One Sumptuous Moment

Richie Hofmann is a poet of eros. He catalogs desire’s soft aches and sturdy cravings; the glacé delirium of flirtation; the languor in soiled ecstasies; the mysterious asymmetries of flesh and fantasy; appalling absence; pleasurable abandon; the accretion of artifacts; the degradation, the devastation, and the hope that sprouts like knotweed in the cracks. In short, he writes in the turbulent language of romantic love.

A Hundred Lovers (Knopf, 2022), his second collection, is ostensibly an inventory of erotic encounters, but these billets-doux are marbled with another form of love as well, one less carnal, though no less cardinal: the aesthete’s passion for art and beauty. True, the speaker of these poems invites readers into his bed, but to get there, he ushers them through his vast internal salon, a mansion of many apartments where paintings by Watteau hang on walls, the études of Chopin waft through the air, and a collection of Tennyson’s poetry is open on a table. There are Heriz rugs, medieval tapestries, Greek and Roman statuary, all manner of artifacts from antiquity. These aesthetic objects are more than decor; they are the bedrock of Hofmann’s poetics.

The cover of A Hundred Lovers, designed by Chip Kidd, fittingly displays not the body of a man in profile but an artistic representation of the body of a man in profile. In Kidd’s own words, “here is an ancient Greek idealized statue of a male torso, but very much as it appears today: ultimately devastated by its experiences over the millennia; but still shockingly beautiful nonetheless.” Its head, arms, legs, and phallus are all missing, lost to time, deterioration, entropy. The torso survives, a synecdoche of a decayed yet persistent masculinity, its marble bruised with lavender. Like the titular Hellenic vessel of John Keats’s "Ode on a Grecian Urn,” this torso remains frozen in time, never to sag or bloat, never to lose that perfect inguinal crease, a still unravish’d groom of quietness.

To this day, Keats’s ode remains the gold standard of ekphrastic poetry. It represents a break from a more traditional idea of ekphrasis, such as that in Theocritus’s Idylls, in which the writer attempts to animate the stationary scene on the side of a goatherd’s cup. Keats’s innovation came in the form of adjoining inquisition to ekphrastic imagination. Rather than merely inventing movements and motivations for the figures on his urn, Keats interrogates them in their stasis, using this interrogation to barrel toward the poem’s famous conclusion: an epiphanic couplet equating truth with beauty.

In “My Ekphrasis,” an essay the Nicholas Hall gallery in New York commissioned last year, Hofmann explains why so many of his poems are ekphrastic: “Immersion in other arts—thinking about form and technique, gesture and perspective—gives me new ways of thinking about what poetry can do. Ekphrastic poetry can raise questions about representation, about the limits and capabilities of different media to capture or enact sensory experience. But most of all: the works give pleasure.” It is from this lineage of both the pleasures of a more whimsical ekphrasis and the epiphanies of a more dialectical ekphrasis that Hofmann’s art-soaked poetry emerges.

In “Looking at Medieval Art,” a poem from the new collection, the stark brutality of medieval objects plunges Hofmann’s speaker into a state of desperate longing—for copulation, possession, debasement:

I’m by myself again, looking at bright green tapestries,
a painted box in which was kept
a human heart. A skeleton with a long, pointed pole
piercing the ribs
of a dying man.
I lunch alone on chunks of venison. The Black Death
feels distant, like you.
The medieval streets have been widened by
modern instruments of pain.
I look for a stranger with whom
to act out the gamut of jealousy, obsession, control
until his body, like a soul, slips out from mine.

Here the violence of sexuality and the sexuality of violence erupt into an internal inferno—all from the seemingly modest aesthetic kindling of “bright green tapestries” from supposedly darker ages.

Even his poems that are not truly ekphrastic are often, according to the author, “at least inspired by works of art and the worlds of feeling they evoke.” Artistic media of every type find their way into these pages; there are mentions of Medici tomb statuary and Madonna songs, of Mapplethorpe and Celan, of Rilke and Ravel. Hofmann’s immense love of art, like his more carnal erotic entanglements, engorges his poetic imagery, deepening the mood and meaning.

Often art draws the speaker out of himself for a brief moment only to force him back inward. In “Museum,” the speaker wanders “From one room to the next,” noticing “the gods / are becoming younger.” The broken face of one figure that “still holds / his flute and harp” allows the speaker to entertain his interest in a more personal shattering: “For a week, I have wanted to be broken // in your hands, offering nothing / in return.” This moment of longing for fracture is followed by a return to the musical instruments held aloft: “The earliest pipes made of river reeds // have disintegrated.” This, in turn, pulls him back into his own anxieties: “I worry our hearts are growing cold.” The toggling between the interior and exterior worlds allows for a blurring of self with surroundings that feels akin to intimism, an artistic movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that focused primarily on depicting the mundane scenes and intimate encounters of domestic life. Intimists often painted people they knew—lovers, friends, family members—in their private rooms and quiet nooks, commingling figure and ground, exaggerating texture and color, in an attempt to apprehend the mood of a particular moment.

Admittedly, most of Hofmann’s references to visual art are pre-Modernist. He has written, “I’m drawn to visual arts in my life, especially art from antiquity and paintings and sculpture from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, which I’ve loved since my childhood years in Munich.” Though his poems offer no direct references to Édouard Vuillard or Pierre Bonnard—or, in fact, to any of the intimist painters—it’s hard to overlook the formal likeness.

Intimists, like the impressionists from whose ranks they branched off, were interested in distilling an impression of an ephemeral moment rather than capturing it with photographic precision. They understood scenes as hazes of light and movement, strokes and hues, memory and feeling. This freedom from the fetters of exacting realism allowed for more interplay between figure and environment. A subject’s consciousness could color the surroundings. This abstraction through subjectivity finds a modern equivalent in Hofmann’s poetry—even if the poet might reject this thread of connection.

Hoffman has admitted to being more excited by representation than abstraction. In “Feast Days,” the final poem of A Hundred Lovers, the speaker claims to “distrust // abstraction” in painting as well. Yet all art is abstraction, including the “art from antiquity and paintings and sculpture from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe” that Hofmann so admires. Even in the most representational work of art, the painter is still able to compose only in paint—with everything reduced to color, line, shape, and texture. “Objective painting,” according to Georgia O’Keeffe, “is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.” Or, to put it another way: Ceci n’est pas une … réalité.

There’s been a resurgence of intimism in visual art in recent years, particularly among LGBTQ figurative painters such as Doron Langberg, Salman Toor, and Louis Fratino. Like these New Queer Intimists of the art world, Hofmann’s focus on snapshots of quotidian life, brief exposures, allows him to capture a cosmos of feeling in an elliptical, ambiguous way (as opposed to using more direct, comprehensive narrative).

In the poem “Weekend,” the speaker is reading “a newish novel, very classy, winner / of the Prix Goncourt, now in English.” He declares “No real interest in the narrative.” Yet, by the end of the poem, he admits, “Actually, there’s something I like in this novel. / Something finally. / When the boys are on the beach, one of them puts his sunglasses inside a sneaker while he swims.”

Hofmann is seduced by such evocative details. In explaining his ekphrasis, he discusses being drawn to paintings that “are like lyric poems already, inspired by narratives, but capturing one sumptuous moment.” Call this the modus operandi for the poems in A Hundred Lovers: ensnaring the sublime in brief, bijou images.

In “Cypress,” Hofmann may offer a key to the connection between image and desire, the twin motors that provide these poems with their thrust, their lift. “For males,” he writes, “the image is the essence of sex.” A Hundred Lovers showcases a scopophilic love of looking at images and an exhibitionist love of being seen as image. And because Hofmann is so image conscious, these poems ooze with sexuality. “One Another” is particularly sensual:

We are knotted in the white bedding.
I don’t want sleep to separate us. We breathe
with the darkness, like an enormous animal.
Our bodies manufacture their odors. I taste earth
on his skin. Eros enters, where shame had lived.
Pale sun, then morning. How easily the earth closes
its cavities. I leave the apartment
wearing his black anorak.

Elsewhere in A Hundred Lovers, the speaker remembers “smoke drifting from [a man’s] lips / making Rococo shapes, his mouth sticky”; a “pearlescent filament / is strung between [lovers’ bodies]”; a T-shirt carries a paramour’s smell, “the weak black pepper of him”; soon-to-be-newlyweds sleep in one another’s arms “like little beasts, vulnerable / and hairy, with saliva on our skin.” Even inanimate objects take on explicit poses. In addition to the medieval streets “widened by / modern instruments of pain” and the earth that “closes / its cavities” are images of “an angry dog / on a choke chain,” a “window sucking in the curtains,” a “fresh nudity / in the sky,” a book’s “pages still uncut,” “water courses / from a gargoyle’s mouth,” and “spring lays its dust over everything.”

There are moments when the sexual frankness doesn’t work—not because of its candor but because sexual description is not poetry in itself; it needs as much transubstantiation through metaphoric connection, crisp juxtaposition, and/or sublime lyricism as do descriptions of sunlight, foliage, and seawater. Sometimes this happens when the image becomes too concrete. For example, the exquisite lines “My dirty clothes / packed above me, the T-shirt that carries his smell, / the weak black pepper of him,” don’t need to be capped by “the T-shirt he wiped his penis with.” They were stronger, more intoxicating, as implication. At other times, this happens in places where the emphasis on image recedes. Compare the line “I dreamed light BDSM dreams,” from “Pernod,” to the more elegant “The sea frilled / like expensive lettuce,” from “Mosquitoes,” and readers might wish BDSM dreams could frill a bit too.

However, even the lines that don’t shimmer create a kind of tense balance when situated next to the more purple poesy. For example, in “Pink Room,” the gorgeous image of an unnamed man who “roams the beach, looking for a place / deep inside himself, like a room lined in silk” is immediately followed by a coarse, simple pronouncement: “You’re disgusting just like me.” Though Hofmann paints his pictures in words rather than oils—sometimes dabbing them delicately with a fine brush, other times piling them thick with a palette knife, impasto—he is always composing a tableau that, as he says of Rubens’s baroque painting Cupid Making His Bow (1614), “vibrates with poetic tensions.” These poetic tensions are everywhere in A Hundred Lovers: tensions between art and life, interior and exterior, representation and abstraction, narrative and snapshot, freedom and control, masculinity and femininity, the posed and the natural, cleanness and dirt, pride and shame, connection and solitude, etc.

If the speaker is indeed “a servant / to order and erotic love,” as he claims in one poem, then this order is not one of neutered, clean balance but of the ebb and flow of conflict—or, to borrow another of Hofmann’s phrases, “orderly, / and yet / tenuous, volatile.”

It is an order of contradictory poses and views, of tidal energy (currents, undercurrents), of the vicissitudes of sensations, selves, seasons. Indeed, the four seasons are ever-present in these poems: “The season was ending,” “Fall is the season / of the end of love,” “All summer, we were shirtless,” “Now summer / is the season of leaving,” “It’s the end of summer, but / the weather changes: another season enters it,” “the season / of in-betweenities.” Seasons are always ending, beginning, changing; they are transitory by definition. Thus, they are a perfect motif in Hofmann’s poetry for they enact the in-betweenities of life.

In one poem, Hofmann writes, “I lived behind a Louis XV door // in a room that imprisoned winter / even as spring was rife outside— // I was not in love, there was nothing to experience.” Without love, in Hofmann’s universe, there is nothing. And though love can indeed be destabilizing—as it sometimes is in these poems—it is also the door through which we enter the world, experience the push and pull of existence, find a tentative equilibrium.

Love in all its forms is central to a life of in-betweenness (the only life worth living). But it is not merely eros that allows for such negative capability but the love of art, the love of beauty, the love of nature, the love of pleasure, the love of distraction, the love of looking, the love of being looked at, the love of self, the love of others, etc. What matters is understanding love not as a single thing but as a web of infinite cables that tether people to the world in a million different ways. We may be separate from our loves, as the spider is separate from the web, but only through those threads can we can feel the reverberations of the world.

At one point, the speaker of A Hundred Lovers imagines death as “freedom from desire.” This is a telling admission. If love and desire connect people to the world, they become manacles too. In “Idyll,” a poem from his previous collection, Second Empire (2015), Hofmann writes, “I don’t yet know that I possess a body built for love.” This eternal conundrum, a recognizable insecurity, courses through his poetry: at once love is the thing that makes us human, the engine that drives the mechanisms of existence, yet we are never quite ready for it, never quite sure of it, never quite ourselves in it.

In “Pernod,” from the new collection, Hofmann writes, “To give oneself to a hundred lovers: hard.” He then adds: “To give oneself to one: also hard.” He might have added: To give oneself to no one: harder still.