Sleepers Awake by Oli Hazzard

Sleepers Awake

by Oli Hazzard

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025

Wikipedia’s disambiguation page for the title, Sleepers Awake, lists a hymn by Philipp Nicolai (1599), a cantata by Bach (1731), a novel by H. G. Wells (1910), and, well, a prose explosion by Kenneth Patchen (1946). This last—a New Directions Paperbook if ever there was one—most closely resembles this list’s latest addition, a new book of experimental poetry by Oli Hazzard.

Hazzard's version dispenses with Patchen’s penchant for exclamation points, his staccato, jazzy bursts of urgency, but retains the same tendency toward non sequitur, the amateur modernist’s crummy sensitivity to juxtaposition. But where Patchen’s zany, headlong prose never lets up (and can be a kind of fun for those in a mind to be spurred and bamboozled by a book with pretentions to narrative, however hamstrung), Hazard’s poems, frequently fireworks-ish in their own way, come across as flat, sedated, uninteresting because uninterested. It doesn’t help that Hazzard tends to limit the scope of his poems to Hazzard himself (“I” everywhere), but most damning of all is the poetry’s tendency toward—no, mania for—the abstract. In Sleepers Awake, it isn’t rare to read a page of verses, another page of verses, a third page of verses before encountering a line that smacks of anything approaching the concrete.

A critic facing a larger word-count requirement might feel obliged to drag in the rubric of a “poetics,” buying time by expounding the poems in philosophical terms. Such excursions, of course, have always been congenial to untrammeled abstraction. The fact is that Hazzard’s poems take strides to be misunderstood. That is their philosophy. If not literally, they are, in spirit, the literary byproducts of an undergraduate mind enraptured by the heady linguistic involutions of Finnegans Wake. Hazzard seems most impressed with himself when he coins the kind of Joycean pun with which his book is littered, accidents of fortuitous sound, like “Extracting the ore / from boredom,” or “a remote mote of forest / rests,” or “dreamlessness / lessness / ness.”

It’s the stuff of a poet’s diary or drafts, where the working out of sound and sense and style is a serious business indeed. But as poetry that’s been stamped for publication, deemed ready to be read by anyone, it fails in the same way that all self-serving art fails: by obliterating the reader. When St. Francis of Assisi needed inspiration, he’d flip to a random page of his tattered bible. Try the same thing here and it isn’t possible to feel as though you haven’t just stooped to cherrypicking. Here’s the opening of a poem titled “Dingdingdinggedicht”:

Yes to panic;

Cool projective pragmatism, one hundo

Unbitted sexual life—

17th century wheat revival; mammal glow

{Zealand}

Yeah—yes. Feels good

Or take the first, impossibly wide stanza of “Incunabulum,” which begins: “Now shall I continue telling about the growth of finger memory as is my preference / or be live-dated by a recent day of memory placement that this person / (meaning ‘individual head blockage’) moved from such a conversation (which I, / a person, spend fearing) to finding why finding the term ‘memorable’ was the joke.”

This is poetry that shoots past the anti-rhymers’ picket line and doesn’t stop. When T. S. Eliot defined “genuine poetry” as poetry that can communicate before it is understood, he wasn’t just fabricating a loophole for himself or his friends, but indicating a climate of invention and experimentation he aspired to foster, a coterie of the kind of mold-breakers who are always in need of a new radical statement. At the same time, he was also describing an implicit limit point. Of all the things the modernists meant to communicate before they were understood—an appreciation of sound and rhythm, a sense for experience and emotion, the striking physicality of a well-wrought image—poetry that refuses these paths is not only not genuine; it’s not poetry at all, just words on a page.

Eric Bies is a high school English teacher based in Southern California.