In a Few Minutes Before Later
"[Hillman's] work is fierce but loving, risk-taking, and beautiful." —Harvard Review

Finalist for the Four Quartets Prize, given by Poetry Society of America, 2023

An iconoclastic ecopoet who has led the way for many young and emerging artists, Brenda Hillman continues to re-cast innovative poetic forms as instruments for tracking human and non-human experiences. At times the poet deploys short dialogues, meditations or trance techniques as means of rendering inner states; other times she uses narrative, documentary or scientific materials to record daily events during a time of pandemic, planetary crisis, political and racial turmoil. Hillman proposes that poetry offers courage even in times of existential peril; her work represents what is most necessary and fresh in American poetry.

During an enchantment in the life


Do you love a living person
        absolutely? Tell them now.
In a half-unwieldy life you made, under
the hyaline sky, while the dead
        drank from zigzag pools nearby,
if they saved you in your wild incapacities,

        in timing of the world's harm
in a little pettiness in your own heart while others took
        your madrigals in shreds to a tribunal,
        when others said you should feel grateful
        to be minimally adequate for the world's
triple exposure or some tired committee...

        The ones who love us, how do they
break through our defenses?
        We're tired today. Come back later.
Their baffled voices melting our wax walls
with a candle, the ones who understand
what being is—the glowing, the broken,

the wheels, the brave ones—
        they have their courage,
you have yours,,,;
        when you meet the one you love,
it is so rare. When you meet
the one who loves you, it is extremely rare.

"1141012843"
In a Few Minutes Before Later
"[Hillman's] work is fierce but loving, risk-taking, and beautiful." —Harvard Review

Finalist for the Four Quartets Prize, given by Poetry Society of America, 2023

An iconoclastic ecopoet who has led the way for many young and emerging artists, Brenda Hillman continues to re-cast innovative poetic forms as instruments for tracking human and non-human experiences. At times the poet deploys short dialogues, meditations or trance techniques as means of rendering inner states; other times she uses narrative, documentary or scientific materials to record daily events during a time of pandemic, planetary crisis, political and racial turmoil. Hillman proposes that poetry offers courage even in times of existential peril; her work represents what is most necessary and fresh in American poetry.

During an enchantment in the life


Do you love a living person
        absolutely? Tell them now.
In a half-unwieldy life you made, under
the hyaline sky, while the dead
        drank from zigzag pools nearby,
if they saved you in your wild incapacities,

        in timing of the world's harm
in a little pettiness in your own heart while others took
        your madrigals in shreds to a tribunal,
        when others said you should feel grateful
        to be minimally adequate for the world's
triple exposure or some tired committee...

        The ones who love us, how do they
break through our defenses?
        We're tired today. Come back later.
Their baffled voices melting our wax walls
with a candle, the ones who understand
what being is—the glowing, the broken,

the wheels, the brave ones—
        they have their courage,
you have yours,,,;
        when you meet the one you love,
it is so rare. When you meet
the one who loves you, it is extremely rare.

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In a Few Minutes Before Later

In a Few Minutes Before Later

by Brenda Hillman
In a Few Minutes Before Later

In a Few Minutes Before Later

by Brenda Hillman

Hardcover

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Overview

"[Hillman's] work is fierce but loving, risk-taking, and beautiful." —Harvard Review

Finalist for the Four Quartets Prize, given by Poetry Society of America, 2023

An iconoclastic ecopoet who has led the way for many young and emerging artists, Brenda Hillman continues to re-cast innovative poetic forms as instruments for tracking human and non-human experiences. At times the poet deploys short dialogues, meditations or trance techniques as means of rendering inner states; other times she uses narrative, documentary or scientific materials to record daily events during a time of pandemic, planetary crisis, political and racial turmoil. Hillman proposes that poetry offers courage even in times of existential peril; her work represents what is most necessary and fresh in American poetry.

During an enchantment in the life


Do you love a living person
        absolutely? Tell them now.
In a half-unwieldy life you made, under
the hyaline sky, while the dead
        drank from zigzag pools nearby,
if they saved you in your wild incapacities,

        in timing of the world's harm
in a little pettiness in your own heart while others took
        your madrigals in shreds to a tribunal,
        when others said you should feel grateful
        to be minimally adequate for the world's
triple exposure or some tired committee...

        The ones who love us, how do they
break through our defenses?
        We're tired today. Come back later.
Their baffled voices melting our wax walls
with a candle, the ones who understand
what being is—the glowing, the broken,

the wheels, the brave ones—
        they have their courage,
you have yours,,,;
        when you meet the one you love,
it is so rare. When you meet
the one who loves you, it is extremely rare.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780819500151
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publication date: 10/04/2022
Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series
Pages: 200
Product dimensions: 7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

BRENDA HILLMAN (Kensington, CA) is the author of 11 books of poetry from Wesleyan University Press. She has co-edited numerous books, including At Your Feet by Brazilian poet Ana Cristina Cesar. A former Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets and a recent recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for innovation in literature, she is Professor Emerita at Saint Mary's College of California and lives with her husband Robert Hass.

Table of Contents

I In Landscapes of Stress & Beauty

Micro-minutes on Your Way to Work 3

A Slightly Less Stressful Walk Uphill 4

Dawn Tercets, with Blake & Nuthatch 7

Right Before Dusk, Some Meadow Fragments 8

A Goodness That Comes from Nothing 10

The Highest Part of the Dust 12

Poem Before the Power Went Out 13

Poem While the Power Was Out 15

& After the Power Came Back 16

[interruption stichomythia] 17

People's Emotions in One City Block 18

After a Pageant, Before a Birth 19

Poem Describing Time to the Unborn 20

II Activism & Poetry-Some Brief Reports

The Times We Find Ourselves In 23

Activism & Poetry-A Brief Report :::::: 25

In the Gardens of José Martí 27

Notes Outside West County Detention Center 28

[interruption stichomythia] 30

Among Some Anapests at Civic Center 31

Wiping Tear Gas off Young People 34

Report on Another Encounter in Nature 36

6 Views of Moss Dendroalsia Abietinum 38

[interruption stichomythia] 40

The American Burying Beetle 41

On the Molecules of Certain Ancestors 42

The Mostly Everything That Everyone Is 45

1967 48

III There Are Many Women to Cherish

Winter Daybreak Stanzas for Our Daughters 59

The Closing of a Midtown Bookstore 60

A Pattern of Minutes During Illness 62

For Our Students Reading the Odyssey 63

The Working Sister of the Muses 64

Lines for the 19th Amendment Centennial 66

[interruption stichomythia] 74

In Some Senses of the Word 75

Taking the Sunflower to the Mountains 76

After the Fires,,, In the Mountains,,, 77

S/kin 78

History of Punctuation on the Face 82

[collage essay] 88

IV For Writers Who Are Having Trouble

A Feeling Right Before the Feeling 93

On Days When We Both Travel 95

[interruption stichomythia] 96

Concerning the Meaning Molecule in Poetry 97

The Child, Finishing Fourth Grade Online, 98

The Scattering of the Lyric I 99

The Photograph of the Black Hole 100

[collage essay] 101

Her Map Might Change Its Arrows 102

[interruption stichomythia] 103

Dear emerging, pre-emerging & post-emerging poets, 104

For One Who Paused Her Writing 105

To the Poets of Myanmar 106

::[an artist's sound, between the Farallones]:: 109

[interruption stichomythia] 110

Winter Song for One Who Suffers 111

V The Sickness & the World Soul

:::[a ragged white moth passes by]::: 115

[at a hospital: in the east] 117

[little breath circles all across town] 118

[::: at equinox, same 12 squares, window:::] 120

[stayed busy inside moments of not] 121

:::[the invisible is full for you]::: 122

[in the split gardens irrational hope] 123

[poem on a birthday::: in shelter] 124

[trance poem with the gray stone] 125

[asyndeton of adenine cytosine guanine uracil] 127

:::[when spring dusk fills the garden]::: 128

:::[lines on Easter during the sickness]::: 130

[for the workers suddenly less employed] 131

::[untitled]:: 132

:::[to the voice of the age]::: 133

::[in a place with no light]:: 135

[—] 136

:::[smooth black stone has seen everything]::: 137

[chiasmus with all the other animals] 139

:::[the voice of the age chorus]::: 141

[pinched nerve in my white arm] 142

[the hive interrogates the helpless hum] 144

[the fourth part of a triptych] 145

[untitled tableau] 147

VI In a Few Minutes Before Later

Escape & Energy 151

The ground of being is changed 153

Escape & Logic 154

Punctuation at the end of time 157

Escape & Song 158

Love & Myth 161

The Themes in American Literature 162

During an enchantment in the life 166

Escape & Speculation 167

Doubt & Love 170

Escape & Exeunt 171

Epithalamium for Anxiety & Energy 173

*** *** *** *** 173

On Hearing the Golden-crowned Sparrow 177

Acknowledgments 181

Notes 183

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"[Hillman's] most recent books are rooted in broad social and ecological interests: 'passion' is a better term. She has invented a kind of dialogue with the earth; she writes with an intimacy and directness few equal and a magnificence of conception almost no one aspires to."—Citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Morton Dauwen Zabel Award 2020)

"She is lightning 'the sea shines purple in.' With a seed bomb of words, she takes on the system... without once turning her back on lyrical splendor."—C.D. Wright, "The Book That Brenda Wrote" [from The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All]

"Thematically significant here, time dominates, as does the looming, viscerally rendered, and gorgeously obdurate natural world, both stretching out"—Library Journal, on Extra Hidden Life, among the Days

"Hillman's work will find a ready audience in poets of her own generation, as well as those younger poets following in her footsteps, in whose hands the category of 'ecopoetry' has exploded, sporelike, into countless unnamed species."—Publishers Weekly, on Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, Starred review

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