Curious crustiness

Since I've finally caught whatever sickness has been going around, but because I still want to keep to regular posts, I'm going to declare it Metrical Riddle Time! and get back to the promised poetic Woodstock in the week to come.

The last section of Hill's Speech! Speech! begins: "English Limper | after the English Sapphic. This/ has to be seen.” Focus on the word “This” that ends the line and contains the first accent mark of the section. The line is describing itself: it begins with a perfect Sapphic (a hendecasyllabic line, composed of two trochees followed by a dactyl and then two more trochees), and then “Thís” drags after, with a twelfth syllable that ends the line on a full-beat. The word “Thís” and the next word “has” – both with accent marks – would certainly already take a full beat in any reading of the poem. Caesuras largely control the syntax here and make us hit those words quite hard. But the accent marks point up the failing comedy of the line’s movement, and so the initial inversion of the second line gets a sort of boost from the marking that conveys incredulity (as in “you have GOT to see this”). It also acknowledges the necessity of literally seeing the word “Thís” – as in, we have to see that beat in order to understand the play of the line, and to see the redemption of deformity with which the poem wants to end. The “limper” is thus weirdly, to use Hill’s pun, “sure-footed”, controlled. “But what a way to go” – the next sentence – means both ‘this is no way to die’ for the raging speaker and ‘this is a long way to go for a joke about meter.’

Obviously the line is also a dirty little chase: limp old limper shuffling after Sappho. What made me think about this line recently was reading William Carlos Williams's epigraph to Book II of Paterson (1948) and finally finding an actual reference to the "Limper" that is perfectly appropriate to Hill's book:

"N.B.: In order apparently to bring the meter still more within the sphere of prose and common speech, Hipponax ended his iambics with a spondee or a trochee instead of an iambus, doing thus the utmost violence to the rhythmical structure. These deformed or mutilated verses were called...(lame or limping iambics). They communicated a curious crustiness to the style. The choliambi are in poetry what the dwarf or cripple is in human nature. Here again, by their acceptance of this halting meter, the Greeks displayed their acute aesthetic sense of propriety, recognizing the harmony which subsists between crabbed verses and the distorted subjects with which they dealt - the vices and perversions of humanity - as well as their agreement with the snarling spirit of the satirist. Deformed verse was suited for a deformed morality.
- Studies of the Greek Poets, John Addington Symonds, Vol. 1, p. 284"

Does anyone know of other places in which the Limping meter (or particularly the "English Limper") has been discussed or defined? I'd love to imagine Hill reading WCW over Symonds, but could anyone make the case that one allusion is more likely than the other?

[There's also an interesting quotation to be found in The Tatler, Oct. 5 1709. And though I'd reckon this passage a lot less likely to have informed Hill's verse directly, some approximation of 18th cen. chatter pervades S! S! and well, it's kinda funny so why not link to it. See the part that begins, "a jaunty limp is the present beauty."]

With Title

Why a blog about Geoffrey Hill's work? (Hill's eyebrow may not be the only one raised in sly skepticism.) Why not just a poetry blog that focuses, at whatever frequency and duration I wish, on Hill? Since around the end of college, I've declared Hill my favorite poet whenever I'm asked (in line at the bank, while waiting for the bus -- you know, the usual places in which one is asked this question). But, in the last few years, my encounters with Hill's burgeoning body of work have been more those of a collector than an engaged critic (Honestly, who can keep up? He's published 6 books of poetry in the last decade alone, as compared to 6 books of poetry total in the 40 years prior to such late productivity; this January will see the compilation by OUP of 688 pages of his criticism).

Hill's exacting critical standard, his dutiful and cautious analysis of how to operate tact in our uses of language, his insistence on poetry's civic role have all been crucial to my own sense of why I am attempting to become a critic and a teacher; and yet these Hill-commonplaces are not really what I want to address here (at least not at first). On the threshold of a dissertation that will likely have very little to do with Geoffrey Hill (tho geez, who knows?), I'd like to ensure that I have some outlet for and prod towards keeping him in mind. I also want specifically to err and essay in public (however broad or narrow that public -- hi mom), in the manner for which Hill's own late verse has provided a model.

Criticism of Hill has largely progressed in accordance with the lexico-ethical angel-wrasslin' that the poet-critic has himself so forcefully placed at the heart of his work. Trauma, guilt, and language are, as they doubtless should be, at the core of nearly every discussion I've read of his project. My modest goal is to try to expand the range of responses (not least my own responses) to Hill's verse, especially in relation to his very recent books: sequences deeply consonant with even his earliest poems and yet radically divergent in ways that have only begun to be addressed. As Hill began hemorrhaging verse in the late 90s, it was perhaps necessary that the naysayers, with their critical accusations of logorrhea and ornery blather, be countered by proofs of Hill's aesthetic continuity: one had to elaborate, for instance, the affinities that a work as scabrous as Speech! Speech! (2000) might have with the mellifluous poems in For the Unfallen (1959), or highlight the continuity between the unhinged "praise and lament" in The Triumph of Love (1999) and the burnished, labored cadences of King Log (1968). While I'm certainly interested in Hill's own occasional insistence that his new work stages tenacious, even melancholic returns to his tested themes (same atrocities, new tempo of regret), I also want to figure out fresh ways of being alert to ruptures in Hill's poetic practice.

Some rupture has seeped in: increasing attention is being paid to Hill's peculiar brand of gallows humo(u)r. Poems since The Triumph of Love have started to itch and fidget with malaprop and cant; the puns have come unhinged. Hill, as is now a given, is funny - like a seasoned vaudevillian! Seriously, check out the bowtie:
This is the man who titled his 70th birthday reading at his alma mater, Keble College, "The Toad Came Home" (though he reported that he never thought they would actually print up that proposed title).

So I also see this blog as a chance to force myself to catch up on the critical work being done on Hill, and to see whether what I've just said is true or utter, presumptive bosh. Why just today, I took a look at John M. Lyon's essay "'What are you incinerating?': Geoffrey Hill and popular culture" (English, Summer 2005, p. 85-98), which strikes me as promising but also quite flawed in its analysis of class and the demotic. I'll likely start my next entry working through this essay, perhaps along with Langdon Hammer's wonderful piece on Hill and Thom Gunn's "Americanism" from a few years back, and, over the course of a few entries, will bring them to bear on Hill's deeply troubling "Improvisations for Jimi Hendrix" from Without Title (2006).
I really want to appreciate Hill's engagement with Hendrix - that gypsy troubadour of transatlantic sonic re-inscription - but at this point I can't help but see the poem as a condescending violence rather than a measured colloquy between two heavy-hitters.

[[Some ellipses and coordinates:
1. Hendrix's gonzo diasporic voice will certainly bring us to the question of race in Hill's verse (including question of nationalism and post-nationalism: I think Tom Paulin's characteristically ham-fisted 1992 accusations of Hill's "rivers of blood" conservatism are misguided but not unfounded - Hill is engaging race and racism, though rarely with paramount concentration - and I suspect that critical response to Paulin's critique is largely incomplete).

2. As Hill's has returned to England now, after his retirement from BU, I think the geography of his poetics will only get more interesting (will we be able to identify an "American phase"?).

3. What do we do with Hill's ever expanding reading list (I'm esp. at the moment thinking of Frank O'Hara)?

4. What more can be said about Hill and visual culture (in particular film)?

5. And is it possible that "The Jumping Boy" (also from Without Title) descends from perfect pitch to the much dreaded TONE (i mean, has Hill ever written a sappier poem?)?

6. And I suspect Hill has become the greatest poet on the embarrassments and sublimities of 'desire in old age' since Yeats (and Hill might actually bear comparison on this point to another contemporary maestro, if not a poet, Philip Roth). So...uh...what's up with that? eros and thanatos, blah blah &c.]]


Hey, I'll try to write once every week!

If nothing else: it can't hurt to have more available glosses on Hill's allusions, right?

testing testing

"From moral virtue let us pass on to matter
of power and commandment...
ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING"
(original epigraph to King Log)

watch this space...

Also:
"From the beginning the question how to end
has been part of the act."
(Speech! Speech!, p. 5)