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

Lisa has asked me to write you a note in case you are feeling discouraged about some public aspects of your poetry. It’s hard not to be discouraged when there’s so much ignorance helplessly displayed toward our art. It is not surprising when you feel overly sensitive when poetry—or your poetry—is ignored. Books of poetry are left off “best-of” lists; they are rarely reviewed in major venues & when they are mentioned, it might only be for some perceived aspect of marketable content. Try to get past this. You are bringing your rare imagination & love of language to the culture that needs those things. Poetry is not a “specialised field.” It has universal & eternal value. It is something that most people start writing when they are children. It is what humans read to each other at weddings & funerals. It takes us into vast spiritual adventures. It enacts original dreams. You do not need to dumb down your art or ignore a century of modernist practice to please what is sometimes called a larger audience. It is not a poet’s job to simplify the mystery of existence or its lexicon. Is the life of the soul ever easy? When you feel downcast, keep in mind those who have encouraged you along the way & write for them; imagine a stranger who may be reading one of your poems in secret someday. Try not to think about the people who are writing facile things on the internet. Remember the radical ancestor poets who have gone before, especially those who received less acknowledgement than they should have, those whose genius was insufficiently recognised. Their poetry provides excellent company, as does the work of great living poets who offer inspiration & consolation. Read across aesthetic lines & identity groups, assembling a varied canon. When you feel paralysed by the pointlessness of temporary fashion, or when dull and predictable work is lauded, try new things that will surprise you as you work for the joy of the process, remembering that all a writer needs are four true readers & one of them can be a tree. Never look at your phone while walking downstairs. Do not destroy your body by self-medicating under poetic stress. Just write new poems & read them to your community. Keep the ego in balance because the ego project is doomed to fail. If you don’t receive the rewards you deserve from “the outside world”—and you very likely will not—try to celebrate the good work of others; hold love in your heart; work for justice for humans & non-humans & keep writing. love, Brenda

Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona and has been an active part of the Bay Area literary community since 1975. She has published chapbooks with Penumbra Press, a+bend press, EmPress, A Minus Press, and Albion Books and is the author of eleven full-length collections from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), which received the International Griffin Poetry Prize and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (2018) winner of the Northern California Book Award. Her latest collection, In a Few Minutes Before Later (2022) continues to re-cast innovative poetic forms as instruments for tracking human and non-human experiences. Hillman has also received the William Carlos Williams Prize from Poetry Society of America, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems for Shambhala Press, co-edited two books by Richard O. Moore, and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, co-edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan, 2003). She has worked as a co-translator of three books: Poems from Above the Hill by Ashur Etwebi, Instances by Jeongrye Choi, and At Your Feet by Ana Cristina Cesar, all from Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press. Her first book of prose essays is Three Talks (University of Virginia Press, 2024). She serves on the regular poetry staff at Community of Writers in Olympic Valley and at Napa Valley Writers Conference. Hillman is a Professor Emerita at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California. She has worked as an activist for social and environmental justice. She is a mother, a grandmother, and is married to poet Robert Hass. 

From Brenda Hillman, In A Few Minutes Before Later (2022), reproduced with kind permission of Wesleyan University Press.

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