How odd to think that Hill, the bane of postmodern poets and critics, may be the most “avant-garde” poet working today. He pushes the resources of English—etymology, music, multiplicity of meaning, rhetorical devices—further than other writers dare. His poems can be as densely allusive, multi-voiced, polylingual, dissonant, and radically playful as Finnegans Wake. Many poets deploy surface difficulty (Guy Davenport called it “false density”) to mask essential emptiness; when Hill is difficult, he has something to say that cannot be said glibly, and he thus rewards attentive readers.
Monday, September 07, 2009
The dominant poet ...
... of our age. Patrick Kurp reviews Selected Poems by Geoffrey Hill. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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It's an excellent piece. I hope many of your readers make the proper time for it.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the ideas about poetry expressed here, and at the same time I don't quite agree that Hill is "avant-garde" or "great." He definitely serves us well by swimming against tides of fashion, by doing the best he can to make the words into something worth reading, but also using them well to express ideas. So I respect Hill. But he almost never makes me feel embodied in the poem, or take me inside the poet's experience. I don't often get the feeling, in a Hill poem, of what Adrienne Rich meant when she opined "A poem ought to BE an experience, rather than be ABOUT an experience."
ReplyDeleteI often think that Hill is a poet's poet, in the way that Robert Fripp is a guitarist's guitarist: a high standard set within the the profession, but not as sublimely interesting to non-writers, or non-musicians.
I agree with Art. Have just finished reading Hill's latest book of critical essays. Quite a struggle. Worth reading, but frustrating. Lots of obscure references, with little or no context or explanation. To use Hill's own words (or ones he quotes):they ‘embody the positive virtue of negative statements’ while serving as ‘a calculated trap for mediation.’
ReplyDeleteTo make one final thought, which occurs to me later, I note that it is often the cry of the reactionary anti-avant-garde to label what Hill presents as "avant-garde." Saying that a reactionary turn against current fashion is somehow avant-garde is a cry I usually hear coming from those who have a more conservative agenda, be it literary or social. It rings false on the ear. It's rather a statement of an anti-anti-position than it is a positive statement of a position. A double-negative, as it were.
ReplyDeleteThis doesn't impress me. I find Mr. Kurp to be at his very best when he presents a thoughtful appreciation, a slice of life, a response to something literary, a daily experience woven in with what he's reading and thinking about.
I find him to be at his worst when, in an article like this, he seems to want to underline an ideology, or present an agenda. It's not even so much that I disagree with him; or, rather, that I don't totally agree with him. It's the smugness. It wears thin after awhile. People who KNOW they're right are the root of most of the problematic arguments in literary circles, or in social ones for that matter.
I am always willing to stipulate something for the sake of discussion. But I feel bludgeoned here. As if I were somehow intellectually inadequate if I dared to disagree. That's the smugness I refer to. It doesn't leave open much room for actual discussion.