Our Cities Vanish, Poetry by Ray Hinman

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Ray Hinman's poems are vibrant with the tension between light and darkness, life and death, and they are a cycle of rebirth in which corpses can blossom again. It is a world built through conversations with the dead, with the voices of the literary past, allusions to the things that have come before and constructed with a clear, conscious sense that poetry is a Craft. These poems understand the value of things like aesthetics, culture and meaning. Ray Hinman understands the poet as the modern descendant of the Shaman, treading the boundary between what is forbidden and what is allowed to guide us beyond the things that distract us and drown the spirit to the transcendent and the sublime 

Ray Hinman returns the strength of history and culture to language. Unashamed of thought, uninhibited by the current fashion of poetic anti-intellectualism, Hinman speaks from a foundation of tradition, yet fashions his structures with the touch and sites of nature. Definitely modern, he unites civilization across time, refuses to surrender to the triviality of high technology, though hints that our era stands out in this defiance of human greatness.His rhythms flow with the love of language's music, and like the Whitman whose ghost tours his city, he finds in the urban tableau the clues to what we search for in clustering into cities.

Our Cities Vanish

Our cities will vanish the way they were built, in flurries of greed and seduction. Dallas for instance, was founded by Appalachian Pariahs, lean men with gaunt faces and a burning in their eyes. Now another Dallas has sprung up where they built, a Mecca for the mercenaries wrapped in steel glitter, wrapped in gold glitter, burning as brightly as their lust. Practicality is their monument to their fathers. Practicality, the faith of Pariahs: the gleam of a bauble pawed by cats. When pressed they will admit truth is beautiful. Nature for instance, is even more beautiful when it's mysteries are revealed, and so they still admire the moon, praise it, for remaining such a worthy objective for their calculations of trajectory, they admire Einstein, who "thought up some good physics," that will allow them to build other Dallases on distant planets. eternity is PROfound. And yet, the only eternity they believe in is the eternal distance between classes, between races, between failure and success. Our cities will vanish the way they were built, and return even more mysteriously.