A Summer of Hill and Frost

What I got for volunteering at my daughter’s high school book sale, studying Geoffrey Hill's Broken Hierarchies, and registering for the Frost Farm Poetry Conference this August.

Hello, friends. Some of you are new, and this is wonderful! I am so glad to have you here.

It has been very busy for our family as we are heading into the close of the school year. This week I spent several days setting up and manning the book sale at my daughter’s high school. As a perk of volunteering, I was able to bring home some books that didn’t sell at the end of the day.

Here’s what I ended up getting:

• Speech! Speech! (2000) by Geoffrey Hill, who is known for being an incredibly difficult poet to read and comprehend (more on him later),

• Babel (2022) by R.F. Kuang which was recommended by my friend Charlie as we wandered around the Egyptian exhibit of the Metropolitan Museum of Art this January,

• The Only Story (2018) by Julian Barnes because I liked his other book, The Sense of an Ending,

• Selected Stories by Andres Dubus (1996), a collection that includes his short story “Killings” which was turned into the movie In the Bedroom that starred Sissy Spacek, Tom Wilkinson, and Marisa Tomei,

• Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) by Jesmyn Ward, which I have to read this year for the

  Close Reads HQ
  book club,

• A Burnt-out Case (1960) by Graham Greene because I’ve read Greene but not this one yet,

• Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle (1987) by Stephen Jay Gould which seems to pit the scientific concept of deep geologic time against religious concepts of time (I am always interested in this type of stuff),

• Liar’s Poker (1989) by Michael Lewis because Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, and Leonard Mlodinow write what I suppose are my non-fiction comfort reads,

• Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (2005) edited by David Sedaris, which is a collection of short humor writing by other authors like Patricia Highsmith, Flannery O’Connor, Richard Yates, Dorothy Parker, and Charles Baxter,

• Paddle Your Own Canoe (2013) by Nick Offerman because it’s Nick Offerman, and

• Americanah (2013) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which I have always been meaning to read because I have a beautiful genius friend who is Nigerian, and she thought well of this novel.

The book I was most excited about was Speech! Speech! because this summer I am studying Geoffrey Hill with The Catherine Project (which I wrote a little bit about here). Broken Hierarchies is a bit much to carry around compared to Speech! Speech!

Broken Hierarchies. Heavy reading in more ways than one.

Here’s the best part: I didn’t realize it until I got home that this was a signed copy.

And now I know what his signature looks like.

It is not hard to believe that some signed copies of his books would be floating around my neck of the woods, seeing as Hill taught theology and English literature at Boston University from 1988 to 2006, which is when he retired.

Here is a splendid final reading he gave at BU at the close of his tenure. (Note Hill’s incredible reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins at around the 20 minute mark.)

As I mentioned earlier, Geoffrey Hill is notoriously difficult to read because of his complex diction and allusion to many works. From his biography on The Poetry Foundation:

Known as one of the greatest poets of his generation writing in English, and one of the most important poets of the 20th century, Geoffrey Hill lived a life dedicated to poetry and scholarship, morality and faith. He was born in 1932 in Worcestershire, England to a working-class family. He attended Oxford University, where his work was first published by the U.S. poet Donald Hall. These poems later collected in For the Unfallen: Poems 1952-1958 marked an astonishing debut. In dense poems of gnarled syntax and astonishing rhetorical power, Hill planted the seeds of style and concern that he cultivated over his long career. Hill’s work is noted for its seriousness, its high moral tone, extreme allusiveness and dedication to history, theology, and philosophy.

I have been in conversation with our course leader,

Andrew Schulman

. And this is what our reading schedule looks like:

Tues 7/2 - For the Unfallen (1959)

Tues 7/9 - King Log (1968)

Tues 7/16 - Mercian Hymns (1971)

Tues 7/23 - Tenebrae (1978)

Tues 7/30 - The Mystery and Charity of Charles Péguy (1983) + Péguy's Temporal and Eternal

Tues 8/6 - Canaan (1996)

Tues 8/13 - The Triumph of Love (1998)

Tues 8/20 - Speech! Speech! (2000)

Tues 8/27 - Without Title (2006)

Tues 9/3 - A Treatise on Civil Power (2007)

This is—for lack of a better word—intense! Please wish us luck.

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Also, the Frost Farm Poetry Conference registration is open. The event is being held this year on Friday, August 16 through Sunday, August 18.

Me in Robert Frost’s barn which is where the readings are held.

I am particularly excited to be there this year because my friend and classmate, Sarah Spivey, won the Frost Farm Prize for Metrical Poetry. I saw her winning entry “The Dispossessed” in an earlier draft at one of our MFA poetry workshops. You can read the final version on the Frost Farm website here.

Sarah Spivey kindly let me use her photo. Her personality is as lovely as her picture.

Last year Brian Brodeur won the Frost Farm prize for “After Visiting a Former Student in a Psychiatric Unit,” and I signed up for his class: “For All / That Struck the Earth”: Verse in Mixed Meters.

Brian Brodeur reading on the first night of the conference in 2023.

The other courses are sure to be insightful and compelling.

Ned Balbo and Jane Satterfield will be teaching the Master Class entitled “No Unsacred Places”: Earthly Pleasures in Environmental Poetry.

Meredith Bergmann will be leading students in Ekphrastic Poetry: From Achilles to the Kitchen Sink, which includes a tour of the Frost house that students will be using as inspiration for their poetry.

Joseph Bottum

of

Poems Ancient and Modern

fame will be teaching poets about The Sonnet. It is a short title for a very big subject.

And Midge Goldberg will be teaching Exploring Rhyme and Meter, which I took last year in preparation for my first semester at my MFA program. It was well worth it. (Last year my instructor was Rhina Espaillat.)

Also… I might be having a big birthday at around the time of the conference. It would be wonderful to see people in person that weekend!

Have you read any of the books that are in that stack I got from the book sale?

What are your comfort reads?

Did you sign up for any interesting courses this summer?

Have any questions about the Frost Farm Conference?

Please feel free to leave me a comment or send me a direct message. I’d love to hear from you.