By Danielle Bettendorf, Living and Arts Editor
Poet and translator Brenda Hillman spoke and read to students about interconnectedness in the environment on Sept. 24 in Weber Chapel Auditorium.
Hillman read primarily from her most recent publication, “Extra Hidden Life, among the Days.”
Much of Hillman’s work dealt with the relationships between living and non-living things in the world. Hillman shared one anecdote in which she and her husband visited a pumpkin field, which inspired her in her work.
“We were driving up the coast of California one day and we came upon this field of pumpkins,” Hillman said. “They were so beautiful and they were having their own experience of not being humans.”
“They were just being pumpkins,” Hillman continued. “They had these inner seeds and I was thinking like, ‘They’re pumpkins and I’m Brenda and they have nothing to do with me. They don’t know that I’m here,’ and the whole book kind of bloomed out of that thought.”
Hillman added that she enjoys engaging with non-human species in her own time.
“One of the things I like to do is a ritual with non-human species, where you go out and you either read something to a rock or you do something outside,” Hillman said.
Environmental elements often feature in Hillman’s work: when explaining her original inspirations, she emphasized the importance of remembering that humans are one species compared to millions of others.
“We are one species and there are eight million others… So that’s one of us and eight million of them. That idea sort of [is] what started me working on the elements about 25 years ago and [“Extra Hidden Life, among the Days” is really the fifth book on the elements that I was working on,” Hillman explained.
Hillman’s work was also spiritual when it touched on the paranormal: Hillman said that she belongs to a coven of witches with whom she reads poetry. “[We] are just a group of women writers,” Hillman said. “We get together in a bar and we hold hands and we drink beer and we read extremely obscure poetry by women.”
Hillman also added that one poem she read concluded with a spell, which she and her coven perform regularly.
Hillman’s work with poetry has been characterized as full of life: senior Aiyona Hayman, who introduced Hillman, said, “Hillman reminds us that poetry is fertile but strong, orderly and unknowable, very capable of doing things.”
Hillman also said that poetry books like hers should be read as collections, rather than individual pieces.
Hillman said she “spreads each poem out on the floor and interviews them, seeing which one wants to go first.”
Hillman touched on her family in some of her work and expanded on how they influenced her writing.
“I grew up in a conservative, religious family,” Hillman said. “My family was kind and strict, yet interested in literature.”
“I wrote because I thought it was really important to have an inner life where you didn’t have to interact with your family,” Hillman continued. “It was like an escape from the family web, which was intense in my life.”
Hillman found further inspiration in the people she’s known, like in the titular “Extra Hidden Life, among the Days.”
“It was a poem that I began for a friend who passed away in 2016,” Hillman said. “I began the poem before her death and finished it after she had died.”
Many of Hillman’s recurring themes are political in nature and interweave with activism in Hillman’s life.
Hillman joked that she could “do without nations for a couple of weeks” and also addressed oil refineries and detention centers in her work.
One of Hillman’s most responsive themes was incorporating the names of politicians in her work.
“I decided like 10 years ago to actually name officials in my poems and then just to go give them the poem,” Hillman said. “And it didn’t have that much effect, not for a while, but then I did actually get a call from my congressman one time when I had been writing anti-war poems and naming the congressman who voted for the war bills.”
“He said, ‘I just wanted to let Professor Hillman know that I voted against the war funding,’ so sometimes it does have a little bit of effect,” Hillman continued.
Hillman has published ten collections of poetry and in 2016 was named Academy of American Poets Chancellor.
Hillman has also won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, the International Griffin Poetry Prize, the Northern California Book Award for Poetry, the California Book Award Gold Medal in Poetry, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Hillman is currently the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary’s College and teaches both graduate and undergraduate programs, in addition to her work with nonviolent activism.
The Seavey Reading series will continue with author Kim van Alkemade on Oct. 9. The series premiered earlier this year with Hasanthika Sirisena, Monica Prince and Elise Burke reading on Sept. 11.
