Angrily Standing Outside in the Wind

—kept losing self control

but how could one lose the self

after reading so much literary theory?

The shorter “i” stood under the cork trees,

the taller “I” remained rather passive;

the brendas were angry at the greed, angry

that the trees would die, had lost interest

in the posturing of the privileged,

Brenda Hillman, who so generously allowed me to audit her class last fall, has just won the Griffin Poetry Prize, a very big deal in the poetry world, for her most recent book, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire. (Her photo here was taken by Brett Hall Jones, who manages the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, a poetic feat in it’s own right.)

The judges’ citation starts: “Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire concludes Brenda Hillman’s tetralogy on the four elements of classical thought. She steers wildly but ably through another day of teaching, a ceremonial equinox, the distress of bee colony collapse; space junk, political obstruction, military drones, administrative headaches, and everything in between. The ‘newt under the laurel’ and ‘the herring purring through the eelgrass’ don’t escape her arc of acuity.”

This poem is from one of her early books, Bright Existence, and it remains one of my favorites, the way it mixes the daily with the darker, ongoing undercurrent of reflection (what they call “steering wildly but ably”) and probably also because the terrain is so familiar to me:

Several Errands

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Tag: Hillman

A few words from Brenda Hillman

Angrily Standing Outside in the Wind

Brenda Hillman on Monday

Several Errands