----- Original Message -----
From: "Dominic Fox" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2009 9:23 AM
Subject: Re: [ Volumes 01 - 07 of Remove A Concept are available now ]
> > It can incorporate improvisational, even chance moments, but these
> must be justified by an overall coherence.
>
> Well, yes, if coherence is the norm the poem is geared to satisfy.
> Geoffrey Hill, no postmodernist, on his Funeral Music: "a florid grim
> music broken by grunts and shrieks". The question of whether the "grunts
> and shrieks" (the noise of history outside one's window) can or should be
> contained within an overall coherence is absolutely not settled for Hill:
> it vexes him throughout the first few decades of his writing. It is not a
> question of abandoning poetry to incoherence, but of keeping the line in
> question.
>
> Dominic
>
What I have to say in answer to this is probably predictable: it's a matter
of half-full / half-empty. Hill's model of "incoherence," the "grunts and
shrieks of history," is HIS model, HIS incoherence. It's quite difference
from the "noise of history" Eliot lets into the Waste Land or Pound into
Mauberley or Berryman into the Dream Songs or Lowell into Notebook, or
whatever you or I might count as such "noise" and let into poems *we wrote.
Hill's "noise" always either makes the reader more sympathetic to the poem's
conservative / Christian-polity nostalgia, or criticizes the latter (I'm
thinking especially of The Triumph of Love) - but only in limited,
controlled doses. You're exactly right: Hill isn't a postmodernist.
"Keeping the line in question" means "keeping the (ideological and formal)
line while appearing to question it." Or, more generously, "keeping the
line however much it is subjected to dialectical attack."
|