Sophia Lauer

“For a long time / I wondered” writes Oli Hazzard in his opening to Sleepers Awake, “what’s all this juice for?” 
So Hazzard welcomes the reader into a work of unique delicacy, offered with the tender hand of a scholar and father. In its deft and soft address, Sleepers Awake invites us to investigate the small moments that define our modern worlds, from “Reading Peppa Pig / upside down” to questioning “sensation’s confetti, life / fluttering on the screengrab surface?” Humorous, rambling, and diving into and across the vagaries of living and parenting in the digital age, Hazzard’s third book of poetry hashes out a new lyric address of our everyday victories and frustrations. He creates his speaker’s portrait in the image of a man pushing back on language’s shortcomings, particularly when it comes to fleshing out life’s unanticipated “batshit relations.” Taking up “the panic of openness towards chance, and the necessary period of desperation that follows” as a means of playing through poetic theory, Sleepers Awake also plays out alternatives—such as joy, fact, and sound—when urgency falls short in its poetic address.
Throughout the book, Hazzard sequences words for their sonic similarities, overtly emphasizing the act of composing a poem as music. He offers alliterative and rhyming phrases, then concedes that “I put that in / to make it / more hummy.” This ‘humminess’ doesn’t disappoint or fade out. Rather, it carries on across the work, finding opportunities to connect disparate phrases—or, we might say, live wires—in a way that takes up space; that is, it unabashedly turns to the kaleidoscopic address to offer a curio shop of odd phrases that simply sound right. Hazzard’s sentences and thoughts meander through and issue challenges to the lyric, but always leave the reader feeling as though they’ve landed on their feet, even when the poet seems to scramble from one breath to the next. The work’s resistance to settling on a certain form highlights form as arbitrary to lyric, which is to say Hazzard has an undeniable ear for sound, regardless of its appearance on the page. 
And what an unassuming appearance it is: paying careful attention to space, taking care not to capitalize too often, or punctuate too much. If the book’s long opening poem “Progress: Real and Imagined” leaves a reader eager and curious, its closing “Incunabulum” offers the ultimate test of stamina. With lines so long a reader must turn the book sideways to read them, “Incunabulum” questions not only a reader’s endurance, but also their tolerance for oddities and nonsense-making. Sandwiched between these two long poems, Hazzard’s shorter poems offer bite-size glimpses into a window between three worlds: the physical, mental, and digital. From texting to emailing to googling, Hazzard unapologetically incorporates aspects of our computerized lives not often taken up in poetry, bringing a special timeliness to his exploration of parenting, working, and living in a world inextricably linked to an online consciousness. 
These shorter poems are where Hazzard’s work assumes a particular glow of genius, seeming to shimmer with a secret logic into which the reader is only sometimes allowed—though we can sense a presence underneath the surface of their beautiful noise. Take, for example, “Dingdingdinggedicht,” a title no doubt in homage the dinggedicht or ‘thing poem,’ combined with a repetition that evokes the smothering of a bell. In it, Hazzard writes:

Amazing paper on the tree
Of heaven is a weed btw. By “you”
I mean pronominal parapraxis
Familiar from earlier in the fire rite

We can perhaps credit Hazzard’s interest in the pronoun to his great appreciation of John Ashbery, who once likened pronouns to “variables in an equation.” We see Hazzard’s appreciation for worldly beauty, his appropriation of modern text shorthand, and his conceptual anxiety about the inherent opacity of addressing a poem to “you,” all folding into a playful uncertainty about the next moves of the poem.
This is not uncertainty in the sense that Hazzard’s own footing in the language is unsure, but that his speaker’s voice delivers calculated missteps and self-reassurances, such as his assertion that “I mean shut my mouth / But that still seems like a kind of chance.” The speaker ostensibly offers intended meanings but often backtracks to expand on their musical potential or to muse on relationships between the sonic reality of the language and the moments it addresses. Uncertainty here means that not only is the reader at a loss when it comes to predicting the poet’s next move, but so too is the poet at the mercy of his own life, thoughts, and language. If the reader can’t predict the next moment of their life, after all, why should they be permitted to predict the next moment of the poem? In its constant turn and swoop, Hazzard would seem to ask this of the reader, demanding one read with a speed that does justice to the tumble of the poem—its order and disarray, scatter and regroup.
Perhaps, then, we can’t call Hazzard misguided in his frustration that “you continuously refer to me as a deadly baby, who cannot know even if I do not know.” Indeed, the un-knowing of one’s next move (or the next move of one’s lyric) is the promise and premise of the work. The poems themselves seem to be in constant renegotiation of this pledge, offering language as both a tool for work and toy for play, as in “Theory of the Lyric” or “Buttery Whataboutery,” in whose lines a reader strains to make much literal sense. The unexpected image of the “deadly baby” thwarts the reader’s picture of the poet as the master of verbiage, instead remodeling him as a babbler who necessarily lives in want of a language he has yet to learn. (Though it can hardly be said, if Sleepers Awake is any indication, that Hazzard has not mastered the English language—akin to a circus performer who can play and dazzle with fire only because of their intimate knowledge of its dangerous behaviors.)
The reader, too, becomes the deadly baby in Sleepers Awake—if Hazzard struggles to know his unknowing and to parse his language, so too must the reader learn the language of his poetic mind. Much like how we draw emotional resonance from an instrumental song, so we must learn to draw resonances from the instrument of language. Taken literally, the words offer clever misdirects and tangents for the sake of music, all working to build on a message we risk missing if we focus only on vocabulary and the literal terms at play, rather than the voice as instrument, the syllable as quarter note, the line break as a rest for breath. 
Maybe this, then, is the demand of Sleepers Awake: to not view our lives too linearly, nor take our language too seriously in a world that insists on clarity of literal meanings in a new digital landscape. Instead, Hazzard’s playful fatherly address invites us into his liminal space between waking, dreaming, and googling, as though opening a door we had not yet noticed: “come in, late / say it with me, sweet / and easily.”