An Interview with Brenda Hillman

BRENDA HILLMAN

© Forrest Gander

Brenda Hillman is an American poet, translator, and teacher. Born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, Hillman has lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than forty years. She has published ten full-length collections of poetry, all at Wesleyan University Press, including a “tetralogy of the elements”: Cascadia (2001); Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005); Practical Water (2009), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), recipient of the 2014 International Griffin Poetry Prize. Hillman’s most recent book, Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (2018), received the Northern Cali fornia Book Award. Hillman has co-translated Poems from Above the Hill by Ashur Etwebi (2011); Instances by Jeongrye Choi (2011); and At Your Feet by Ana Cristina Cesar (2018), all from Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press. She has also edited an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poetry and co-edited two books by Richard O. Moore and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, the anthology The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (2003). Hillman is the recipient of the William Carlos Williams Prize from Poetry Society of America and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship and she was named by Poets & Writers as one of the Fifty Most Inspiring Writers in the World.

In 1985, Hillman joined the English and creative writing program faculty at Saint Mary’s College of California. Today, she is Olivia C. Filippi Professor of Poetry. For decades, Hillman has participated in antiwar and social and environmental justice activism. She is a mother and a grandmother and is married to the poet Robert Hass.

Hillman’s poetry resists categorization. Her work draws from and adapts Romantic, French Symbolist, Modernist, and activist writing traditions. Her forms have ranged from short lyrics to long poems, lyric essays, formal poems (epic, ode, elegy, p’ansori), and collage and visual poems. Sometimes with sharp irony and humor, and other times with unflinching sincerity, Hillman has written about everything from divorce, parenting, and addiction to street protest, entering a trance state while sitting in on a Congressional hearing, and performing mourning (or moaning) rituals at the gas pump. Hillman is a key contributor to a body of contemporary poetry that thinks critically about its own relationship to a perceived lyric tradition, or, as Virginia Jackson has characterized it, the tradition of reading poems as “lyric” poems. (Jackson argues that “lyric poetry” is not so much a transcendent genre dating back to antiquity as it is an idea about the history of poetry that emerges through nineteenth- and twentieth-century reading practices: “to be lyric is to be read as lyric” [Dickinson’s Misery 6].)

A major work of Hillman’s is her tetralogy, a series of four books—Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water, and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire—thematizing, respectively, earth, air, water, and fire in California. The books employ various lyric forms to document California geologic and bioregional history; political events such as the war in Iraq; and personal experiences of love, friendship, and grief. Following second-wave feminism’s maxim that the personal is political, Hillman’s work commits itself to the idea that writing from interior places can constitute a form of political critique. But this interiority is often mysterious, its meaning and political significance not immediately apparent. In a 2008 essay titled “On Song, Lyric, and Strings,” authored midway through the writing of her tetralogy, Hillman wrote, “The music of lyric poetry brings a voice from a wilderness we do not understand, to expose acts of false authority for the ways they are dismaying to human and other earthly life. Its mind is a counterculture.”

Hillman’s tetralogy also suggests that lyric poetry can constitute “experimental feminine” practice, to borrow Joan Retallack’s phrase (“The Experimental Feminine,” The Poethical Wager 90–101)—practices that undermine hegemonic patriarchal logics. Of her own experience of coming to feminist poetry, Hillman explains:

I wasn’t finding poetry that seemed really intimate about radical places in...