Skip to main content

Speech! Speech by English Poet Geoffrey Hill

Speech! Speech! 

By Geoffrey Hill

 


1

Erudition. Pain. Light. Imagine it great

unavoidable work; although: heroic

verse a non-starter, says P E O P L E. Some believe

we over-employ our gifts. Given identical

street parties, confusion, rapid exposure,

practice self-emulation; music for crossed

hands; for two fingers; music

for taxiing to take-off; for cremation.

Archaic means piles pillaged and erased

in one generation. Judge the distance.

Innocent bystanders on stand-by. Painful

scenes mar final auto-de-fe.


                                                 ***

Published in 2000

Stanza, 12 lines, unrhyming

(2 stanzas per page, left justified)

Cinematic take – scene 1 – Lights, camera, action. Poem is a performance directed by the poet

Erudition – criticism of Hill – ‘difficult poet’. Intellect, feeling, focus – setting the scene. Unavoidable – creative impulse. Heroic verse preferred by Hill, not popular with PEOPLE or ‘some’, vox publica.

Exposure – camera, light

Self-imitation, also heard as self-immolation (self-harm). Music (poetry) for virtuosity, playing simply with 2 fingers, music (Muzak) in airplane and at funeral

History pillaged and erased in 1 generation. Judge the distance – poet’s point of view, artistic decision, starting point for the stanza. By-standers - extras for the performance, also chiasmus – concepts repeated in reverse order

Painful scenes mar act of faith (auto-de-fe) – burning heretics, persecution of Hill for saying something other (out of time)


                                              ***


Hill preferences speech over writing – but he does it with writing. In speaking, there are ambiguities in diction, sounding, mis-hearing – from Eliot in ‘East Coker’, Four Quartets -

              the intolerable wrestle

With words and meaning

This stanza establishes the starting point for the poem. Key themes – the poet as director, the poem as a performance, music as poetry, types of music, the contraction (shortening) of history (into 1 generation)

Erudition – refers to earlier poem The Triumph Of Love – Hill defends himself against the charge of ‘erudition’ –


    Shameless old man, bent on committing

    more public nuisance. Incontinent

    fury wetting the air. Impotently

    bereft satire. Charged with erudition, put up by defence to be

    his own accuser


unavoidable work – epigraph to The Triumph Of Love


“AND I SENT MESSENGERS UNTO THEM, SAYING, I AM DOING A GREAT WORKE, SO THAT I CAN NOT COME DOWN: WHY SHOULD THE WORKE CEASE, WHILEST I LEAVE IT, AND COME DOWN TO YOU.”  -- Nehemiah 6:3

Also, for the artist, the compelling impulse of creativity

 

Heroic / verse – English tradition of the outmoded ‘heroic couplet’ – 2 lines of rhymed iambic pentameter (lines of 5 ‘feet’) – unstressed syllable followed by stressed syllable – da-DUM of the human heartbeat -back to Shakespeare


… piles pillaged and erased

 

Self-emulation – imitating oneself, following on from oneself, repeating one self. Sounds like ‘self-immolation’ (no distinction in what is heard), self-deprecation, self-dislike – the act of killing oneself for political or religious reasons, usually with fire. Connects with final line of poem – ‘auto-da-fe’ – during the  Spanish inquisition, before heretics were burnt in public they were asked to make a final act of faith to redeem their souls




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

From Academy to the Street, From Poetry To Prose

From academy to the street, from poetry to prose - Nicanor Parra – ‘My own antipoems use this blank verse. I’ve often been asked what an antipoem is and the most frequent response I’ve given, without realising  what I was saying is – “an antipoem is quite simple a dramatic utterance”, and a dramatic utterance, we would have to add, is a Shakespearean blank verse. Or rather, it is a hendecasyllable that lengthens and shortens, and that oscillates between the academy, the street and the fairground.   I’ve always worked with these elements: I’ve even managed to combine verse with eleven syllables and one with one syllable, and verses with prose. I thought it was a great invention of mine, but the Elizabethans were already working with these methods – Shakespeare used them in King Lear , where a large percentage of the work is written in prose, without us fully knowing what is verse and what is prose. This is very important: we could say that they are prosaic verses, or poetic verse’
Post a Comment
Read more

Breaking Heads - Two Rompecabezas From Nicanor Parra

  PUZZLE by Nicanor Parra   I give no one the right. I love a piece of rag. I shift tombs back and forth.   I shift tombs back and forth. I give no one the right. I'm a ridiculous sort In the light of the sun, The plague of soda fountains Dying of rage.   I am a hopeless case, My own hairs accuse me On the bargain altar The machines give no pardons.   I laugh from behind a chair, my face fills with flies.   I am the one who can’t say what he means Talking in long rows of what.   I stutter, With my foot touches a sort of foetus.   What are these stomachs for? Who made up this mess?   It's best thing is not to let on. Thinking one thing I think something else. (Translated by W.S. Merwin) Rompecabezas   No doy a nadie el derecho. Adoro un trozo de trapo. Traslado tumbas de lugar.   Traslado tumbas de lugar. No doy a nadie el derecho. Yo soy un tipo ridículo A los rayos del sol, Azote de las fuen
Post a Comment
Read more

The Strange and Compelling Inner Life of Clarice Lispector

Dedication - Cuando a la casa del lenguaje se le vuela el tejado y las palabras no guarecen, yo hablo When the house of language has its roof blown off and words do not shelter, I speak - fellow Latin American writer and contemporary, Alejandra Pizarnik, "Fragmentos para dominar el silencio” (Fragments to overcome silence)   ---   “ALL THE WORLD BEGAN WITH A YES. ONE MOLECULE SAID YES TO ANOTHER MOLECULE and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began. Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort” - From The Hour Of The Star (1977)   ---   When I read Clarice, I’m reminded of Montaigne - "I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself … I roll about in myself” Maurice Merleau-Ponty described Montaigne as someone who put "a consciousness astonished
Post a Comment
Read more