Book Review

I am writing this review on a day when my dog is particularly anxious and vexing in her refusal of all efforts to assure her. Gone with the first keyed letter but there when I opened this document to begin, my Word’s new Copilot feature—included in the latest update with no regard for whether or not I actually desired a copilot—offered to write for me several essays related to recent queries I suppose I must have made, though why those particular topics confounds me as the subjects were in focus now many months ago. My daughter’s paper plate whale, in need of some Scotch Magic Tape repairs this morning, stares me down from the dining table where I’m seated.

Bear with me. I have reason for beginning this review with such context that would seem to some, if not many, entirely irrelevant. Perhaps you’d like me to get to the point; to suggest whether or not poet-activist-grandmother Brenda Hillman’s prose collection of three short essay-lectures is worth your time; if it will be of use to you; if it provides the “toolkit for a functional imagination in times of crisis” it Hillman purports it to be. But if poetry, like being human, is a practice, as Hillman also claims in the collection, and these are indeed perhaps the same practice, as Hillman suggests, then the answer to your query cannot be answered so curtly.

Of use in what way—the review, the collection, the tool kit, a poem? That is the question that drives these essay-lectures, ultimately. Perhaps they should be lecture-essays. They were intended as lectures and originally delivered, albeit via Zoom, while Hillman served as Kapnick Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia in Spring 2021. And yet they meander after wisps of thought, seeking through trial—though not error, really—as an essay might. And so it is in kindred spirit that I find I cannot otherwise write of my experience with the work. Indeed, Brian Teare’s forward is itself a generous review of the lectures, or essays, that follow, collecting threads of inquiry and encounter from across Hillman’s poetry as he himself experienced it and contextualizing the “lessons” the reader is about to receive.

Brenda Hillman is herself aware of the ambitious and too often segregated audiences she intends to address—student, specialist, general reader—and also of the importance of restoring joy as what can often be a forgotten element for those of us thick in the work as specialists and students. It is perhaps the same joy we’ve forgotten in casual conversations and encounters with neighbors, not as colleagues or points of transaction, but simple unhurried human encounters, and relishing in these moments of connection, whether in the poems she guides us in close reading, in her anecdotes of her efforts as an activist, or in reflecting on past friendships is a signature “device” across the lectures.

Ostensibly, these three talks address six forces of poetry that Hillman identifies as Metaphor and Metonymy, Meaning and Mystery, and Magic and Morality. One might ask, as they consider this work, whether it is coincidence or craft that they all begin with the letter M. “Precisely,” I imagine she would say if posed the question. For what connects the practice of poetry with the practice of being human is an unavoidable compulsion to make meaning, and we each do and must approach such work from our very-much-bound-by-circumstance and subjective individual positions. And if Hillman cannot reveal to us the questions we each wrestle with in our own poetry—and perhaps more broadly, our lives—she can and does model where and how we might look. Each talk, while centered on one of the aforementioned pairings, is structured around modeled close readings that, while they reflect at times a reading or arrival that is necessarily particular to Hillman, invite the reader to activate their own engagement with the poem. For example, in “Metaphor and Metonymy,” I do not myself read love into the poem “Miniature” by Yannis Ritsos, translated by Edmund Keeley as Hillman does, but rather a tension in age and agency and an instrument of insurmountable fatigue. But under Hillman’s instruction, I do not find myself precluded from voicing my own sour experience/understanding of the thin lemon slices, the sad hands that shape them thus. And while there are the occasional pithy one-liners for teaching that hold true (e.g., “metaphors compare one thing to another, reaching clear into the unknown, the unseen, the imagined. They make the leap”, or one of my favorites, “Our job is to renegotiate styles of reality”), overall I find the work to be less of a self-contained and portable collection of tools and more of a gentle guide and companion as I progress, or rather wander, along my own practice—both of being a poet and a human.

Altogether I would say the three talks in this prose collection read rather like a poem in that if one is looking for some kind of precise advice in the production of poem-as-finished-products, one will not find them. Rather, like a poem itself, what unfolds in the writing—what Hillman and subsequent readers must unfold in the writing (as ongoing verb)—is a needling, seeking movement through an interior landscape. Often leaps in her own thinking are signaled by a delightful recurring typographical use of rows of nonparallel or wobbly vertical lines, like Emily Dickinson’s famous dashes, only upended on their sides. Just as often, Hillman simply runs on after thoughts and observations, trusting the reader (who, one must remember, was originally a present, though virtual, and hopefully active listener) to walk apace awhile, as it were, with their chosen guide. That is, at times Hillman’s musing seems to stray from a consideration of recognizable poetic subject matter—and yet, shouldn’t any good poem? What these talks emphasize, with both examples of close readings of poems and forays into childhood memories, is that the practice of poetry cannot be separated from the practice of living. At times these slips from thought to thought indeed act similarly to how an effective poem invites me to enter a similarly engaged exercise in consciousness and internal movement.

My personal sense is that a poet does bear a responsibility in their work. And yet as a teacher we want to encourage our students’ individual ambitions and aesthetics. Through her modeled thought and reading and drawing on her lifetime at this calling, I feel that same indictment in these pages—not just for the poet, but also any reader of poetry, and it is clear we need more of them. Unlike Paisley Rekdal’s craft text Real Toads, Imaginary Gardens, published just last year, I would be more inclined to bestow this collection to my father or one of my siblings, who appreciate the value of poetry in our lives but are just as often confounded by how to enter most contemporary poems. In Hillman’s references throughout to other poets and their thoughts on craft, I am again suspicious that much of the work of poetry—and being human—is stumbling to ultimately say the same thing, to learn the same lesson we seem with each incarnation or generation or civilization to forget and have to rearticulate for ourselves. But the result is a readable meditation and bit of company in what seems, now five years after the specific crisis in which Hillman fashioned these talks, to be a never-ending time of crisis. As Hillman says herself in “Meaning and Mystery,” “Sometimes indirection and disjunction help the crisis of the eternal Now.” Not decidedly dualistic as the titles suggest but offering instead “a dialectical exchange of energies,” Hillman provides at the end of each talk an “assignment,” in case the invitation to participate was not clear enough. These assignments are perhaps almost too open at times—that is, as an educator, I would not necessarily use them in the same way I might use traditional writing prompts—they demand a kind of condition of the mind that we are reminded in Hillman’s collection cannot be done without.

In her final talk, Hillman says, “What is called a moral life—living according to a set of values that might lead to a greater good—is not considered a specialty of poets. Poets like to misbehave and so do our dream lives.” Perhaps splitting hairs, I would call what Hillman defines as “moral” to be instead “ethical,” and not not a quality of poets, as I see poetry as, in its practice of being human, precisely an engagement with how we interact with each other. To close her series of lectures, Hillman states she would “like to talk about three subjectivities in poetry of engagement.” By this point in the work I’m convinced there is no other kind of poetry but one of engagement. And what is perhaps most valuable about this small collection is that it provides a model of just that.