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| GEOFFREY HILL |
A TRIBUTE TO GEOFFREY HILL at BU’S CASTLE ON THURSDAY EVENING
by Michael
Todd Steffen
On Thursday
November 10th at 7pm, at the Castle, 225 Bay State Road, Boston
University, the second Fall BU Poetry Reading, directed by Meg Tyler,
will pay tribute to Geoffrey Hill (18 June 1932 –
30 June
2016), an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and
religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston
University. Hill taught at BU from 1988 – 2006.
Like
Herbert or Hopkins, Hill’s poetry is religious in its mindfulness
of God. Yet, with open eyes to the age, his expression, rather than
resorting to them as attitudes, intends remoteness and irony, often
commenting on the contemporary world through history. In his
much-anthologized poem “Ovid in the Third Reich,” Hill says that
“God/Is distant.”
I have
learned one thing: not to look down
So much
upon the damned. They, in their sphere,
Harmonize
strangely with the divine
Love. I,
in mine, celebrate the love-choir.
Seamus
Heaney noted, “[Hill] has a strong sense of the importance of the
maintenance of speech, a deep scholarly sense of the religious and
political underpinning of everything in Britain.”
Wikipedia
also tells us Hill defended the right of poets to difficulty as a
form of resistance to the demeaning simplifications imposed by
“maestros of the world.” He argued that to be difficult is to be
democratic, equating the demand for simplicity with the demand of
tyrants.
The tribute
at BU on Thursday evening will include readings by Archie Burnett,
Saskia Hamilton, Kenneth Haynes, Marcia Karp, George Kalogeris,
Christopher Ricks and others. The series is sponsored by BUCH, the
Arts Initiative and CIT at CGS.
Among his
many awards, Geoffrey Hill received an Ingram Merrill Foundation
Award. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His Collected
Critical Writings won the
Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the largest annual cash
prize in English-language literary criticism.
Considered
to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation, Hill was
called the “greatest living poet in the English language.” This
is a wonderful opportunity to gain familiarity with and insight into
a guarded albeit rich spirit of poetry.
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