The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe

by Laura Gilpin

Laura Gilpin's first collection of poetry, for which she won the 1976 Walt Whitman Award.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Nonfiction

73 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1976

About the author

Laura Crafton Gilpin (1950–2007) was an American poet, nurse, and advocate for hospital reform. She won the Walt Whitman Award.

Gilpin was born on October 10, 1950 to Robert Crafton Gilpin and Bertha Burghard. Gilpin attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University.

In 1976, Gilpin was awarded the Walt Whitman Award by the Academy of American Poets for her book of poems titled The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe. She was selected by William Stafford. Gilpin later wrote another book of poetry, titled The Weight of a Soul. Her work was also published in the magazine Poetry.

In 1981, Gilpin became a registered nurse. She was a founding member of Planetree, which has been described as a "pioneering organization dedicated to humanizing patient care in hospitals". Gilpin worked to develop and implement hospital care centered around patients.

Gilpin died on February 15, 2007 in Fairhope, Alabama, at age 56.

Reviews

[Necrxpolis]

maybe one day I'll read "The Two-headed Calf" and not cry.
today was not the day

[🇵🇸🇵🇸 hasfia 🇵🇸🇵🇸]

HOW DARE THIS END???

I’m an empty, hollow shell.

Full RTC.

[Gail Holman]

I love that poetry can say so much with few words. This slender volume has some real beauties, my favorite, as for many, is The Two-headed Calf. It is a view of the fragile beauty of life. I wish she had written more.

[ahotbath]

“It is raining and there is a dog lying
in the gutter and the gutter is filling
with water because the sewer is clogged.

If the dog were alive he would be drowning
but as it is, the water is simply stroking
his fur.”

[Emma]

I'm so happy I stumbled across the work of Laura Gilpin. I wish I had known her work sooner! Her writing is elegant in the way that it is simple, graceful in how straightforward it is. Poetic in the way nature is beautiful because, well, it just *is*. Some poetry is like mint tea, some poetry is like straight up brandy. But in the best way possible, I found this work of poetry to be like that first sip of water you take when you wake up in the middle of the night dying of thirst.

My favorite poems from this work were " The Meaning", "Concerning the Gold Fountain Pen Sent to Me by My Father on My Twenty-first Birthday with a Note Congratulating Me on My New Independence", "An Afternoon of Painting", "The Whole of It", "The Two-Headed Calf", and finally "Seeing a Dog in the Rain".

I really enjoyed this little book. I got it through the ILL system at my library, and I'm really sad that I must return it. I wish it was in print for me to purchase! I hope other people read her work too someday and she gets a little more recognition.

[Ba]

Just read this book on archive.com. It evokes a lot of fondness in me for the writer. There are some really beautiful prosaic moments, but I think the main strength here lies in the simplicity and the authentic emotion of the poems. I think anyone reading this comes away feeling a lot of love for Laura Gilpin. It is so sad that this book (and her writing in general) are not as widely printed/read as they should be. One of the poetry collections that has resonated with me the most.

[Mia Tryst]

Gilpin's one and only published book to date, The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe won the Walt Whitman award in 1976. Then she disappeared from the public spotlight until her death in 2007. I had her book, lost it, retrieved it from the attic where it had been buried for years. I can't say that her work in this book was remarkable, or that it was especially memorable, but there were several poems that will always stay with me . I was saddened by the news of her death, and it made me want to go back read over her work. What I found was that the simplicity of her lines, her wording and phrase were so guileless, pure, and quiet that I am sad to think she may go unknown, unread by the vast majority of readers today. Her poem, the "Two-Headed Calf" is probably her best known poem.


The Two-headed Calf
by Laura Gilpin

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky, there
are twice as many stars as usual.

[Sarah Cetra]

Listen, The Two Headed Calf alone is enough to make this a five star read, but also… damn was Gilpin talented. She captures relationships in such a beautiful way. The father-daughter poems were particularly incredible.

Loved.

[Leyla]

"as it is, the water is simply stroking his fur." :((((

3rd re-read and i am finally logging this book.

[Cian]

The genius responsible for The Two-Headed Calf, Laura Gilpin is one of your favourite poets and you don't even know it yet. My favourite poem of hers (and one of my favourite poems of all time) is Seeing a Dog in the Rain: as swift and winding as a punch in the gut, but I love it all the same. It scratches the same melancholic, animalic itch as Two-Headed Calf, only 100 times stronger, and it always makes me misty.

Other highlights include Life After Death, Hanging On, and The Field Where You Lost Your Mother. If there's one thing Laura Gilpin did, it was write a sad poem—and have an intense, sometimes eyebrow-raising attachment to her father; I'm not saying Electra complex, but... she did write a rather confessional poem (aptly titled The Whole Truth) about "wanting more" from her dad and finding a lover like him, so...

Anyway, this collection isn't on sale anymore, so if you want to read it (which you absolutely should), there's a great pdf on the Internet Archive that's easy to find/I can send you.

[Alicen Henning]

I don’t claim to know anything about literature- about what makes something good or bad or brilliant- nor anything about the universe; about life; or anything that matters really. This book found me unassumingly one day while I was supposed to be doing something else and all I can say is that I’ll always be grateful that it did.


Is Here

Everything I own is here

these books
these chairs
this table

when I reach out for them
they meet my touch

they help support me
they bear up under my weight
they bend to my will

they offer me encouragement
at ease in my presence
in this room

none of us have to be here
and yet all of us are

and all of us have been around
long enough to know it is best

to be firm and silent
and accept the way
each thing fits in.


The Whole of It

I am as resilient as a robin’s egg
falling out of the nest
twenty feet above ground

My one salvation
is the little boy across the street
who collects odds and ends.

[shelby]

it’s a shame this is out of print but thanks to the internet archive (donate!!) i got to read the full collection. this is THE writer of the two-headed calf poem. she died in the town right next to mine years ago. she is a beautiful poet. thank you internet good doers/archivists.

[Koeeoaddi]

This would be a brilliant book even if it didn't include "The Two-headed Calf". But it does. 5 stars.

Ms. Gilpin died far too young.

[Erica Lin]

THE TWO-HEADED CALF

“Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass.
And as he stares into the sky, there
are twice as many stars as usual.”

This was the poem that had me seeking out its author. I crossed paths with it sometime a few years ago and it always stayed with me. How melancholic, how tranquil, and how devastating in its implication. How would you distill this kind of feeling in anything other than a poem?

Laura Gilpin was born in 1950 in Wisconsin and a nurse. This poetry book was awarded the Walt Whitman Award and is the only collection of hers that was published while she was alive. Her poems are a heady admixture of the sadness of losing something and the sweetness of starting again - a few steps shy of crossing full-throttle into the surreal and going full Elizabeth Bishop. Her poems span a pretty considerable breadth of topics and stanzaic forms - surprising given how few of them are featured here. She is particularly effective at writing short poems, this being another example:

AN AFTERNOON OF PAINTING

“And the artist, carrying
his watercolor, walks
home in the rain.”

Only three lines, and yet. Did his paintings get wet? Did he know it would rain, and went out painting anyways? Or was the rain falling upon his watercolour and making a mess of it part of the transitory experience, if not the entire purpose, of his outing? What an interesting proposition - a painter working in the rain.

“The Mittens My Grandmother Made Me” is rather wholesome and something you’d find in a children’s collection, and “Concerning the Gold Fountain Pen Sent to Me by My Father on My Twenty-first Birthday with a Note Congratulating Me on My New Independence” is humorous (and a clever way of disguising a letter as a poem; I love when titles are used as a line of poetry itself).

“Hanging On” and “Love Poem for a Dead Man” are both about the death of a lover and took on some unexpected nuance. “The Apple” is an appeal to the physical senses, “Infinity” to how we are infinitely finite in our knowledge, and “Coming Home”, simply bittersweet.

Still - “The Two-Headed Calf” is by far my most favourite poem of hers, though a few more may have have just joined its ranks. :)


Some favourite lines:

”You lived too soon.
If you had waited,
if you had slowed down
for a moment
I might have caught up with you.
Instead, I was always arriving
just as you were ready to leave.
Our few moments together
were always spent saying good-bye.
But that summer our timing was off.
I arrived but you were
already gone.
I looked for you
among the faces at the airport
but you were not there.
I went back to the places
where we used to meet
but you were not there.
I've heard that
when a person dies
he sees his whole life
pass before him.
Is that true? Did you
see me in that last moment?
Was I there?”

“The things I know:
how the living go on living
and how the dead go on living with them
So that in a forest
even a dead tree casts a shadow
and the leaves fall one by one
and the branches break in the wind
and the bark peels off slowly
and the trunk cracks
and the rain seeps in through the cracks
and the trunk falls to the ground
and the moss covers it
and in the spring the rabbits find it
and build their nest inside
and have their young
and their young will live safely
inside the dead tree
So that nothing is wasted in nature
or in love.”

AT THE POINT OF WAKING

“At the point of waking, as at no other time,
it is possible to hold dreams. And even then,
it is only for a few seconds: the moment when
you are awake enough to realize you are still
asleep. And whatever dream is with you, for
that one moment, becomes tangible. You are
able to touch it, stroke it, like a tame animal
asleep in your lap. And you can feel the soft-
ness of his fur and the gradualness of his move-
ments as he wakes slowly, stretching each paw
out in front of him, licking the darkness from
his whiskers, before he leaps away from you,
taking your warmth with him, and leaving his
with you.”

[amxndita (taylor's version)]

“You say there is an infinite number of stars
only because you haven't counted them”. 💫

Este fue el primer poemario que me ha hecho llorar, me dejó con una presión en el pecho, es como si pudiera sentir todo el sufrimiento que hay detrás de cada palabra

[catie 🧿]

i really enjoyed her style of writing. has some rly great poems in it. i think for me the highlights of the book would be “life after death”, “the field where you lost your mother”, “at the point of waking”, “i rarely dream of orpheus”, “separation”, “my shadow”, “dust”, “night song”, “body count”, “two headed calf”, “examination”, “snow”, and “infinity”. if u don’t feel like reading all of the poems here i definitely recommend at least reading those. the book was rly short so i read it in like half an hour tops.

[Atlas J Stormzand]

It is a real tragedy that it is hard to find this book in print nowadays because I loved every last drop of it. Each poem hits a sweet spot in length and language that is unlike anything I've ever read before. If a book could hold you with a gentle strength that says "it will be okay, even if it's not" this would be the book that could do that.

[Henry]

read this at weaver street, just as the sun was setting. it's just for the first time this year a little too cold for me outside, and there's a rowdy group of high school boys laughing and joking at the table in front of me. this feels appropriate. i don't know how to talk about poetry -- great rhythm? -- but some of these really hit. i liked it. 3.5/5. (reading on further) okay I really liked it. I forgot I read this because it's where The Two-headed Calf was published. 4/5.

[savanna]

god this was stunning… laura gilpin you were radiant

my favourites:
- watching my mother sleep
- life after death
- the hub of the universe
- body count
- the two headed calf (one of my favourite poems of all time)
- a toast to the alchemists
- examination

[Laura Defoor]

Favoriete gedichten: Watching My Mother Sleep, Life after death (IV), Concerning the Gold Fountain Pen Sent to Me by My Father on my Twenty-First Birthday with a Note Congratulating Me on My New Independence, The Field Where You Lost Your Mother, The Apple, January, The Two-headed Calf, Body Count

[Ava Jast]

i haven’t read a poetry collection in a minute and this was such a nice way to reintroduce it into my life. #lovesit

[denisa ʚїɞ]

outstanding collection MY HEART IS BEATING SO FAST

[Sarah]

To celebrate the birth of a new two-headed calf I wanted to revisit the book which started my love of poetry.

[I]

Suddenly you understand
your purpose in life:
to crawl through the ferns and mushrooms
asking why

[Gabriella]

My favourite poem is in this book. Laura truly has a way with words. So simple yet incredibly profound.

[Gibsy]

no words for how these poems made me feel.

'If the dog were alive he would be drowning
but as it is, the water is simply stroking
his fur'

[Adam]

Stumbled across the poem "The Two-Headed Calf" and so I thought I'd check out more of Gilpin's poetry.

A nice collection of varied poems, common themes seem to be the passage of time's effect on people, relationships and objects.

Highlights:
-The Two-Headed Calf (obviously)
-My Grandmother's Eighty-sixth Birthday
-The Apple
-Seeing a Dog in the Rain

7/10

[Tala]

I think this is perhaps my favorite poetry collection of all time (so far). Short and concise while packing a punch.
I was first introduced to Laura Gilpin when I read her poem titled ‘The Two-Headed Calf’ and it struck a chord with me. I’m pleased to report that there is merit in the whole collection as well.
4.5 stars

[Annelie]

The two headed calf poem makes me tear up everytime.😭😭😭❤️❤️❤️

[Elsi]

Oi miten ihastuttavia pieniä runoja! Luin tämän kaksi kertaa putkeen yhdeltä istumalta runobrunssilla elämäni parhaan perunasalaatin äärellä. Pidin varsinkin neljännestä osasta, jossa käsiteltiin ihmisen kykenemättömyyttä käsittää luonnon ihmeellisyyttä. Kokoelman nimikin on teemaan harvinaisen osuva.