Monday, June 20, 2022
I saw a twitter post from Alicia Stallings about the death of Jay Hopler, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award in 2005. If you are not familiar with his writing, it might be best to start with the first link, so it is the network of poets and writers whose work he affiliated himself with that would make further reading more rewarding. The contributors include Kimberly Johnson, Molly Peacock, Stephen Burt, Stephen Yenser, Katie Ford, Alicia Ostriker, and Calvin Bedient. It would be an even better collection if Mark Jarman could have contributed an essay, too, I am very grateful to have this available on-line to serve immediately as part of Hopler’s legacy.
And, just for the record, here are four lines of poetry that will last as long as any written by Thomas Nashe (“In the Time of Plague”). in the past century in the United States, the plague is cancer, to which Hopler succumbed this past Thursday.
Over the soccer fields roll
The shadows of clouds.
In the piss-tolled bowl,
A little billow of blood.
If you can’t hear the echo and swell of Hopler’s vowels and consonants, then you need to “put your ears on.” I only wish Hopler could have been a guest on the Century Cable program I had that used that imperative as its title.
According to his faculty page at the University of South Florida, where he taught since 2006, he was “a practitioner of Ashtanga Yoga, an aficionado of the creature feature, a devotee of punk rock (favorite bands include Bad Brains, The Vandals, Black Flag, Fugazi, and Rites of Spring), and a supporter of Arsenal Football Club.” His Ph.D. dissertation at Purdue was on the topic of the hit man as a trope in American literature. Suzanne Lummis and Hopler would no doubt have had a memorable conversation, if only he had lived longer.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bfm%3A978-3-319-55300-9%2F1.pdf
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/jay-hopler
https://pen.org/the-pen-ten-an-interview-with-jay-hopler/
https://aprweb.org/poems/gardening5
About Bill Mohr