Brenda Hillman is a contemporary poet who specializes in ecopoetics. A graduate of the Iowa's Writers' Workshop, Hillman has published 11 books of poetry covering topics such as politics, family, the environment, and spirituality (among others). Her recent collection, entitled "In a Few Minutes Before Later," was published in 2022. Hillman has also received several accolades for her work, including the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and the "Los Angeles Times" Book Award. The following interview is between Brenda Hillman (BH) and one of the 2023 Head Editors of Kiln: Amanda VanNierop (AV).
AV: Our theme for the magazine this year is “Out of Focus.” We’re interested in narratives that go unspoken or unrecognized in the background. What images does the phrase “Out of Focus” invoke to you?
BH: Interesting. Well, obvious photography. And then thinking about it as not necessarily a positive term… And yet, I can think of ways in the arts in which being “out of focus” and being in a blurred, liminal space can be a good thing. I think it has both positive and negative connotations. Making things out of something that has become accidentally “out of focus” seems a desirable creative force in some way.
AV: What drew you to ecopoetics as a genre?
BH: First of all, it’s not really a genre. It’s maybe more of an intersection. I like to think about Jonathan Skinner’s way of using the term, that it’s not a thing, but more like a site of discussion. It can’t be identified as a concrete instance of something. I feel a bit like one of the early feminist explorers of the term in California, because 20 or 25 years ago, it wasn’t as much of a conversation as it is now. The climate conversation wasn’t happening as much. The conversation in poetics wasn’t happening as much. There was much more of an interest in aestheticizing issues and problems that have come up in poetry, so it wasn’t so much that I was drawn to a type of thing, but that I entered into it because of what was happening on the Earth. The writers I admired in the far West canon (mostly male naturalist writers) like Kenneth Rexroth, Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, Bob Hass were profound writers. I felt the things that interested me had to do with the feminist perspective of it, which drew me to shake up what I thought was going on in terms of describing things and making shapes on the page. I was really interested in experimental forms and interruptions in language that seemed to go along with what was happening on Earth. Certain forms that interested me in feminist experimental poetics were very serviceable in that way. I really felt like form and concern about disastrous content were in conversation with each other.
AV: So is messing with temporality a big anchor to your work?
BH: Very much, yes. And also bringing in lots of traditions which speak to each other. Cascadia has poems with decorations or outlines of punctuation around them. The poems about the churches were created in a way to sort of enact the sort of abstract design work that was done not by Christina artists, but by Indigenous artists.
AV: You’ve said before that ecopoetics has to “involve the sense of peril and endangerment that we have created.” That reminds me of Audrey Mayer’s argument that you can’t talk about the bird in an ecological system without including the bulldozer. Does this “sense of peril” ever grow depressing to work with?
BH: Yes and no. I don’t reside in hopelessness exclusively. We were speaking earlier today about what keeps you from sinking. Partly, I think action does keep you from sinking. Writing is a form of action; it’s not the only form of action we should be taking. Maybe this is harsh to say, but I don’t feel like we can afford despair. Gerard Manley Hopkins has a poem called “Carrion Comfort,” where having certain forms of comfort seem like inedible food. I also think despair is an inedible food. We have to put ourselves in the mode of thinking in the round when we’re engaging with these things. I personally tith my anchor—I don’t allow myself to be enraged every day, because it doesn’t feel like there is going to be a serviceable energy there. The forms of help that we have to engage in can be multitudinous, but we just can’t do without the information.
AV: As a writer and an activist, what role do you believe poetry plays in the world? If it plays a part at all?
BH: All of the above. We talked today about how “a poem is not a protest.” I do strongly believe that there is good and even great political poetry, and that it can be a place of reflection about ethical judgment. But there’s something that always calls me to question and undermine pure ethical statements in poetry. I always want to mix up something like confusion or doubt, because preachy or bombastic poetry that might do at a rally… It’s nothing that you don’t know already. And preaching to the choir is not the point of that. Whatever makes us more aware than we are, whether it's about language, information, states of our emotional life, perception that is much louder and purer than we think… that’s part of our action. Poetry as a rallying cry? Stephen Collis said, “Poetry is not the riot, it’s the riot dog.” By which he meant it’s not the thing itself, it’s the thing that accompanies the action. Riots are a fallout of despair also. They’re not going to accomplish anything—it’s what happens when something boils over. But I do love that sentence.
AV: We spoke at lunch about the varying trends that arise and fall in contemporary poetry, like the split between the lyrical and experimental. What trends would you predict as upcoming topics of controversy in contemporary poetics?
BH: I’d love it if poetry was in more people’s minds. I’d love it if people were like, “Can you believe what she wrote in The New York Times?” [laughter]. I think there’s a lot of social justice poetry that’s being written now that comes out of many, many forms of identity and political issues that have come up in the last ten years more strongly. Not anything new: systemic racism, homophobia, misogynistic, terrible stuff, capitalist horror, etc. I would say, from your previous question, how not to aestheticize the difficulties and yet remain true to something that poetry might want to do for people: Bring objects of beauty and consciousness into their lives. Represent experiences that are rare and profound. We’re seeing a time of much more inclusivity as there are more writers of color who are publishing who may not have had access in the last 40 years since I’ve been writing. Lots more visibility and inclusivity for LGBT writers as well. So, I’d say subject matter is where the opening out is occurring.
AV: A return to the confessional?
BH: Somewhat. There’s a term that I like called “lyric empathetic poetry,” where a writer will write about an incident that gives an insight, and the incident is about a personal realization that happens. It’s a great tradition in American poetry, and I wouldn’t call it so much “confessional,” as that term is very specific. People started using “confessional” a lot. I think that has expanded in many different directions, not just in contrast with other types of poetry. It’s important that the types of subjectivity have become layered and nuanced. I was tired of a certain kind of exactly paced lyrical poetry. I almost felt like I wasn’t going to learn anything more, and I’m still looking for stuff that’s going to teach me stuff.
AV: And we get that from voices who might not have been amplified in the past?