Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill, The Purcell Room, South Bank, London, 11 December 2011

'It's not stand-up comedy,' Geoffrey Hill explained, 'but, there again, they're not paying me stand-up comedy money'.Professor Hill spent as much time talking about his poetry as reading it, which is always welcome, especially in a poet like him. His grasp and intellectual acuity in history and culture is apparently monumental and poets don't come any more high church than this. He explained that his work belongs with that of the painter Anselm Keifer and Paul Celan, so it is serious matter.

Poetry for him is not 'self expression' but 'a conjoining of shapes and harmonies' and I couldn't quite get down exactly what it went on to be to do with language. His poetry has been described as 'iron spikes sticking out of a blasted landscape' and I don't think he would have quoted it if he didn't like the description.While it is interesting to hear poets of this stature talk about their own work, the poet is ideally not their own best critic and it looked mildly alarming when he named his own three best books but it didn't turn out to be quite so self regarding from then on. Some self awareness is a good thing and his realization that his work is 'weird and unlovely' was reassuring.

Anybody with the slightest interest in poetry would be aware of George Herbert's Easter Wings. Well, yes and no. But that's the sort of level he works at even if I allow myself to dip below it occasionally. It is a fine and marvellous thing when the country's most doyen and eminent of poets can tell his assembled audience that 'nothing would drag him to a poetry reading', those most 'abysmal functions' and I can see that in a way but, on the other hand, one gets more from an hour in the presence of the poet than from several hours pouring over their books. Interestingly, after I have charted the general trajectory of most poets' careers as not reaching maturity until the age of 40, and then eventually fading or becoming repetitive sometime after 60, Prof. Hill's Collected Poems has grown exponentially in the last few years leading up to his 80th birthday. It is perhaps due to the rigour of form being able to impose itself on the chaos, where at least some of the chaos is dementia. But while apparently frail enough physically, there was little evidence of any dimming of acerbity, observance of the most difficult formal strictures and a non-curmudgeonly clarity of vision that can't help but pass as the driest of wit. This was not, as he pointed out, Poetry Please. Poetry plays oblique games with him.

But for all that, I haven't laughed as much or as satisfyingly at any other poetry reading. I've been equally thrilled and impressed and I've thought about several for a long time afterwards but none will have been so paradoxically 'laugh out loud' and the more impressive for it when the most serious and high-minded, one of the bleakest and spare, provides more genuine hilarity than those whose main object is to be comic and yet don't quite raise a laugh although you notice where the jokes were.

If young Hill were to attend a masterclass run by me I might even advise that his internal rhymes might in context look like affectation and if he wants to use rhyming forms then he could hide the rhymes more subtly as half rhymes so that the frugality and bareness of his 'vision' were not occluded by such simple effects. His music is that of deep and complex rhythms devoutly adhered to but it's a lot to ask. As he says, 'you try writing in these meters.'Fulfilling his hour with delightfully grumpy grace, he observed that we are run nowadays by a 'financial plutocracy' decorated by a small amount of aristocracy and democracy. Although one can't help but feel that he would be politically somewhere on the right, this is the preception that is beyond day to day politics and really ought to have wider currency and not need explanation from one of such austere dignity and dark, brooding solemnity.As if to provide some context or contrast, there was a reading afterwards by three young poets under the title Echoes of Geoffrey Hill in which the trace of any echo eluded me in three unprepossessing performances. Fine poets in their own milieu, I'm sure, but very forgettable. And then a half hour spent looking at the magazines in the Poetry Library made me reflect that the best thing that could happen to the poetry industry in this country would be a paper shortage. I don't think I saw a poem worthy of the shelf space. But the curmudgeonly spirit can only be properly exercised by those who have earned the right and my disdain is less worth having than Prof. Hill's. We will soon see how my credentials measure up in the next week or so if and when I review my signed copy of Clavics.