In Memory of Bob Hart, gentleman-poet

I learned, with great sadness, from Eric Norris and a FB post by Jane Omerod that Bob Hart passed away on the morning of August 13, Saturday. I met Bob Hart at a Pink Pony reading at Cornelia Street Cafe, NY, in 2005. Or rather, it'd be more accurate to say that I heard him first. The mellifluous voice at the mic was strikingly different from anything that had gone before, and It made me sit up and take note. You know the sensation when you know you are hearing poetry, and not prose? Bob Hart never read any prose; he is, was, all poetry. The writing was lyrical, exploratory, musical and witty. It was inspired by the greats like Shakespeare and Donne. I got to know the man a little better when I edited and published his second book, Lightly in the Good of Day. When I asked to see his poems, he gave me a cardboard box filled with tissue-thin sheets of paper, covered with his slanty handwriting in blue or black ink. Over a decade of writing. He dated his poems, and the revisions, and so I could see that he wrote almost every day for long stretches of time. He was ever so gracious when I approached him with suggestions for edits. Some he accepted calmly, others he rejected firmly. We would meet in a cafe in Hell's Kitchen to go over the poems. Bob did not do email; he had no Internet at home. Our conversations hewed pretty closely to the poems but he would tell me, once in a while, about his belief and involvement in Christian Science. I must admit I listened with only half an ear, ignorant and dismissive of what I had always taken to be a Christian cult. But now I see how vital were his Christian Science beliefs to his poetry. As his editor, I regret not giving his religion its due in a critical preface for his book. I was guilty of condescension. Indeed it is easy to underestimate Bob Hart. He was so modest, soft-spoken and self-effacing. He was always quick to give credit to others. One of my most vivid memories of Bob was how he leapt forward at the end of a Pink Pony reading to praise and thank a reader whose work he particularly liked. He was a generous man, and gave as much of himself as we could find room in ourselves to receive. One of my favorite Bob Hart poems:


WATERY WITHIN THIS GRAVELED WORLD

Watery within this graveled world,
translucent almost,
thinner than the air,
we move as rarer than our monuments
which we can occupy or not
however crude or well we shaped them;
feeling frail amid solidity
and pinned down by the names which,
large enough to run in an environment,
are points too dot-ephemeral
to pin the powered nowhereness
our talent operates from,
we agree, like entities leaped out from story pages,
to sit, assuming body styles,
disrobed from our invisibility,
with lightnings folded like mosquito's wings
polite in company.

by Bob Hart