Review of Heidi Seaborn’s tic tic tic

tic tic tic.

tic tic tic is time.

tic tic tic is our time.

tic tic tic, the title of Heidi Seaborn’s latest poetry book, reproduces the clipped and repetitive sound that irritates whether emitted by a timepiece measuring seconds or by a bomb counting down to detonation. Tic tic tic’s staccato intensifies Seaborn’s poems as they explore today’s psyche. In the poems, there’s a nervousness about American culture that produces a wretchedness within the self (family and community) and within the world’s larger contexts (history, religion, nature, arts, and politics). As do most lives, tic tic tic also includes poems that move toward joy or salvation as in the line from “Take Five,” “Each beat // a brightening.”

Seaborn had two requests of her Cornerstone Press editors. First was to include twenty-one black-and-white photos sourced from the public domain, online posts, and her son Jack Sinclair’s work. The photos add echoes, definitions, and emotions to the poems.

Her second request was that tic tic tic’s design be in a square format. This layout ensures that her poems, page by page and sentence by sentence, are displayed as she intends. She uses layout as a visual guide to accomplish a solid, intentional delivery of her lyric. The square format allows the page width to accommodate each poem’s varying pattern for stanzas, lines, and margins. Her layouts are purposeful, masterful, and attentive.

In this configuring, her long lines are allowed visually to play themselves out. They don’t break for lack of space at the right margin. Margins, poem to poem, vary. Some are narrow, some shift to the right, hold to the traditional left, or shift within the poem.

Her stanzas divide text into logical units, but the white spaces between the stanzas also function to indicate leaps of narration, time, mood, and place. Stanza break and length serve as visual cues that affect meaning and guide the reader through the poem. The white space of stanza breaks doesn’t create fragmentation, but signals transitions efficiently and strikingly, thus allowing Seaborn’s poems to avoid the wordiness that opens and ends many lyrics.

Seaborn sees the white space; she sees the black text. Her white spaces further define units of sound, breath, or silence. Tension is tightened or loosened. For the reader, this attention produces clarity, cadence, beginnings, and ends. All tic tic tic’s design is savvy. Nothing is showy; nothing interferes with the reader entering the poem. Each page is a canvas for the text.

tic tic tic’s poems display sensitivity to sound delivered in a luscious vocabulary. Supporting the tone and theme, sound impresses each poem with alliteration, assonance, and rhythm. The lines are skillfully noisy or soft with sound or with allusions to sound: “snails / nibbling,” “Vivaldi’s final L’Inverno allegro,” “espresso’s whir,” “ah that quick tsk of hope,” “the tendril of my voice,” “crescendo of tanks grinding villages to resin,” and “god in the syncopation of birdsong.”

The book’s second section “Spring” contains twenty-three poems underneath the title “Time Capsule.” These poems are unvaryingly personal, presenting Seaborn’s self across the decades. Again she uses a visual layout form to define the poem. The poems are borderless boxes, one to a page. While the book’s other poems vary in layout, the core of this section’s poems appears as a rectangle, neatly contained by white margins on four sides. Each poem is topped with a title and date, followed by five lines of even lengths. If necessary, full sentences or words break at the right-hand margin and wrap to the next line. This form creates a visual conformity page to page. Perhaps these verses are prose poems, but their crafting indicates that Seaborn employs a poet’s sure skill.

While Seaborn’s run of “boxed” poems deal with self, the other poems consistently widen to the essential concerns of contemporary existence couched in Seaborn’s experience. 

Within these parameters, the poems’ content contracts severely to recall the poet’s intimate life through childhood, puberty, child bearing, and menopause. She combines addiction and love: “And on the third try, I married a pack / of cigarettes, the cool cat at the bar.” She explores dating: “Once I slipped off a red / stiletto for a man to fill with champagne.” She ages: “In a post-menopausal moment, I blush / orgasm.”

Throughout tic tic tic, Seaborn laces past into present by threading quick quotes, full lines, allusions, cultural assumptions, landscapes, and direct and oblique references from other poets/musicians/artists/philosophers. Doing this, she extends and deepens her poems’ insights and narratives. Her experiences include not only America but China, Europe, and other foreign lands.

Intensifying her poems are references to Dante, Kusama, Arthur Sze, Akhmatova, Kwame, and “a nodding reference” to the “fluff” of A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. Present are Pearl Jam, Shin Yu Pai, Amanda Gorman (“the buttercup poet”), and T.S. Eliot. She interweaves these references as support for her own poems, her personal basket of content, narrative, laments, hymns, and images.

With Eliot, Seaborn favors his lines throughout the collection. However, as her endnotes state, her poem “Lookout” is “in conversation” with Eliot’s poem “Four Quartets.” She sorts her lyric into four parts as does Eliot. She substitutes Eliot’s subtitles with titles that reflect her own realms of exploration.

Eliot’s subtitle “Little Gidding” is Seaborn’s “Skagit Valley” where she observes a local brush fire. She writes of “refining fires— / the way Eliot thought about them— / purifying cauldron, the torching of our dross, all those sins—.”

Another Eliot subtitle “East Coker” is Seaborn’s “Feverish.” She defines today’s climate crisis as a time when sea temperatures rise, Maui is incinerated, the news can’t be outrun, and “How in every season—a wildfire.” The poem ends with “Am I not praying— / for a beginning while flecked with ashes from the end?”

While Seaborn’s run of “boxed” poems deal with self, the other poems consistently widen to the essential concerns of contemporary existence couched in Seaborn’s experience. She is not Eliot’s Teresias; she is better for us, she is more us. She is a woman in red stiletto heels who is cognizant of our culture and the languages that encapsule it. She brings us to the edge to see what she would see today, modern, informed, living vividly.