Page 33 - The Keble Review 2016

Professor Sir Geoffrey Hill
Honorary Fellow
(1932-2016)
Dr Erica McApline, Robin Geffen Career Development Fellow in English writes:
When England’s greatest living poet shows up unannounced at your poetry reading group, you pretend it’s normal. (He is wearing UGGs, after all.) But you hang on his every word. I remember his quibbling that Seamus Heaney should not have used the word “white” twice in a poem we were discussing
– but then conceding, perhaps in the spirit of competition, that the poem was otherwise quite good. I remember his championing vehemently a poem by a relatively unknown Canadian poet. I remember the twinkle in his eye as he mulled over the significance of the word “moon.” (“As a verb I believe it means to show your buttocks.”) Geoffrey’s written words will forever cast a spell, but we at Keble were so fortunate to be with him regularly in so casual a setting. He was feisty and kind and rigorous. What happened there, over poems, indeed feels like a form of magic.
Professor Diane Purkiss,
Tutorial Fellow in English, writes:
Listening to Geoffrey Hill talk about poetry was beyond a privilege; it was big-wave surfing, the cream foam of wit and the heavy push of the mass of water behind it. My notes for just one meeting record his words on his own experience of writing poetry: “What risk am I taking? The risk of saying ‘split second’, or ‘robust’. And of mere self-expression.” (Spoken venomously, but with a sense of the comedy of
it.) “The risk that the reader isn’t up to it. The reader must be your antagonist.” He went on, searching his mind for
a metaphor, and began to recall a film where an actor is performing for Hitler and is suddenly caught, desperate and hunted, in the hideous exposing glare of a spotlight. He couldn’t recall the name of the film, and someone hissed it: Mephisto. He continued: “You have somewhere to find the strength from somewhere to turn that risk into the poem.” He knew, and always said, that truth is the most difficult
thing there is. Typically, this knowledge was triggered by a poem to which he took exception, a poem that used a word carelessly. He took equal exception to his own early poems, and revised them with equal savagery; his art was the direct outcome of his courteous ferocity.
Dr Matthew Bevis, Tutorial Fellow in English Literature, writes:
Talking about poems with Geoffrey made everybody want to raise their game, reminded them that poetry was more than a game. Which is not to say that he declined to have fun. Geoffrey knew that seriousness wasn’t necessarily solemn, and during our meetings he often spoke – and listened – with a glint in his eye. He somehow conspired to remind you of King Lear and of his Fool; he could play both parts of the double act, and when he responded to poems he frequently sounded both authoritative and quizzical. Geoffrey knew what pleased him, but he was also keen to be surprised by poetry. Demanded to be surprised, in fact. I remember his joy at being introduced to a poet he’d never heard of before – George Stanley – and his delight in the poem “Veracruz”: “These lines are wonderful – like the shards of a detonated sestina.” He was always on the lookout for the power, the thrill, of apparently insignificant details. I remember the gruesome glee with which he seized on what he called “the weird untouchable nakedness of things” in James Wright’s poem “Small Frogs Killed on a Highway.” And I remember his phrase for his sense of that poem’s subject: “the perilousness of aliveness.” Not the least of Geoffrey’s gifts to the group was his ability to communicate – and to inspire – a feeling for pleasure amid peril.
The Salutation and Cat is a poetry reading group which meets in Keble every other week in term time.
Full obituaries can be found on page 38 of the e Record.
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