Dear Brenda Hillman 2021

Dear Meghan,

Thank you for your inspiring letter about my poem “& After the Power Came Back.” I love that you start with your own relationship to writing. It’s always my hope to have offered poems that will help other poets in their practice, among other things. I’m grateful for your remarks about how the flow of life and death take place in the poem first by offering examples of things we do not control; you continue, “...there are other days when you are filled with power, and when life is filled with possibilities.” That is very much what I was trying to convey in the first half of the poem. The word “power” of course is a bit of a pun, having to do with both the sensation of power within the human person, and also the electrical power source referred to. Even as I write this, the area where I live is experiencing some loss of electrical power.  The people in the poem (the students being addressed) are experiencing the loss of both kinds of power, and you note this is a kind of process of dealing with those uncertainties.

I especially like the way you relate to the word “awe” and find your interpretation unusual for a young poet. About the lines “you/stop in awe & are home,” you write: “...sometimes awe can be felt not because I have worked for it, but also because being human allows me to appreciate life this way.” Awe and wonder are often considered synonyms but the concept of awe feels a little vaster, suggesting that we are able to be small in relation to a physical universe we don’t understand. Sometimes the “awe” in  “awesome” isn’t quite up to the power of “awe” without the “some”; I confess I associate it with commentary on sports events. I like using the poetic words in some of their original meanings; so even if awe can be almost too much to handle we need some of it, and as you imply, sometimes we are discouraged from going for the larger scope of things. Poetry is connected with the human practice of seeing things in the largest possible perspective, with the most nuance. So many things offer us simple binaries, black and white choices, things reduced to special effects. I find the gathering of calm helps in the process of keeping a sense of awe.

You ask an excellent question in your penultimate paragraph. You would like to have a deeper understanding of how I work through my “projects,” and ask how this goes, given the time constraints we all have. One of the best ideas I can share on this subject is to try to keep a secret poem or poetic project going in your notebook—not for a class or a “project” at all, but because it is helping you work through something you’re going experiencing. Writing good poetry takes work, but it is worth the extra labor to get access to language you like. If you don’t like something you’ve written, just keep substituting till you find the satisfying choice. I copy my poems over and over (by hand, on paper) until I like the sound of the lines together; since I write a lot of lyric experimental poetry, sometimes I put scientific facts or research moments in my pieces.  Lines might visit for a while then they leave, unless they are just right, then I let them stay. That means, in short, that I’m willing to throw out the less good writing, and when I am on my way to the near final draft, I start typing it into my computer. I hope that helps your process.  Please check out lots of excellent poems at poets.org—there are thousands of model poems there for you to sample.

I hope some of this is helpful. I’m very grateful for your readership. Please stay well this year and keep writing.

Best wishes,

Brenda Hillman

Dear Caroline,

I was struck by the honesty and depth of your letter from the start. You mention that you connected with the themes of stress and pressure in my poem, and that you have been struggling hard to become the “ideal well-rounded person in hopes of a successful future.” Though I’m probably the age of your grandparents, I often feel the same way. It is very hard to know how to lead a “balanced” life; maybe “balance” is not the right term for what sensitive people are really seeking; we crave the values of artistic, refreshing or interesting spiritual life. Maybe some aspects of our current culture have become unreasonable and not sustainable—and why should we balance those? What if you’re participating in after school sports, clubs, trying to get homework done and sleep 8 hours a night? Maybe the way we live is very difficult. You note that it is very hard to stay on track with the need to “heed and heal” when you are being pulled in so many different directions. The most important thing is to be aware and not panic when life feels this way. The stress is adjustable if we see it as a bi-product of our activities, some of which we can change. But my poem is not a self-help book, it enters a mystery. Poetry is not therapy; in a poem, you might encounter a place where struggle is only a small part of the whole picture of what you call (and the poet Wallace Stevens also calls) “reality.”  

Technology offers temporary outlets for the stress and isolation, but they are partial solutions. When I see people standing around compulsively punching at their phones, I’m reminded that the little device really doesn’t solve the human dilemmas we face—to build institutions that embody racial and environmental justice, and to live in connection with other beings, including bugs.  I love your phrase, “the fake abyss of technology” because, honestly, the connections the phone and social media make for us last such a short time, like some form of not very nourishing sugar. We need a deeper spiritual connection to nature, to each other. In my poem, the students are typing questions in their phones when those questions cannot be verbalized in other ways. Some of my poet friends write lines to themselves in their phones, and the phone is a tool for your life, not an end. I <3 my phone but I write poems by hand in a notebook.

Composing this poem, I thought about what humans face particularly during climate change (in this case, the power was out because of the wildfires on the West Coast) when we’re all struggling to know how to live. You ask a very good question at the end of your letter about how the modern world (which we’ve been in for over 120 years, if we count the whole Twentieth Century) prompts a shift in the way we live. Big question! I think modern poems can show us different kinds of imagination as we face what actually is happening and what our wild dreams are; we cannot return to what was pastoral or bucolic, nor would we give up our phones. Poetry lets us take imagination and fact together, which is why I love it.

I am deeply moved when you write about your hopes and dreams of independence, “boundless freedom,” and family. Please do not give up on your dreams! You ** can** have some of what you want with work and imagination. Keep your dreams high and your expectations low! Envision a magic circle around you that will let you have your own free thoughts whatever you are going through and keep adapting—please think of it as my gift to you.

I send my very best wishes for your writing and life,

Brenda Hillman

Dear  Anna,

Thank you so much for your wonderful response to my poem “& After the Power Came Back”; please also thank your teachers for keeping poetry in the lives of their students. My piece was written a few years ago, before the pandemic, as the climate crisis was getting even more intense. Last year people were increasingly using the word “unprecedented” to describe where we humans were going through, not only in light of covid-19 but also in light of the climate crisis.  I’m saddened so many younger people have to worry about where we are. But as a poet, I am spiritually hopeful for the powers of art. As a teacher and activist, I feel committed to keeping this at the center of educational and political practice.

I’m not sure where you live or whether you are experiencing power outages or other climate challenges. The year I wrote the poem the outages were very frequent because the danger of wildfires was made more acute by the power lines in California. I like very much what you had to say about the idea of human nature, and the way you connect it to a search for meaning. Meaning is an odd concept and one of the most important things about human life. In poetry it happens via pure sound, at the level of syntax or through the image or emotion.  The meaning of the word “nature” is very complicated and whole books have been written about what we call “nature”— whether “nature” is trees, flowers and mountains, or whether “nature” is everything in the material universe, including cell phones, Tater Tots, paintings, shoe laces, video games.  Mostly they mean the first category—things they associate with outdoors, outside human habitats, but there’s a way can think of nature as including the effects of human life and human commerce on the planet. I’ve been called an “eco” poet because I write a lot about the environment and about non-human species; but there are very few places on the planet that aren’t affected by human life, and while I don’t think cell phones are as wonderful as trees, technology gives us great tools. Human creations belong in our poems. Since you are an aspiring writer, you’ll already be in love with words and will think about every word really carefully, how every word can have so many different nuances.  What are some of your favorite words right now? One of my favorite words is  “as.”

You asked for advice about choosing titles. What a great question!  I have a lot of thoughts about choosing titles. I love titles and think they are important, even though some of the poems I love don’t have titles (much of the work of Emily Dickinson and Paul Celan).  One line — even a title— can have so much meaning. I like working in the slippery space between what seems like very obvious title and a kind of mysterious poem. Another thing I like about great titles is they can seem like poems in themselves and can act in a very loose relation to the content of the poem itself. Sometimes my students think it’s hard to find titles for their poems, but try to think of short or long titles in advance.  Sometimes I write possible titles  even if I know I will never write the poem.

 You sound like a wise, determined person. Please take care of yourself, keep writing your poems and try not to stress too much. You don’t have to decide everything right now;  your life choices will help you decide. Just try to stay interested, loving and safe.  There is a lot of work to be done, but the world has a great deal of beauty and I’m sure you will be able to be in it.

Very best wishes,

Brenda Hillman

Dear Sravya,

Thank you for writing to me from Pittsburgh. Several of my loved ones live in that city, and I love visiting and seeing its beautiful bridges—especially the yellow one—where several rivers come together.  I know it’s also a place where amazing poetry is being written right now! Please thank your teachers (you mention Mrs. Feniello and Mrs. Barron) for their work; I am impressed with middle school teachers who teach poetry because I’m told it’s not always the easiest thing to teach in middle school and high school. I’m never sure why this is, but one of the reasons might be because of something the poet Matthew Zapruder wrote about in his excellent book, Why Poetry; people develop an idea that poems are riddles with specialized language instead of reading what is there on the page, staying loose and imaginative about their reading.  There are so many ways to read and experience each poem.

I received your letter in late summer; it is a couple of years since I wrote the poem you read, “& After the Power Came Back,” but it was written in this season too—just after school began.  Probably you know that there have been wildfires on the West Coast for several years, and when there is fire danger, our electric company turns the power out.  You asked about how I came up with the idea of the poem. During one of those power outages, I had the idea of writing several poems to my students about the experience, not only of losing power but also of being in a state of uncertainty without power. I don’t know about your poetry, but mine is sometimes formed when things collide—sometimes an idea and a piece of language, or sometimes an image, or sometimes a vague feeling I don’t have a name for until I start writing. I had the image of my students punching things into their phones when the power was out, and it seemed to me they were very anxious.  Other things in the poem were a little more abstract: “serrated hills,” “stipple the worry” and other things I liked the sound of. Usually if I have a piece of language I like and an idea or deep feeling, I can enter the house of the poem, but it is still a bit mysterious to me what makes a poem come together.

I appreciate your other questions and comments, especially your words about the natural world and how it has provided some salvation for you.  I have always shared that feeling. When I was in middle school I didn’t think the planet was in danger, and walked in the desert where I lived without much fear of anything except rattlesnakes. Even though we are in a serious climate crisis, with fires in the west and too much rain in the south and east, we are still on a beautiful planet, full of great creatures, mountains and river valleys formed eons ago. We humans are threatening the earth with our behaviors (too much plastic and fossil fuel consumption), but we are in an intricate relationship in the web of growing things; we can love where we are and keep a vast sense of wonder and hope balanced with scientific knowledge. You mention you had written a poem with your cousin when you went to Niagara Falls; the poem was not in your letter, but I hope you will send it to me someday.

I’m grateful you find the voice in my poem calming.  I’m a fairly intense person, but I find writing poetry deeply intimate and helpful, even if the subject matter or emotional impetus is quite serious. I hope you will continue to love poetry all of your life, that you will bring you pencil and pen when you travel so you can write down your thoughts.

With my very best wishes, Brenda Hillman

Dear Zaharoula,

Thank you so much for your beautiful letter about my poem “& After the Power Came Back.” I’m glad to have your readership, and your questions and comments are really great. You must have a good poetry teacher as well.

You mention that reading my poem corresponded with your writing one of your own, so the two felt connected somehow. This happens to me sometimes when I read powerful poems by others; though going into a poetic space can be very intense, I find deep commonality with another working poet, and I think it’s because poets are working at a deeper level than many other people so there is a symbolic world we hold in common. Your letter also says that you are ten years old. You have some wisdom beyond your years because you already understand many basic things about poetry.  I started writing poetry when I was about your age; it’s a great age to become a poet because you’re still vulnerable to the childhood feelings. Middle school students seem to become uncertain about poetry. I stopped writing poetry in middle school for a short time, but then started again in high school.

You commented on the fact that my poem doesn’t use end-rhyme and you wondered about that. You are maybe reading lots of poems in your class that use what we call “free verse”; mostly there isn’t a formal rhyming or rhythmic structure in free verse poems but poets use other devices you may learn about, other sound effects. I like to use internal rhyme. For example, in my poem there are a lot of inner vowel sounds that rhyme. “Tried” and “remind” both have long “i” sounds (this is called “assonance,” if you want to use a fancy word and impress your teacher!)  I like using repetitive patterns. These give a different kind of musical pleasure that is different from traditional rhyme.  

One of my favorites among your questions is about the ampersand (&) and why I was using it. That’s a smart question. If you get further with your reading, you’ll find many poets from the twentieth century, instead of writing out the whole word “and,” use that symbol as a kind of hip shorthand. It gives a signal that the poet is writing in with those poets as friends, so I feel drawn to using as a shout-out to some of the poets I like to read. To me it looks a bit like a figure kneeling. If you ever use the ampersand in your poems, maybe you will think of my poem and use it to keep our poems connected into the future.

You asked about the inspiration for the poem; it was written during fire season when I was thinking of the configuration of pressure and stress many of us are going through. In the west we have had to deal with power outages, and I wanted to write a poem for my students who are stressed. So many are having different geographical burdens of climate change. There is an image of putting questions in your phone; I’m glad you could relate to that image even though you don’t have a phone. There has been so much isolation and worry and I worry when my students are having a rough time. Mostly of course I don’t allow phones in my classrooms unless we are researching something, but later they might write someone about their experience.  I’m always struck by how much stress those little devices are absorbing (and causing!!). But  stress is only one feature of the poem. Mostly it refers to living with multiple energies so we will not be trapped in anxiety.

Zaharoula, I wish you all the best with your reading and writing; I know you are a sensitive person and will do a great job making the world a better place.

Respectfully,

Brenda Hillman

Dear Lola,

Thank you for writing a wonderful response to my poem “& After the Power Came Back,” and I send gratitude to your teachers for teaching poetry during this difficult year. Sometimes teachers think they should be teaching very practical things during a crisis, but there is nothing more practical than poetry. Your intelligence and deep caring shine through in your letter; you offer a personal interpretation of the first stanza and relate it to the way students often have stressful, experiences during their studies. I’m not sure whether you are meeting in person or remotely at your school as I write this. I hope you are back with your classmates. I’m struck by how you make the experience of the “you” in the poem both individually meaningful and collective. I’m especially struck by the way you leave the possibilities open; you offer the idea that the student being addressed in the poem might encounter the unfamiliar environment and difficult emotions but that these difficulties are resolved by considering other aspects of the same experience. You speculate on which aspects of the experience are stressful, and which aspects will be resolved in time.

You asked whether the poem came from my own student days. The poem alludes to an electrical power outage, among other things, a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly common where I live. Growing up in Arizona in the 1950s, I did experience plenty of stress as a student, but we did not have many climate related crises such as power outages very often.  Students were not living with climate anxiety as much as they were anxious about conforming socially because there was a much narrower range of what would be acceptable; but the chief worry was not existential. It’s true, was no social media so we did not compare ourselves on a global scale, and “trends” were local, but there was not a lot of freedom in personal style until the late 1960s when there was a cultural revolution.  Students have always compared themselves with unrealistic norms. And our generations share the hopes for a more just and sustainable planet.   

In our area, the electrical power often goes out when there is a weather event; here it is wildfire related but it may be different in your area. The pun is present: when communities lose their power, everyone feels powerless on a number of levels, and the power comes back eventually both to humans and electrical circuits. I wanted to remind students there are beautiful things in the environment, little animals seeking shelter and finding their way, even during environmental crises. Even as we experience ecological stress, the loss of power is not absolute. I’m glad you were able to connect it to the general state of urgency the student is feeling.

You comment on a few odd moments of language, including “stipple the worry, the grief-torn,” which I was thinking was the riskiest thing in the poem. I was worried students might not relate to that line because it is a little more abstract. “Stipple the worry” doesn’t make as much surface sense right away but I was so happy when you found the most difficult thing in the poem something you could relate to! Similarly, the idea of freedom in the poem and on the line that “freedom... still pulses on your skin” is not immediately legible but the meaning is woven with the mystery. I’m not interested in platitudes or easy answers, and my favorite poets (including Emily Dickinson ) don’t offer easy solutions in their poems, they offer complex statements. I trust smart readers to get some comfort from the layers of poetry. Reader and writer work through the mystery together by visiting conditions of beauty and knowledge.  I hope you will go on writing and reading poetry throughout your school years. Many thanks again for being a reader of this poem.

Best wishes,

Brenda Hillman

Dear Nellie,

I’m grateful that you wrote to me about my poem “& After the Power Came Back,” and impressed that you have also been reading poems by fellow Chancellors Natasha Trethewey and Tracy K. Smith, as well as by an ancestor poet, Homer!  You say you are in 9^th Grade, studying in Los Angeles. I know there are many great epics yet to be written in L.A. so I hope you will be at work on your urban epic poem soon!

Your letter is full of caring, and of details of your reading and thought. You seem to have a sophisticated literary sense. I am struck by your comment on the irony of the first few lines (the dead are reminding the living to breathe). I wrote the poem a few years ago during the same time of year as I’m writing you now, when the hills are tawny and dry in the autumn. I often feel that our California hills seem to be waiting for something, starting the very moment when the beige/brown first appears in late June-early July; there is a sense of the presence of the dead, and this presence seems to surround our cities. I experience this as a companionship from the spirit world and have always felt that since I was a child. The voice in the first stanza takes place between two states of being. The “old rat” and the “moveable nothing” are other forms of an unseen world the poet is trying to access.  Because you are interested in mystical realities, I am sure you know what I mean there. Poetry seems one of the best places to encounter the human and the non-human, the living and the dead; I never worry about there being lots of different entities in my poems because such things stretch the imagination and many poets throughout history are familiar with these concepts, whether metaphorically or not.

In the same paragraph of your letter, you note that being a busy high school student, you sometimes  forget to take care of yourself. I can relate to this, even though I am probably about the age of your grandparents. When I am stressed, poetry helps me to go on having a relationship to a consciousness outside my own, and it helps me to think there is something beyond my individual life and ego. If we live poetically, we are related to the presences in the hills and will always have company. Thank you for that wonderful observation about those lines.

You ask where I get ideas for my poems. I love the quilt image you use and I have just referred to quilts in another letter I am writing for Dear Poet. Multiple ideas and images are sewn together in my poems—sometimes it is called a collage method—and I take this as an inheritance from the twentieth century modernism I was introduced to in high school.  Or a different metaphor: honoring ideas is a little like getting an old storm drain cleared out at the beginning of our rainy season (I hope we have one this year!) I take my trowel out and dig the dirt, and find there are many moist earthworms that need to be transferred elsewhere in the garden! There is a lot of life and there are hundreds of ideas for any poet at any time; it’s a question of entering a method that will do them justice. I frequently start with a line or phrase for possible poem, even an abstract sound like “stipple the worry” and start writing without knowing what the poem will be about till much later.  Some poems have no “about”; they are pure music. So even if you are stressed, keep your small notebook handy and collect pieces of language for your poems.

I hope some of this will help you with your own poetic practice and that you will always keep poetry in your life!

Very best wishes,

Brenda Hillman

Dear Nina,

Thank you so much for writing to me about my poem “& After the Power Came Back.” I am glad you connected with it and found it helpful. I really loved the personal tone of your note to me, and your sentence about identifying with the poem as a writer; I’m impressed by the quality of your writing; you mention that you are fourteen years old.

One of my favorite things about your letter is the clause “since the world is dismantled and veiled”— what a gorgeous phrase that is, containing so much about your view of things! I hope you will put that right into a poem soon! You write that you enjoyed the lines “The great dead circled the serrated/ hills; they tried to remind you to breathe”; I thought about those lines for a long time and decided to go with an intimate personal image at the beginning of the poem, and the image of “serrated hills” is a bit odd, so I’m glad you connected to them. The emphasis in my poems is often on getting knowledge through the specifics of language; I’ve always loved the unusual sound of “serrated” because the low hills look a little bit like a saw, and the word “serrated” is a bit bumpy or serrated.   I don’t know about you, but sometimes I choose words for pure sound, or for the ways they present images, or sometimes for their ideas or emotions. Serrated might have been chosen primarily for sound, but then I realized the hills looked a little like a saw or another serrated object.

You ask what inspires me to write. Inspiration is a tricky word—it really means breathing in, but what are we breathing in? Just about anything in the environment or in the unseen world! There is a great deal we do not see.  I find life events, plants and animals, odd ideas and history inspiring—the visible, the invisible, science, myth. I like to write about the natural world, psychological matters, spiritual matters, politics, or daily life objects like phones and parking meters.  I have a lot in my brain and heart, so even when I’m confused about how to live a poetic or ethical life, it’s interesting to try to put experience into language.  Since writers are more sensitive to our environment than other people, we have to write our way through the snags and try to hear our way through the utter confusion, either through the process as it unfolds or through a metaphor or model. Writing a poem usually provides a little window into the next poem.  I’m trying to make a sense of inner experience come into being in the form of a poem. In the poem you read for this letter, I was hoping to connect not only with my own experiences but also with those of my students after an electrical power outage. Probably you don’t have as many as we have here in California, but in the last few years we have had a lot of them, mainly during wildfire season. I feel a profound sense of the spiritual world during a power outage; very often, things are hushed and regain their power slowly.

Another of your interesting questions has to do with the relationship between my editing work and creating poems; you must be a remarkable student, because I’ve never heard a young person ask that question. When I’ve worked as an editor, it has always been a labor of love. I edited a poetry series for a university press; an anthology of essays about motherhood and poetry; an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems; and several other volumes of the work of other poets. I’ve also facilitated some translations. Those were labors of love because they didn’t come with money, just great satisfaction at having helped the work of others. Editing can be a thrilling experience, so I hope you will get a chance to do it sometime, whether you do it as a job or not. There are good paying jobs in the field of editing, but being a poet doesn’t pay much! So if you end up writing poetry, you’ll need to supplement your income!

Thanks again for writing to me, and best wishes with your poems and your reading,

Brenda Hillman

Dear Addie,

I’m so grateful you read my poem with deep care; I can really relate to your questions and concerns. You tell me so much about yourself in only a few sentences—that you live in Maine, that you are far along in high school, that you are interested in the irrational side of things. I don’t really have answers. The conundrum you set up at the beginning is one of the deepest problems humans grapple with— what to do with fear, anxiety or grief, with some of the so-called negative emotions. The ancillary question you pose to me—what role nature might play in all this—is something poets think about a lot, and something I think about every day.

You write, “It is obvious that you believe nature has certain healing properties...” and that is true, but it such a complicated thing. I love the worlds of plants, animals and other species (lichen are neither!!) I get solace out of being outside of buildings, though I find nature inside of buildings too. Maybe in your 11^th grade class you’ve come across the term “ecopoetry”; that is a term for some of what some poets like myself are I writing in the intersections between humans and the non-human world. This “unsmooth” nature poetry may include anxieties about the effects of human life on the planet, feelings about climate change, environmental degradation and so on, that may not appear in a different kind of nature poetry. Even the trees in our gardens may not always be sources of solace only because of what is happening to them. Ecopoetics also interrogates concepts of race, white supremacy and human centrality.

The people (I was addressing a group of students, but it could be anyone) experiencing a power outage in the poem are admonished to breathe and to think about the larger picture. Even breathing is complicated during our wildfire season because sometimes we need air purifiers! But despite the fact that many habitats and bioregions are at risk, and even though there is much work to do, there is so much beauty and inspiration in the parts of the planet besides the humans. We can expand our ideas of nature. For example, in my eco-poetry class, I like to have my students interview ants.  I’m so glad you like the lines  “the linked auras/ in trees & a colorful radiance,” which is true as a sensation and as a metaphor. The sun and other light bodies make circles, but the poem is inventing the connections. I like seeing the beauty in weeds as well as flowers. There is no time for despair, nor is there time for our wasteful gas-guzzling habits, so it’s to be hoped humans will get a clue, find new economies that will make human life sustainable.  

You ask about tech and social media. They are not bad but are are only tools, like knives and forks; they are not the dinner, or ends in themselves.  I’m drawn to some of these platforms as ways of keeping up with friends and family; they are great places to post poems, news and photos,  to keep up with accomplishments and fill people in.  But I don’t spend much time on them, just a little every few days, otherwise it gets a little addictive. I prefer calmer, older technologies like books, paper and pencils for writing. Don’t worry about missing out if you minimize social media. Just make more meaningful connections with some people you trust, develop your inner world, try to use such tools for pleasure but not for toxic worry of popularity.  The shallow opinions on social media only provide a temporary hit, but that is not where your value lies. We poets need a deeper connection to reality.

Addie, I hope some of this is helpful to you. Please keep the natural world and poetry in your life and you will do a lot of good. Thank you again for writing to me.

Best wishes,

Brenda Hillman