Second Empire by Richie Hoffman (review)

In his seminal essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot wrote the following:

Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

Hoffman’s erudite, finely stitched, drop-dead-gorgeous poems are exemplars of the work someone with a “perception” such as the one Eliot speaks of can make. We don’t just get “books” in this book: we get antique books with marbled papers. We don’t hear a song: we hear a passacaglia, capriccio, or opera. We don’t just consider power: we consider empire. We don’t just see affection: we see sweat-laden Egyptian cotton sheets. We smell the sea. Throughout his tour-de-force book of beauty-on-beauty, Hoffman reminds us, too, that tradition and queerness are essentially, experientially, historically bound.

In “Night Ferry,” a poem that nods to Benjamin Britten’s opera Death in Venice, the speaker says, “I’m a hierophant / to the past.” The word “hierophant” comes to English from the combination of two Greek words: “ἱερός,” meaning “sacred,” and “φαίνειν,” meaning “to show.” The sacred past, to our poet-priest Hoffman, is undeniably beautiful, and accompanying the surface beauty are meditations on desire, tradition, power, and how we map our most complex relationships. He also writes with undeniable reverence for things finely made (opera, paintings, buildings, books, etc.) like a curator and connoisseur.

Hoffman’s title invokes both an architectural style—that of the Palais Garnier, the Paris opera house that serves as the stage for one of the poems—and the concept of the expansion of power, of boundaries, of “civilization.” And Hoffman is certainly an architect of a poet: The spaces his poems both inhabit and create are lush, generous, and suggestive always of more. Hoffman clearly understands the linguistic relationship that the word “stanza” has in the realms of architecture and poetry (“stanza” translates from Italian as “room”). And each room or stanza is perfectly staged: the surfaces beg not only admiration, but exploration; the acoustics good enough to enjoy Bernstein’s conducting Mahler’s Fifth; the walls witness to love—or the aerobics of love—between men.

Perhaps one of the most beautifully deft arguments runs quietly (or really not so quietly, like a passacaglia’s ostinato bass) beneath these museum-worthy poems: from the first poem, Hoffman suggests to us that queerness is fundamental to the past and present of Western civilization. In the first poem, he mentions Antinous, that “favorite” (or lover) of the emperor Hadrian, that (apparently) gorgeous man who was deified (and then revered) by the empire after his death at age nineteen or twenty, that figure who every queer classics major loves reading about.

In invoking Antinous, Hoffman also introduces the idea of loss along with queerness and empire. And why wouldn’t he? The past, while it can inform the present, inspire it even, is still lost. But the loss—maybe “separation” is more apt here—still calls to mind, especially when considering this as a book of poems, what Eliot says in that same blessed essay:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism.

It...