Geoffrey Hill reciting "The Storm"

[RossMcCague]

Season of Stealth blog

Chainlessway youtube

[RossMcCague]

The new Oxford Professor of Poetry, 2011.

[pulsebreathing]

Beautiful words you don't have to be embarrasssed to read.

[alsonross]

Ross McCague Red Cloth Series on youtube in tribute to Hill.

[mstephe9]

This is for prodsmash2 - well, it depends on what you mean, exactly, by "understand," but, yes, I believe I do. Not everything by Hill - and certainly not his newer stuff - but quite a bit of his early and mid-career poetry. And when I first read that early stuff, I didn't understand it, or not intellectually. I find it takes time to understand Hill. In fact, I had a recent break-through with his Triumph of Love (later stuff): it's begun to make sense after appearing initially impenetrable.

[citizen2k1]

I agree with you mstephe9 and would add the question, since when did poetry have to be so totally and immediately "understandable" for it to be enjoyed, or, indeed, good? What about the sheer love of the rhythms of language?

[DanLackey]

Geoffrey: I guess I'll have settle for this virtual sighting. Wish you were still just up Beacon a ways . . . and I approve of the Moasaic beard . . .

[prodsmash2]

Geoffrey Hill does not deserve to be called a poet. His writings are at very best ideas for poems.

[Cielamouroux]

Does Ted Hughes deserve to be called a poet? I'm asking because you are apparently the person who decides such things. Please do let me know.

[bigbadnubbins]

Wow, prodsmash! Thanks for letting us all know about this situation. Perhaps you ought to make such a scandalous bit of news more widely known.

[c0rt0m4ltese]

like this is just the right place for saying that -- a video where geoffrey hill is reciting a translation.

[prodsmash2]

This indeed is the right place to say that Geoffrey Hill is not a poet - precisely when he is reciting a "translation" of somebody else's poem (which everybody is drooling over) rather than one of his own inpenetrable efforts!

[mstephe9]

Funny, at its very best, Hill's poetry seems to me to make just about everything else that's out there seem like ideas for poems. He works in words - not ideas - like few others, which is one reason why his poetry is as difficult as it is: words aren't merely a transparent medium for ideas for him, they're the thing itself. See what Seamus Heaney has said about him to that effect.

[prodsmash2]

mstephe9 thanks for your comments - but do you really understand Hill's poetry? It would be very easy for me to throw any one of a number at you and be guaranteed that (through no fault of your own) you'd be sinking in the mire.

[mstephe9]

Well, it depends on what you mean, exactly, by "understand," but, yes, I believe I do. Not everything by Hill - and not a lot of his newer stuff - but a fair bit of his early and mid-career poetry. And when I first read that early stuff, I didn't understand it, or not intellectually. I find it takes time to understand Hill. In fact, I had a recent break-through with his Triumph of Love (later stuff): it's begun to make sense. Let me throw some at you: Septemeber Song. Know it?

[grobbledonk]

Where is the comment by Heaney from that you're referring to? I know he wrote about Hill in Englands of the Mind & referred briefly to him in Stepping Stones, and also in a recent interview regarding the laureateship. Hill takes a swipe at Heaney in the Triumph of Love, but in typically ambiguous manner

[mstephe9]

"Words in his poetry fall slowly and singly, like molten solder, and accumulate to a dull glowing nub."

That's the quote exactly, from Heaney's "Selected Prose, 1968-78." However, I can't tell you exactly where in there, as my immediate source is the back-cover of Hill's "New and Collected Poems, 1954-1992" (Houghton Mifflin, 1994).

[grobbledonk]

Ah yes, I remember now. Yes, I've read that in the blurb too - it's from Englands of the Mind, in which he also discusses Larkin & Hughes.

[moralphenomena]

Thanks for the video. Geoffrey Hill is an incredible poet. I'm disappointed that the public has such limited exposure to his work. He is little studied in British acdemic institutions due to cataclysmic decisions on syllabi matters. It seems that poetry is hardly allowed to be difficult; the lines written by Geoffrey Hill are some of the most insitently harrowing, dramatic and absorbing in the language. Unique amongst living poets. His work cannot but be admired...

[edusto]

mó bonito, o dia lá fora

[viniciusp]

The Storm that batters the magnolia's

impermeable leaves, the long-drawn drum roll

of Martian thunder with its hail

(crystal acoustics trembling in your night's lair disturb you while the gold transfumed from the mahoganies, the page's rims of de luxe books, still burns, a sugar grain

under your eyelid's shell)

[viniciusp]

lightining that makes stark-white the trees, the walls, suspending them-

interminable instant - marbled manna

and cataclysm - deep in you sculpted,

borne now as condemnation: this binds you

closer to me, strange sister, than any love.

So, the harsh buskings, bashing of castanets and tambourines around the spiler's ditch,

fandango's foot-rap and over all

some gesture still to be defined...

[viniciusp]

As When

you turned away and casting with a hand

that cloudy mass of hair from off your forehead

gave me a sign and stepped into the dark

[Droolx]

Thanks for posting this. Excellent!

[grobbledonk]

Good to see this, however amateurish (that's not a criticism) - it's so rare that one can find any footage of this poet, among the best living.

[grobbledonk]

I only meant that someone was obviously surreptitiously aiming a camera at the poet during public performance, rather than being professionally filmed with his complicity. It's the only visual footage of him I'm aware of. When I saw him perform he said "Wild horses wouldn't induce to a public reading were I not professionally compromised"!