H.L. Hix's As Easy As Lying is a collection of critical essays and reviews from literary magazines. Since 1990, Hix has published three books of poetry, four books of philosophy/criticism, and a book of translation. Needless to say, he works rapidly, and there is some evidence of haste. Consider this passage from the collection's first essay:

I wanted my first book to be a feather tickling the clitoris of the world; the rhythmic ringing of steel on steel as a sledgehammer swung by a sweating coolie joined the country's coasts by rail; a goldfinch pinching thistle seed on a garden feeder in morning sunlight while the young boy watching it holds his breath.

How did Hix intend us to take the passage? As comedy, it is clumsy. As hyperbole—even in context—it is dull and labored. Hix produces a similarly puzzling description in a review much later in the book: "Just such fruitful surgery does Jason Sommer perform in his evocative, funny, sad, and damn-near-perfect book." "Fruitful surgery," at least for me, conjures images of animated, scalpel-wielding apples and oranges. While evocative and funny, it is for the most part sad that anyone should be praised so imperfectly. These are just two instances, but they represent well the occasional awkwardness of Hix's prose style.
          Nonetheless haste often works in Hix's favor. Some of his aphorisms are inspired, perhaps by the very speed of their production: "Humans, the animals whose main parasites belong to their own species," he quips in "Toward A Prodigal Logic." Moreover, when Hix hurries to put the recent history of poetry in context, he proves remarkably practical and observant:

The hyperbolic assertion [...] that during the sixties, seventies, and eighties free verse had complete control of the poetry world, nearly eliminating formal poetry in an act of aesthetic cleansing, sounds a false note, the tinny clang of conspiracy theory. John Hollander, Anthony Hecht, James Merrill, and others were publishing with the best house. Howard Moss was editing the New Yorker. And the list of Pulitzers in any twenty-year period since its inception has featured a majority of poets writing in the traditional form. Even in the depths of the purported reign of free verse, in the 1970s and 1980s, the prize went to more narrative and formalist poets than not: Richard Howard, James Merrill, Howard Nemerov, and Donald Justice among them. Pulitzer score: Richard Wilbur 2, Robert Bly 0. The famine may have been visible, with the hungry in the streets, but (as Amartya Sen points out) famine arises not from insufficient food supply but from the food's becoming too expensive for the poor to purchase. The wealthy never starve, and Formalists have eaten well in every decade.

Note the careful balance of political and social commentary in the analogy concluding the passage. Elsewhere, Hix's balance appears as part of a common-sense approach to heady philosophical and aesthetic issues. In the first half of the book, he weeds out myths about postmodernism, points out the shared interests of postmodernism and New Formalism, and provides a sketch of the relevant history and social context of poetic issues. In this way, Hix works toward his own poetics with its love of experiment and appreciation for the traditional. His eagerness to quote a wide range of poets and philosophers marks his rhetoric as diplomatic: Mark Jarman, Dana Gioia, and Mary Oliver merit mention as readily as do Frank Bidart, Jorie Graham, and Carl Phillips. He quotes Deleuze, Wittgenstein, and Nietzsche, but he is not forgetful of Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine. In each essay, then, Hix crafts powerful appeals. For example, he draws on Wittgenstein's ideas about games to criticize the notion that poetry has an "essence" (an essential identity rooted exclusively in form, in this case):

Wittgenstein challenges his reader to consider "the proceedings we call 'games,'" including board games, card games, ball games, and so on. "What is common to them all?" he asks. "Don't say: 'There must be something in common, or they would not be called "games"—but look and see whether there is anything in common to all." Doing so reveals, according to Wittgenstein, not some feature common to all games but "a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing."

So we here discover one of Hix's deepest convictions: poetry, too, is a broad network of familial groups, some in competition, but most closely allied. Even if this family portrait is a little blurry for its rapid development, it is nonetheless just what the literary community needs to see from time to time. Hix has the common sense to point out what we have in common: artists and their audiences, he argues, are part of a political plurality; we are not just a collection of minor warring tribes.
           Ultimately, paradoxically, Hix follows in the tradition of William Blake, which is most plain in the aphoristic abandon of his concluding work, "Toward A Prodigal Logic." In this poem-prose, Hix lays out short, assertive passages of proverb-laced rhetoric; the passages alternate sides of the page and are capped with fragmentary assertions (such as "Correct me if I'm wrong" or "Except" or "Oh, come on") in the center of the page. (This has the visual effect of some kind of poetic syllogism, but I must confess that any further method to its madness is lost to me.) The work focuses on paradoxes of form, truth, meaning, language, etc. "We created language to express not our knowledge but our doubts," he states at one stage. "It is hard not to state what you mean, though the poet must try," he states later. While unsaid, unresolved, open-ended, unwilled-yet-discovered properties of language and mind remain the focus, Hix nurtures the urge to transcend the limits of his argument: "To ask philosophical questions without a philosophical method" forms one of the stated aims collected in a montage of purposes at the center of the work.
           In the end, Hix excels most at assertions of refined preference: "I care less for books I cannot put down than for those I cannot forget," he opines. More than just preference, though, his prodigal logics resolve and extend the moral and aesthetic arguments of the essays that precede them. Whatever the occasional silliness of his prose style, then, Hix argues with a high seriousness worth our attention. He offers straightforward visions of poetry without ignoring the complexities of the art.