Hillman and Hass

In between a lot of other things, I have been avoiding reading and sometimes actually reading Brenda Hillman's Cascadia. I wasn't avoiding because I don't like the work, but because the work is demanding. However, the other day, spurred by my yoga teacher's urgings to commit to what you love (thanks, Kat, if you're reading this) I sat down to finish the book. I ended up reading most of Robert Hass's Sun Under Wood too, so this is my account of both books.

Although Brenda Hillman and Robert Hass are married, their poetry couldn't be more different. Well, of course it could, but it's pretty different. Here are the first six lines of Cascadia:

A left margin watches the sea floor approach

It takes 30 million years
It is the first lover

More saints for Augustine's mother

A girl in red shorts shakes Kafka's
The Trail free of some sand

And here is the opening of Sun Under Wood:

Because yesterday morning from the steamy window
we saw a pair of red foxes across the creek
eating the last windfall of apples in the rain--
they looked at us with their green eyes
long enough to symbolize the wakefulness of living things
and then went back to eating--

Hass's writing is like comfort food to me. I can curl up with it. I know where I am in it. Reading Hillman's writing is like getting off a plane in a foreign country whose language I studied briefly in high school. I am not at all sure of myself.

Which is not to say I don't like it. Reading (well, rereading) Hass's collection didn't make me want to write like reading Hillman's did. It's just that Hillman's poetry does things I don't understand, and I'm not sure what this says about my ego, but that always makes me kind of annoyed. And even after two years, I am pretty much still a tired new mother, so it's hard for me to use A's naptime to sit down and try to figure things out.

But here are some thoughts on what I did read. In Cascadia (click here and scroll down to "Book Description" for an introduction to the book) both the commentary on writing itself and "the girl", often a girl reading something, resurface often. I especially liked the comments on writing, which seem somehow to comment on the book itself. Hillman does lots of intriguing things with page space, like placing text vertically, inserting a hand-written sentence diagram, sprinkling the margins with lighter-colored text or symbols like ///, and placing words at the tops of the pages like guide words in dictionaries. This is both the stuff I love to discover and the stuff that drives me crazy. I want to know what it means. And the truth is I feel like I haven't put enough time into the book yet, because I still don't know. But I can't read Cascadia forever. I am saving it for another time, letting it simmer.

According to its back cover, Hass's book, dedicated "to Brenda," "finds supple form in poems that embrace all that is alive and full of joy." I think that's a bit over the top, but the poems do seem full of love, both love for their subjects and sometimes about love, although none of them are really quite love poems. They are detailed, conversational, insightful. A couple of times in the book, Hass includes "Notes" on a preceding poem as a new poem itself. I liked this move. As someone trying to once again write poems, it reminded me of all the choices you have when writing, what to include or not to include. And it seems to be at least one similarity between the two collections--both commenting on writing itself in the writing.

I was just reading an essay by the poet Matthew Zapruder in which he says that when he teaches beginning poets, he tells them, "without clarity, it is not possible to have true mystery. By clarity, I mean a sense in the reader that what is being said on the surface of the poem is not a scrim or a veil deliberately hiding some other hidden, inaccessible certainty" (the essay is from the fall 2011 American Poet). I would definitely agree with him. Reading those words made me think of what I was planning on writing about Hass and Hillman, and I considered whether the problem with Hillman is a lack of clarity. On some level, for me, I think it is, but I don't feel like the poems are trying to hide something as much as they demand more study. It is, in fact, study I am hoping to do as a job kind of soon. However, as a non-academic, right now, I can't do it. The implications of that fact--and I do think it is a fact, I don't think I'm just being lazy, although that's a possibility, or maybe desire plays into it too--could be the subject for a whole different post. But my shelves are calling, and Amelia is still sleeping, so I am moving on to the next book.