> Dominic -- your poem.  I first read this extract on brit-poets,

That's funny. I don't remember putting it there (I'm not on that list)...

It's been posted, or part of it, to trAce, however.

> and find it more powerful when read in the light of this discussion.
> It would serve as an ideal paradigm in the 'clarity/ difficulty'
> debate, although perhaps you may not be keen to have it so
> used . . . .

I haven't yet decided what the rather wilful hermeticism of that extract is
actually *for*. I mean, I'd defend to the point of bruises and scratches
(death threats might put me off) the right of anybody at all to practice
wilful hermeticism for whatever purposes they saw fit, but one does need to
have some idea of what one is about. I *think* I'm trying to look at 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. But I'd need to write more to make this work better...

> The S.J. quote has also provoked a question with regard to
> Hill's work -- is it true to say he writes of torture in a sensual
> fashion?

Sean O'Brien says something to that effect in his essay on Hill in _The
Deregulated Muse_: "history-as-pornography" is the exact expression (this in
reference to "Funeral Music" in particular). But he also says that Hill's
"sensuality" is rather wilful than spontaneous - that it substitutes ideas
for acts, because of the "dissociation of sensibility" that infects or
refracts Hill's imagination. One might compare Byron's assertion that Keats
was "perpetually frigging his imagination" - instead of, y'know, going out
and *doing it* in a properly Byronic fashion (the essay closes with a nicely
turned sexual insult: O'Brien has Hill "brandishing" something - he says
it's "the paradox of England", but I'm not convinced - of which he declares
"it won't lie down, but it seems to be dead"...)

 Or perhaps more generally, if writing poetry itself is
> a sensual act, linguistically, how do we read references to such
> terrible acts -- if they are 'transfigured' (as they must be) in this
> way?  And how does this reflect (or contradict) Hill's sense of
> the scrupulous?  It is not merely a case of 'saying what happened'
> surely?  I guess I have developed a suspicion of Hill's passion
> for such details, over the years, and would appreciate your view
> on the matter.

It is a problem for Hill's poetry, and one about which he is quite explicit
on occasion: how do you reconcile the pleasures of the text with the
feelings of horror it purports to embody or enact?

A key exchange here I think is that between Jon Silkin and John Bayley in
the pages of _Agenda_, in which Bayley writes (if I remember rightly)  that
Hill's _September Song_ eventually reconciles itself to the cruel
inevitability of deriving pleasure from the very language in which one
speaks about horror: that it eventually gives itself up to "the tongue's
satisfactions", in spite of Hill's purportedly moral protest against "the
tongue's atrocities". Silkin's reply ("Feeling and Morality: A Survival from
the Sixties"? Agenda vol. 30 No. 3, Autumn 1992) stresses the "tenderness"
which underlies the "contingent ironies" of Hill's treatment of this
question, and "without which we would have just - irony". Silkin writes:

I have known some writers and readers who feel that Hill's poem (of the
sixties) centres too much on a consideration of whether or not the poet has,
or could have, found the right language, and earned the moral right to speak
of what he does speak.

- but such a consideration is only a consideration if one is aware that
one's feelings about the matter may be distorted or distracted by the
*wrong* language - if one has some "real feelings" for which the language of
poetry threatens to substitute "artificial ones". The point of Hill's poetry
is not to make a grand show of getting one's language right through the
exercise of an increasingly convoluted and self-referential "scrupulosity",
but to demonstrate the inadequacy of such scruples and, indirectly, to bear
witness to the feelings to which they are inadequate.

As for Hill's "passion for such details", O'Brien suggests that one needs to
ask "what the grown man adds to the child's intensity of response" to the
violence of history. It may be that the question can be reversed: how
successfully does Hill remind himself, and others qua grown persons, of the
"intensity of response" which is numbed and dissipated by repetition,
apologetics, propaganda, time and distance? Are not our compromises and
compartmentalisations, our coping mechanisms, amnesiac to a degree?

- Dom





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