"Annunciations," from a philosophical viewpoint

Irene Hossack has posted a paper on Geoffrey Hill's "Annunciations" on her blog.  Here is an excerpt:

"Being in a position of unknowing is a condition for the work of poetry: attending to the poem unraveling conditions a bond and an opening to poetic insight.  This space is beyond and before the place of knowledge and sources from where the poetry might arise."

"Obsessed with the difficulty of honest poetic speech"

That is Adam Kirsch describing Geoffrey Hill's New and Collected Poems 1952-1992 in his review of Without Title (New York Sun, March 28, 2007).  "The best reason to read Mr. Hill is . . . the self-forgetting that occurs when he writes about nature and landscape, love and death."

David Gervais on Hill's "Late Flowering" in PN Review

A few tidbits from "The Late Flowering of Geoffrey Hill" by David Gervais in PN Review 183, 35.1 (September-October 2008):

"...what gives Hill's verse its name for 'difficulty' is less its abstruseness (things can after all be looked up) than its refusal to spell out the links in its chain."

"...Hill's verse is not 'difficult' because it is recondite but because it puts us on the spot as readers, that is, on the spot both morally and aesthetically."

"The hostile voices that disrupt the surface of Speech! Speech! are ultimately inseparable from its 'noble vernacular', woven into the fabric of the very poetry they threaten.  Nothing better shows why Hill is essentially a public poet than this obligation he feels to include such alien voices within his verse even when they run counter to its lyric inspiration."

What does he think about elections in the USA?

How would GH vote, if he were voting in the US this year?  There can be no answer to that question, but we do know the following, thanks to his article "Civil Polity and the Confessing State" in the Warwick Review 2.2 (June 2008):

"Cogent difficulty, that yields up its meaning slowly, that submits its integrity to the perplexed persistence of readers of good will, is one of the best safeguards that democracy can have."

Carol Rumens on "Tristia: 1891-1938"

Carol Rumens chose "Tristia:1891-1938" as poem of the week in the Guardian (August 4, 2008). Sagely she writes, "I would argue that any amount of difficulty is justified in a poem: so too is any amount of simplicity, provided, in both cases, the poet is doing something sufficiently interesting and memorable with language."

Theodor Adorno vs. William Logan?

"Political slogans, designed for mass manipulation, unanimously stigmatize as 'luxury', 'snobism', and 'highbrow', everything cultural which displeases the commissars," wrote Adorno in 1949... and in 2008 one might consider swinging that phrase at William Logan's recent review of Hill's A Treatise of Civil Power in the New York Times Sunday Book Review (January 20, 2008).

For a review of Logan's The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin (2005) by Brian Henry, see Verse.

R.W. & G.H.

Le Monde on August 5th ran two articles concerning the end of the Lambeth conference that emphasized the unresolved tensions within Anglicanism. My thoughts went to Rowan Williams who admirably conversed with Geoffrey Hill at the opening of “Geoffrey Hill & His Contexts” at Keble (July 2, 2008). What follows are excerpts from notes taken at the conference and may (unintentionally) misrepresent the speakers. I do hope that a complete transcript will become available soon.

RW: began by quoting Ruskin, “Everything costs its own cost and one of the best virtues is a just desire to pay it.”

GH: spoke of his new article in the Warwick Review, concerning the just state, “…we live in plutocratic anarchy,” destroying the sense of intrinsic value.*

RW: “Poetry embodies the labor of seeking…” he said and mentioned two ways a poem shows laboriousness, through the need expressed and the muscles (heroism) of fixing the reader on complexity.

GH: “I see difficulties on the way leading to semantic epiphany . . .” T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets mumble and proclaim difficulties in a low-grade way. Those “pensées” don’t engage with real struggle like the lesser-known Kierkegaardian poems that Eberhart wrote.

RW: quoted Bradley, “the judgment to contain the condition of the judgment . . .”

GH: Bradley’s “somehow” signals the epiphanic final moment of a poem. John Berryman, quoting R.P. Blackmur in a poem suggests that the art of poetry is amply distinguished from verse by its fresh idiom, language twisted and posed such that a poem “adds to the stock of available reality.” Poems change the course of the world by extending reality. “A great poem is an annunciation or epiphany.”

RW: Hopkins?

GH: The poem is a monumental object that contains bidding. “Difficulty” is the greatest safeguard democracy can have.

RW: What about time, the time to read and understand and make criticism?

GH: Velocity is increasing exponentially and will destroy memory. Computer technology is a velocity thing: a plethora of information speedily applied will destroy criticism.


*See: Geoffrey Hill, “Civil Polity and the Confessing State,” The Warwick Review 2:2 (June 2008)
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/warwickreview/jun2008

Reginald Shepherd on Geoffrey Hill

Reginald Shepherd wrote (June 19, 2007) at http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com:

Geoffrey Hill observes that “difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. If you write as if you had to placate or in any way entice their lack of interest, then I think you are making condescending assumptions about people. I mean people are not fools. But so much of the populist poetry of today treats people as if they were fools.” I don’t want to be patronized or condescended to, as a reader or a person; I would prefer that the poet assume that I am both intelligent and interested.

One-Minute Book Reviews

Janice Harayda, creator of the "One-Minute Book Reviews" blog, has written several entries about Geoffrey Hill which don't seem frightened by difficulty, at least not for 60 seconds...
http://oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/?s=geoffrey+hill

Her own books are featured on her website:

http://www.janiceharayda.com

Strong Coffee

When asked by a student about a methodology for reading difficult poetry such as Pound's or his own, during a conference held at the University of Caen ("Selected Poems from Modernism to Now," March 20-22, 2008, organized by Hélène Aji and Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec), Geoffrey Hill said, "Read Fast." For those of you seeking to improve your speed reading, may I recommend a good cup of expresso?

Hill spoke at the Collège de France on March 18, 2008, and illustrated his remarks by reading some poetry. You can listen to the talk here.

Someone filmed him reading "The Storm."
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=51g-hrs5oVc