When I started the podcast, I had two formats in mind, and deciding I could not do both, chose one, and then realized this isn’t “The Road Not Taken,” and I can do both, so this week the episode is what I’m calling a “Sidebar” one: a reading and brief take on a poem that moves me in some way. I’m starting with Anthony Hecht’s “A Hill.”
You can find the complete text of “A Hill” here at The Los Angeles Times, which once reprinted it and has kept it archived. The New Yorker has it too, if you’re a subscriber.
Anthony Hecht (1923–2004) was one of the second half of the 20th century’s great American poets. And perhaps only second or third to Richard Wilbur and James Merrill as the best poet of meter and rhyme in the era, though that horse race is a photo finish. His new collected poems is essential reading for any poet.
I was lucky to meet Anthony Hecht once, at a reading he gave when I was a grad student at Johns Hopkins in 2001. He seemed to a young me an imposing figure—so well put together, with a voice that sounded almost British. I probably barely spoke two words to him. But I’m glad I got that pleasure once.
Hecht was born in the 1920s, Jewish but to a secular family, and served in World War II along with the units that liberated the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Some of his most famous poems are about the war—“More Light, More Light,” “It Out Herods Herod, Pray You Avoid It,” and “The Book of Yolek,” about which poet and critic Alexander Long wrote in the once-great literary magazine The Writer’s Chronicle, “It may be the most powerful poem written by an American that addresses the Holocaust because it both addresses and enacts the taxations of memory via a received poetic form, the sestina.”
“A Hill” opens Hecht’s second book, The Hard Hours, for which he would win the Pulitzer Prize in 1967. It is not, so it would seem, a poem about his experience in the war, but rather a different trauma, his lonely and troubled childhood. His younger brother, Roger, suffered from epilepsy, and Anthony was often left alone as his parents tended necessarily to his brother.
What interests me so much about this poem is how humdrum Hecht makes the vision seem in the beginning. He tempers his telling us about his vision by saying this is what happens in Italy, where you had Dante traveling to the underworld, almost as if it could have happened to anyone, but that his wasn’t anything like that. A vision, perhaps, but not an epic one, no rollicking adventure, maybe not even a vision. This was a separation, removing him once again from companions. Moving from the riot of color and sound to the barren, dull landscape of the hill. And a sound—a gunshot, he thinks—that makes him feel less alone. Only to realize it was a falling tree branch. A broken family tree, perhaps? That may be a bit too far.
And he ends it so plainly, realizing it was just some hill north of Poughkeepsie he used to visit— nothing magical—and yet he would stand in front of it as a child for hours. There is no great reveal at the end of the poem, no great metaphor, just plain language describing a memory from his past.
According to David Yezzi, in his excellent new biography of Hecht, Late Romance, WH Auden didn’t like the nonspecificity of this: “Vagaries irritated Auden,” writes Yezzi. To Auden, the boy standing there for hours “would seem an irresponsible hyperbole, until one understands how an image can root itself in the psyche, reasserting itself, unbidden and ever-present” (110–111).
And I think that’s what so powerful about it. The poem lets its plain starkness live and resonate. It’s not a vision, it’s a memory so intense it takes over his reality, bringing him back to his childhood, where he is still standing in front of that hill, even decades on.
The wonderful poet A.E. Stallings has a great review essay about both the new Hecht collected poems and the Yezzi biography at the Poetry Foundation website, which is worth a read.
In other poetry news, today is William Shakespeare’s birthday. Here’s one my favorite of his sonnets (#29):
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
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About your host: Jason Gray is the author of the poetry books Radiation King (Idaho Prize for Poetry) and Photographing Eden (Hollis Summers Prize), and his poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, American Poetry Review, and the soon-closing Image. His career in publishing has brought him to the university presses of Ohio State and Wisconsin, and Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
A note on the podcast title. I am an unabashed fan of The Simpsons, and in Season 8, Episode 9 “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer),” Marge attempts to stop Homer from going to the local chili cook-off, because, as she says, every time he does, he “get[s] drunk as a poet on payday.” And that has made me laugh for decades now.
I in no way endorse getting oneself overserved and behaving like a jackass, poetic or otherwise. And if you or anyone you know is struggling with alcohol, there are resources for you: Alcoholics Anonymous Al-Anon