An 'ethical' response to 11/9 and 9/11

This post is written from Paris on November 13, one year after the brutal killing and wounding of (mainly) young (mainly) French people sitting at cafés, watching a sporting event, and going to a concert. A number of them are still in the hospital receiving treatment for their wounds. We all know what terrorism is, and the sad fact that it plays on ignorance and destroys innocent people. Brainwashing is usually required to get people to kill other people and to blow themselves up.

As we begin to cope with the fact that an alt-right candidate is now president elect of a leading democracy, and brace for further hate-crimes (these first days of no response from Donald Trump about incidents of school bullying and unleashed racist slurs do not reassure!), those who read Geoffrey Hill's poetry may feel that they have been prepared, somehow, to resist. For many Americans, that is the only course of viable action. Shocking was the way distorted language colored the campaign, and most likely distortions of language will only get worse. 

The sermon Rowan Williams gave at Emmanuel College for the funeral of Sir Geoffrey Hill actually addressed the role of poetry and language.

It is true that poetry is not ‘about’ passive endurance; just as true that it is not ‘about’ inspiring readers to political action, even political violence.

Yet --

Poetry is a real good, and not the only one. It is an aspect of the hunger for justice. It must do justice in its wording and do what it can to carry stresses that are not only its business. And, as he suggests almost casually, one of the most significant ways in which poetry does this is by memorialising the dead. Geoffrey’s readers will recognise at once the centrality of this to his own practice: if poetry cannot be either propagandist or exquisite, one thing it is singularly equipped for is doing justice to the past of words and speakers, giving voice in a multitude of ways to that always-present cloud of witness, about whose fate in one sense we can do nothing, yet whose life and voice is in some way in our hands.

Poetry, Hill's poetry (and that of Auden, MacNeice, Pound, Yeats, Sitwell, Hernández, Celan...) may be the language the United States needs most now. And plenty of satire will also be needed. As Hill said in his Paris Review interview (2000), "genuinely difficult art is truly democratic." It counters propaganda's binary simplifications.

Links
Broken Hierarchies, published by Oxford University Press.
Rowan Williams, "Sir Geoffrey Hill," PN Review 43:2 (2016).
"Geoffrey Hill, the Art of Poetry #80," Paris Review 154 (Spring 2000).

Murphy's Hill = integrity

Well, at last Kenneth Haynes has been mentioned with some admiration for having tackled the task of getting Hill's twenty-one volumes together for us, the consuming readers. Hayden Murphy's review of Broken Hierarchies in today's Scotland Herald reveals a bit about the company he keeps with Dominicans and Jesuits. That must be good training for writing a fair-handed and subtle review.

Since the reviewer has been reading Hill's poetry since the 1960s, it can be assumed that he has had time enough to digest the material, though for him like the rest of us, coming to an assured space of complete comprehension of the Daybooks is not something humanly possible after only one reading. And thinking about the limits of our meager human intelligence—compared to the omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and immutability found among the theologian's list of God's traits—reminds me of Saul Bellow's description of  how happy God would be to sit down incognito and relax at a café in France. This anthropomorphism has often entertained me: with such a list to cope with, why wouldn't God be tired and want a coffee or a drink? With further joy, I rather imagine God's lingering in the café—ordering a second drink—while reading the Daybooks. I bet She would understand everything on a first reading!

I shall look forward to reading a bit more of Mr. Murphy.

Hayden Murphy, "Geoffrey Hill: Broken Hierarchies - Poems 1952-2012 (OUP)," Scotland Herald (January 11, 2014).

Climate / is now dynamite.

Here's one illustration for this line from Broken Hierarchies:

Collection of Reviews and Comments for Broken Hierarchies

This post will grow as new reviews are discovered.

Colin Burrow, "Rancorous Old Sod," London Review of Books 36:4 (February 20, 2014).

Hayden Murphy, "Geoffrey Hill: Broken Hierarchies - Poems 1952-2012 (OUP)," Scotland Herald (January 11, 2014).

Nicholas Lezard, "Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 by Geoffrey Hill—review," Guardian (November 20, 2013).

Jeremy Noël Tod, "A vast volume offers the chance to assess one of poetry's greats" in The Sunday Times (November 8, 2013).

David-Antoine Williams, "Broken Hierarchies: Precursor to a Variorum?" (November 6, 2013).

Mr. Bojangles, dance!

Wouldn’t it be great if authors would write a review of their own works that took up the leading points, highlighting the original accomplishment, and guiding the confused reader a bit into the work itself? Readers of modernist texts in particular might find this kind of exercise helpful. Charles Péguy did just that, under a pseudonym, for his late long poem Eve. There were several reasons for this. Speakers of French will notice that it is a language that contains the phrase "Moi, je…." But rather than being taken up with himself, Péguy was anticipating the kind of reception his work was likely to get, and wanted to avoid misinterpretation. He must have been worried about being overly admired by the very people he found himself more inclined to be writing against. One hundred years ago, in 1913, Péguy was writing with a driven urgency.

Geoffrey Hill’s Broken Hierarchies arrived in my mailbox yesterday. I think the notion of driven urgency might also do well to describe it. It is Hill’s own "boutique des cahiers" of sorts, containing sixty years of poetic composition. In the revised, much longer  "Hymns to Our Lady of Chartres" I read: 

Things are desperate here as I believe

you know, Lady. The poor in heart possess

three fewer skins; subsist on swallowed glass;

Commedia constrained to no reprieve.  (165)

Seasoned and un-seasoned readers of Sir Geoffrey Hill will find much to be excited about in the word-play and resonance in this volume, especially in the most recent poems. For the nursery-rhyme crowd or those that enjoy Stevie Smith:

Mind drift. Mend craft. Deemed folly. Shamed. Daft.   (606)

Tony Harrison fans may be intrigued: 

You should all fuck less

and pray more. Climate 

is now dynamite. (618)

For those who prefer Colin Firth, there is:

The old King’s speech favoured our new wireless— (634)

For capitalism-bashers:

Out-of-sync Dollarton on the north shore. (639)

For Benjamin Britten fans:

Buoyed by the storm music from Peter Grimes (641)

For those who favor iambic pentameter combined with social justice (see the context):

Still I would check my name if I were you. (650)

Then there’s a bit of Auden-bashing (but I think in jest):

Very strange man, Auden, very strange man. (659)

Oh, and by the way, with the 100-year anniversary of the great massacre of World War I on the horizon, those looking for allusions to that war will not be disappointed. This is true especially in several poems published here for the first time. To some extent the volume commemorates the poet’s luck at having a father—at having the luck of being fathered, and those circumstances that saved the poet’s father from the Somme.

Singing its beatitudes is perhaps a rather pitiful attempt at a first encounter with the book, and (so far) I’ve only given it about three hours. But then, reviewers and mere bloggers can be comforted from the outset as to the company they keep, when one reads: "Small steadfast throng / go get it wrong"(608). Of course it will take a bit more time to "come 'round right" as in the Shaker Song, but this I have already understood: If Péguy was a "footslogger of genius" (144), Hill is the "jumping boy"(487) that never stopped tap dancing. "He talked of life," as Jerry Jeff Walker sang in 1968. But these words should be heard with the voice of Nina Simone: 

Mr. Bojangles, Mr. Bojangles, Mr. Bojangles, dance.  

Impatience is a virtue

Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 is out now, or almost.  A survey of Amazon in France and UK as well as the OUP   on-line this morning shows that it "is not yet available". . . . but there is already a review by Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian (November 20, 2013).  It's not that what is said in this review is off, but it's perhaps a bit curious that there are no page numbers? Nonetheless, before entering into any argument with the venerable reviewer, I shall endeavor to read the book itself.

The impatience to lay hands on a copy grows with the mounting buzz.  One site indicates the publication date is November 28.  That means we'll all be waiting at least four more days before it ships.

Poetry Foundation, Chicago (November 20, 2013).