EXCHANGE WITH BRENDA HILLMAN ON “POEM WHILE THE POWER WAS OUT”

By Cynthia Hogue and Thomas Fink

“Poem While the Power Was Out” from In a Few Minutes Before Later Copyright 2022 by Brenda Hillman. Published by Wesleyan University Press. Used by permission.

Cynthia Hogue: I read In a Few Minutes Before Later in what seemed to me an altered state of consciousness. I have long loved the element in your poetry where you give voice to the “purpose & meaning” by which we live. In this volume, that extends to the very minutes—and what you call the “meaning molecules”—of our lives. In this poem, what strikes me is how the details unfold in tactile descriptions that also bear traces of psychological insight: the winds are “hot,” the silence is “blurred,” sunlight “might bring harm,” and “forgiveness” entering the suburbs is “odd.” Could you speak to how the descriptive associations lead to that weighted word, “forgiveness”? It seems to come from another realm than the physical.

Brenda Hillman: Thanks to you and Tom for doing this feature about my poem. I’m deeply honored. Your first question gets to the root of what is necessary to poetry. Maybe one thing has to do with what people call “insight,” which is a method of experiencing, for want of a better term, through linguistic and sensory discoveries that penetrate the dullness of living without curiosity. Blake famously refers to “the doors of perception” – Blake is one of my big influences—and when Blake talks about the doors of perception being opened, people of my generation often used that as an excuse to partake of psychedelics, but I mostly took that phrase to mean that there is an intense reality to be lived at every moment, lived emotionally and perceptually, in such a way that will make what is really there unfold.  The phenomena of moments are endlessly profound. Sometimes the gathering of emotion and color, pattern, memory seems almost unbearably dense;  I’m not sure how other people live through their days, with such an onslaught of things to think and feel about every single moment, but it seems to me there is a barrage of possibilities, and there are several doors into each of these units of experience. 

The poem was written—along with two companion poems, one before and one after—during a time when the wildfires in California were severe and the power was often out. I was working on this book in a particularly bad autumn, when the wildfires were going an extra-long time, and the power company had decided to address the danger from the winds with rolling blackouts. Sometimes these were sudden and sometimes not. At first, there were class cancellations at our college, but after a while when the power outages became more frequent, teachers were asked to figure out how we could muscle through the black-outs and still keep to a bit of academic rigor. During a few of these periods, my creative writing class met anyway, even though there was no power. We sat with our phones and read poems; we wrote with pens and pencils in the half-light when our phones lost charge. Even though there was widespread dismay over the power grid in California and the negligence that had caused some of the fires, there were times when the mysteries of having to slow down, to operate with candles and flashlights and crank batteries was not completely awful. Just as during the pandemic there was a kind of unity at first, there was a sense of shared mission in some of our communities. 

I appreciate how you ask about specific words in the poem; sometimes an adjective/noun combination will arrive because of a particular perception about a moment that is full of oddness. Poetry is especially good at helping focus on perception in this way. We go through our days having to perform so fast, to go quickly to get on to the next task without noticing—how the houseplant strains in one direction or another, how there are different numbers of raindrops on each pane, and even with familiar observations—like seeing university students walking along texting with one hand—their heights, their jeans, their shoes—so what is there, what is so marvelous and disturbing and interesting about each day—has to be rushed over, not valued. 

The examples you give—the hot winds, the blurred silence, the sunlight bringing harm and the forgiveness as something odd—have different valences. Forgiveness is odd because it is unexpected on days of environmental disaster and power outages.  How is a blurred silence different from a clear silence? It may be a bit of synesthesia—the way a blurred window is different from a clear window. It is probably taken from phenomenology in writers I love like Bachelard—in which self-awareness or the consciousness in a perception isn’t an invention but a deepening. 

I studied John Ruskin and his ideas about art when I was eighteen or nineteen and I remember quibbling with the objection to pathetic fallacy. My students hear the word pathetic differently—”oh, that’s just pathetic,” something that is degraded and invites contempt— but of course it refers to pathos, feelings what invoke pity and sympathy. Ruskin didn’t want too much feeling to be placed on things or entities that don’t have a lot of feeling, like oceans, mountains and trees. But as a closet animist, I think the awareness of extra feeling-states might just be heightened consciousness. So a couple of things in this poem might be examples of Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy—certainly the sun bringing harm or forgiveness entering the suburbs. It may be that emotion outside the human sphere is more common than we think. So one of the ways to answer your question is that the world of sense perception, the vastness of the other side, things we cannot perceive but are there, such as the extra colors other animals sense that we cannot, these things might be unmanageably large. It is not only that we project ourselves onto things in our environment. They are there with us.  My work with trance and interior states brings me to think that at a depth level, forgiveness is odd, silence is blurred, and sunlight can be sinister during wildfire season. This is a kind of synesthesia of the soul, going in and out of states of being. The poetics is a core principle here. 

Thomas Fink: What prompted you to indent—with varied spacing—13 out of the poem’s 24 lines? Also, is there a special significance to the use of octaves?

Hillman: Before I speak about indents let me say that stanza patterning is rarely accidental for me even if it seems haphazard. I have more love for certain numbers and the number 8 has no particular relevance for me; I’m much fonder of 3’s, 4’s, 6’s and 12’s. But in a sort of procedural lunge toward a practice that seemed at once organic and inorganic, I have for a few books, in some poems, been trying to work within lengths for short poems that are decided in advance; one of these is the 24-line poem, because of 24 hours in a day, and so on. 24-line poems are nearly always aimed at gathering small collections of the visual, the sonorous, the emotional, and the yet-to-be-parsed unit of thought. 24 has such centrality in our days. A few decades ago, while working on some longer poems, I decided it’s really good poetic practice to keep trying to write wildly into the short poem, trying to put everything you have on a page. I like to try different shapes to come up with my 24 lines, and this one came in these 8-line blocks. 

Where did the ragged left margin come from? Like many people of my poetic generation and age, a classic and traditional fidelity to the left margin is how I learned my craft. My roots of experiment and play stem from—or, should I say, the stems are rooted—in several sources:  19^th century romanticism/symbolism; literary modernism; twentieth century avant garde practices, the unpredictable business of being alive. The experiments with beauty.  My generation of “experimental” women poets, interested in visual elements, drew from Modernism of course, and modernism began earlier than the 20^th century. Making an irregular and not always “tab-stopped” ragged left margin/right margin technique began to seem appealing just to mix it up, to stay interested in technique, to try new music for a new time of life.  I first learned about visually exploratory poems at Pomona College from studying Mallarmé. I’ll never forget opening “Un Coup de Dés,” spread across the two pages, called, so oddly, the gutter. The productive space between pages is far from a “gutter.” On the left, not starting the poem all the way at the margin, was a little different in the 70s and 80s though many had done it before. I began playing with the tab-stops and the space bar almost as if playing the piano, improvising, and there’s a quality that happens with little (or larger) indents.  I always wished I played the piano and envy those musicians who can sit down and improvise like my friend Chris Stroffolino or jazz pianists. Playing with poetic form is the closest thing I will likely come to musical play. So playing with formatting in a final-ish version of a poem is to arrive at a different sense of the visual line, through play and impulse. How does this contribute to “meaning”? The ”look” of a poem sometimes communicates with a different intelligence than the thinking aspects of its language. When visual aspects of poetry are in conversation with the thinking aspects of the poem, it can be exciting.  I’ve always felt that the visual forms of poems reflect the way we see things with pre-cognition, insightfully, spiritually. I still return to the left margin; it is like a very faithful parent, and one always goes back to it in some regard, or one pushes against it. 

I’m not sure how much of experiment is fear of boredom, fear of being “pinned down” to one thing by folks who have gotten used to expecting a particular technique or style. Some poets want to be characterized by a particular “look.”  The desire to be known, to have a signature style… But what if your signature style is a mixed bouquet of weeds and flowers, a group of forms, no one thing? As a young poet, one might want to have an identity or to be known for an invention. Or, to be acknowledged by – oh, whoever acknowledges. But I have been more the kind of poet who was afraid of having freedom taken away, and not the other kind of poet. Many poets I feel close to are poets of development—Yeats, Rilke, Barbara Guest—poets who try different things and go through stages. What does it mean to experiment with form? So the little shuttle indents have been a stage for me, like a dance step I’m learning—but quite irregular. The poem is in octaves and all but a few of the lines have 6 words per line, which I do often instead of counting syllables. Like syllabics, the counting process adds order and irregularity.  I like the look visually because the margin looks “torn.” Making procedural forms—deciding on some “rules” in advance of my writing and letting the imagination push against the cage—in this case, a very orderly number of lines per stanza and words per line, but a kind of bouncy left margin—gives a lot of pleasure in the writing. I don’t play solitaire or sudoku or anything like that, but I do like to challenge myself to make meaning out of my own formal inventions and the one in charge is the intuition, which wants to invent something new for myself each time. Intuition—that is one of my favorite concepts because of not having to prove anything. The slight jiggling dance between order and disorder. 

Hogue: Forrest Gander termed the recurring figure of the white-breasted nuthatch in this volume “talismanic.” Animals and plants live so radiantly and fully in these pages! In this poem, one from which Gander quotes, the “Nuthatch left stripes    when it flew off,” and those stripes leave traces of the bird’s “presence.” He calls that residue “time-resistant.” Could you talk a bit about that sense of time-resistant presence here? What are you getting at?

Hillman: Time-resistant describes one of the great flavors of eternity, though I’m not quite sure Forrest meant that by it—it does sound safe in the rain!  If by “time-resistant” Forrest means that the poem might last, one can only hope! In my poetry, there is often a presence or set of presences other than human, encompasses and includes the human. I sometimes get a little tired of humans. But probably “time resistant” refers to the kinds of eternity that art can participate in and create, the artifacts of human imagination that are beauty-giving and beauty-remaking rather than the kinds of destructive imagination that artifacts of war and persecution—far greater in number—bring to us. Among my favorite birds are the nuthatches; I have a great fondness for nuthatches, both the white-breasted and the red-breasted varieties that come to our feeder. They are very sleek creatures; they look like Corvettes. They swoop in quite fast and they select their seed quite deftly in one quick visit; visually, then, the human eye might experience the parts in a way that the brilliant film editor and translator Walter Murch describes in his beautiful conversations with Joy Katz about film editing (https://www.filmsound.org/murch/parnassus/) as a kind of translation that makes possible thought between various states of perception. For me, the nuthatch is a being whose experience I don’t have access to, but that leaves a sort of residue of light in its very efficient processes of flying and seems to leave a stripe. I delight in seeing creatures and in imagining their states in both naturalistic and metaphoric realities. Presence is, well, presence. 

Fink: In the middle of the second octave of the poem, the addressee “feels” the “unreasonable” illumination of “reason” in the context of this absence of literal illumination. What form of reason is referred to here? And what makes it unreasonable?

Hillman: Great question. Since the Romantics it’s been fashionable for poets to bash rationality. There’s no need to do that, particularly now, when the lack of facts might create a global crisis. Yet for poetic dreamers there’s always a slide between the 18^th century and the 21^st as a continual negotiation between appealing models that, if taken too far, are not helpful. Of course rationalism, agreed upon facts, realities that we can all share and participate in, test, anchor with our senses and our brain power, is what we rely on to help us live on earth together as a species. We are in an era when people doubt facts to such a degree that we are in a true crisis in the Anthropocene—climate change denial, doubts about connections between human greed and the demise of millions of species, and the feeling on the part of so many that humans are the only species that should triumph.  Many people live solely by models of reason, that human experience is knowable through reason, logic, naturalistic approaches to our lives on earth. Yet each day can be approached dialogically, in conversation with an invisible truth that is not provable or factual but based on an inner, metaphorical realm. 

In that stanza, perhaps there’s a little jab at the kinds of reason that keep us locked out of experiencing all the layers of being. We need facts and “majority rules” realities to agree on basics: what is a circle; why does 3 follow 2; where is Germany; how much Tylenol is required for a headache; why should drivers obey traffic signals.  But existence has so many aspects beyond material existence that are available to our senses and with our instruments; quantum theory has shown that measurements are based on indeterminacy. And even things we know through our senses are full of other layers, of degrees, of feelings, of meanings. The models of living offered by the arts and by spiritual systems hold us in different kinds of powerful truths. Though I love reading about historical forces and thinking in relation to scientific explanations and rational approaches to reality, I don’t think we should be limited by rationalism or even by provable facts. Getting back to what kicked off this poem: sitting with my students in the half-lit classroom, trying to read poems on our phones, made for a show of strength and imagination after the lights went out on campus.  

Hogue: There’s an interlocutor, or addressee, in this poem, who is chided for worrying, and for not “remain[ing] strong”: “Once you were strong,” “you” is told, when “the rare / historical voices moved aside so you / could be different.” Has the “you” succeeded in being different? Or is the forgiveness introduced in the first stanza perhaps self-forgiveness for not being different? “Power” seems by the end of the poem to be something like a personal power, which “you” has perhaps lost. Is that right, or is something else happening?

Hillman: That’s something I’ve fretted over most of my poetic life. The problem of whom or what to address in one’s poem may be one of the most interesting and varied and vexed issues for poets but particularly since Modernist practice. I don’t feel I’ve solved the problem or even located the crux of it, but it is profoundly a problem of how to distribute subjectivity. The metaphor I would use is one from my mother’s baking: “cream the butter and the sugar very well.” Some poems of narrative subjectivity broke major ground in poetry in a new way in the 20^th century, so one could feel a psychological identification and intense cluster of emotion, but I became a little impatient with poems of isolated ego. One of the things that led me to a kind of agitated relation to lyric subjectivity in the 1980s in particular was a sense of dissatisfaction with the sort of narrowness that the telling of an incident or situation should have a certain amount of moral tonality that would be drawn out of the circumstance, because the singular self had gone through something and wanted the reader to share in the experience of a moral pay-out. At the same time, the poems in which there is nothing on the line for the writer other than a sense of play aren’t really satisfying always, at least for me, when it comes to the awe-inspiring tasks of being alive. It’s one of the three or four main “craft issues” I’ve always wrestled with. So, to answer this another way: in this poem, there’s a hidden questioner who is addressing a less hidden “you.” At the end of the series of poems there’s a dedication: to the students. But in fact, the poem is a conversation with parts of the self that seek to be assured and that cannot be, very easily, assuaged when there is environmental anxiety.    

Fink: How could/can the addressee come to be the “ideal” of “the rare/ historical voices”— that is, the “real” ones? And considering the treatment of activism, which can never reach an “ideal” status, in the book as a whole, do you perceive the poem (or at least moments in it) to be connected to the interplay among individual behavior, collective action/inaction, and the ecological crisis?

Hillman: Gosh, I can give the hopeless answer and the hopeful answer. We can never measure up to our ideals. Yet the power of collective creative force for humans is so much larger than any of us individually and yet how much we need to think with these capacities now. The poem is perhaps making an appeal, after throwing itself at the mercy of a previous helplessness, to engagement with great models. It always seems as if our poetic models are inspiring us, but also, in an odd sense, standing in our way of doing something drastically new. I live by my models of great art and great artists even while always wanting and hoping to refresh the kinds of poetry that I want to offer to future readers. The speaking “voice” of the poem, addressing the “you”—as I say above to Cynthia’s question, a you that is the self, the other, the collective listener, a mixed bouquet—gathers strength by an odd insight, a proposed insight that may be an absurdity: if we turn to dead or living models for strength when facing an impossible reality, it is possible that we are also trying to rely on them less, trying to forge some other way of being at the same time a creativity that breaks our models in an iconoclastic sense. Maybe there’s also a kind of mystical zone of the soul in which what we admire also admires us—or, we can make, in a Jungian sense, archetypes in which this occurs. I would like to live that way—where the dead admire the efforts of the living, because we are putting in a lot of effort!  Thank you both so much for all these complex and interesting questions, and thank you for sharing my work with your readers!