An academic, in my opinion, in the ivory tower, I am sorry to say,
and his work certainly shows that influence of his, that, life. Ah,
those poor masses...!
Tom
>It's a bit of a factitious "series" anyway (I've seen claims that
>Canaan + TTOL + Speech! Speech! are a trilogy, then that TTOL +
>Speech! Speech! + The Orchards of Syon are a trilogy, then Scenes from
>Comus came out...it's a bit like The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy
>billing itself as a trilogy in five parts). I think he just keeps
>knocking them out, and will probably carry on doing so until the
>reaper catches up with him.
>
>While the poems present themselves as outward and visible signs of an
>inward and spiritual struggle with difficult matter, they are not
>themselves "difficult" in that sense. "Impenetrable", yes; but other
>people's minds *are* impenetrable and I think part of the point is to
>remind the reader of that fact. I don't think it actually helps that
>much to be a literary intellectual. Because Hill himself is a literary
>intellectual, I suppose that literary intellectuals might share more
>of his frame of reference, but even among literary intellectuals
>people who've read Thomas Bradwardine's _De Causa Dei_, or even know
>what it's about, are in somewhat of a minority.
>
>There are at any one time various overlapping "consensus realities",
>shared frames of reference which are useful for exchanging information
>(or disinformation) and co-ordinating activity (or inactivity, as may
>be). When we talk about poetry having "an audience", often we mean
>something like market positioning: poetry that is pitched to a
>particular discursive consensus, and especially poetry that reinforces
>that consensus, tends to be found "penetrable" by consensus-users and
>achieves "market penetration" as a result. This interpenetration
>produces satisfying feelings of cathexis and mutual warmth, in the
>absence of which the reading public tends to feel spurned or cheated
>and goes off in search of the superior jollies that are to be had
>elsewhere.
>
>Being a modernist, Hill wants to renew the language of consensus, to
>broaden the spectrum of information it is able to carry, purify it of
>certain sorts of disinformation ("cant"), and perhaps encourage its
>users to "alter their object and better their intent". The fact that
>much of his poetry seems like indigestible foreign matter is presented
>as evidence of the narrowness of our public faculties: Hill advances a
>persona who in attempting to articulate what most nearly concerns him
>finds himself driven back into an obsessional private code, because
>the things he wants to say are not *sayable* in the common tongue.
>
>The point I'm trying to make is that if one finds oneself unable to
>grasp what is going on in the interior of this obsessional private
>discourse, that does not mean that either oneself or the poem has
>failed (on account of the insurmountable "difficulty" of the task).
>Hill's poetry dramatizes the dissociation between private reason (and
>passion) and public speech, and tries to reconnect and reconfigure
>what has become disconnected and disfigured. It's not so much
>something you understand, as something you watch him do.
>
>Dominic
>
>On Fri, 4 Mar 2005 06:48:54 -0000, Douglas Clark
><[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Eileen Abrahams" <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>> Sent: Friday, March 04, 2005 12:46 AM
>> Subject: Re: Geoffrey Hill's Comus
>>
>> > Douglas,
>> > I've just read Hill's Comus for the first time, and of course, I'll need
>> > to
>> > read it many times over to understand it in the way I want to understand
>> > it
>> > (its dense allusions, its entangled voices, its Welsh, etc.), but there
>> > are
>> > also passages of astounding lyrical beauty and translucent wit. I hardly
>> > think that Hill's poetry ever only yields a moments' thrill. Would you
>> > care
> > > to clarify?
>> > Best,
>> > Eileen
>> >
>> It is a bit like Michael Hofmann's poem in today's Times Literary
>> Supplement. The language is superb but a poor ignorant person like me is
>> left bereft of the meaning. His only penetrable poems have been the lesser
>> poems re his father. I used to like the feel of his language but have
>> stopped buying his books.
>>
>> A similar feeling has come over me e Geoffrey Hill. I thought Funeral Music
>> a great piece of work in the language when I came upon it nearly forty years
>> ago. And Mercian Hymns was more penetrable still with the distinctive
>> language. Since then he has been patchy and often more prosey presumably
>> from the lessons he learnt translating Ibsen. I think the last book where I
>> think the mix of penetrability and language occured was in Canaan. I bought
>> the first two of the new series of books but didnt buy the third. It is many
>> years since I read Comus and I doubt if a reading would help me with Hill's
>> new poem. But from the ten minutes I spent with it yesterday afternoon it
>> seems a triumphal return in the sense of quality of language. But as to
>> meaning I couldnt make head or tale of it and not being a literary
>> intellectual I am not capable of the understanding of the work.
>>
>> So I have to relegate Hill's and Hofmann's books to the level of
>> 'entertainment' which is much in vogue in poetry these days. Where you
>> salivate over the words as you read them but ten minutes after you have
>> finished the book the experience has vanished from memory because the
>> meaning is impenetrable for you. Hofmann and Hill are serious poets with
>> something to say and I find it a tragedy for me that I am too thick to treat
>> them as anything but 'entertainment'. I hope that explains my 'moment's
>> thrill'.
>>
>
>
>--
>// Alas, this comparison function can't be total:
>// bottom is beyond comparison. - Oleg Kiselyov
--
Visit the Maine Poetry website for classic and contemporary
Maine poets, poems, books, etc. - http://www.mainepoetry.com
|