tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post1916199431072270191..comments2024-03-28T19:56:32.848-05:00Comments on Anecdotal Evidence: `Shocked By Excellence'Patrick Kurphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08436175583386298032noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999805.post-21721191078994080962009-03-20T13:09:00.000-05:002009-03-20T13:09:00.000-05:00Hill is phenomenal. His poetry always condenses mu...Hill is phenomenal. His poetry always condenses music with the full weight of the British poetic tradition behind it. “Emblem” is an eerie sonic landscape, where “sunslanting rain” and “invisible wing-roots” seem like run-of-the-mill descriptors of the English countryside and conventional images like “slag remonstrances” and twitching roses seem imbued with a certain poetic heaviness, of memory trying to justify itself. <BR/><BR/>Hill’s remarks about his own project, also linked, show an even more shocking rarity: a poet actually explaining his themes, his motivations, his influences, his effects. That’s something a critic can’t understand and a poet can’t word, but he seems to take it as a given, something that is part of his “civic obligation.” Contrast that with the attitudes of U.S. academic poets, full of preening gestures (“a crisply pop vocabulary [that] belongs to the realm of high-definition television”), chimerical generalizations (“linguistic dislocation from gender/racial power structures”), and naval-gazing appeals to the authority of the canon (“Emily Dickinson <I>wanted</I> to be published”).WAShttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10403669322174979974noreply@blogger.com