Hunting For Meaning Poem by gershon hepner

Hunting for truffles can be lots of fun
when you’re looing for food that’s expensive and rare,
but those who write poems and think that it’s none
of your business to know what they’re thinking aren’t fair
to their audience, and often it seems they prefer
it to wallow, interpreting depths they can’t plumb,
and force it with forceps or mains d’accoucheur
to pull out a meaning and call it a plum.

William Logan reviews “A Treatise of Civil Power” by Geoffrey Hill (“Living with Ghosts, ” NYT Book Review, January 20,2008) :
Modernism asked just how far the poet could expect the reader to mole about in old books to make sense of a poem. Eliot provided notes to “The Waste Land” as a casual afterthought, to fill out a slim volume; and Pound buried so many moldy allusions through “The Cantos” that scholars have been hunting the truffles ever since. Both poets felt that poems could survive obscurity without help from the slush of footnotes we expect in the Norton Anthology; yet, without explication, a poem like Hill’s is hardly a poem, just language at war with itself. Hill taxes the reader to buy a good library, or — in these fallen days — sail the traitorous Internet between the lies of Scylla and the damned lies of Charybdis. A reader must want to thumb through dusty pages, or dustier Web pages, to learn more of Burford’s Levellers (New Model Army mutineers) , Clock House (in Bromsgrove, Hill’s birthplace) , Randolph Ash (a character in A. S. Byatt’s “Possession”) , Quid, Obtuse Angle and Inflammable Gass (all from a manuscript by Blake) , and much else. Good luck finding “Mrs. Nanicantipot, ” whose name Hill misspells (she’s from the same Blake manuscript) . Such stray facts are the price of admission to Hill’s poetry; and the reader might reasonably ask if these devious, dissuasive poems are worth the penalties of sense. Over the past decade, Hill has made this quarrel more strenuous (his poems are full of antique quarrels, which is fine if you like quarrels) . Once a poet of archly mannered speech, for whom every stanza was a quiet martyrdom, he found himself during a course of antidepressants suddenly keen to talk a leg of mutton off a lamb — books began to tumble forth every year or two, rambling monologues full of jokes at Hill’s own expense, dumb raillery, heavy-handed argument. The caterwauling of “The Triumph of Love” (1998) , “Speech! Speech! ” (2000) , “The Orchards of Syon” (2002) and “Scenes From Comus” (2005) , despite their peculiar gifts, has diluted a career of painstakingly crafted, close-managed poems. There’s no telling now what Hill might say, just embarrassment at some of the things he does say.

1/21/08