Shoulders hunched, eyes lowered to the podium, Brenda Hillman recites her poetry as if she’s not entirely comfortable with an audience. With her exquisite power of description, however, and her melodic voice, she enchants any listener fortunate enough to hear her speak.
Hillman read in the Russell House Millet Room on Wednesday night as part of the Writing Program’s Distinguished Writers Series. As always, the Writing Program brought in a poet whose work is celebrated as some of the finest in the literary world. In addition to her numerous critical awards, she was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
“Hillman can be described as an alchemist of words,” said Stephanie Ellis, publicist for the Wesleyan University Press, in her introduction. “Her structures are elaborate and original without being ornate.”
Hillman read selections from her earlier books, including “Loose Sugar” and “Death Tractates,” as well as from her recently published collection, “Pieces of Air in the Epic.”
Although she resides in San Francisco and is a professor at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California, Hillman is closely tied with Wesleyan University. All of her seven books were published by the University Press, and her only child attended Wesleyan a few years ago.
True to form, Hillman is deeply involved in activism, and many of her poems are political.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about the responsibility that we have in this war and thinking about how we’re all implicated and we can’t get out of it,” she said. She then read one of her poems from “Loose Sugar,” called “Cheap Gas.”
“Removing the nozzle we should notice,/when the vagrant drop falls down, the liquid is still/pretty golden, pink dominates for an instant,/then forgets,” she said in her poem. “Doesn’t look like the blood of young men,/liquid from bodies: tears, semen, blood, urine,/acids, the yellow drop/of cheap gas has all those in it.”
She spent part of her reading emphasizing the necessity of activism.
“I feel as if it’s very important to figure out a way that we can each do a few hours of activism every week that involves contacting our legislators,” she said.
Hillman’s poems reveal her peculiarly sensitive view of nature and the universe.
“I started thinking about air in a whole bunch of different ways,” she said. “One was the way in which air is different in cities in certain angles. It was a kind of existential or quasi-metaphysical condition that was impossible to describe except in poetry.”
The poem that deals with this condition is called “Street Corner” and is from her new book “Pieces of Air in the Epic.”
“When you let yourself really see things, everything is very strange,” Hillman said. “People’s thoughts are very odd. We all self-correct, we correct our thoughts to make them normal, but they’re not normal.”
At the end of her reading she accepted questions from the audience, much of which was made up of her friends and colleagues. Her answers to the questions reiterated the opinions on activism and “irrational beauty” expressed in her poems.
“[There is] a great storehouse of riches inside of ourselves that we don’t take advantage of often enough,” she said when asked about her writing process. “Poetry is good at getting to those half-feelings and half-states [of mind].”
To the poetry students in the audience, she said that rewriting is the best way to edit and develop their poems.
“It takes twenty years sometimes or two days,” she said. “You rewrite and rewrite and if you hate it you rewrite it again.”
Hillman’s website includes her poetry selections, her biography, reviews of her work, and instructions on activism. The address is http://galileo.stmarys-ca.edu/bhillman.
Leave a Reply