak.” (The blasting, it was thought, burst the gallbladder, allowing corpses to rise from the depths.) Hummer shares Huck’s roguishness, but it is their mutual desire to live a life outside of life that permeates this poem.
I admire these lines, and I suspect that the river trope is the reason. Gone is the Heraclitan river, very much within time, replaced here by an eternal river, blessedly outside it. The drowned man floats it into the “labyrinth of his own impervious dreaming.” Like Twain, Hummer sees the river as timeless escape. (T.S. Eliot wrote of Twain that “the River God is his God.”) Like Twain, Hummer has an appropriately complicated relationship with his Southern roots. (See his essays in Available Surfaces, 2012). As in Twain, the river leads to a reexamination of the self. The poem ends:
What did I order? What do they use in this place
to pay the bills? Will I have to sign my name?
I can hold a pen with only bones for hands, but who
will I say is writing in the blank where I should be?
The final line in After the Afterlife poses a question that Huck or Jim or Twain might ask just as well of themselves: who really can fill in the “blank where I should be?” Huck is defined by his on-shore aliases, Jim by his race, and Twain by a pseudonym drawn from the Mississippi. It would be nice to say that a signature refers back to the signer, that first person pronouns hold us together like some metaphysical skin. Hummer isn’t so certain, and he ends After the Afterlife with a pen balanced ghoulishly between his metacarpals and no more clarity than when he began. “I searched myself,” Heraclitus tells us as After the Afterlife opens. Here, in the afterlife of this last poem, the world’s a foreign country, names are unclear, and nothing seems to have changed. Or almost nothing. We do have the gift of these poems, for which T.R. Hummer can be exceptionally proud.
