On a Review of Pieces of Air in the Epic

How is writing a volume of poetry based on a concept tricky business? How often do contemporary American poets do this? How often has it been done in the past? What is the success rate? Is writing a single poem not tricky business? What makes Hillman's hands so adept? What is the pitfall she is avoiding? How is tricky business a pitfall? If air can change and is therefore a master of disguise, what is the missing premise? How is an affected trope distinguished exactly in a work which self-consciously draws attention to its artifice? What is negative about an affected trope in such a context? Is it the definition of "affected?" What does it mean to call wind, space, and breath different guises of air? Is the difference between them supposed to be vast? Is the difference even moderate? Why don't we always recognize whether the poem is about air in general, or about air in detail, or about air doing something? Does Hillman place extra space between words and phrases? Are such spaces just to provide pauses and enticements to pondering possibilities? Is such intention as simple as opening a window, "to let in some air," or is there a deeper, more specific reason?

What is Hillman's approach? And what does it have in common with "language poetry?" Is all opaque writing influenced by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement? Why not replace transition with transformation? What is the line being tip-toed here? Is the import such that we could not bring ourselves to make the edit completely? If something is cryptic what does it matter whether it's intentional or not? What is the skill required? Syntax is torqued, pronouns shift, and a griffin appears: why a griffin? Why did Hillman choose the tired techniques of the post-avant over the tired techniques of the traditional lyric? Are materials themselves "a little bit of [meaning]"? Why not explicate the little bit of meaning that is there? Or is all meaning made in the mind of a reader? Was this an interesting thought in 1968? Is it an interesting thought in 2006? Were such a thought laid bare and broken into five relatively wordy lines would the result be recognized as "absolutely dazzling" by the post-avant activist? What is it about Hillman's lines that should make readers want to "put [the materials] together" themselves? Does every response of "What the fuck? This is nonsense?" mean the reader is confused or alienated? Why would such a response be inaccurate here? Should the reader feel bad that little epics have hurt feelings because they're not big epics? Is "little epic" French for orgasm? What would Shakespeare do with this material? What about Whitman? What about Tu Fu? If those aren't fair questions, what if we make adjustments for inflation? What are the people who find "exactly what they are looking for" in Hillman's work looking for? What is the freedom her poems achieve? Is it the freedom of a former slave? Could a reader be something other than liberated by this freedom? Could the freedom lead to a kind of oppression? Or is it really, truly a complete freedom? Is it possible? Is a former slave ever anything else?

It may be true that "we must trust" Hillman, but should we? What hints are there that it will be worth our time? What good is it if only "she knows the way through her poems?" What if I get distracted in the middle of a poem, how will I find my way back into it? Is the path different every time? Most of the time? Some of the time? If only she knows the way, but the reader is making the meaning, then who is in control? What if I'm the reader and I don't feel like engaging in this tug-of-war? Am I included in the "we" of this review? Do we ever get the feeling that we're in a not-for-profit version of The Matrix? Is this how we want to spend our days before we die? If avoiding order is a worthy goal why make poems and not bombs? How can we tell that Hillman is "willful" in her violent treatment of sense? If a great disorder is an order, is the poet back where she started? If a great disorder isn't an order, why not make every poem out of random words plucked out of a hat? How will readers piece together meanings when they can't even acquire expectations? I could have the expectation that something unexpected will constantly be happening, can't I? When one expects something unexpected is the unexpected very interesting? Even if it's possible, could it possibly be likely? How would one figure? What is significant about Hillman's "fractured, refracted, dispersed by space" vision? How is this not an affected trope?

What does the injection of "pure lyricism" into a non-lyric poem do for the poem? How about to the reader? Is it beautiful? The "intersection of abstraction and the real world" may be "a fair description of what we encounter in subsequent poems," but isn't it also a fair description of what we encounter in the poems of any number of post-Modern poets? Why not the periwinkle noise of sparrows? Or the pepper spray noise of sparrows? Would "someone else's dream" be stranger than mine? Do dreams bleed off the trim or do they cry? Are moments of clarity and precision always this dizzy and vague? Have we, perhaps, reached a point of agreement?

Are lyrical threads and narrative lines necessarily non-associative? What is the form Hillman takes away from her poems? How does association help her get to the heart of her poems exactly? Could there be an ordering of words, random or otherwise, in which the words don't accumulate in sense, here broadly defined, and sound? How does "often whimsical" language lead to an "intentionally cryptic" approach? Would being willfully whimsical in the course of being "deliberately opaque" imply that the whimsy is just affect? Is the incomprehensibility of the world an accomplished fact? The existence of meaning is arguably meaningless, but is there really no order in the world? If Hillman's work is like holding up a mirror to the world, why not hold up a mirror to the world and forget the words? What is gained by holding up an opaque mirror? Why not a self-portrait in a convex mirror?

Wouldn't the "I" have to feel less like a narrator in a non-narrative poem? Why use "I" to enter into self-referentiality? Why not a greater disordering of pronouns? Is this a case of being trapped in a tank? Where is the air here? If air is invisible why are there words in the poems at all? Why not an epic composed of blank pages? Why write lines that "create and keep a certain distance" when the reader must trust the writer to blaze a path through the poems? Is this supposed to introduce air into the text, as if it's merely an affected trope? What does it mean to write an existential riff and include it in a book of poems, to publish it and wait for it to be quoted in a review and recognized as such? Would any reader have thought it more heartfelt question than intellectual musing? More question period than musing? Why bother? What is the greater sensibility behind these poems? Greater than who? Greater than what? If a question is a rhetorical question, to the point that the question mark is left out in favor of a period, why not say: this is a rhetorical question? Who could argue that idle questions aren't the devil's balls?

Wouldn't it be better to be whimsically political or cryptically political than forthrightly political? Why the change of heart? How long ago did we reach the point where it became a cliche to state that being political in a poem is "risky?" Crossing the street is risky and it's a cliche, too, but why should the reader care? If Hillman's language gains force when being forthright, why not be forthright all of the time? Most of the time? More of the time? Has she achieved the perfect one-part-this / five-parts-that balance? How can we tell? Why are the moments of unmistakable meaning interesting when contrasted with the abstract wording surrounding them? Is bluntly referencing the president more political than opaquely referencing the world in which he lives that has no order? What would an American poem of epic sweep be without Greek references? Am I included in the "we" of this review? So she's saying we're all side stories? Is this the news Williams was referring to? Why only include "the gods, men and women of classical mythology?" What about the rest? What about the breath of all the people in all of the cultures of all history? Shouldn't that breath be joining ours, too, in this affected trope we call a world?