Holy Hill (from See What I See, Zerogram Edition)

“Poetry is a strange angel. And has very little to do with enjoyment, actually. Great deal to do with joy, not with enjoyment. Enjoyment is patronizing and possessive, like the old archaic euphemism of a man sexually enjoying a woman’s body. So when you enjoy a poem, you say, You are mine. And you please me in my current mood. And the Angel of Poetry says, Sod off. Sod off!” — Geoffrey Hill, 2009 poetry reading

The last of the fifteen Oxford lectures Geoffrey Hill gave during his five-year tenure as Poetry Professor (works not yet published, but online, as sound files), is called “Words, Words, Words.” Hill spends the first moments introducing the poet and critic Charles Williams, before using the last two-thirds (forty-five minutes) to critique Philip Larkin’s well-known poem “Church Going” by putting a hot poker to Larkin’s word choices, repeatedly checking his softball language (for Hill) against the Oxford English Dictionary and how he “poetically employ[s] colloquial ambiguity,” branding the line “what remains when disbelief has gone?” as “an act of blundering self-therapy.” These lectures are hour long meteorites demonstrative of what is so missing in today’s literary weather — a passion for form where one consistently thinks of oneself secondarily and, in the process, abandons the late- twentieth-century dependence, according to Hill, on “the quotidian and how it has been, with significant exceptions, overvalued as the authenticating factor in works of the imagination. The poem itself, assessed in this way, becomes the author’s promise to pay on demand, to provide real and substantial evidence of a suffering life for which the poem itself is merely a kind of tictac or flyer.” And indeed, Hill reveals in the final minutes of the lecture that one may take all five years’ worth of the lectures and reduce them to one quote he came upon in a Guardian interview of choreographer Mark Morris: “I’m not interested in self-expression, but in expressiveness.” So how do we go beyond and make art that will resonate over years and centuries? Hill would say it starts with knowing the history of our art, especially in the light of its current dimming.

If we are living in “end-times,” and most of the world’s scientists so aver, it seems incumbent to think about our place in history; to ask, as we always should, What’s worth doing? I don’t mean to parse our collective body weight with a certain twenty-first-century technology-finessed truculence, something leading one of the more conscientious fiction critics, Mark Athitakis, to write a “think-piece” for the Washington Post with the title “Where is the great millennial novel?” A few weeks later, Henrik Bering, a critic writing in The New Criterion about his reading habits, observed: “…I seem to lack the patience to read about high-strung millennials with partnership issues.” Glib, yes, but it holds a few strains of truth. Many people in the “writing world” often salt their criticisms of someone’s work with the old sangfroidian saw “What is at stake?” And if you have to ask, it’s usually not there. “What’s worth doing?” and “What is at stake?” sit in the same section of the ballpark, but they probably don’t like each other. Still, our “moment” consistently demands answers to many other queries that leapfrog the question of the work itself.

As in Athitakis’s gambit, there is much perturbation these days about writers finding their place, something like a niche. Though such a position is ideally recognized by others and not self-appointed — to do so tests the last vestiges of compunction and most writers would not risk such a foolishness. But finding a place might be exactly where we don’t want to be. Shouldn’t a true artist fight against any consumer packaging and the sorry regulation to the flavor of the moment box — one often not of one’s own choosing? Besides social media, or in spite of it, authors are expected to promote themselves to puppet-like degrees. Guy Davenport saw the writing on the wall in 1998 when he wrote:

The idea persists that writing is an activity of thoughtful, idealistic, moral people called authors and that they are committed to protecting certain values vital to a well-ordered society…To this assumption there has been added…the image of the author as a celebrity, someone worth hearing at a reading or lecture even if you have no intention of parting with a dime for one of the author’s books.

The anxiety around the recognition race is an endless cacophony of weasel words. The author, Justin E. Smith, got it too right when he recently wrote, “ I am struck by how much, at this point, what we still call ‘books’ are no longer physical objects so much as they are multi-platform campaigns in which the physical object is only a sort of promotional tie-in.” Why, yes, the book now is a promotional tie-in; at The Strand you pay the price of one to get into an event to see the author read from it, but, in more cases, to divulge their “opinions” and other superficialities, like the time of day he or she writes. Yet, “campaign” is perhaps the most important word in that sentence. Obviously, a writer’s ideas or rip-offs and their lyrical beauty in prose or verse are no substitute for “getting your book out there.”

During one spate of gray winter months, my taste for fictional prose, as happens every few years, dried up and I began to run in the fields of posey, visiting old friends before reading one of the best American poetry critics of our day, William Logan. Arch and acerbic, but dignified, he is often undeniably correct in many of his assessments. In his many “Verse Chronicles” (reviewing five or so books at a time), I saw a name repeated again and again — Geoffrey Hill, who had died just two years before. Hill had written sixteen books in the last twenty years of his life, dwarfing the first five books in nearly forty. On-line, there were many murmurs of his agon with the prosified poetry of the moment, and of his own poetry’s “difficulty.” On first reading the poems, I recognized those “radiant node[s] and cluster[s]” of Ezra Pound, who so defined a poetic image. Pound was famous for his ideograms, a term, according to Davenport, meaning “a pattern of images, which is read as the sum of its components, as in the Chinese written character, which is built up of radicals,” with radicals defined as root parts. So an ideogram is a pattern of these radiant nodes or clusters where the verse electrifies as it fossilizes, becoming a permanent relic in the ongoing scree-pile of Western Art. Hill himself would have called them “fields of force” (a term taken from Pound and Hugh Kenner), and here is one from Hill, the beginning of Canto XX in his Orchards of Syon:

Two nights’ and three days’ rain, with the Hodder
well up, over its alder roots; tumblings
of shaly late storm light; the despised
ragwort, luminous, standing out,
stereoscopically, across twenty yards,
on the farther bank. The congregants
of air and water, of swift reflection,
vanish between the brightness and shadow.
Mortal beauty is alienation; or not,
as I see it. The rest passagework,
settled beforehand, variable, to be lived through
as far as one can, with uncertain
tenure.

It is nature, pure and not so simple, being parsed through the speaker’s mind: “congregants” (a word full of religious connotations) of air and water give off a “swift reflection.” The act of seeing gives way to a glorious expanse, with a commentator piping hidden lyricisms into one’s innards: the “tumblings” are of not just light, but “late storm light,” which is colored by the colorless color of “shaly.” Eight lines of atmosphere before the guillotine of old-fogey judgment bears down and hacks out, “Mortal beauty is alienation.” There follows a dialed-back mantra for existence, taking to task the platitude of life being very difficult and mysterious, but never saying it; instead, life is our “passagework” (and between the words “rest” and “passagework” is a caesura where “is” would detract from and muss the rhythm), while “with uncertain tenure” blows its second surly word through more hidebound circumstances.

I found myself nodding at nearly every overture of Hill’s in his lectures and the Collected Critical Writings as copacetic with prose, especially how it should obey at least some lyrical and acoustic strictures to guide its lines (sentences) to make its verse (prose) more immortal. I’m very tempted to list the nuggets or aperçus in no great discursive enfoldment, a la David Shields’s Reality Hunger or the forlorn Twitter quotage, where something eerily stands as deity to be kneed to, a morning affirmation forgotten during teeth brushing, but then I’d be only a celebrant, a fanboy not engaged with the form. Maybe nothing more typifies Hill’s stance than the way creativity is bastardized by the pop logic of the current age versus the more diverse and rigorous views of the past. In the “Democracy of the Dead” lecture, Hill breaks down his own view of authorship by beginning with an F.R. Leavis quote: “All that we can fairly ask of the poet is that he shall show himself to have been fully alive in our time. The evidence will be in the very texture of the poetry.” Thereafter, he adds:

This moral affirmation of an intellectual concept, that the intrinsic value of a poem is finally determined not by inspiration, or vision, or teaching, or self-expression, but by semantic and rhythmic texture — context — was to affect radically the teaching of poetry…for the next thirty years. Success in this context, equals intrinsic validity of the text itself. Associative pleasure, such as being reminded of a summer holiday, is not only irrelevant, it is vicious…

Hill then boomerangs back to the primary source of these directives, T.S. Eliot, who wrote: “The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done.” With Hill calling for “the extinction of mere self-expression,” and in propping up a more craft-centered type of poet, he highlights Ezra Pound’s metaphor in Canto LXXIV: “Hast ’ou seen the rose in the steel dust,” a reference to the latter’s own critical writing in Guide to Kulchur; wherein the artwork’s “concept [or] dynamic form…is like the rose pattern driven into the dead iron-filings by the magnet, not by material contact with the magnet itself…[and] the dust and filings rise and spring into order…the concept rises from death…” Here is how art is made. Creation of a thing itself, not a simple journal entry on how one felt about something. In citing an obituary in his college newsletter of a man distinguished in another field, but who was said to have written poetry and enjoyed romance novels, Hill testily rejoins, “If you have a hobby, you’re a hobbyist, and you ride a hobby horse.” True authorship is so much more. Biography and self-biographical pronouncements lessen, and the work stands in for the person — just a name and then their books.

All this comes up dry in the watery world of today’s literary culture, but it can be no coincidence that the most serious artists produced their greatest work when embroiled in these parsimonious intaglios. Hill’s own work abhors “mere self-expression.” All through the lectures and critical writings, this “difficult” poet is constantly reminding us, as he quotes the early twentieth-century critic Charles Williams, that “…the chief impulse of a poet is, not to communicate a thing to others, but to shape a thing, to make an immortality for its own sake.” The end is always the work and not the campaign to canonize the person who wrote it, an act that is surely an aspect of the current cultural and language crises Hill often alludes to and many of us feel. Hill called it “anarchical plutocracy,” meaning a system, headed by the wealthy, which “destroys memory and dissipates attention,” where too many succumb to consumerism and are “self-satisfied with the offer of total solipsistic pleasure in the self” — social media’s bane. There may be glints and glitters of Hill’s life in his poetry, but often we don’t know whom his speaker is really talking about; his own life is just about the least important thing to glom on to. Take the lines at the beginning of Hill’s “In Ipsley Church Lane I”:

More than ever I see through painters’ eyes.
The white hedge-parsleys pall, the soot is on them.
Clogged thorn-blossom sticks, like burnt cauliflower,
to the festered hedge-rim. More than I care to think
I am as one coarsened by feckless grief.
Storm cloud and sun together bring out the yellow of stone.

Well, possibly the speaker is talking about Hill himself, or at least an aspect of him (the “I” is as tempting as a suitcase full of money), but it’s what the “eye” sees: “Clogged thorn-blossom sticks, like burnt cauliflower.” This vignette is more about the quotidian man who began his life in one fashion and has “coarsened” into a very different story — the long journey in a few lines. No wonder he stated, flippantly, in an interview: “All my poems are love poems…either about particular women or about language…All my poems are acts of coitus with the English language.” As for his view on confessional poetry, it is full of expected opprobrium: “…the so-called ’confessional’ movement in post-modern art and literature is mainly a mating-display clumsily performed.” All writing is autobiographical, but in vertiginous ways and often indirectly, as one scouts the strata for the motherlode. Hill metaphorically suggests that when we look at a table or any other piece of furniture, we don’t think about the biography of the person or persons who made it and this should hold the same for a work of literature. It’s the only art where verbal criticism is apt — and to react with silence is as scornful as a critical shellacking.

But what is Hill’s major concern? Words, with the Oxford English Dictionary being “the quarry of [his] distinctions and definitions.” Not just anyone would attempt a fifteen-page review of the OED, which he did in 1989, or deliver the annual T.S. Eliot lecture with the title “Word Value in F.H. Bradley and T.S. Eliot,” or write in a TLS review, aptly titled “The Weight of the Word,” that “the distance between grace and sentiment may be the breath of a syllable,” or deliver this little ditty from the Oxford lectures: “The sonnets by Shakespeare that encounter the double betrayal…are delivered with what we call a ‘shit-eating’ grin — sense 1b, of course, of ’shit-eating’ grin: ingratiating, embarrassed, or uncomfortable expression of someone undergoing a humiliating experience.” This all leads to one of his main concepts, turned from a precept of Coleridge in the latter’s nearly forgotten Aids for Reflection — “living powers” — a term so obsessive to Hill that it shows up in his late poetry. Coleridge: “For if words are not THINGS, they are LIVING POWERS, by which the things of most importance to mankind are actuated, combined, and humanized.” And how delightful it is to know we have “living powers” — that is, the God-like practice of “naming” and “coinage,” which is to say pieces of verse and prose are very goddamned serious things. Any words we use, even those to the deliveryman and the salesgirl, are really “living powers” and we must use our powers to their utmost. Every time we press air to issue in sound, it would be helpful if we gave a little thought to our ripostes, since most of our talk is response, with too many tawdry collegiate innuendos, like “That’s what she said” and, more recently, the stripped-down, ballyhooed “LOL” or even just the lonely tower of the exclamation point (!) in texting and messaging. The quality of our texting can maybe tell us more than we’d like about our lives. Our relationship with words determines all of our other relationships. Words enhance and complicate how we see life, how we love; words are our undoing — words people pretend not to hear, those they long for but never find, those they’ll never forget.

Hill claims, “Any poem that is seriously good is weird,” meaning that the best is not so easily apprehended. This thought is further enhanced by his description of language: “Language, whatever else it is and is not, can be understood historically as a form of seismograph: registering and retaining the myriad shocks of humanity’s interested and disinterested passions.” He also details how tender and tensile poetry can be, “Poetry is one of the multifarious forms of self-consciousness. It is a consciousness of self, a consciousness to, and in, itself; and an embarrassment to itself and others.” Again “living powers,” though when Hill says it’s an “embarrassment to itself and others,” he may mean bad poetry (and bad poetry overheard), but I still take it, throbbingly, in a very personal vein, more as the power of words to cause certain unseen pain since some can’t or won’t allow themselves to feel anything, even to feel lost, which is hardly ever the poet’s intention. The greats often teach you how to read them.

“The modern poem,” Hill writes, “is not a public occasion,” but so is much of the modern appreciation of poetry. It is a deep and probably inextinguishable, but elementary, tragedy when you can’t talk about the things you love with the people you love. Relationships with poets, and more so with their poems, can be very personal, and as healing as connection to a father, a friend. Associative pleasure is often there because artworks act as time machines to many feelings at different points of one’s growth.

Falling this far for words had a strange birth. Amid the anodyne smell of the University of Oregon’s Knight Library — dust on old books, new books getting quickly older — I was defrocked by each subsequent loan. I often read beyond the syllabi and where, among the tacit stacks, I experienced what Hill explains in one lecture: “The book which is to change your life stands next on the shelf to the book that you’d come to take out from the library.” Some kind of trial started in those stacks; courtship proceeded, but by abnormal means. To make it work, I had to accept that unconditional love would never come my way; latter days would contain more magisterial estrangements, leading me to toss out Ashbery and much of Merwin for all of Stevens, all of Pound. As Hill says, “Whatever strange relationship we have with the poem, it is not one of enjoyment. It is more like being brushed past, or aside, by an alien being.” Anything great, remaining fully loaded throughout the years, has often first had this effect on me.

The eros of language gets keener as the appetite opens. I can still hear Hill rereading certain poems and prose in the lectures, certain passages — something a person who attended some lectures at the time called “tendentious,” but what I would consider the key to understanding. How else do you appreciate a poem? — you hear it and read it again and again. You devote hours. Hill stresses repetitions of lines and phrases, the sounds of combinations, as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 137:

If eyes corrupt by over-partial looks
Be anchor’d in the bay where all men ride,
Why of eyes’ falsehood hast thou forged hooks,
Where to the judgment of my heart is tied?

It is a quatrain from the heavens, as Hill uncharacteristically dotes, “My God how wonderful that is.” He once wrote, “Eros is the power that can be felt in language when a word or half-finished phrase awaits its consummation.” Ensnared in the harmonics of the quatrain above is a moment when the reader gets to “hooks” at the third line’s end and, questing after termination, she enters something like the third turn of an oval racetrack, knowing she is shortly powering to the tie of “ride” — a word still lying on the veranda, waiting to be ravished by rhyme — and zooming across the finish line, she is awarded “tied.”

The reader feels these cinchings, blossoms, and ruptures of language occur in a very private arena that tries to get called out in duplicitous terms and half-truths in social media, tamping down literature from a way of life to a bulletin for one’s personal political propaganda. When literature is so counterfeited, everyone loses. When seemingly so few can take pure joy in literature without a spotlight of shame focusing to find fault, it is good to be reminded how ninety years ago another generation felt differently about the strange art, as Charles Williams wrote:

Poetry, one way or another, is ‘about’ human experience; there is nothing else that it can be about. But to whatever particular human experience it alludes, it is not that experience. Love poetry is poetry, not love; patriotic poetry is poetry, not patriotism; religious poetry is poetry, not religion. But good poetry does something more than allude to its subjects; it is related to it, and it relates us to it.

And, in ninety years more (time permitting), we might feel differently again.

The further glimmering is how the past informs and teaches, as Hugh Kenner wrote to Ezra Pound: “What the next generation knows of the past is what this generation tells it, plus what they find out for themselves by chance; and chance is too random to trust.” Maybe the greatest current hinderance to society and literature is the increasingly bewildering unalloyed judgments of the past — how wrong people of ancient generations and, most especially, those of five minutes ago, were to think in such a way and how right we are, because we are alive to now know best. A literary counterfeiter will leave the history of art out in the cold because he is frightened of the authority amassed in thousands of books that have stood the test of time. His time is always the present, reflection and nuance being poisons to his brand of bullying.

Years teach, and let’s hope, they teach reverence for the thickets of language we pass through and sometimes pass over us. What stands out with Hill is not only the reverence for literature but that for language and words, down to the origins of their etymology and their continuing grammatical dexterity. Call it “sacred,” call it “holy” — you don’t have to believe in God to know how those haloed words coax a respectful human attitude to such erudition. As the adage goes, whatever’s worth doing at all is worth doing well. For Hill, “what’s worth doing” is only the ectoplasm of “what’s worth knowing.” The past is the fuel — every artistic renaissance, especially the one with the big -R, is about the rebirth and revival of ancient arts. T.S. Eliot wrote: “Someone said: ’The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.” Hill is now among them. What a mind to know.