A Clown at Midnight: Poems

By Andrew Hudgins

“Recklessness and rigor, in equal measure, mark the stirring poetics of Andrew Hudgins in this fine new book. Hudgins can wrestle a rhyme scheme into submission with one hand tied behind his back and can penetrate the black heart of history with a single, subtly rendered detail. He laughs with Democritus and weeps with Heraclitus and, line by distillate line, contrives a tonic antidote to “the acetone / of American inattention.” — Linda Gregerson

In A Clown at Midnight Andrew Hudgins offers a meditation on humor with a refreshing poignancy and cutting wit. He touches on love and nature, but at its core this collection is about the consolations and terrors, the delights and discomforts, of laughter, taking its title from a quote by Lon Chaney Sr.: “The essence of true horror is a clown at midnight.” Skillfully probing paradoxes, Hudgins conjures the titular clown: “Down these mean streets a bad joke walks alone / bruised head held low, chin tucked in tight, eyes down / defiant. He laughs and it turns to a moan.” Hudgins gives us utter honesty and accessible verse, exploring moments both uncomfortable and satirical while probing the impulse to confront life’s most demanding trials with laughter.

“Hudgins’s poems are often funny, hinging on a joke or wisecrack or malapropism, but human nature red in tooth and claw has always been his greatest theme.” — BookPage

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9780544105522

Andrew Hudgins

ANDREW HUDGINS is the author of several books of poems, including Saints and Strangers, The Glass Hammer, and Ecstatic in the Poison. A finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, he is a recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships as well as the Harper Lee Award. He is a professor emeritus of Ohio State University.

Book preview

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

1

A Joke Is Washed Up on a Desert Island

Birth of a Naturalist

First Year out of School

A Clown at Midnight

In the Arboretum

I Saw My Shadow Walking

In Arcadia, the Home of Pan

Steppingstone

The Offices

Autumn’s Author

2

At Evening, Eden

Mattress under Sumac

Swordfish

Fairy Tale with Ex-Wife

Star Jasmine

Laid Off

At the DMV

Princess after Princess

In the Lounge

There, There

Visiting an Old Love

Under the Maypole

Love Poem

Foresworn

The Wild Swans Skip Coole

3

A Mystery

The Humor Institute

Jesus Loved His Body

Self-Portrait as a Family

Now and Almost Now

The School Bell

Birthday Cake

The Mezzanine

Wigwam Village

The Imagined Copperhead

Welder’s Smoke

Suddenly Adult

Two Bourbons Past the Funeral

Orpheus in the Garden

Lord Byron’s Boots

Our Wars

Summer of ’09

Death Mask of Sargon

Stalin’s Laughter

The Return of the Magi

4

Villanelle with a Refrain from the Wall Street Journal

Night Harvest

In a Distant Room

Broadcasting Winter Rye

Bess

March

The Funeral Sermon

Harvest

Having Labored All Night

Grand Expensive Vista

Bryce Hospital: The Old Cemetery

Fleeing Time

Beyond My Footfall

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright © 2013 by Andrew Hudgins

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Hudgins, Andrew.

[Poems. Selections]

A clown at midnight / Andrew Hudgins.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-544-10880-6

I. Title.

PS3558.U288C56 2013

811'.54—dc23

2013000391

eISBN 978-0-544-10552-2

v1.0613

For Erin

Agathon arose in order that he might take his place on the couch by Socrates, when suddenly a band of revellers entered, and spoiled the order of the banquet. Someone who was going out having left the door open, they had found their way in, and made themselves at home; great confusion ensued, and everyone was compelled to drink large quantities of wine. Aristodemus said . . . he was awakened towards daybreak by a crowing of cocks, and . . . there remained only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon, who were drinking out of a large goblet which they passed round, and Socrates was discoursing to them. Aristodemus was only half awake, and he did not hear the beginning of the discourse; the chief thing which he remembered was Socrates compelling the other two to acknowledge that the genius of comedy was the same with that of tragedy, and that the true artist

Reviews for A Clown at Midnight

[detailmuse · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I am so early still in exploring poetry. But while I find my way overall, I’m eager to look at contemporary poets, and I was attracted to this collection from Hudgins, described as humorous. Well it’s darkly humorous -- as I should have anticipated from the title and as is confirmed by a quote from Lon Chaney as the epigraph to the title poem: “The essence of true horror is a clown at midnight.” It’s a great poem -- the most memorable in this collection of 58 -- and begins:Down these mean streets a bad joke walks alone,bruised head held low, chin tucked in tight, eyes down,defiant. He laughs and it turns to a moan.He repeats some of those words and phrases through the rest of the poem and they echo, hauntingly.A couple snips I especially liked in other poems, this from Swordfish:My fingertips marveled at the silvery shimmer,already less silver, less shimmery than when it lived.I never again should cause flesh this beautifulto be less beautiful, I thought.and this from Now and Almost Now:Under dawn light,cars glow, and a paper,heavy with yesterday,reposes on the walk.And my favorite of the collection, Night Harvest:From my neighbor’s dark garden I harvested asparagus;I pilfered slender spears from their feathery bedand clipped buds of American Beauty. All springand into early autumn I savored a fragranceredolent of theft. Through summer I plucked squash,beans, and more squash from his vines.In the yard where I watched his daughter marry,I divided hostas by moonlight and daylilies too,keeping half. My neighbor’s dead, the house for sale,and after dark his garden’s mine to love and plunder.(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.)