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POETRYETC  January 2008

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Subject:

Re: Hill Review in NYT

From:

Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Poetryetc: poetry and poetics

Date:

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 20:42:02 +0000

Content-Type:

text/plain

Parts/Attachments:

Parts/Attachments

text/plain (34 lines)

"Hill has made brutally plain that the common reader is of no interest to him"

This is quite significantly false. I'm afraid I don't have a copy of
the earlier Clutag "Treatise of Civil Power" - now that I'm not trying
to build an academic career by driving my horse and my cart over the
bones of Hill's oeuvre, I'm not quite the completist I once was. I do
have the Penguin volume, however,which I think is very good and which
says a few things about honouring the intelligence of "the common
reader" (whom Hill in a recent radio interview referred to as "a
natural aristocrat of the spirit", cribbing I think from Lawrence)
that I wonder at Logan's simply ignoring in this fashion.

There are two things Hill's current critics habitually do that I find
particularly tiresome. One is moral exhibitionism, exhorting the
reader to imitate the critic's efforts at decoding, say, _Speech!
Speech!_ as if so doing might somehow make you a better person (like,
e.g., your humble critic). The other is making a big fuss about the
obscurity of his references, the normal method being to pick a couple
of especially obscure ones and explicate them just to make the point
about how terribly erudite and perspicacious one needs to be to handle
this stuff (so unless you're as clever as me, dear reader, you might
as well not bother). I simply don't think that's true; I think Hill's
verse does most of its real work at some distance from its points of
departure, and tracing the path back to the latter is an optional
exercise: it depends on whether the poem itself makes you curious
about its field of reference, and sucks you in. Reading Hill's poems
has at times prompted me to investigate all sorts of recondite areas,
and that has been one of the pleasures of them, but they are
emphatically not calling for some sort of ideal reader who has read
everything Hill has read and thought everything he has thought about
it.

Dominic

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