Jump the Clock

If it doesn’t pay to be an individual, what else is there to be? We may not be able to answer that question “until we enlist sense to illumination and make room for the blanks.” That line comes from Erica Hunt’s Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems, a sometimes brutal, always brilliant tour of Western individualism’s social and ecological effects.

With a hand over her heart, Hunt leads us by love deeper into our attention to the present, wherein past and future teeter on our tongues, waiting to see just what we are really ready to do.

This collection of Erica Hunt’s poetry might just save you. Including out of print works and others, this volume is one of inspiration, resistance and possibility.

We have lived in one chronology for many decades, of disrepair, divisions and fears. In response, Erica Hunt’s is a full-fronted other way of naming. In every detail and crevasse, her work unmutes voices and refigures necessary community… Hunt is crucial to an analytic poetry engaging in this work.

Erica Hunt has been publishing poems since the 1980s. Jump the Clock gathers nearly two hundred pages’ worth of them. I generally feel like a poet has some level of talent if, in a chapbook, I find a couple of lines I want to quote; Hunt’s book had me nodding or laughing or wincing in appreciation at least every other page. I emerged from it with the sense that she is, whatever this term might mean, a major poet.

In 1994 I wrote about Erica Hunt’s first book, Local History, for the Village Voice. In that review I praised an “insistently high level of self-consciousness” that “pressurizes ordinary perceptions until some small truth that tells on the poet bursts forth.” Almost three decades and several books later, her intensity of utterance continues to produce a verse that springs revelations from the commonplace. Containing selections from all of her books and additional unpublished material, this volume testifies to a sustained vision and the development of a language that veers from the personal to the abstract so smoothly you can’t quite tell the difference.

Hunt here, and elsewhere, presents difficulty with love, and our lives are richer for it.

Poets & Writers: How long did it take you to write Jump the Clock?  

Erica Hunt: Jump the Clock assembles selections from five books of poetry written over a span of almost forty years. There are a few poems, never gathered in a volume and unpublished, but the majority passed the “would I read this poem more than once” test.

Click to read Erica Hunt’s interview in Poets & Writers’s Ten Questions series!