Hunt Hawkins, Author at Politics/Letters Live

Ian Watt Memorizes “The Divine Comedy” on the River Kwai, 1943

Posted by Hunt Hawkins | Jun 16, 2022 | Poem |

[Note: With the publication of The Rise of the Novel in 1957, the charismatic Stanford professor Ian Watt (1917-1999) became one of the most influential literary critics of the post-war period. He did not publish much, if anything, about his still recent experiences as a Japanese prisoner-of-war and a forced laborer on the infamous Burma-Thailand Railway, the historical truth of which did not find its way into the film The Bridge on the River Kwai. Marina MacKay’s Ian Watt: The Novel and the Wartime Critic (Oxford, 2018) digs into the archives of his fellow prisoners as well as Watt’s...

Consciousness

Posted by Hunt Hawkins | Mar 17, 2021 | Poem |

Strange flame of neurons firing inside the helmet of my head, full of knowing, sights royal, azure, robin, finely graded, the roll and pitch of sounds, sweetness on my tongue, memories seemingly true, the 110 steps up to our house on Edgevale Road, the tree I fell from when six still there though I’m not, the gleam of Chesapeake Bay when my family was together driving to our rental on the shore, shadows falling on the Taconic Parkway going away to college in the North, “Now you know all of me,” she said, sitting on the yellow couch, all...

Tunnel (Waterways)

Posted by Hunt Hawkins | Mar 7, 2021 | Poem, Waterways |

Plunging into Lincoln Tunnel, my daughter stares at the yellowing tiles, empty glass booths hanging from the walls, the vertical blue line dividing New Jersey from New York, and asks what’s above us. When I say the river, my son exclaims, “Hey, neat,” but she winces, and I can see she’s imagining the bed of silt, the tons and tons of water, even the fish swimming, and far above, the ships resting lightly on the surface. In her body, she must feel the fragility of the tube, the possibility of cracks opening, water replacing air, people frantic. Don’t be...

River (Waterways)

Posted by Hunt Hawkins | Mar 7, 2021 | Poem, Waterways |

Standing in the front room, unable to remember why I came here, perhaps for a notepad, I notice a butterfly through the old glass wavy windows, its blue wings wavy, zig-zagging from bloom to bloom but never returning to the same one, and beyond, the golfers, old guys since it’s mid-morning mid-week and they don’t have to work moving up the eighteenth fairway, sometimes hitting an oak but generally progressing to the green where long ago God appeared to the evangelist, now dying in a hospital in North Carolina but then young, telling him to preach salvation, and...

Old Veteran Cypress (Waterways)

Posted by Hunt Hawkins | Mar 6, 2021 | Waterways |

[There’s water everywhere in Hunt Hawkins’ “Old Veteran Cypress,” but in this poem focused on a single unmoving tree the ways of water are mysterious. We move from one body of water (including that of the nearly drowned poet) to another, and water’s movements are compared to memory’s. But are there other connections as well, as for example to the American (imperial?) urge to travel and its risks? — John McClure] Memory murkier than the ocean, I forgot why my mother, ashes now at rest in Chambersburg, had the painting currently hanging in our...

Author: Hunt Hawkins

Ian Watt Memorizes “The Divine Comedy” on the River Kwai, 1943

Consciousness

Tunnel (Waterways)

River (Waterways)

Old Veteran Cypress (Waterways)

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