The Name Inside the Name: On the Poetry of Kevin Hart
When we encounter a superb poet for the first time, we relearn how to listen, how to read. In T. S. Eliot's words, it is "a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate With shabby equipment always deteriorating" (189).We were in Oregon, driving north on Highway 101, and my wife was telling me about Kevin Hart, a poet and scholar whom she had known in Australia and whom we had just met briefly at a conference in Pennsylvania. She opened her iPad as I drove, located some Hart poems online, and began to read: "There is a silence words can't touch."If I thought anything then, it might have been, "Good line. Not great. Good." Most poets endure mixed feelings about their medium: the extraordinary plenitude of language and the poverty of our efforts. The second line quickened my interest: "And there's a name inside my name." I was not thinking about a heart having a Hart inside it. Not yet. Nor did I know that Hart's mother was Jewish, though she kept that identity hidden, and that he would have been thinking of the secret Hebrew name Jews traditionally have written inside their proper name.The poem was called "My Name," and with time I would discern that Kevin Hart often repeats the same tropes, obsessively getting at elusive experience behind or beyond or within them. Name. Emerson said the poet is a namer. Name and nature. The nominal and the numinous, the spirit ground where word and experience nearly meet, where poet and reader gaze across an open field. To name, to nominate, to suggest, to evoke, to invoke. One falls down a rabbit hole in reading.Here is the whole poem I heard in my wife's Australian accent that summer morning:There is a silence words can't touch.And there's a name inside my nameThough one my mother never said out loudShe never said it, never once, althoughShe knew there was another nameThat sleeps inside my nameSleep now, old name,For no one wants to know of youMy mother, she is dead these dozen yearsAnd she is grown so smallShe sleeps inside my name when it is saidI think she sleepsWithin that other name as well, more deeply, farMore quietly, turning only once or twiceInside that paradiseSleep now, old love,It is too late to say a word to you (Wild Track, 125)By the end of it, we were wiping away tears. "Read it again," I said. With each hearing. I became more aware that its sure footed technique and apparent simplicity were enacting not only personal grief but also the very condition and purpose of poetry itself, the place where being and poetry appear to be one and the same. As I came to know more of Hart's poetry teaching one of his collections and inviting him to my college to lecture and read I realized how rare and profound it is. Our trivializing age can hardly apprehend such beauty or connect poetry's expressions of the inexpressible to a true evocation of being.Notice how nothing in this poem is wasted, nothing is extraneous. Nothing shows off the poet's studiousness or cleverness even though these words were written by one of the most erudite intellectuals on the planet. Notice how each line moves the poem further into knowledge and the limits of knowledge. What would a name inside a name be? What psychological or spiritual or linguistic conditions are nominated there? A whole flood of them all at once. Line 3 introduces a mother in particular relation to the name. One thinks of Yeats: "our part To murmur name upon name As a mother names her child" (181).My wife is a namer, a poet, and a mother. When she sees into a person she loves, she gives that person a new name. Hart's mother or the mother in the poem never says the name she knows. The quality of knowledge is ambiguous, but the personal reserve of a certain kind of English woman also comes into play. And what of the name? It "sleeps inside my name." An infant slumber, a dream state, a liminal ambiguity.