Crafted Leaps, Poetry of Great Permission A Review of Brenda Hillman's Practical Water

Date of Review:

07/29/2009

Published Work:

Reviewer:

Kevin Arnold

Source:

Caesura magazine

Review Excerpt:

Crafted Leaps, Poetry of Great Permission

A Review of Brenda Hillman's Practical Water

Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 2009, 103 pages

It is hard to read Brenda Hillman's poetry without one’s mind turning to questions about artists and freedom. We've all heard the shibboleth 'Artists love constraint.' Poets who relish constraint can become known for expected characteristics, perhaps 'that guy who writes those luscious long lines,' or 'the woman who brings wantonness to every stanza,' or a unique use of lineage or sense of rhyme associated with his or her work.
Brenda Hillman foregrounds the other side of art, the part that says, "No, whatever box you want to put me in, I don’t quite fit there." She does this with carefully crafted leaps, the association of disparate ideas in a way that keeps the reader with her, but seldom very comfortably. Once again with this, her eighth volume of poetry, she audaciously meets each poem on its own terms. If a poem's lineage should be shaped like a river, it is ("Request to the Berkeley City Council Concerning Strawberry Creek"). If it requires straightforward four sextets ("Permission to be Strange") or a two-column short-line presentation (“Phone Booth.”), she lines ‘em up.
If a poem requires stanzas as disparate as
The man says poetry should be simple enough
for school girls to understand

But sir, school girls understand everything

Nancy Drew was in love with the obstacle, not the clue

and

Sir, when i think of poetry keeping you alive I know
you were entered by incomprehensible light
in the hour of lemon and water

then those stanzas rub shoulders in the same poem ("The Late Cold War.”)
Brenda has divided the book into four parts, each with its own title page with quotations. Each title page can be viewed as a poem on its own. The first, Of International Waters, starts this volume out wide, like a cinematographer’s camera taking in an entire setting before settling on a particular scene. It contains titles like “The Eighties—An Essay,” and “Pacific Ocean.”
A reader feels the second part, Reportorial Poetry, Trance, and Action, with titles like “Reportorial Poetry, Trance & Activism: An Essay,” “In a Senate Armed Services Hearing,” and “Economics in Washington” is of great importance to Brenda. Just the fact she’s taken the time to attend such meetings indicates her commitment to anti-war politics. In the last poem, she confronts her complex feelings about politics and poetry unambiguously:
A poem changes nothing

This isn’t a political poem
There are no results in poetry

A shaking doubt has instructed you
to address the long wars
with short cries

Not to live against earth
You who have so little time

You to whom others have written

You a citizen of matter & beyond

[the poem ends in a photo of a government building taken from inside a car]

The section of the book that appealed most to me was Part Three, Of the Months When you Work and The Months When You Can’t. Like a playwright who uses the entire house by having actors enter from the balconies and trap-doors and exit up the aisles, Brenda wants to use all of typology’s possibilities. She even includes gray-tones. She grays out the second-column poems, the ones where she can’t work, to great effect. Each of these month-by-month column-poems (the left poem where she can work, the right one, grayed out, where she can’t, twenty-four in all) is followed by a black-and white picture. Indeed, the volume contains many postage-stamp-sized photos, mainly taken by the poet. One grayed-out poem, “May Moon,” is followed by the picture of a woman jumping a horse over a small “X.”
Officer, I was speeding
because light sped
like crushed bits of God.

seeking more energy

i understand the horse
who broke her front
legs trying to run
i understand that horse

all women understand her
we all understand that
horse we all understand

her all of us do.

Part Four, Of Local Creeks and Aqueducts, contains the longest poem in this collection, Hydrology of California, An Ecopoetical alphabet. The lines in it are of varying length, even for a Brenda Hillman poem. I found the poem exciting in its challenge. Eleven pages long, with eight photographs, mainly of dams and other water-places, the poem ends:
Dear love I’m tired
Let’s go to bed Maybe a college girl is reading this when we’re a little
dead O girl please mind your watershed Take care of crazy poets
Visit the inner-net In the end there will be a rupture
said Walter whose arcade
thought up the Web
We are freckles of sun We are sleeping in the poem Shoppers stand
in the little shops They don’t know what to buy We lie at the Shangri La
between z & y No one knows how this sentence will end in a dream
with a lyric sky
Visit us Joni Mitchell
Visit us Future of Poetry with a solitude of streamlets into a local
pond the mind at the end of the palm Nothing was gone when we
saw that bird We saw its feathers as water It was in & out of time

This ending was difficult to type, because Brenda is not using standard punctuation. The fragments and sentences aren’t asked to be consistent even with themselves. No end-stops, no periods. Most sentences end with four spaces, but some with two or three, so indeed “no one knows how this sentence will end in a dream/with a lyric sky”

Change does seem to be accelerating, even to young people; perhaps Brenda’s open acceptance of change is what makes this book so appealing. Underneath the poet's nonstandard forms lies the opposite of an unquestioning belief. There are questions, and those beget more questions, and when you circle around to the initial question it has often changed. Practical Water delineates a lack of simple order both inside us and the universe. But all is not lost in this world she describes; through well-crafted leaps, the poet highlights the enormous possibility for each of us to work through to our own creative combinations.