Richard Hague Reads Garden at Cincinnati's Joseph-Beth Booksellers

Richard Hague, an accomplished poet from Cincinnati, read from his latest book, Garden, at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati. Joseph-Beth hosted this event on September 19, 2002, which drew more than 20 friends, students, and other readers of poetry. Garden was a runner-up for the 2002 Word Press Poetry Prize, sponsored by Word Press, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Dick Hague, who has received two individual artist fellowships in poetry from the Ohio Arts Council, began the reading by explaining how Garden was structured and what he wanted to convey to the reader.

"The book was structured so that it began in the fall and ended in the fall," Mr. Hague said. "Doris Lessing said that the fall provides 'a place of rest.' Fall does provide this sense of rest, and it cures what I call 'garden fatigue.'"

Mr. Hague, whose Cincinnati home is surrounded by more than 200 species of plants, has created a garden at the edge of the Wayne National Forest in southeastern Ohio. "At the height of harvest, I make tomato sauce with tomatoes from my garden," he continued. "I make it with a sense of relief that the work of spring and summer is over."

Mr. Hague also told the audience that Garden was "skeptical" of the work of poet Andrew Marvell, responding both positively and critically to the 17th century English metaphysical classicist, who wrote of paradise on earth. He said that his own poems evoke a sense of lost Eden and lost innocence, and of falling from the paradise of Marvell's poems--echoing our country's fall from innocence after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Readers can see for themselves in two of his poems, entitled "Adam Earth," and "Standing by the Garden, I Dream the Flash."

 

Adam Earth name carved in a picnic table in Eden Park In raw cuneiform, wedged deeply in the green park table Adam Earth has made his mark. Idling in the sun, I think of him, stranger, man or boy I've never seen, hunched intently, laboring to make his name a part of summer's change and spin. Later, heat-struck to a drowse, I start awake and see him at the table's end stand into the blue-green air, moving in his sudden magic leaves murmuring a song to light. I see him gathered into clover like some blunt bee nudging, delving, see him wedged into crevices of bark, folded thinly as a moth's wing, watching me. Adam Earth: I see him moving like the wind's hand rippling grass, his small voice living in the birds, his presence like a tingling in the air. He broadens, name by name, to every form around me: finch, elm, hillside, jay, deep soil.

Standing by the Garden, I Dream the Flash Annihilating all that's made into A green thought in a green shade It bursts above the horizon, that filigreed edge of hill, redbud and cedar and maple eched in its glare as in glass, then it fades and grows a cauliflower of cloud, larger than the sky, a curried turbulence of vapor . . . fire's taproot fissuring down among graves, tossing and fusing the mica of Indian gorgets, splitting the oak's boiling roots smelting the lime of fossil shells, scattering the grit of sandstone in a wind . . . more powerful than sin or grace or vengeance, and I am gone, gone in the world-plantation's ruin, gone with bones, sticks, dirt, leaves, teeth, feathers, pollen, children, fingers, tools, God's eyes, air: all. Gone.

"Nine-Eleven brought back the Cold War fears of my youth," Mr. Hague said. "I cast the destruction in vegetable imagery. I often thought of seeing a mushroom cloud, blooming like a cauliflower, over the horizon as I was working in my garden. Our vision of paradise was shattered by the fear of nuclear war."

After reading for half an hour, Mr. Hague took questions from the members of the audience, several of whom were his former students at Cincinnati's Purcell Marian High School. When asked about what kind of poetry he liked, he cited content rather than genre.

"What makes a good poem for me is one that gives me a moment of clarity," Mr. Hague said, citing Galway Kinnell's poem, "When the Towers Fell," which appeared in The New Yorker. "It digested other poems and was wonderful to read. I want a poem to arrest my attention, reward my ear, and let me see something I've seen before in a new way."

After he finished taking questions, Mr. Hague sat at a small desk and signed copies of his book. The members of the audience chatted briefly, and then filed out of the store singly or in pairs. As the months and years pass, these readers of poetry will likewise find their moment of clarity for events like September 11, 2001, perhaps in one of Richard Hague's poems.

Author Richard Hague, center; Meg Cannon, Joseph-Beth Booksellers events
coordinator, left; Kevin Walzer, Word Press Poetry Editor, right. All photos
by Lori Jareo, Word Press Business Editor.