There are people out in the world, I suppose, who
genuinely like Gertrude Stein’s writing.
Personally, I like her in theory.
I like the idea of her, the
attitude and the bohemian lifestyle and the fuck-you-if-you-don’t-like-it
approach to things she seemed to have.
Her writing, though, tends to make my eyes and my brain glaze over after
a few paragraphs. Brave work, yes, and
totally necessary to the evolution of modern writing, but I like her better in
paraphrased soundbites.
Which is where HABEAS CORPUS, Cindy Hochman’s fine collection of prose poetry,
comes in. She has a similar attitude to
Gertrude, and she enjoys some Stein-ish wordplay, but Hochman makes all of her words count. A lot of Stein’s work has always left me with
the impression that she was just playing around for the hell of it. Hochman, on the other hand, gets right to the
point. She hits you with her images and ideas. Occasionally, she elaborates on them; occasionally,
not. She works like a surgeon, all clean
motion and exact incisions. Whatever isn’t
necessary to bring her point home is left on the operating room floor for the
lesser poets to fight over.
HABEAS CORPUS is a poem cycle, a conceptual piece, a literal body of
work, with the individual poems named after body parts and culminating in Full Body Scan. An excellent literary device, and
well-played. Each poem stands on its own,
but still serves the greater good. The
poems themselves range from short-and-cryptic to longer, more fleshed-out
pieces. Humor is a driving element, and
it’s handled well. Smart-ass phrases and
images are mixed in with much more subtle bits.
Sometimes the jokes are there just for the sake of a good joke, but more
often they serve to drive home a darker subtext. They need to be stepped away from, thought
about and then returned to for the full meaning to be revealed.
Even the cover deserves mention, as it too fits the overall
concept. An excellent image, and kudos
to the design team.
This is a short collection but, really, the length
feels just about perfect. Again, the
surgical comparisons apply. There are no
wasted words or images, no fat to trim.
The body is perfect.
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