Dear Brenda Hillman 2019

Dear Lauren, 

Thank you so much for your articulate response to “The Letters Learn to Breathe Twice,” and for your questions to me. I was gratified to read that you developed a really good set of poetic vocabulary tools, as when you commented on the difference between “literal” and “figurative” uses of language in a poem. Your reading was quite sensitive and full of original insights. Your teacher must be very proud of you! 

You asked about the ampersand (&) and why I chose to use it instead of the word “and.” At a certain point I started to like the way the ampersand looks on the page—kind of like a yoga position! But the main reason I use it is because certain writers I admire, including the great San Francisco writer, Robert Duncan have used it as a form of mental shorthand when you’re thinking fast. I like the compression of the ampersand and find it a really attractive sign.  

You also asked about the geese in the poem. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and we have some geese flying south and north at all times of year. Sometimes they even seem confused, though I am sure this is only my projection of poet’s confusion! They do fly in the fall, and when I see them, I think about the school children learning to write in relation to their funny honking overhead. The poem is also about different kinds of breath. I was thinking about the breath in the letters the children are making. 

You ask whether this poem comes from a particular moment. I often work on poems in groups or even in collections. The book that houses this poem is about fire: fire in the outer environment; inner fire of the spirit and language; the outer fires in our lives. In California we sometimes have wildfires in autumn, right when children are learning their letters, and that is why I refer to the time when “the danger of fire is passed.” 

There are many different readings of any features of a poem, so there are almost no wrong answers; I hope your teachers will be great and will encourage you to experience the true freedom of language.

Thank you again for reading my poem. I hope you will continue to read poetry forever and that you will write your own poems too. 

My warmest wishes,

Brenda Hillman

Dear Lillie,

Thank you so much for writing to me and for your thoughtful words about my poem “The Letters Learn to Breathe Twice.” You are such an excellent reader, and I’m honored that you chose to write me a letter and that you would like to read more of my work. 

I was moved by what you wrote about the being shy, and tracing skin around “the unsayable.” That is my metaphor for learning to write what you cannot quite get at, what always remains just out of reach. In my poems I like to connect spiritual and psychological states with facts in the physical world, including facts of language. 

When I was a young girl in school, I almost never spoke in class, and of course we didn’t have mobile phones or Snapchat, and so writing poetry on the page, especially making lines slowly by hand, became a good way of expressing my feelings about life and being young. It sounds as if you are also using writing as an outlet, and I’m sure we would have been able to trade poems had we been friends in school! When I was working on this poem I kept remembering shy children learning to write, accompanied by other kinds of things that happen in the autumn. I loved reading the account of your writing as an access to internal freedom. It is wonderful that you connected with the image of writing as being access to a type of breathing also. Please know that when you are a writer, you can always connect with other writers, great ancestral writers and living writers, through their work. It is a way of being connected with the deeper things in yourself.

When you are developing your writing, I hope you will read a lot of things that are recommended and read things you like immediately as well as things that are strange. Write to me through the Academy if you run out of poetry to read. Keep writing forever! 

Very best to you,

Brenda Hillman

Dear Zayd,

Thank you for writing to me from Houston and from the sixth grade! That is a very important grade and Houston is a wonderful city for artists and poets. I especially love the Rothko poems in the chapel.  I am so glad to read in your letter that you connected with my poem “The Letters Learn to Breathe Twice” and found some meaning in it.

I am especially happy to hear that you had a thought about my lines “The children/ try to be normal though/ no one knows what normal is…”; it’s kind of an odd statement because a lot of people think they do know what normal is, and believe that “normal” is only one thing! But it is so many different things, and that’s why we are always trying to get the importance of honoring people’s differences.

When I was in sixth grade, people tried to conform artificially and I thought the creative artistic kids tried too hard to conform to some idea of “normal,” but in truth, no one knew how to be “normal.” Everyone looked around and thought there might be a generic idea; it was a time of much conformity in America. But of course everyone is unique, and even though we share characteristics with others of a group, like hair color or skin color or religion, we all have individual characteristics and natures that are not like anyone else’s. I very much like the metaphor of the individual soul. There is certainly no such thing as a normal soul, and poetry can be an individual expression of a moment in one’s inner life or collective life or language with others.

I hope you won’t let anyone bully you into conforming in ways that are not helpful, especially on social media or in video games or something like that.  If they do try to make you conform, just find a better group of loving friends, and keep on reading and writing and doing creative things, because the world needs creative people to be a little abnormal all the time. 

All my wishes, 

Brenda Hillman

Dear Ryan,

I’m really happy to read your letter about your studies, and thank you so much for reading my poem “The Letters Learn to Breathe Twice.”  First of all, your list of interests is so wide ranging! I appreciate that you are studying all the things you mention: philosophy, psychology, drumming, track and field; now you can add poetry to those interests and poetry can include all of them! 

I really loved your anecdote about the children at the summer camp where you worked and the way you responded with empathy and compassion to the child who was confused by having fallen. I think “cheerful mild constant anxiety” is something our culture—even our families sometimes—imposes on children in part because it makes the adults anxious when children are unhappy (I have lots of grandchildren!) and also, as you say, there is a lot of uncertainty about the future, when we are young: what will I become? Will I be loved for what I am? How will I survive when the earth is so precarious? The speaker—or “speakingness”—of the poem tries to convey that there are layers of revelation about how one might be in the life with all this going on and maybe a sense of spiritual freedom and an imaginative approach to the everyday might give some relief from the anxiety.

As for the “unwanted dandelions”: I sometimes get annoyed at people not liking common flowers that are considered weeds and are extricated from gardens. Taraxacum officionale is a good plant that was considered a weed arbitrarily. The leaves are very good in salads, and the flowers are quite pretty!

You ask many questions about my career as a poet. I’m not sure being a poet is a career exactly but more like a calling—there are no opportunities for progress or promotion, even if one is successful in being published.  Yes, I love the internet but it is a tool that can be widely abused (especially when overused in social media!) and I am really glad I grew up without the internet because as a kid I got to read a lot of books instead of having to text, like the poem says.  My kind of poetry comes out of a lot of traditions because I love so many writers from across many traditions; I like Rilke as much as I like Barbara Guest. About publishing: it is a truly golden age for poetry—so many great presses and amazing books coming out—poetry publishing is in great shape at the moment.  I hope you will read a great deal and will keep poetry in your life forever! 

All the best,

Brenda Hillman   

Dear Rose Mary,

Thank you for your letter about your life as a fifth grader. I love the way you describe going to your room after your brother and you have an argument and you listen to music—a great stress-reliever when you are young. I am trying right now to guess what your music may be. When I was in fifth grade The Beatles were just forming though it was a few years before they would produce hits. Now I like all kinds of music not only because it is a great stress reliever, it is a source of astounding inspiration. I love listening to classical, jazz, pop and rock music, old punk rock, soul, country and opera, depending on my mood.  

Thank you so much for reading my poem, and especially for writing about how you connected with the lines “The children/try to be normal, though/no one knows what normal is…” There are so many ways to try to conform, but we each have an original and beautiful life to live. When you are young you may not realize how many ways of being “normal” there really are because no one is alike. It would be so nice if we could all just be a little crazy and still find ways to feel acceptable. I like that you mention that it is hard to be a caring person when you are in fifth grade, even as a babysitter. Even babysitting can be stressful! 

You asked if I’m a well known poet; I am lucky to have a good group of readers but no poet feels as well known even as an obscure professional basketball player. Most poets feel neglected in our country because even though there is much great poetry being written now, people do not read poetry widely. It is not because poetry is difficult or built of secret code; clearly young people like you know what is going on in poetry. People should read a lot more poetry because it is a beautiful great art, and I know you will turn that tendency around and keep great poetry in your life. Thanks again for writing!
 

Warmly,

Brenda Hillman 

Dear Nora,

Thank you for your wonderful response to my poem, “The Letters Learn to Breathe Twice.” I appreciate reading how you interpret the image of the geese overhead as honking adults, as there often seems to be an actual species disconnect between children and parents. The image is meant to be a little funny so I’m glad you picked up on several aspects of it; the geese flying overhead may sound to the young person like honking humans not just like honking adult geese! It is so important to have readers like yourself to unpack all the possible readings of the poem. 

I also loved your comments about the complexities of expression and about how the image of the garden and the children’s languages are braided; the ideas of writing giving humans a freedom to express the inexpressible, and to trace around the possibility of the unsayable, are so much a part of our language acts as human. I hope your teachers and your fellow students are able to discuss these complexities you have rendered.   

You ask whether writing could be an escape for everyone, and you ask about the relief  that may come in the acts of writing things down—relief from a psychological state, or from the necessities for secrecy, for example.  Those are very complicated and wonderful questions. I often experience a deep satisfaction—even a relief—when I feel I have been able to name a particular state or fact about the world, the coming together of two conflicting facts or paradoxes.

I have been very grateful to live in relative freedom to write, and because I had a good education – both in public schools and at Pomona College—I was exposed to a lot of great poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including romantic, symbolist, modernist and postmodernist poetry written by many rule-breaking writers who helped free up form and content for other writers. I like to be a rule breaker and cross boundaries in my writing. But I also know my freedom of expression and form—as a white educated person living in the United States—might be a privilege elsewhere. Writing freely throughout history has not always been available to women, people of color or those living under economic oppression. When poets live under brutal regimes or in societies in which there is no freedom of written expression, where governments that oppress their writers for speaking out, the poets strain against these things, and the amazing thing is how often they find their way through these oppressions to bring their truths, and they even – as under Stalin—bring their poems in secret language. 

Thank you for asking these great questions, and I hope you keep writing and reading poetry! 

All the best, 

Brenda Hillman

Dear Dalton,

Thank you for writing to me about your life in Ohio, and thank you so much for your thoughts about my poem, “The Letters Learn to Breathe Twice.”  I am really interested in what you say about being in the Boy Scouts and writing lots of letters! I am wondering if this is because you are writing letters to individual people or to groups of people?  I am also wondering about whether Boy Scouts do a lot of outdoor activities? When I was in the Girl Scouts in Arizona in the 1950s, I was always surprised we didn’t go outside very much but we did lots of indoor art projects. My troop did lots of imaginative things like making puppets out of papier mâché, which means “chewed paper” in French, but really just involved putting little bits of moistened paper onto a shape. This helped me when I started learning to write poetry because it was sort of a collage out of bits of newspaper.   

I love what you wrote about a letter changing two lives, two breaths. That’s a really cool way of interpreting the title, and I like it a lot. I had in mind something related to that; I was thinking about how  letters or signs when they are used have both a sort of intention – what the writer intends, breathing their own life, their own reality, outside of what we intend for them to have when we start putting them on paper or into our devices (I was thinking of the alphabet in the English language here, A-Z, because that is the alphabet I use, but it could be any sign-system or letters and syllables). This poem is part of a book in which I was thinking that individual letters have fire and breath and life—it’s kind of an odd idea but some other poets think this too. Anyway, I really like the fact that there are several readings of the two breaths idea. 

You were asking me elaborate on the word “normal.” My family of origin had a traditional structure for 1950s—father, mother and children— but now we know because the idea of normal is evolving that there is no “normal” that fits everyone, and that the idea of trying to fit in can be kind of oppressive.  I never felt very normal when I was in high school in the 1960s, and fortunately there was a counter-culture “flower-child” movement I could be a part of in art and poetry; we pushed back against recognized authority. As a species we probably seek categories and models to feel safe, but in the arts we sometimes balk against that. I like to break rules for what is normal in my writing because I think we all have unusual ideas. Probably you can see some of this in the poem you chose. 

Finally I wanted to add that I hope your health continues to improve and that you are doing really well.  I hope you will keep poetry in your life. 

Warm good wishes, 

Brenda Hillman

Dear Julia,

Thank you for writing such a clear and wonderful response to my poem, “The Letters Learn to Breathe Twice.”  It sounds as if you have a good language arts program at your school and I love that your list for becoming an excellent writer includes journaling, expressing yourself in various kinds of writing and learning about vocabulary and parts of speech; it’s a great set of tools. I hope you can read a lot of poetry; there are millions of poems on the internet to inspire you!  

You were asking about “the cheerful mild constant anxiety” I refer to.  It sounds as if you have a lot of wisdom about your anxiety. I’m sorry to hear you experience some of it but I trust you have a good sense of balance.  Many sensitive people suffer from anxiety because there is so much in our heads swirling and colliding; our family lives, the demands of work and social media, the conditions of the world we live in—economic disparity, climate fears— all contribute to making a creative person anxious. When I was young, I never could stand being told to get over how I was feeling because that did not seem to help. Whenever I’m anxious now, I try to figure out the reason, I go deeper into it and put a slightly more interesting piece of the thought into words. Some of the wisest poets I know do not have all the right answers, but are spiritually questioning, like Gerard Manley Hopkins.

You were asking  about my writing process and what gives motivation or courage to write. I fell in love with poetry from an early age because of particular poets like John Keats and Emily Dickinson, and it seemed like writing poetry helped many things that were difficult in life. My motivation to write poetry comes from several kinds of things that are like different doors to the same house. Sometimes I start with odd ideas, odd feelings, or some an unusual perception when I look at something. It just pops into my head and I cannot exactly account for it. Sometimes it is just a piece of language that I think can be made into a poem, a phrase or a peculiar scrap of language. I believe that everyone has these truly odd things inside their heads but we are mostly taught not to pay attention to them. In answer to your second question, yes, writing makes me feel very calm, especially recopying poetic drafts by hand (handwriting); if I don’t recopy I tend to stick with a less interesting piece of writing. It’s fun to try this. I hope some of these ideas are of help and that you will be able write poems forever.  

Very best wishes, 

Brenda Hillman 

Dear Magnolia,

I want to thank you for taking the time to write me such a wonderful letter, and thank you for the really beautiful remarks about my poem! It means a lot to me that you like it. I can’t find the name of your school on the letter you wrote,  but I imagine you have an amazing English teacher who is willing to teach you poetry that may be a bit out of the mainstream. I was also really glad to read your clear printing because your handwriting is very legible and it gives a good, grounded relationship to the paper, just as I was mentioning in the poem about children tracing around “the unsayable.”

I couldn’t agree more with what you say in your first paragraph; it’s very hard for me to understand why some people don’t like writing; for some it may seem like a chore but for me it has always seemed like a true lifesaver. There are an infinite number of good poems out there and I agree with you, there is really no such thing as a standard person. When I wrote those lines, I was thinking of being in about sixth grade and always looking at the shoes of the other girls, especially the popular girls, and thinking that there was a particular style of dress that would make one “fit in,” then a few months later I started writing poetry and realizing I didn’t particularly want to fit in, because there was nothing really to “fit into”! It was long ago, the Beatles were just coming to town and the Beatles were breaking the rules about how boys should wear their hair. Many things about that period gave me the courage to write poetry, even though as soon as a style becomes mainstream. People start conforming to that. 

You asked where my inspiration comes from. It comes from the inner or the outside world, from things I see and read, or from strange ideas or feelings that have been residing within me. I started writing poetry when I was nine years old, mostly because I loved the sounds of the highly poetic King James Bible and a book by John Keats that my grandmother in Mississippi sent to me. Then my dad gave me a book by Edna St. Vincent Millay. A writer named Lucille Clifton and I used to always talk about how we started loving Edna St. Vincent Millay when we were young.  I talked to plants when I was young and had other strange friends. Writing poetry helps to make shapes of the odd or unmanageable realities I experience, and I’m always glad when a few people can connect with them, because my poetry can be peculiar. It definitely makes you feel more at home in reality to have a relationship to art. 

Finally, thank you for commenting about the endlessness of imagination. Of course, imagination is not always for the good; some people use their imaginations for destruction, but mostly in art, the imagination is a nonviolent force for the good and the free.  I am really happy to hear when young people fall in love with the imagination in poetry because it is a gratifying and magical art form, is easily available and not very expensive to share; poetry can take you on a vast journey far off the page. 

Thank you again for reading my poem! 

Very best wishes to you, 

Brenda Hillman

Dear Allison, 

Thank you for your excellent reading of my poem. I am impressed that you came up with so many different angles in your reading of “The Letters Learn to Breathe Twice.” I’m especially moved that you took the time to come up with a kind of orderly system for reading my strange poem. You probably have a great English teacher who taught you that careful reading is a key to finding meaning, even when life is a struggle. 

One of my favorite parts of your letter is the connection you draw between the praise for a garden and for the breath that finds its way to the paper; you write:  “The paper that we get from nature that carries our words, thoughts and feelings, also once had its own life and breath.” I like how you put this; the poet-speaker in the poem is addressed with some detachment, because the address is to a “you” that is sort of the poet herself and sort of general. That is one of the questions you asked. 

Another of your questions has to do with whether I meant “to highlight the pain of today’s youth and the struggle for identity?” Surely the struggle to feel “normal” and to fit in to one’s social world is a timeless concern, not just for young people but for everyone: the struggle to exist in relation to one’s family’s expectations; the struggle to define oneself and feel worthy with the chosen work, creative and economic; the struggle to define one’s unique characteristics in relation to one’s race, gender, ethnicity, abilities and age; the struggle to be seen in a culture that often doesn’t value the very things that make us stand out. These are kind of timeless issues for young people and young readers; maybe they are intense for each generation in a different way. I know you are wise and will sort these things out, in the great flow of relationships. 

You ask about the ability of literature to alleviate anxiety. Literature and art can address the soul’s distress (though some artists don’t think the soul is a relevant metaphor) but art can’t feed people (unless by that we mean selling it as a product); it can’t cure disease or fix climate disaster or get rid of bad leaders. That happens through other means, and in activism sometimes with other people.  But humans have the infinite capacity to communicate through our limitations, so language—especially beautiful or powerful language — always gives me hope. I wish you joy in all of your studies! Keep us posted. 

Best wishes,

Brenda Hillman 

Dear Nicole, 

Thank you so much for your letter. I really enjoyed the way you started right in by quoting a comment you must have heard a million times. Too much fantasy and not enough reality, is probably something all creative children hear so often, and as you say, it might be very annoying. It is almost as if the person who made the comment wished he, she, or they could have a little of what you has, a dream life or an escape. There is always a dutiful teacher thinking the day-dreamer might need to have been brought into line.

I liked your remarks about the innocence you found in the poem “The Letters Learn to Breathe Twice,” especially as children try to sort out the normal from everything else, and to determine whether being normal is even in the range of the desirable. What after all is too strange? In addition, the child doesn’t really know whether the models are within the bounds of the acceptable or not. One thing I love about poetry is that it really takes us beyond really clear demarcations of those things and blurs them—at least, that is one thing I get out of it. 

You ask what compels a poet to write, and what an “unwanted dandelion” refers to. I write to get at what can only be expressed through the poetry, not through any other mode of expression. If I sang I would do it that way, but poetry is my chosen art.  I very much enjoyed the way you refer to the small occurrences that make their way into your writing. The eye for detail and the ability to get that detail into a memorable sound are such good tools—though not all poets want to represent things realistically; some want surreal images. You ask also about the encouragement of adults. The adults in my childhood were generally strict and perfectionistic about performance, which caused some challenges, but my parents and grandparents valued reading and independent interpretation, which helped my literary life a great deal. They were generally proud of my poetry.  

As for the dear, unwanted dandelion: the dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, is considered a weed by some, but it is edible and quite an attractive plant, in my opinion! Its serrated edges are lively and useful. It has been found to have medicinal properties. I called it unwanted because it is pulled up by overly zealous gardeners. 

I hope you will enjoy poetry all of your life. Thanks again for writing to me! 

Best wishes, 

Brenda Hillman

Dear Katy,

I am glad to receive your nice letter about my poem, “The Letters Learn to Breathe Twice,” and happy to know that you were writing your letter not too far away from the house where I wrote the poem! I live very near Richmond.  The Bay Area has been beautiful this year from so much spring rain, and we can enjoy gardens with their unwanted dandelions all year. Since you mention the dandelion line, I will say I’m glad you were struck by that line. As far as I’m concerned, the dandelion should not be unwanted because its foliage makes delicious salads, full of vitamins that make poetic eyesight very strong. To my mind, the word “weed” is often a misnomer because “weed” just means the plant is inconvenient to a human, but dandelions have edible leaves, yellow flowers, and puffy seeds enjoyed by small children when they blow them all over the yard.  

I am really happy that you say my poem inspired you. A poet can work for years hoping to receive a letter in which someone has been inspired. We poets want to make our way into the reader’s heart, inspiring that person to have an experience she might not have had before.  My poems can be peculiar, so I always think I am very fortunate when I have a reader who understands a kind of unusual view of things. I am particularly happy to read you might find your way to writing your own poems because of reading mine. It makes me happy to think my poem inspired you.

Please go on reading and writing poetry through high school. I am teaching at Saint Mary’s College which is not far away from Richmond. So when you think about college, please consider our nice school.  It is just over the hill from Richmond and you could be in my English 102 class. We have a lot of fun and we go outside all year to look at the non-human species; sometimes we even write poems to weeds! 

Warmest good wishes,

Brenda Hillman

Dear Connor,

Thank you for your wise and thoughtful letter about my poem “The Letters Learn to Breathe Twice”; I’m very interested in your experience of ninth grade these days, and I’m glad you connected with the poem. I’m happy you mentioned the adjectives because they seem to me a sometimes problematic part of speech; sometimes they can be overused in poetry, or sometimes when you’re trying to find just the right adjective for the noun (like “blue sky”) you might really want to be saying the less right thing because the slightly wrong thing is more accurate (maybe it’s really an “porcelain sky”) so I often find myself waiting for just the perfect degree of wrongness in an adjective that will then be more right than the right one. 

I haven’t been a child for a long time of course but I have quite a few grandchildren and when I write about childhood I try to get to the feeling of delicate balance that one has to have; here I was trying to capture what it was like when learning to write in the fall, with all kinds of changes going on. I really like remembering learning to write my letters on the paper, because I still write my poems on paper with a pencil before I type them, and I like how there is uncertainty and a little extra energy that sort of squeezes out on to the page right before the actual letters form the words.

You use really wonderful vocabulary in your note to me. The tildes are meant to be a little mimetic—to represent, as you say, more or less the wing motion—but of course there are other more abstract possibilities too. I really love your image of the raised bed in a garden. The need for a kind of conformity is always possibly confused with the comfort of the predictable and we must maintain our inner wildness. 

As for anthropomorphizing, it’s more like a weird sense of extra life I grew up with; I don’t imagine plants populated with humans but I grew up with a sense of worshipping the life force in plants and animals and other growing things. If there is possibly a spirit world, these beliefs are metaphors for us to unpack because so much of reality we know nothing about and have no access to, just as some deep sea creatures can see many more colors than humans. So I keep my metaphors for extra life in my poetry. 

I hope that you will write some of your own poems in high school. Writing poetry is very good company and there are many cool poets for you to know. 

I send you all the best,

Brenda Hillman