Oh geez, that sounds like a stressful way to go. I can see why you wouldn't want to do it that way again. Which Hicok did you get signed? I only have This Clumsy Living. I only read it once, but it didn't really stick to me. I'll give it another read though. I always get Hicock and Christian Hawkey mixed up because when I bought This Clumsy Living I also bought Hawkey's Citizen Of, which I didn't really understand most of. Foolishly, I left it behind during my last move and now I want to read that again too (but I don't want to pay another $14 for, sorry Hawkey). I think the networking aspect is what drives a lot of people to go and that's something I would definitely find valuable as I haven't kept up most of my poetry connections. One of these days I'll make it out to one, just to check it all out for myself. Thanks for writing all that out :) Oh and, I use my old student IDs often. I used to be able to go to the MFA for free, but I guess that arrangement has changed.
Words for Empty and Words for Full. What got me started on Hicok is his wonderful Switching to Deer Time which I think is in the book you mention. However I can't say I'm completely in love, he's not a Dean Young or Louise Gluck or a Lawrence Ferlinghetti to me. Words for Empty and Words for Full deals a lot with the VTech shootings as he was teaching there at the time. It's interesting but Hicok gets very political very often. I struggle with political poems. They get very dated very quickly, I find. And personally it's not something I find inspiring very often. Yeah no problem. It helps to decompress, you know?
Hmm. Yeah, I just reread Switching to Deer Time and I really liked it this time around, though I wonder because I know I've read it before and yet I remembered none of it. Maybe I just wasn't open to it at the time, preoccupied by something else. Sometimes reading can be like flossing for me, as in, sometimes I read something it passes through my brain and takes something with it, kind of the opposite of what I expect reading to do. I don't like political poems for a lot of reasons, though I have experimented with writing them in the past. In general, I don't think that poems should be used to espouse philosophies, political or otherwise because that uses poetry as a vehicle for something that is likely better stated in prose. For me, poetry is the vehicle and the driver. Political poems rely on a carryover of emotion from whatever issue evoked the reaction in the first place. It feels like cheating. You're right about the timeliness too. I know a guy who used to write political poems and often about political landmarks from history. I could not handle poems that were both historical and political. In any event, he writes about politics and financial stuff now and I think that's a better fit. He's a pal, but man oh man.