Maybe I will eventually buy it to see how much I can interpret. The problem
is he is talking to/about himself and I just dont find him an interesting
enough person..not in the class of greats like Pound and Yeats. But the
language of the new book is impressive enough to tempt me.
Douglas Clark, Bath, Somerset, England ....
http://www.dgdclynx.plus.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "Dominic Fox" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, March 04, 2005 11:03 AM
Subject: Re: Geoffrey Hill's Comus
> 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
>
> --
> This email has been verified as Virus free
> Virus Protection and more available at http://www.plus.net
|