Even though the first-person speaker dies midway, the poem continues after his death. It is as if the speaker returns from the dead to complete the poem.
Richie Hofmann’s third collection of poems, The Bronze Arms showcases a host of stunning poems that also offer a sustained and profound meditation on the lyric form. In this taut and tender collection, Hofmann writes about beauty, love, childhood, the body, desire and death, pleasure and pain. In addition to frequent references to Hellenic myths, the trope of water is pervasive throughout the collection. In fact, to hold The Bronze Arms in one’s hands is to feel the moistness of Hofmann’s words and the dampness of his aesthetics. Lines such as “he chewed my hair softly,” “the end of love isn’t like a death,” or “In public toilets/Piss tethered strangers/To the wall” are bound to leave a salty aftertaste in one’s mouth: the kind of salinity one associates with the sea, semen, sweat, tears, blood, and other propulsive fluids. In fact, Hofmann’s collection also doubles as a theory of the lyric that is inextricably bound up with his piquant interest in matters of the flesh.
A Guggenheim fellow and a winner of the Pushcart Prize, among other prestigious accolades, Hofmann is the most European poet writing from within America today. A self-avowed admirer of Hervé Guibert, Hofmann’s imagery, allusions, and metaphors are heavily drawn from Greek, Roman, and French literary traditions and cultures. One is more likely to discern the influence of Sappho, Rimbaud, or Cavafy in his verses than Whitman or the New York School. In the words of Jericho Brown, Hofmann’s second collection of poems, A Hundred Lovers (2022), is a poetic treatise on erotic desire that “hearken[s] back to Shakespeare’s sonnets.” This traversing and transgressing of borders—national, sexual, cultural, temporal—allows him to move effortlessly between different poetic forms, both traditional and experimental, as evinced by his debut collection Second Empire (2015) and the current volume under consideration.
The eponymous and opening poem of the collection, “The Bronze Arms,” starts with an intriguing metaphorical description of love: “Love is a memory now, you said.” In Allegories of Reading, Paul de Man writes that “Love … is structured like a figure of speech,” which is to say that love is produced as and a product of rhetoric and figurative language. If all language is premised on the fundamental arbitrariness and discordance between sign and referent, between what is meant and what is said, then Hofmann’s metaphorical description of love gestures towards an irreparable gap at its center. It is owing to this reason that the bronze arms in the poem lack fixity. The poet enunciates the disfiguration of the arms (“most of the bronzes have been melted down/and made into other bronzes,/coins, weapons,”) in the poem to suggest that one word can move towards different directions. “Arms” here have been disfigured to connote either limbs or weaponry. The collection’s opening poem, therefore, establishes a premise in which the readers are no longer certain what the bronze arms are supposed to mean or do: if “arms” are read as the upper limbs, then they cannot offer love and embrace, for they are lifeless, inanimate, made of bronze. Even artificiality lacks stability in this poem; the bronze metamorphoses into other bronze artifacts. And if “arms” are imagined as armaments, then the connotations of conflict and death are written into Hofmann’s poetic-erotic-aesthetic vision of love, where love is seldom safe or sane or protected by moral grandstanding, but almost always protean, electric, kinky, laden with risk and danger.
The arbitrariness of words and signifiers is exploited fully by Hofmann to not simply proffer the paradoxical nature of love and desire, but also craft a form that extends that theme. When Hofmann writes in one of the untitled fragments in the book, “desire desire without any meaning,” the double space or void between the two desires poetically and stylistically conveys desire’s meaninglessness precisely because its essence exposes language’s intrinsic vacuity. The poem titled “Dolphin,” which, in my opinion, is the best poem in this collection, explores this idea most astutely while simultaneously challenging the boundaries of the lyric form. The opening stanza of the poem evokes the gentler aspects of desire: meet-cute, falling in love, beauty, and prettiness.
“A dolphin fell in love with me.
Probably because of my looks—
people always said, What a pretty boy you are.”
The poem records the speaker’s growing obsession with the dolphin (“I kept glancing at the shimmering sea,/hoping he was there. My dolphin”) and his frequent excursions to the sea, desiring romance, companionship, and intimacy with the aquatic creature until he starts dreaming of “becoming/a dolphin” himself. “I held on to his fin and we swam, he always dove up/so I could breathe,” writes Hofmann, painting a fervent picture of tender togetherness between the human and the non-human with masculine pronouns. “Yet, each man kills the thing he loves,” Oscar Wilde usefully reminds us, a painful maxim recreated by Hofmann in the poem takes a tragic turn. One day, while playing in the ocean, the dolphin accidentally injures the speaker and kills him:
“He hadn’t meant to cut my flesh
with his sharp fin,
the salt was stinging.
I died onshore, my dolphin tossed me there.
And he flung himself there, too,
to die beside me.”
The “fins” that the speaker once “held on to” for support, affection, camaraderie, and to stay afloat, now cut through his flesh and bleed him to death. If fins can be thought of as limbs or arms of aquatic creatures, then the dolphin’s “sharp fin,” like the bronze arms (as in weapons), betrays the speaker and penetrates him to death. Arms, in this collection, therefore, are a switch-point between life and death, pleasure and peril: in a poem titled “Arms,” the “ father’s arms” save the speaker from drowning; in “Dolphin,” the marine creature’s “fin” (his arm) kills him.
Even though the first-person speaker dies midway, the poem continues after his death. It is as if the speaker returns from the dead to complete the poem. He draws attention to his own death (“I died onshore”), effectively suggesting that he is a ghost-speaker who uses the past tense to speak from the other side of death. Scholars have endlessly debated over the years whether the first-person speaker of lyric poetry is the poet or a persona. Hofmann’s The Bronze Arms complicates this line of thinking because, while on one hand, the poet inserts himself in his poetry—in “Breed Me,” he writes, “Angelic Richie with bite marks/In such a clean room”; in “Young People,” he demands, “Tell me I own you, Richie”)—on the other hand, there is a relentless attempt at obliterating and erasing the self, at fracturing the speaking “I.” This tension between self-referentiality and self-effacement animates the collection, and is most eloquently expressed in one of the later poems, titled “Maze”:
This separation of “me” from “self,” that is, the shattering of the speaking subject, is poetically conveyed through the stair-like arrangement of the line breaks, where it seems the speaker gradually descends from wholeness to shatteredness. There is no distinction, therefore, between the poet and the persona, between “Richie” and the first-person speaker, for the poet is as much alienated from himself as he is from the persona.
It would be erroneous, however, to believe that there is a coherent “self” in these poems, either for the poet or for the persona, which precedes the shattering. Rather, the “self” in these poems has always already been shattered, prone to disappearance. The poet achieves this, foremost, by repeatedly inviting our attention to the speaker’s bodily orifices, suggesting that he is a punctured being with gaps and holes. “My body a series of entrances and exits,” writes Hofmann. Different things pass through the oral orifice: “And other men tried to put death into my mouth,” or “he shoved crumpled dollar bills in my mouth,” or, “put your camera in my mouth,” and finally, “My mouth fills/with water” (“Maze”).
In one of her fragments, Sappho writes: “Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me/sweetbitter, impossible to fight off…” Writing in the shadow of Sappho, and under the tight grip of Eros, the speaker’s self loosens to the point of disaggregation. He declares: “Eros grabs me/Eros tells me what to do.” This bodily disassembling finds an objective correlative in two images: referring to the worn-out statues in “Arms,” Hofmann offers, “None of the statues had arms,” and reminiscing about a plushie from his childhood days in a poem titled “Lamb,” he notes, “I had a lamb I brought everywhere/Who only had one eye … I don’t remember when the eye became unglued/And who knows where it went … I remember falling asleep,/Putting my finger in the hole where it used to be.” The missing arms of the inanimate statues and the missing eye of the plushie lodge an interplay between eye and I, for both these images mirror the disaggregated “self” of the speaker that is perpetually at the risk of effacement.
Besides imagining the self as punctured and perforated with holes, the speaker’s fantasy of death is another attempt by the poet to relinquish the self. If we read “I can’t help lying there like a slain boy” from one of the untitled fragments alongside the last line of the book, “I play dead in your arms,” then “lying” and “play” suggest that death is a pretense and a lie, which ultimately confounds the boundaries that separate life from death, truth from falsehoods. “I played death-games/With my friend’s belt…” (“Pantheon”), “Let’s play that game where I’m the dead bird from The Hours” (“Armed Cavalier”), and “all your dead lovers sleep inside me,” proceed to demonstrate that the poems teeter between life and death, often carrying death within life and life within death, causing their semantic borders to overlap, and render the speaking subject—the most important component of lyric poetry—both alive and dead, or in other words, unstable. It is owing to this instability that in one poem, the I is a phantom speaker, while in another, the I is immortal: “I didn’t die/But for one moment/I was someone who would never be old” (“Drowning on Crete”).
In Homos, Leo Bersani claims that one of the ways homo-ness manifests is when, under the grip of desire, we risk our own boundaries, and are willing to forgo our knowledge of where we end and others begin. Hofmann experiments with the lyric form by not merely attempting to obliterate the speaker, but also the other. If the first-person speaker is the most notable aspect of lyric poetry, then equally important is the poetic address to an actual or implied you. Hofmann’s lyric poems stretch the first-person speaker to the point of collapse while simultaneously weakening the borders of the hearer or the addressee. “Minotaur” opens with these lines: “There was sand in my camera lens./It ruined the edges of every picture I have of you.” “Breed Me” takes the idea a step further: “You used to be like everyone else.” And, in “Maze,” the poet calls “The lover/a faceless/presence.” Taken together, the blurring of the “edges” of the addressee makes the border of the other weak, and, in the absence of any definite border that could give him a distinct shape, he begins to resemble “everyone else.” The addressee is denied difference and is folded together with everyone else, including the speaker, so that he ceases to remain a separate entity. By crafting this textual homo-ness or sameness, where the borders between the speaker and the lover/other are obliterated, Hofmann presents us with a theory of homosexual lyric where homosexuality is not simply a matter of erotic object choice but also a question of form, aesthetics, and poetic technique.
The sea, in this book, is a site to realize such a textual homo-ness or sameness, for it not only collapses the difference between life and death, pleasure and pain, but also holds the power to dissolve the distinctions between the speaker and the addressee. “On the beach: I watch you walk into the water” (“Minotaur”), writes Hofmann, which mirrors “One day I walked right into the water” (“Dolphin”). This makes more sense when in “Breed Me,” the poet writes: “…the outlines of my body/A kind of emptiness…” The speaker, here, is an empty signifier who not only contains the sea and the dissolved lover within him, but is himself contained in the sea. “I wake up covered in sweat” (“Night Autobiography”) and “My sweat soaked the sheets” (“Breed Me”) paint a picture of saline fluid, like sea water, oozing out of the speaker’s body. The speaker, the lover, and the sea, are metonyms in these poems that structure Hofmann’s homo-poetics.
In Second Empire (2015), Hofmann’s first collection of poems, the sea is an interlude; in The Bronze Arms, it is the prelude, the interlude, and the postlude. The book jacket bears testimony to this, where we see the poet’s name, the title, and a qualifier—all mere signifiers—floating on the opaque seawater. John Berger famously asked about James Joyce’s Ulysses: “Isn’t it the most liquid book ever written?” I want to close this piece by asking: isn’t this the wettest collection of lyric poems ever written?
Rahul Sen is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English at Tufts University. His research interests include psychoanalysis, queer theory, postmodernism, and cinema studies. He is always on the lookout for a cup of good hot chocolate!