Hi Andrew,

O'Shem is I think clearly O'Brien, if for no other reason than that Hill
takes issue with O'whoever's use of the word "factitious". See Sean
O'Brien's intro to Hill in "the Firebox" for this. Actually, Hugh Haughton
also uses the word in relation to Hill. Perhaps O'Shem simply stands for
"the Irish faction" - Haughton, cited by Paulin, cited by O'Brien. It may
also be a reference to Shem the Penman in Finnegans Wake...

Morosa delectatio - I take it you don't need telling that this is Heaney's
phrase ("morose linguistic delectation"), although it goes back to Aquinas
via Joyce (somewhere, forget where, in _Ulysses_). Interestingly, the hero
of Huysmans' _Against Nature_ also succumbs to morose delectation on
occasion.

Lothian MacSikker I take to be Lachlan MacKinnon, who reviewed Canaan for
one of the newspapers (forget which).

Croker was the critic whose hostile review of Keats was alleged by Shelley
to have caused the poet's death. Possible also Neil Corcoran, although I
can't think of a reason *why* - I'm not aware of Corcoran having
"righteously censured" Hill on any occasion. It may be someone else
entirely, if it actually *is* anybody in particular.

I've compared these nicknames to the nicknames given out by grammar school
boys to grammar school masters - Croker/Croaker especially. Hence also the
various other bits of grammar school lore encoded in the poem (pax/Kings
etc.). This is to do with patronage, essentially.

> >the way in which the horrors of historical record can be incorporated
into
> a sort of
> private grief (or morose delectation) which actually begins to obscure the
> original referents by making them part of a private idiom - and question
> that process. <
>
> Well, you've described in a nutshell what I see in Hill's work on
> occasion . . . which makes me wonder whether you intend to
> tackle Hill in some way within your poem at some point?

Um, yes:

(...Talk about
nature, here - botanical particulars
enlightened by etymology. Animadvert.

Avert. Excite the verities with a swish
aphorism...)

My sequence _The Spirit Zone_ already pauses on occasion to point a
pea-shooter in Hill's general direction - this is not without being fairly
comprehensively dominated by his style, preoccupations etc., which is why I
call the poem "a weak misreading". The section on sadomasochism seems
somewhat germane here. URL:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Den/8787/index.html


  (No
> poetry-as-football metaphor intended this time!)  If you'd
> be willing to send me some more extracts back-channel I'd love
> to read them.

It's still somewhat semi-formed, but I'd be happy to do so when there's more
to show.

> This seems to me to be the issue at stake with Hill's work --
> how far he succeeds in walking the tightrope between 'morose
> delectation' and the 'intensity of response'.  The degree to which
> we trust such a sensual witness, perhaps . . . .

I've just been comparing Hill to Dennis Potter, looking at the way in which
the body is made to say what the language of political or literary eloquence
cannot say (Potter thematises the flaring up of his psoriasis as a kind of
bodily revolt against his co-optation by the establishment). I think there
is a class issue here: a deliberate posing of sensuous feeling against the
abstractions of the discourse of the powerful. That is putting it somewhat
simplistically, but you get my drift. Earlier comments on Plath's version of
morose delectation vs literary "gentility" may also be relevant to this.

> >history-as-pornography" <
>
> Yes . . . I had a conversation with Sean O'B in an Edinburgh pub
> once about this, I think sparked off by the fact that 'Canaan' had
> just been published . . . Sean mentioned the fact that Hill had a
> framed photograph of Holocaust survivors hanging on his office
> wall at Leeds University -- survivors as they were discovered in
> '45, I mean -- which he considered rather creepy, or questionable
> at least.

This - not the photograph, but the creepiness generally - is one of the
things _The Triumph of Love_ admits to, of course. Which may not exonerate
it.

> Has Hill every gone on record as to why his style became
> increasingly experimental with 'Canaan' and beyond?

Not to my knowledge. I think that _Tenebrae_ effectively takes the aesthetic
of harmony and "constructedness" that had informed Hill's work up until that
point and completely desiccates it; after that, you get the Bergsonian
burlesque of the Peguy poem, the occasionally luminous attenuation of
_Canaan_, and the _Triumph of Love_ which is stylistically very close to
Hill's critical prose. His latest thing seems to be using BCP-style pointing
and a sort of Audenesque syntactical torsion which I find quite hard to
follow, but I'm waiting for the whole sequence or volume or whatever it's
going to be to come out...

best,
Dom



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