If a Poet Falls in the Woods...

No matter what happens in the remaining 10 and a half months, 2006 has already been redeemed by the appearance of a new book of poems by Geoffrey Hill.

Ours is an impoverished era for poetry, precisely when we need it most – so much solipsism, so many tin ears. Most of what gets published is either dogmatically incoherent or so self-obsessed it threatens to suck the reader into a black hole formerly occupied by a poet. In the first camp we find the so-called Language Poets, including Ron Silliman and Clark Coolidge, who take a smirking, political pride in crafting ugliness and making no sense whatsoever. Almost 18 years ago, I interviewed Coolidge at his home in western Massachusetts. I wanted to meet him after a reviewer in Ohio had called him “arguably the worst poet currently writing in English.” For a newspaper reporter with a love of books, I felt a moral obligation to meet such a person, like a guy with eczema making a pilgrimage to a leper colony.

Coolidge had a drum set and, with the aid of earphones, played along with Elvin Jones and Art Blakey. He seemed to be unusually well off for a poet, with a big house and lots of books and music. Here’s an example of a Coolidge poem that I cited in the profile I wrote for my newspaper: “time coal hum base/treat south admit/low the dissolve add/owl.” A little weak in forward momentum and linguistic intensity, you say? Isn’t the rhythm, from a drummer/poet, rather obscure? (It reminds me of a line I heard from the late baritone sax player Nick Brignola: “So many drummers, so little time.”) That was early Coolidge. Here’s a sample of late-middle-period Coolidge:

“How could I have come to the deck in my life
where the music goes on even especially when I’m not
listening to it? Listening’s maybe only
a matter of the time you think you’re listening?”

The lines are longer, and the rudiments of subject-verb-object grammatical structure are mostly in place, but the rhythm still needs works.

What I remember best about Coolidge was the patrician hauteur he attempted to conceal with a show of hipster bluff. Dismissing readers who came to poetry with expectations of beauty and coherence, he said, “It’s not TV. It’s not the Carson show. A poem never stands in any one place. The delight is in the way the poem changes. It’s not going to sit still and answer your questions.” He went on: “In the popular mind, they still think of Robert Frost, Joyce Kilmer, Rod McKuen, greeting card verse.” In effect, he was saying, most readers are too conventional, too bourgeois to appreciate his gifts. The hidden shame of the avant-garde, besides its nagging puritanism, is so often the human-all-too-human sin of snottiness, exclusivity or – dare I say it? – elitism.

I closed my profile with another Coolidge quote: “There’s no other reason to write poetry except for the ecstasy of it. I don’t have a choice. I do it. I can imagine doing it if nobody read it.” If a poet falls in a forest, does he make a sound?

About the second group of poets, the monsters of self, we can be comforted with the knowledge that soon only pedants will remember the contributions of Tony Hoagland, Billy Collins and the rest of their clan. They are simply too trifling, without the saving grace of wit we enjoy in light verse, to survive.

Recent years have been tough on poets. In the new century we have already lost Edgar Bowers, Thom Gunn, Czeslaw Milosz, Donald Justice and Anthony Hecht. I intend to write more about Hill’s Without Title, after I further digest it. Hill will turn 74 in June. Since 1996 he has published six volumes of poetry and one of very knotty prose. This late eruption of creativity is less reminiscent of Yeats than of Henry James, who published three of his greatest novels, as well as The American Scene, stories, essays and letters in and around his 70th year.