Tim
this really comes for me out of reading the later books in Broken Hierarchies.
Almost at random, from page 920 (a sequence called Al Tempo de' Tremuoti)
Let your eye in | under the cello's bridge
Bow's early Bomberg's edgy cubism
Acuity of pitch processing spasm
Desire's infinitude sheared at that
edge:
Crafting--say weft--the soul in selving kind
And of remembrances to disencumber
The heart's finally ineffectual chamber
Old age bewailing its lost wunderkind.
There are pages and pages like this! Hill's allusiveness has always been different from Prynne's, although they sometimes coincide on who they call on (Celan, Pound, 18th century poets). Hill likes to name names, there are for more proper nouns in H than P, but here the allusions are so compressed it reads a bit like Prynne. With Hill there is often a voice, a speaker if you like, which you do not really find in Prynne, but it sometimes becomes obscured almost to invisibility.
Like to know if anyone else has been reading late Hill, what they think of pieces like this?
To put Prynne and Hill in the same box because of their 'intelligence' is daft, as though they are the only examples of intelligence within the poetry of their time. They stick out intelligence wise because of the contrast with the general anti-intellectualism and self imposed limits of the post-movement mainstreams, that's all. But I would be interested in hearing what Giles has to say about their shared concerns.
Cheers
Tim
On 31 Oct 2014, at 11:46, David Bircumshaw wrote:
Correction: although I do not have the article to hand but it did make an explicit comparison with the code-breakers at Bletchley Park.