HOOVER, Paul (Andrew)

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Nationality: American. Born: Harrisonburg, Virginia, 30 April 1946. Education: Manchester College, North Manchester, Indiana, 1964–68, B.A. 1968; University of Illinois, Chicago, 1971–73, M.A.1973. Military Service: Conscientious objector, 1968–70: worked at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago. Family: Married Maxine Chernoff, q.v., in 1974; one daughter, two sons. Career: Since 1974 poet-in-residence, Columbia College, Chicago. Founding member and former president, the Poetry Center at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1974–87. Since 1986 editor, New American Writing, Chicago, and Mill Valley, California. Awards: National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1980; General Electric Foundation award for younger writers, 1984; Carl Sandburg award, Friends of the Chicago Public Library, 1987; Editors grant, Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, 1988; winner, Contemporary Poetry Series Competition, University of Georgia Press, 1997; Artist's grant, Marin Arts Council, California, 1999. Member: Modern Language Association. Address: 369 Molino Avenue, Mill Valley, California 94941, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Letter to Einstein Beginning Dear Albert. Chicago, The Yellow Press, 1979.

Nervous Songs. Seattle, L'Epervier Press, 1986.

Idea. Great Barrington, Massachusetts, The Figures, 1987.

The Novel: A Poem. New York, New Directions, 1990.

Viridian. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1997.

Totem and Shadow: New and Selected Poems. Jersey City, New Jersey, Talisman House, 1999.

Novel

Saigon, Illinois. New York, Vintage, 1988.

Other

Editor, Postmodern American Poetry. New York, Norton, 1994.

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Film Adaptations: Viridian, independent film directed and produced by Joseph Ramirez, 1994.

Theatrical Activities: Actor: Play— Rimbaud in Abyssinia, New York, 1987.

Critical Studies: "Bridging London: Chicagoans Stretch from Midwest to West End" by Kurt Jacobsen, in Chicago Tribune (Chicago), 12 August 1990; "Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover: Avant-garde Bards" by Penelope Mesic, in Chicago Magazine (Chicago), September 1990; "Servitude et Grandeur Litteraires" by Paul West, in Parnassus (New York), 17 (2), 1991; in Writing Illinois, by James Hurt, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1993; interview with Vittorio Carli, in Letter Ex, 93, April/May 1994; "Without a City Wall" by Mark Ford, in Times Literary Supplement (London), 17 March 1995; by J. Haines, in New Criterion (New York), 13 (10), 1995; "Ambiguity Isn't What It Used to Be—Or Is It?" by Fred Muratori, in Georgia Review, spring 1998.

Paul Hoover comments:

The work of William Carlos Williams and Frank O'Hara was especially important to me as a young poet in the 1970s and 1980s, and they continue to be a presence. But my influences are diverse and include Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery for their use of the romantic sublime, Emily Dickinson and George Herbert for their devoutness and metaphysical compression, Cesar Vallejo for his daring and disjunctive use of the lyric, and in general the so-called New Americans, including the New York school, projectivism (especially Creeley for the tension in his voice and the beauty of his line), and beat poetry for its urgency and accessibility. Since the mid-1980s I have been alert to the theoretical position taking of the language poets. But I am not a language poet despite the assertions of the New York Times Magazine in 1995.

A meeting of thought and lyricism, my poetry can be described as abstract (or critical) lyric. The poems are organized less by narrative than by concept. They also are very active in language and ask to be read word by word as much as sentence by sentence. But they can also be read for the nature of their comment. All poetry, even disjunctive postmodern poetry, can be read for its argumentative, theoretical, or observational statement, as in Williams's lines "so much depends /upon /a red wheel /barrow." My work is never fully narrative, as is common to realist poems and their personal concerns. I prefer a poetry of quick association and the cold fusion of the metaphysical ("Zero at the Bone," Emily Dickinson). The poet Gillian Conoley once reviewed my long poem The Novel: A Poem as "appetitive." Like the Pac-Man video figure, I am an avid consumer and organizer of disparate materials. While I have edited a leading anthology of postmodern poetry and am associated with its practice, I see myself in the tradition of romantic metaphysics: I think, therefore I write. Like Wallace Stevens, many of my poems are concerned with poetry ("not the thing itself /but a diagram of the harvest"). But they are not without reference to events in the real world. "Desire" ends with Tiananmen Square, and "Impossible Object" comments on the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson ("the present /moment's knife /writing blind /in space"). Both complexity and the direct approach are features of my writing.

As early as the poem "The Orphanage Florist," published in the 1987 volume Idea (the title taken from Michael Drayton's sixteenth-century sonnet sequence), I was interested in poetic form. Like many poems in Viridian and Totem and Shadow, "The Orphanage Florist" was written in counted verse, which requires a certain number of words per line. In counted verse I prefer a two-by-two or three-by-three stanza, the number of words in the line dictating the number of lines in the stanza. The mathematical approach to composition—counting—is of course traditional. But I am also interested in the experiments of the Parisian group Oulipo, who are nontraditional as formalists. An example of Oulipian form is the Lipogram, which requires the elimination of certain letters from a piece of writing. Thus Georges Perec wrote an entire novel, "A Void," that contained no letter e. My recent poem "American Gestures" is a cento, a form that requires each of the poem's one hundred lines to be borrowed from other poems. Working in form provides for me emotional access unguarded by irony. Thus lyricism has become a stronger force in my poetry.

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Paul Hoover's considerable presence in the world of "alternative" American poetry is equaled by few poets and critics. As an editor/critic as well as a poet, he has been a much admired figure for more than a generation, coediting with his wife, the writer Maxine Chernoff, the journal New American Writing and editing the anthology Postmodern American Poetry, which has since its publication in 1994 been the chief textbook through which university students have been introduced to the complex diversity of recent American poetry and poetics outside the mainstream.

While most reviews and discussion of American poetry have centered on conventional lyricism, especially as filtered through the kind of confessional work promoted by poetry workshops, Hoover has drawn attention to a wide range of experimental work from second-generation New York school writers like Alice Notley and Maureen Owen to language writers like Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein. A poet-in-residence at Chicago's Columbia College, Hoover has the academic credentials to present a credible case for innovative and experimental writing, and Postmodern American Poetry, offering selections from Charles Olson to Bernstein, may be the most admired successor, among many candidates, to Donald Allen's The New American Poetry, the anthology published in 1960 that first mapped out the traditions alternative American poetry has, for the most part, followed since.

Hoover wrote in the introduction to his anthology that the book "shows that avant-garde poetry endures in its resistence to mainstream ideology; it is the avant-garde that renews poetry as a whole through new, but initially shocking, artistic strategies." At the time he said this, one could find critics and at times even poets arguing that the avant-garde was dead, that it had perhaps been merely a phenomenon specific to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But by presenting works by poets as radically innovative (and radically different from one another) as Gustaf Sobin, Robert Grenier, and Michael Palmer, Hoover showed that the obituaries were somewhat premature. In the succeeding years, as enthusiasm for workshop poetry has faded while the attention given to Palmer, Notley, Susan Howe, and others recognized by Hoover has expanded, both his anthology and his journal have emerged as key entry points to American writing at the end of the century.

Hoover's influence as a critic and editor is due in part to his own accomplished work as a writer. His first book, Letter to Einstein Beginning Dear Albert (1979), was received by John Ashbery as "exciting and important," and the later work in his book Totem and Shadow: New and Selected Poems (1999) appears to search, said Publishers Weekly, "for a way to articulate a more positivist poetic, whether it be through affirmative eros … or beauty"; the poems, the reviewer noted, are characterized by questioning that is "genuine." Between these two books Hoover published other collections of poetry and a novel, all of which earned high marks from reviewers and critics. Viridian (1997) won the Contemporary Poetry Series competition of the University of Georgia Press. A section of his novel, Saigon, Illinois (1988), appeared in the New Yorker, and the book itself was issued in the Vintage Contemporaries series.

Hoover's work is distinguished by an allegiance to a diversity of aesthetic tendencies. Like his anthology and his journal, his poetry responds to traditions as different as the lyricism of the New York school and the linguistic interrogations of language writing. His poetry is marked as well by a strong surrealist element and by narrative control, the latter at a time when many poets were, at least briefly, avoiding narrative as too restrictive. He is also a humorous poet—one of the few truly humorous poets of his generation—as suggested by an early work, "We've Decided" from Nervous Songs (1986):

   I can be myself today, tall space ape
   in a garden where other space apes play.
   What a nice time this will be! and I
   can roll on the sides of my balled feet
   like a hairy barrel loaded, swinging arms
   that scratch the ground like leaves. I'm
   an ape today, headed for my pulpit of joy
   in sunshine by the window.

But he can equally master a darker and meditative tone, as in these lines from "Stationary Journey," collected in Viridian:

   At the outskirts of everyplace else,
   the afternoon grows tall then leans back in its window.
   Isadora's scarf catches in Sylvia's wheel.
   The traffic is calm as a locked museum.
   Silence wakes with red leaves on its lips.

The range of Hoover's work is as unusually broad as the range of his critical and editorial tastes. He is capable of doing so much, and doing it so well, that one who is looking for a point of entry to the intricate and various currents of the contemporary American avantgarde would do well to start with him.

—Edward Foster