Sean Patrick Hill is the author of several books of poetry, the most recent being the chapbook Hibernaculum (Slash Pine Press, 2013). His poems are forthcoming or have appeared recently in Typo, DIAGRAM, Spork, Phantom Limb, The Pinch, and Forklift, Ohio. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where he runs Green Fuse Press, publishing poetry broadsides.
His poem, "Dark Kentucky Holler," appeared in Issue Fifty-Five of The Collagist.
Here, Sean Patrick Hill talks with interviewer Darby Price about tragedy in the internet age, furnishing the daimon, and being a poet at rest.
Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of your poem, “Dark Kentucky Holler”?
In my mind, the poem began simply as an experience of what became the opening image. I was driving home to Louisville from Cincinnati. It was night, and along one stretch of Interstate 71, I saw to the side of the road a single, bright light, about the brightness of a streetlight, the kind of light farmers will sometimes install beside a barn. That light sat down in a hollow between two hills, a gully. The rest was dark. That light struck me as being infinitely lonely, that far out in the countryside, the hilly region along the Ohio River of northern Kentucky. I carried that image for a few weeks. Later, my mind transformed that light into the idea of the “candle” that Emerson spoke of when he referred to the “scholar.”
The rest of the poem came of what was happening at the time, certainly the Sandy Hook school shootings, but also the emerging news of all the child casualties from the war in Afghanistan. There had been an article, an opinion, pointing out how much we as Americans grieved over the shootings of all those children in Newtown, but how little we recognized the deaths of children from drone strikes half the world away. Now, even more than then, one can see videos of children, babies even, killed in errant missile strikes in, say, Gaza.
I’m a father. My daughter at the time I wrote this poem was three years old. That certainly stimulated the writing of the poem. To imagine not only that I was the parent of a child killed in his or her own school, but to imagine a bomb killing my daughter in a warzone, enraged me as much as it grieved me. Imagine the impotence a father must feel, finding his child killed. This poem, for me, is an explosion of that grief and rage and also of empathy and of compassion for those who have lost children. Something is being accessed here, a deep feeling, though one I can’t adequately explain.
But to return to that opening image: for me, the triggering idea here was how this news, the events of these deaths, penetrates via the media deeply to every corner of the world, even the holler along the Kentucky interstate. Social media does that, the Internet does that. There’s the strange paradox, or irony, that even as we’re interconnected with the entirety of the world via the so-called “Web,” we’re not necessarily connected psychologically or emotionally. But we see, or at least we are capable of seeing any tragedy, anywhere in the world. Whether or not we’re connected at all seems to me to be the question in this poem.
There’s an immediate tension in this poem between the bucolic setting (“a few lights/ by the barn,/ dim house, dim star”) and the “piping/ in of culture” through the TV that brings bad news of the wider world. In what ways do you want the initial setting—this “Dark Kentucky Holler”—to work within the broader context of the poem?
I often think of this idea, or this tension as you say. Right now, I live in a certain region of the world. Let’s call it Kentucky, or the Ohio River Valley, or the city of Louisville. I live on a hill, Crescent Hill, in an old house where, every morning, certain birds start to singing: cardinals, chickadees, wrens, robins. There’s the weather, the rise and fall of the creeks. I see certain people on the street, in cars or on foot; some I see daily, some once and perhaps never again. This is what I am conscious of everyday, and therefore this is my life.
Just this morning, I watched four men out doing yard work with all their machines. I was fascinated, watching one man trying to start a leaf blower and failing repeatedly. When he finally got it going, he hoisted that thing on his back, an engine, roaring away, and I could see the gasoline sloshing around in the tank. And of course, the whole thing is a microcosm of the oil economy, right? I used to mow lawns, too, sometimes with gas engines, and later with push mowers. Work can be meditative, I was thinking, but the way we have it here is so speedy that we lose that quiet time with the hands and replace it with a neighborhood full of noise. What’s wrong with using a rake? “Worrying about the time you save,” as John Fogerty sang. This, I mean, is how the world comes to my doorstep. It’s not an abstract idea of mining tar sands—that’s a thousand miles away, both physically and psychologically—but rather the concrete, sensual idea of the use of fossil fuels right here before me. Here is the effect. I can grasp that.
So I think, what is my life as an individual? Partly, it is simply what I experience directly on a daily basis. In fact, I can only tangibly and sensibly experience this valley in Kentucky, or this yard, most of the time. So what does it mean to see news from Sandy Hook? Am I experiencing it? How? As an American, is it possible for me to connect with that tragedy? What is an American, in fact? Is there such a thing?
In the same way, is it possible to be a world citizen? Can I truly be “cosmopolitan”? The word was first used, in my understanding, by Diogenes: “I am a citizen of the world,” he said. Yet I can never experience, at least not from my vantage, the bombing of an apartment building in the West Bank. Yet, I can see images via the news—whatever “news” is. I can’t even say I am experiencing something indirectly because a video I might see, or something as small as a “tweet,” is shaped by a perspective and, therefore, distorted. It’s bad enough that my own experience of this place I live in is distorted by my own opinions, prejudices, and so on.
A short time after this poem was published I went to Eastern Kentucky, to Appalachia, where I was taken to meet the mountain people by the photographer Shelby Lee Adams, whom I was there to interview for an article I was writing. One thing he lamented was the fact of the people there being exposed to outside influences, whether it was satellite television or methamphetamines. Appalachia, or anywhere really, is not entirely a “bucolic” setting, in the etymological sense of the word. It’s not Romantic, you see. Anywhere can be rustic, and often is. My own backyard has a rusted furnace out lying in the grass, beer cans from the neighbor, and I just realized the bottom step on my back porch rotted and split. The alley is full of wet garbage.
But my thought with that holler is that there are people entirely isolated by geography, or else just marginalized by a lack of media. In America, I figure, plenty of people simply don’t know what’s happening in the world. Should they? What, then, is the disparity between their experience and the experience of people on the other side of the world? After all, humans are humans no matter where you are. There is violence everywhere, and there is joy everywhere. There is the idea that to live in one place is to know everyplace. In a sense, we know what the news is. Marcus Aurelius said, more or less, that by the time a man was 40, he’d experienced all there was to experience: love, war, and everything else. And all that knowledge is available no matter where one lives. I love, too, the trees in Barry Lopez’s Crow and Weasel, how they say that all the news comes to them on the wind.
Nevertheless, there is an emergence in the poem. Even Emerson pops up, the old American idea of “the candle that lights the world,” as Arthur Miller said. If I am one person in a provincial city, I still can know the grief of the world, for it is my grief, too, or at least potentially. There’s plenty of suffering here.
I feel as if there’s a sort of eternal debate that rages over poetry’s place in American culture, and whether or not poems should be political. Can you talk about whether you see your poem as “political,” and how you’ve situated it among some of our deepest concerns (foreign wars and the Newtown shootings, for example)? What were your goals in doing so?
I’ve long been interested in political poetry. Poetry is primarily the art of language, of course, but after that, the construct of poetry—including its subject, if that’s the right word—lies either in our daily experience or else in our assemblage of ideas, and more often than not, both. What you are obsessed with will find its way into the poems. It’s a gnostic and cathartic art at once.
Let me reference Jack Spicer, who was enormously influential to me. His idea of the poem’s creation has to do with—at least this is my understanding of it—the daimon, which he called “The Martian” or “X” in his lectures. Miłosz, too, speaks of the daimon frequently, and he was certainly a political poet. But Spicer said that this force was what wrote the poetry, but it needed “furniture,” which is to say, the words and ideas you have in your mind. The poet’s job, he said, was to provide furniture rather than to “write” a poem—to feed the mind and give “X” the concepts and words to work with. For some, like Miłosz, that furniture was “political,” which may not be “political” to him so much as experiential. After all, he writes of lying on the ground, bullets popping all around him, realizing that poetry makes not a whit of difference. That’s direct experience, the “furniture.” And it’s hard to write political poetry if you don’t have that furniture. How can we speak for another? What is the “poetry of witness”?
Again, the problem in my poem is this: did I experience this tragedy? What is tragedy in the Internet age? If the idea of the political simply means how we treat each other, how we converse and interact, then, of course, everything is political. Which means, I suppose, nothing is. At the time, though, I did see that I was writing what was generally a “political poem.” I must have been in a frame of mind at the time, because during this month of Sandy Hook I also wrote my long poem, “History of Snow,” which is overtly political, to my mind. I was dealing with landlords who were throwing us out of our rental, simply because we called them on the fact that the house had numerous code violations: peeling lead paint, a rat, disintegrated insulation in the air ducts, you name it. I was angry, of course, and I was trying to locate my experience in some sort of context, geopolitically and historically.
The violence the landlords showed toward us—and admittedly that I showed toward them—is utterly political. But in “Dark Kentucky Holler” I situated the poem in what is the most overt metaphor for this conflict, which is war. War as we know it is simply the macrocosm of the internal conflict. War has casualties, and the fact that the casualties are oftentimes children is distressing. Killing children is child abuse taken to the absurd extreme, from the pointed, bitter word to physical abuse to outright dehumanization. Though there is no comparison with the children of Sandy Hook or the Middle East, my daughter suffered, in a sense, from the violence of our landlord’s wanton ignorance.
There were dangers throughout the house: lead paint peeling into the bathtub, rusted metal, exposed nails, broken steps. This is small by comparison, but the violence begins here and potentially escalates because the seeds of the objectification of humans are there. That’s part of the “culture” that gets piped in, as the poem says. To simply take this ignorance and expand it to full-scale war is to make the macrocosm of the microcosm. They are mirrors of each other. It is a matter of volume, only. We all know what violence against children is when they are shot, killed, beaten, but how often do we see that we are hurtful to them in the more subtle forms of violence, belittling them and so forth? Even in “teaching” them, or reducing them to potential consumers?
Was there a goal for this poem? I don’t know, honestly. The poem, to me, is complicated. I don’t even know that it’s good. It was composed rapidly, beyond my thinking. It was not planned, but I prefer that method. That image of the lonely farm lay in my mind a time, several weeks I think, before Sandy Hook happened. Then the image became the beginning of a poem that roared out, just as “History of Snow” had. I didn’t know that considering that lone light—Emerson’s candle—would lead to my own fatherhood as a theme, my own reaction to tragedy on that level. I can only say I’m glad it did.
In the second half of the poem, the speaker’s father is introduced, and we see him as a former soldier, a man who is ill, and a man who is “in the process/ of becoming/ a man in a country/ giving rise to a lunatic fringe”. Then, this person becomes all fathers, men who “[find]/ the inner mother” and “[wait] for their child/ to stand up/ and be counted.” I feel like there’s so much to unpack here: generation gaps, the political roles of parents, gender—can you talk about the importance of the father character(s), and why the poem ends with this image?
It’s funny, because I’ve actually been reading about the animus, as Jung defined it, that inner father figure that, according to him, every woman—and man, I’d argue—strives to unite with, to fully become human. But there is also the anima, the feminine aspect of the man that we as men must ultimately unite with, too. In order for a man to nurture, to care for children and ultimately, I’d guess, cease with causing violence, they’d have to find—symbolically, at least—that inner mother and become that mother. They have to care. Naturally, this is only conceptualization, but it seems pertinent to me.
When I wrote the poem my actual father was on my mind. He served in the Air Force before I was born, though he was in the Reserves for a long time after, and he did eventually die of cancer, though at the time of this poem’s writing, he was at the beginning of that long illness. I remember when he served in the Middle East for a number of years after 9/11. I know that the tour troubled him, perhaps even disturbed him.
Again, I’d point to the poem’s movement, which was entirely unpremeditated. I did not set out to structure the poem at all. Because my father did, in fact, serve in Afghanistan during the war, it was a natural leap to think about the children there and simply recall that he, unlike myself, had actually been there. From there, I started drawing the connections between that father, who was a teacher like myself, and my own persona as a father. I would guess, rereading the poem, that in all that talk about the “man becoming” that there is a good deal of Wordsworth creeping in there: “The Child is the father of the Man” and so forth.
In one sense, my father in the poem allows me to view troubled things from multiple sides. He served in the war, on the side responsible for hurting and killing children. America did the same in Vietnam; it’s no secret. We are all responsible for this, and it’s that responsibility that troubles me. After all, as I say in the close of the poem, one is trying to be a mature being, a full human being, in a country that is going insane. You know: our taxes pay for this war, all these wars, and in the meantime hordes of people are stampeding department stores for toys. Our inner conflict continues to manifest as outer conflict. And what about those grieving parents now? All the parents: the parents of the dead children at Sandy Hook, the parents of children killed by errant bombs. Their suffering continues, while we continue to watch television, or, like me, publish poems. I weep to think about this, in all honesty. I can hardly stand to think about it, but it’s the only way to engage one’s compassion and to release it.
The poem ends the way it does, entirely imaginatively of course, with my connection to those parents, specifically those fathers. Many of the men who create these wars are fathers themselves. My father was a soldier, as many men serving today are fathers. The war disturbed my father, as it disturbed many of the men returning from Asia, just as it did when they returned from Vietnam, Korea, Europe. And the children who are left fatherless for the duration of the war, if not for their entire lives, whether their father was killed physically or emotionally: is this not yet another act of violence against them?
What are you reading right now—and/or what have you just finished reading?
As far as poetry goes, I’ve been reading Diane Wakoski, who I came across by a series of interesting circumstances. I’ve been reading for several months the collected poems of both William Bronk and Joseph Ceravolo. I’ve been really intrigued by Joseph Massey—I’ve been reading his most recent chapbook, and I’ve another one of his on the way in the mail.
But a lot of my reading has been J. Krishnamurti, whom I read years ago and have returned to. I’m also going through the Yoga Sutras of Patañjali, several translations. In both cases, I’m focusing on the question of consciousness, on what the mind is. I’ve set out to discover this. In addition, I’ve been reading through Guy Davenport’s translations of the early Greeks, especially Heraclitus. I recently read Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.
Also, though it’s not exactly “reading,” I’ve been watching the plays of both Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. Beckett, in particular, is of high interest to me. I’m also reading Charlotte’s Web to my daughter, Teagan. I really enjoy E. B. White; I’ve read my daughter Stuart Little twice through.
I read so much, it’s hard to keep track of. Lots of articles from The New York Times or many magazines or the web. Even if it’s a paragraph by Pema Chödrön, it counts.
What writing projects are you currently working on?
Because I’ve gotten so interested in drama, I’ve actually started into playwriting. I started with a couple of monologues, which I had informally performed last month by a couple of actors. I just wrote a dialogue, a 10-minute play, and I’ll have that one performed as well. I’ve found that drama allows me to release far more than poetry can afford me, at least for now. I can be more direct with drama.
My poetry seems to be wandering, looking for something: a subject, a voice, I don’t know. In that area, I’m just playing around. The most full-scale project I’ve done lately is the manuscript I’m sending out right now, which is called Twilight in the Mind-Field, a triptych and a long poem I wrote while my father was dying. That was completed last year, but it feels like the main project. As far as my current inertia in being a poet, I feel the way Sylvia Plath described it once in an interview: “poet at rest.” Or, I suppose, I’m just not a poet at all, not unless I’m actually writing a poem. But that’s a good thing, and it’s liberating. I’m tired of lugging around the baggage of “I’m a poet” or “I’m not a good enough poet.”
I’ve also been writing a lot of essays. I’m just exploring ideas about everything from ruin porn to the etymology of the words “rent” and “tenant” to a fragment of Heraclitus I’ve carried with me for close to a decade. I find the essai stimulating right now, both essays and drama, so I’m following that energy. Again, this writing allows me to assume an attitude of articulation I’ve not explored before, and I like it, frankly.
But in all these areas, I’m trying to reside at what Roy Melvyn calls the “cosmic address” of the Here and Now. I’m trying to be local, to be present to my daily life rather than the dilution of Facebook and all that. I write about what’s close at hand: my bathroom sink, the cardinals, the weather, and the experience of being in this body. If words come, they come, but I don’t demand of them anymore, and I don’t expect them to come. If they do, it’s a gift.