{"id":1452,"date":"2014-08-21T00:28:18","date_gmt":"2014-08-21T00:28:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/?p=1452"},"modified":"2016-02-19T17:23:25","modified_gmt":"2016-02-19T17:23:25","slug":"altieri-seasonal-works","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/literature\/altieri-seasonal-works\/","title":{"rendered":"Brenda Hillman\u2019s Seasonal Works With Letters on Fire"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"letters-on-fire\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I love this book so I want to explore the grounds of my pleasures. What is the volume\u2019s power to modify our understanding and develop a distinctive sensibility, and why does it produce a fresh vision of lyric\u2019s place in our decidedly anti-lyrical world? These questions lead me to the possible implications of what I consider the volume\u2019s most striking and yet also most characteristic statement\u2014\u201cUse your imagination, my mother used to say, meaning, you don\u2019t have to use it, you are in it\u201d (67).<\/p>\n

It is no accident that it is the mother who makes this observation. It takes intense care for particulars even to recognize that there is a significant difference between believing one has to use<\/em> one\u2019s imagination and believing that one is already in <\/em>imagination, so one can trust that living well and imagining well occupy the same plane. Perhaps when poets think they must use <\/em>the imagination they are also likely to accept a host of classical and high modernist ideals about poetry that Hillman wants to escape or at least to finesse.<\/p>\n

A commitment to using the imagination risks invoking a deadly seriousness as one contemplates from the outside what one has wrought: so it had better have a \u201cmeaning\u201d with integrity and depth of its own. Being in<\/em> imagination affords quite different dispensations. It suggests a freedom to speculate playfully and assume a transparency between self and other not possible when imagining is projected as a mode of labor. This freedom\u2014the dominant existential and writerly trait in this book\u2014opens the lyrics to celebrating the immediate pleasure and focus afforded by the intensities of fire (1): lightening and lightning may have more in common than we usually credit. Freed from the pressure to make meaning, poets might revel in the various modes of meaningfulness that seem inherent in imagination\u2014for example, a spirit of play, an emphasis on the connection between feeling and fact, the elaboration of hypotheticals, dwelling on an ever-present sense of relatedness among what might seem isolated particulars and, above all for Hillman, a faith that a focus on conversation (with what seems active in things as well as in persons) will foster our fullest capacities for agency. Seasonal Works <\/em>celebrates poetry as a mode of sheer delight in the kinds of being that are committed to finding pleasure and freedom and connection as elementary conditions of being in the world. As for seriousness, our machines can do that for us.<\/p>\n

One poem in particular stands out as an emblem for how Hillman re-imagines the lyric by absorbing what we might call the intimacies of domestic space into religious figures of prayer and devotion. I think \u201cLight Galaxies Sleep for Our Mother\u201d is one of the great elegies and expressions of feminist values in American poetry:<\/p>\n

\r\n\tbetween  work & human         \t her style of love\r\n\twill boycott time            for children\r\n\tasked for change         for March of Dimes\r\n\tfeeds the wild\t\t  her kindness\r\n\tbrain of a lily          aspirin in the water\r\n\tone aspirin                 like the sun\r\n\tput plastic\t         on the guest bed mattress\r\n\tfixing radios              first hand\r\n\tluminous names\t\t    visit our mother\r\n\tthe state worn\t\t      \tgravity garments\r\n\tneed fixing              gravity declines\r\n\tluminous names\t\t    beyond dust\r\n\tabide with us\t                o mother abide\r\n\tbeyond work\t         letters & days\r\n\tuniverse\t          you second hand\r\n\twedding dress\t\t     infinity cloth\r\n\tcover her\t         when she sleeps\r\n\twhen she rests             at night let us\r\n\tnot let her not\t               forget us\r\n\twhen she closes\t\t\t both her eyes.  (103)\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/span><\/pre>\n
The structure here evokes the work of the mother\u2019s two eyes, constantly watching as each fosters a domain of constant care. But the full resonance of the poem turns on its last lines, since the final reference to two eyes both interprets the structure and expands the poem to a mythical level embedded in concrete attention. And, even more important, these last lines define in utter simplicity the enormous difference death makes. They provide a beautiful transition from mother to daughter, whose eyes at night are now focused on covering her and worrying how there might be a path by which to \u201cnot let her not\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 forget us.\u201d As this shift takes place, we also realize that what seems an elegy is also a prayer and a hymn of something like thanksgiving, all because the poem contours so closely what can embody a life of caring within the purview of living in the imagination.<\/p>\n
But living in imagination also has other facets that encompass a range of epistemological and axiological parameters\u2014all predicated on the powers of the eye to establish possibilities for being \u201cI\u201d without constructing social meanings for that \u201cI\u201d that then have to be defended. For Hillman there is an alternative model of sociality that stems from attending to the destructive and creative fire that simply burns through righteous ideas to concrete objects that elicit our caring. Sociality in her poetry arises from her radical, eco-centric view. It is the result of being aware that what we love and what engages us in the world will be lost if we fail to find alternatives to what that world is becoming.<\/p>\n
This sense of the animated eye leading to the appreciation of relationships is fundamental to Hillman\u2019s version of eco-poetics and, consequently, to her understanding of one model of the poet\u2019s work as giving letters a breath (and breadth) that allows them \u201cnot\/ to decide as\u201d the work curves \u201cbetween\/ skin-bearer & the being said\u201d (63). For the meaningful escapes the burden of projecting meaning by preserving a dynamic relation between capturing actual states in the world and displaying the force of the pleasures inherent in that capturing:<\/p>\n
\r\n                                              Meaning\r\n\tis their Caliban, a search \r\n\t  removed from history.  Phenomena\r\n\t request your attention: out the window:\r\n\t\tan ecstasy of now--  (88)\r\n<\/span><\/pre>\n
I could go on at length about how these poems not only assert this \u201cecstasy of now,\u201d but also construct it as a condition of attentive reading and a locus of responsibility in the world. But in my limited space I have to go directly to the second-order aspect of this construction and this resistance to \u201chidden meaning\u201d (36): her exploration of the possibilities that this work can significantly modify our understanding of lyric by presenting the poet with different ways of regarding the role of rhetoric\u2014which is to say, her self-consciousness about the relation between attention and making. Here I need an abstract model in order to define how I value certain aspects of Hillman\u2019s commitment to concreteness. So I will discuss her opening poem, \u201cTo Spirits of Fire After Harvest\u201d:<\/p>\n
\r\nBetween earth\r\n& its noun, i felt a fire \u2026\r\n\r\n--What does it mean by \u201ci\u201d Mrs?\r\n--it means (and i quote): one\r\n    Of the vowels in the brain\r\n\t     & some of the you\u2019s--:\r\n\r\nwe were interested in the type of thing\r\nhumans can\u2019t know,\r\ninterested in kinds of think animals think\r\n--a rabbit or a skink!  (Eumeces kiltonianus)\r\n\t   when autumn brings a grammar,\r\n  wasps circle the dry stalks\r\n  & you can totally \r\n  See through amber ankles dangling\r\n\t   in dazzle under our lord the sun\r\n\t   of literature\u2014\r\n\r\nBetween noon & its noun,\r\nthere were ridged\r\n& golden runes on pumpkins \u2026 bluish\r\n\t\t\tgourds\u2014in the fields \u2026\r\n\t\t  (their white eyes lined up\r\n\t\t       Inside)\u2014Wait a sec.  Please\r\nDon\u2019t nail the door shut.  The air is friendly\r\n& non-existent as Victoria\u2019s veil-- \u2026\r\n\r\nEarth don\u2019t torment your fool,\r\nyour ambassador clown. Bring\r\nthe x of oxygen & sex, a fox \r\nrunning sideways through present noon\u2014 (3)\r\n<\/span><\/pre>\n
The most remarkable feature of this poem is its utter fluidity, as if speaking and thinking and thinging all occupied the same plane. And that plane seems to afford a common theater where \u201cI,\u201d \u201cyou,\u201d and \u201cwe\u201d could rapidly substitute for each other by sharing modes of attention, modes of fear\u2014and ultimately the same prayer with animals for the earth to be bountiful in yielding pleasures that extend from what we can see to what fits our alphabets and so affords meaningfulness. Here the uncapitalized \u201cI\u201d sets the tone. That figure is not a gimmick, especially in the context of the volume\u2019s fascination with the life of alphabetical letters: \u201ci\u201d brings the same kind of pleasure as \u201cx\u201d brings later. The poem searches for an \u201cI\u201d more concerned with its placement in relation to other letters and so other meanings than those that require it as an originating condition. And if the \u201ci\u201d can take on this kind of freedom, it can also accept the many possible tones of speaking that can continuously prove sufficiently flexible to allow \u201cus\u201d to play many parts\u2014\u00adas a dialogical partner and as continuous source of the letters fundamental to making \u201cnoon\u201d a continual presence.<\/p>\n
Poetry here accepts the roles assigned it by the imagination, content to find itself within playful activity. For there is a close correlation between letting the spirit of play prevail and not nailing the door shut to the friendly air. Earth remains approachable within this spirit of collective play, and there is no need to differentiate prayer from simple pleas for recognition.<\/p>\n
Hillman\u2019s interest in what prayer symbolizes will prove a crucial factor here because as the volume progresses, she encounters various forces that do capitalize \u201cI\u201d and lose all that \u201cx\u201d brings, because of defensive and blind activities devoted to protecting the interests of capitalization. It is as if the first section of the volume created a new mode of heroism\u2014the freedom to treat poetry as contoured to a life of articulate pleasure in the world, in the self, and in unguarded openness to others.<\/p>\n
Here the value is all in the spirit of light-hearted conjunction making lines like \u201cBetween noon and its noun\u201d (3) and \u201chabitat for halibut\u201d (22) so joyous a mode of living. But then the second part of the volume forces that spirit into action in inhospitable situations, testing whether the private virtues of being in imagination can influence the public world\u2019s very different sense of virtue and vice. The basic challenge in poems like \u201cA Brutal Encounter Recollected in Tranquility\u201d becomes to cultivate anger while refusing the bitterness that usually accompanies it when history turns against the poet\u2019s values, marshalling forces that are incredibly ignorant of every factor that gives poetry its vital significance. How can the poet be true to what history rejects while having to fight on terms set by history\u2019s winners? Hillman\u2019s answer is to offer no answer. There is only continuing the commitments that produce the range of values represented by these poems:<\/p>\n
        \r\n                                   History wakes us\r\n\t    to sort it out with the press\r\n\t    of great voices, silent now--; i fear\r\n\t\tbosses will always win. \u2026\r\n\tthe spirits have abandoned me;\r\n\tlet me not abandon myself\u2014 (90)\r\n<\/span><\/pre>\n
This ending risks echoing standard heroic poses that fix identity against the threats it encounters. And I suspect Hillman wants these heroic stances in the background, but well in the background. The focus has to remain on the powers of this lower case I as in fact the locus for the myriad modes of responsiveness that are possible within a life lived in and for the imagination.<\/p>\n
 <\/p>\n
CHARLES ALTIERI<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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