More on Hill

As has been pointed out, 'Scenes from Comus' does indeed reference a masque (and also references Hugh Wood's music based on 'Comus') and does so in a way that could be said to be equivocal about the power relations involved in presenting a masque to a powerful patron. There's a good discussion of this in Signals magazine. As to whether a single line should be taken out of context, the answer is, probably not, so here's the whole stanza:

With splintering noises the ancient tannoy
celebrates more delay like a bequest
or benefaction long overdue.
An ordinary day, one more rehearsal.
Ducking and weaving, the last flight goes in,
the voice of reason maddens with its fear;
voices of prophesy assail the dead.

In the previous two or three stanzas, 'I' and 'me' is used, and as the above seems to be set in an airport (or at least a metaphorical one), we can assume it's the poet-narrator persona who is speaking here, and in the context, I think we can say that the line 'the voice of reason...' does seem to be ambivalent about reason itself (or at least that's a possible interpretation). Much of this long poem is didactic in style, and the poet-narrator makes what appears to be personal statements of opinion about things, including (as in much of Hill's late poetry) old-age:

implausible, credible muse
whom I assuage by night

or

Where are we sans our lovers, you name the place?
The place itself if common; I have been here many times and enough.

So, in this context, the line about being a 'portal for the heirarchies' can reasonably be interpreted as being statement about what the poet-narrator would like to be. Hill is Professor Emeritus of Literature and Religion, and, of course, religion is all about hierarchies.

Some Thoughts On Geoffrey Hill

As it was John Milton's 400th birthday last week, I re-read some of his poetry, including 'Lycidas' and 'Comus'. This led me to Geoffrey Hill's 'Scenes from Comus' which I've had for some time, but not got round to reading. I've read Hill's poetry, on and off, since the days of 'Mercian Hymns'; the solidity and musicality of his language appeals to me, and if I took the trouble - particularly with the later works - of tracking down the Biblical, literary and other references, I'd probably get even more out of it.

But...

The edition of 'Scenes from Comus' that I have comes with a front-cover endorsement from none other than Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury (not sure what Milton would have thought if he'd been told that bishops were still around 350 years after he campaigned to get rid of them). It struck me that much of Hill's style may stem from the fact that - like the said Arch Bishop - he is a very clever, highly educated man, who nevertheless holds a belief-system, Anglican Christianity, which is difficult - some would say impossible - to justify in the face of current scientific knowledge. So Hill and Williams, in trying to avoid sounding like fundamentalists, are led into extreme subtlety and complexity. Indeed, a recent speech of the Archbishop's concerning Sharia Law was so subtle that it was misconstrued by almost everyone who heard it.

Not that there's anything wrong with subtlety and complexity, it's just that in Hill, it sometimes feels like it's being used to mask some umpleasant sentiments. So, in 'Scenes from Comus', where the speaker is talking of contemporary culture, we have lines like:

The voice of reason maddens with its fear

So becomes unreasonable? Or, it's maddening when reason is afraid? Or, more worryingly, reason is maddening because it's making people afraid? Hard to tell. Or:

The cunning is to swing it, be a hinge
of the unhinged time. At the very worst
gaping on all, missing what pillage finds;
at best a portal for the heirarchies.

The bit about being a hinge is just a Yeatsian superiority complex - everyone's unhinged except him and a select few of his friends. But 'portal for the heirarchies'! What on earth does that mean? It sounds impressive, mystical even (unless you're thinking of an internet portal), but... come off it Geoffrey! Are you saying that 'the best' would be some prophet - like yourself - dispensing wisdom from those higher in the hierarchy? Hardly a very subtle idea after all, though veiled in bardic tones.

But... I'll continue to read Hill - just as I read Pound - and enjoy passages like these:

The small oaks crest the ridge, the sun appears
cresting this instant; their topmost ranks take fire
and vaporize or find some other form
wherewith to be not of this world.
How can I tell you? - dawn after dawn,
immeasurable taking up of dross and dying.

To conclude, here's a slightly tongue-in-cheek review of Hill's "Speech! Speech!" which I wrote for Poetry Nottingham in 2002:

Geoffrey Hill's position in contemporary poetry can be compared to Milton, after the collapse of his ideals and the restoration of the monarchy, raging at the world around him. Hill is reviled by both the avant-garge and traditionalist camps, and for that reason alone, 'Speech! Speech!' ought to be read; that it will not be by many is due to the spectre of Difficulty. And there can't be anyone who would not find this poem difficult. A comparison with that other poet renowned for his opacity, J.H.Prynne, is instructive. Prynne's work cannot be deciphered by following up allusions and references or using scholarly resources. His technique is to resist this, and deliberately bewilder and disorientate his readers, thus (the theory goes) forcing them into a new accommodation with language. Hill is less elliptical than Prynne, more didactic (even, in this book, to the point of telling readers which syllables to stress, by accenting them), and ultimately more authoritarian. Hill's poetry is made difficult by the mass of learning applied to it, in the manner of Pound. But a reader who was diligent enough to do the research, could decipher most of it.

And what would the meaning be, after such explication? A not-too-subtle hint is that there are 120 stanzas:

As many As the days
that were | of SODOM

Leaving aside the worrying thought that a twentieth century intellectual might approve of the god of the Old Testament and what he did to the city of Sodom, the persona in these poems is that of the grand poet/scholar railing at those too ignorant or boorish to appreciate Beauty/Modern Poetry/Their Fallen Ways:

Erudition. Pain. Light.
Imagine it great unavoidable work;
although: heroic verse
a non-starter, says PEOPLE.

Hill's speech can be linguistically exciting, and there are even flashes of dark humour (the title alludes to our modern addiction to being centre-stage for our 15 minutes of fame). But he presents a mystical vision of England, drawing on Bunyan and Blake, that many will find disturbingly nationalistic. The main theme of the poem is the familiar high-modernist one;that the modern world is a mess; that the ignorant masses have usurped cultural life; that popular culture is worthless; that an enlightened few are struggling to maintain high standards against a flood of mediocrity. You may not agree with this, basically right wing, view. I don't. But, as ever with poetry, it's not what you say, it's how you say it.

John Bloomberg-Rissman's long poem 'No Sounds Of My Own Making', which was published by Leafe Press in 2007 is now also available on-line as a single column of text (it comes to 200 pages in book form). It's accompanied by an illuminating essay by Karla Kelsey. It's good to see this fine piece of work being made available like this. Congrats to JBR.

And then there's this sort of thing, also from Tender Buttons:

A no, a no since, a no since when, a no since when since, a no since when since a no since when since, a no since, a no since when since, a no since, a no, a no since a no since, a no since, a no since.

The only way I can read this is to speak it aloud, as a type of sound-poetry, somewhat along the lines of Hugo Ball and the DaDa movement, though Tender Buttons was published two years before the DaDa manifesto. Amazing. A true original.

Here are some short poems:

A BLUE COAT

A blue coat is guided guided away, guided and guided away, that is the particular color that is used for that length and not any width not even more than a shadow.


ANGST

I had angst


THE GREEN SEA

Above his head clanged
Turning
And there were no dreams in this sleep
Over this table


OUT OF MINE

rather than melt the ice passes through my hand
i pass through another way
dead surrounded by white
light flowers out


EYE GLASSES

A color in shaving, a saloon is well placed in the centre of an alley.


A NEW CUP AND SAUCER

Enthusiastically hurting a clouded yellow bud and saucer, enthusiastically so is the bite in the ribbon.

Recognise them? The second and third poems were written by Ted Berrigan in the 1970s, the fourth was written by Tom Raworth in the 1960s, and the others were written by Getrude Stein, a woman born 134 years ago, and who published these poems in 1914. The poems in 'Tender Buttons' wouldn't be out of place in a poetry collection written now, and they seem to prefigure a lot of contemporary work, including LANGUAGE poetry and much of what we'd currently call post-modernism. All of the poems above, by their very abstraction, are questioning the relationship between language and the world - a contemporary preoccupaton, but not in 1914 (I'm ready to be contradicted here). It strikes me that Ezra Pound now reads like a great poet from another era, while Gertrude Stein reads like a great contemporary.

Hotel February

by

Alan Baker

£4/$8 (postage free - contact Leafe Press in the UK). pub. Bamboo Books. Cover image, Bob Rissman. Stapled pamphlet.


Read a poem from this pamphlet on Todd Swift's blog.

I've been reading Gertrude Stein's 'Picasso' to while away the evenings in my hotel this week. It's quite something: a highly personal and insightful description of Picasso's life and work (at least up to the 1930s). It's also a triumph of style: plain, direct and yet with a clever use of punctuation, mainly using commas where you'd expect a full-stop, that throws you slightly, and makes you read more carefully. Her comments and asides on art, history and psychology are masterful:

"The spirit of everybody is changed, of a whole people is changed, but mostly nobody knows it, and a war forces them to recognise it because during a war the appearance of everything changes very much quicker, but really the whole change has been accomplished, and a war is only something which forces eveyone to recognise it. The French revolution was over when war forced everybody to recognise it, the American revolution was accomplished before the war, the war is only a publicity agent which makes everyone know what has happened, yes, it is that."

That final "yes, it is that" clinches it: giving the impression that she is talking to herself, that she has just realised something as she speaks/writes.

Francophone?

Having described the poet Abdellatif Laâbi as a "Morrocan francophone poet" I found this statement by him in an interview in Double Change magazine

"I don't really like the term 'Francophone.' Aside from the fact that it's politically charged, the term is reductive. It's a means of confining very diverse literary experiences, each of which are distinct, into a singular issue with language."

Laâbi argues that Maghrebian, African, and Caribbean literature in French has parallels with writers like Milan Kundera (Czech, writing in French) and Salman Rushdie (Indian-origin, writing in English), and that they constitute a new kind of literature emerging from the peripheries.

The whole enlightening interview can be found here.

I meant to mention the poetry/artwork by Ed Baker which is now available on Litter, soon to be followed by poetry from Morrocan poet Abdellatif Laâbi, in a new translation by American Gordon Hadfield. Work is hectic at the moment. After the delights of John and Kathy's visit and our French holiday, it's back to the grind. I'm working in Bracknell, Berkshire this week, next week in Prague (an improvement on Bracknell, admitedly), then, I hope at home to catch up.

I might add to my previous post, that the charming provincial towns of France idealised in my last post saw large-scale and prolonged riots in 2005 by sections of the population that official France likes to pretend don't exist. Toulouse was a scene of burning cars, smashed windows and police baton charges. The situation was worsened by the inflamatory statements of the Interior Minister, who became a divisive hate-figure before he was elected President by a different section of the population.