Each Thing We Know Is Changed Because We Know It

Kevin Hearle

Kevin Hearle’s collection Each Thing We Know Is Changed Because We Know It explores the writer’s sense of identity against the backdrop of his Southern California hometown—what it was and what it is now and, ultimately, what that change means to him. In these poems we see a love-hate relationship with a land that has become a stranger to him before his eyes. Hearle is a native of Santa Ana, the town known for its winds which once fed the wild California brushfires, but now “Sweeps away the L.A. smog, a haze which is the air of millions.”

Kevin Hearle was born on St. Patrick’s Day, 1958, in Santa Ana, California, the second of three sons of a family whose mother’s side had come to California during the Gold Rush and had moved south to Santa Ana in 1871. He holds degrees from Stanford, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and UC–Santa Cruz. His work has appeared in the anthologies California Poetry: from the Gold Rush to the Present, The Poetry Cure, and Unfolding Beauty: Celebrating California's Landscapes. He lives with his wife on the San Francisco peninsula.

A sample poem from the book

For Confucius, Giordano Bruno, and my Uncle Johnie

I sing this song for Confucius,

who loved music and recommended it

as a means of moderating grief;

and I sing this song

for Giordano Bruno, who

loved memory and felt

that nothing

was ever moderated it was

transposed into a different form;

and I sing

this song for my Uncle Johnie,

who, in his love and

drunkenness

at eighty-two, called me

his grandson and begged me

to remember his dreams.

I cannot please them all:

I remember their dreams

only so much

as they are mine, and I sing

to remember them, those

who made me who I am.

And, if I should wake up

from their dreams no longer singing,

that would be the grief

most wholly mine.