The Butte College Literary Events Committee and CSU, Chico’s Writer’s Voice Series are proud to present poet Brenda Hillman. Hillman will be reading from her new collection, “Seasonal Words with Letters on Fire” at the 1078 Gallery, Tuesday, October 8th at 7:30 pm.
Born in Tucson, Arizona in 1951, Hillman has earned degrees at Pomona College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California and is the author of nine books of poetry. She has received a number of awards, including a Pushcart Prize and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Society of America. Hillman was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her collection Bright Existence (1993) and a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award for her collection Loose Sugar (1997). Her latest collection, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013) is a nominee for the National Book Award.
Says Publishers Weekly: “Hillman’s fast-moving, energetic, and ample 10th collection blazes with indignation . . . . It’s one page lyrics its one-page lyrics connect the origins of the Roman alphabet, children’s reading habits, topical cries against our present-day wars, the evils of genetically modified seeds, the structure of Greek tragedy (“Tiny first with hurt earth spirits/ as in Aeschylus”), prose essays on poetry and protest, daily life on a West Coast campus, and larger-scale objections to the way that human beings have treated the earth…‘Around each word you’re reading/ there spins the unknowable flame.’”
Hillman’s poetry explores the way we use and interact with both the written and spoken word. Her poetry works to displace our familiarity with language: the same letters we use to communicate “drone strike” or “mother” on one page have, on another, been literally turned on end as she does in “Autumn Ritual With Hate Turned Sideways.” In the case of “Two Summer Aubades, After John Clare,” she reduces lines to linguistic building blocks:
I. towhee [Pipilo crissalis] wakes a human
pp cp cp cp chp chp
pppppppppppp
cppppcpp cpp cpp
(a woman tosses)
Gulf disaster ster sister
aster aster as asp
ppp cp cp p bp bp BP BP
scree screeeeem we
we we didn’t
neee neeed to move so fast
2. woman in red sweater to humminbird
sssssss we sssssss weee
no i’m not not sweet not
sweeeeetie i’m not
something to eeeeeeat
“Two Summer Aubades, After John Clare” – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgxCNYzuHxI
The bold poetics found within the pages of “Seasonal Works With Letters On Fire” are further expressed through Hillman’s approaches to form. Take for instance a haibun entitled “The Body Politic Loses Her Hair,” which not only does not include a haiku, it does include a 1”x3/4” image of the poet holding a protest sign embedded within the text. Or a seemingly new form: a series of double columned “galaxies” dedicated to Helen Hillman and Ruth Gander. Hillman is also a vocal environmentalist, so Mother Earth as a potential subject is easy to imagine.
Ringed Galaxies Work With Our Mother
as they clean in skinny time
in desert autumn drip on verbena
scraps of toast sorted rubber bands
scraps of string saved for the least
did she have to could someone else save
bits of matter could fail to rise
ask your doctor if cosmic fire
is right for you when you were born
kingdom to creature qui coisa
their iambs of those
some galaxies rise as a furnace
needs cleaning its arcing noise
the mom is our sheperd her diving down
hummingbird baroque freedom you know
my substance was not hid
from thee where I was
made in secret the visible talks back
her areas of power
just need not to worry
behind the tiny pizza behaviors
aren’t essences you know that
Hillman’s poetry is at once deeply activistic while at the same time capable of transmuting language into its most basic parts. In doing so, she forces her readers to reevaluate their perspectives, their “new haircuts” and their “bosses” with their “new wars.” She has distilled the fire of our language and the fires burning in the world around us into lines, stanzas, and dedications.
We hope you will join us in celebrating the work of Brenda Hillman.
By Stan Upshaw and Danielle Fernandez
