Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

I was ready to give up more than once on Brenda Hillman’s Seasonal Works With Letters on Fire. It won the Griffin Prize. Hillman is praised for her experimentation. She writes in phrases as much as sentences. She is an activist and often slips references to social issues into what seems the middle of something else, as in this section from “At the solstice, a Yellow Fragment”:

. . . . (a fox
deep in its hole under yellow
thumbs of the chanterelles,
(no: gold. gold thumbs, Goldman Sachs
pays no tax . . .

[Note: as I feared, the indentations don't come through in the post.]

Those parentheses are two of four which will close all together six lines later. Is this supposed to reflect stream of consciousness?

Shifting indentations make the lines float on the page, which fits the often very fluid writing. Typographical tricks abound. One poem I like is “Autumn Ritual With HATE Turned Sideways,” which puts each of the letters to bed, repeating them in different ways, including a row of E’s laid on their backs. Poems like this are not easy to type into a review!

The one poem in this form which I found on the web is “Between the Souls and the Meteors” at:
http://www.upne.com/0819574145.html

Here is the first part of another piece which is in a different form: this block of text is followed by a picture, a few scattered words and another paragraph. Like a haibun, but not.

In High Desert Under the Drones
We are western creatures; we can stand for hours in the sun. We read poetry near an Air Force base. Is poetry pointless? Maybe its points are moving, as in a fire. The enlisted men can’t hear. Practice drones fly over-head to photograph our signs; they look like hornets [Vespula] with dangly legs dipping in rose circles with life grains. They photograph shadows of the hills where coyotes’ eyes have stars. They could make clouds of white writing, cilia, knitting, soul weaving, spine without nerves, dentures of the west, volcano experiments, geometry weather breath & salt. Young airmen entering the base stare from their Hondas; they are lucky to have a job in an economy like this. The letters of this poem are also lucky to have a job for they are insects & addicts & thieves. Volcanic basalt recalls its rock star father. Creosote & sage, stubby taupe leaves greet the rain. We hold our signs up. We’re all doing our jobs. Trucks bring concrete for the landing strip they’ve just begun.

The picture is ¾” tall by ½” wide. There are a number of similar size in other pieces. What is the point of a picture so small the reader can barely make it out, if at all.

I admit that all of this playing around with formatting makes me jealous. How does she rate such treatment from the publisher for poems which I can understand only in pieces? Many of the poems have “For” plus two initials at the end. I feel that I’m an outsider, not privy to the whole story.

I like the way Hillman mixes nature and personal relationships with outside realities with language and writing. I’d like to figure out how she does it; this is probably why I’ve spent so much time on this book. But I wish for more poems where I feel like “I got it!” - a satisfying whole.

I have to admit I feel lost in the excerpts included in your review. Unless things started adding up cumulatively, by repetition of certain images or somesuch, I think I would have the same response to the book as you did. Even in the one you provided a link for, I felt, as you aptly put it "an outsider, not privy to the whole story."

I sympathize but was nonetheless charmed the unexpectedly contemporary sensibility of the line "Volcanic basalt recalls its rock star father."

I'm reading this now. I was rather put off at first and lost, but have warmed up to her style.