Brenda Hillman, experiments, and solitary perspective

I enjoy any work of art that makes me think or feel something i was not expecting. I love talented experimentation. Often, experiments fail just so that the next one can succeed. What is learned from the failure is useful to the extreme. It would be good for all of my scientist friends to keep that in mind, it is a universal truth. Smile, as best you can, at the failed experiment and move on with the new tools garnered.

Brenda Hillman experiments with poetry's form throughout her work. I feel that this poem is very successful in that it has the ability to be read in a multiplicity of ways.

Hillman seems to take on three or four conversations at once and her use of space and form within the poem make these discussions possible. She steps away from common boundaries. She speaks with a few different voices without being confusing or sounding forced. The poem describes itself without being overbearing. Some poems are written in one sitting and others are conceptualized over a period of weeks, months, or years. The work put into this poem is something to be admired. It is satisfying to read over and over and that is successful, boundary pushing, experimentation.

Hillman can write many types of poems. This is a beautiful poem of the desert southwest, her birthplace, that shows the stark landscape as a mirror of the family's thoughts. It is a simple poem that works, magically like the sandstone and massive sky, on our little minds. The Saguaro only becomes more and more impressive the closer one gets to it. The perspective changes our place in the world. We become powerful in our loneliness. We learn that our boundaries are self-imposed. The mind wants to experiment with someone or without.

To write a simple, lovely poem and a long experimental poem with the same energy and passion and voice is brilliance, gorgeous brilliance that is rare. It is as rare as a single raindrop on the sandstone where the Saguaros live, a fleeting gift.



Saguaro

Often visitors there, saddened
by lack of trees, go out
to a promontory.

Then, backed by the banded
sunset, the trail
of the Conquistadores,

the father puts on the camera,
the leather albatross,
and has the children

imitate saguaros. One
at a time they stand there smiling,
fingers up like the tines of a fork

while the stately saguaro
goes on being entered
by wrens, diseases, and sunlight.

The mother sits on a rock,
arms folded
across her breasts. To her

the cactus looks scared,
its needles
like hair in cartoons.

With its arms in preacher
or waltz position,
it gives the impression

of great effort
in every direction,
like the mother.

Thousands of these gray-green
cacti cross the valley:
nature repeating itself,

children repeating nature,
father repeating children
and mother watching.

Later, the children think
the cactus was moral,
had something to teach them,

some survival technique
or just regular beauty.
But what else could it do?

The only protection
against death
was to love solitude.



By Brenda Hillman
From FORTRESS Wesleyan University Press