"I" Looking Down on "i": Poetry of Brenda Hillman | Katarzyna Czajkowska

“I” Looking Down on “i”: Poetry of Brenda Hillman

The “I” grammatically towers over the entire world. No other pronoun in the English language has the privilege to be capitalized. Is this how we see ourselves? This little grammatical detail speaks to our culture’s praise of individualism and emphasizes the overblown ego. It puts us at the center, marking our importance. Since language has an enormous impact on how we perceive and act in the world, even this ostensibly insignificant feature may turn out to be a bigger issue than one might expect.

This established hierarchy is missing from Brenda Hillman’s poetry. In her most recent book, Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (2018) she contests the hegemony of the ego. Her I’s are not capitalized in most of the poems. On the other hand, she introduces a “shorter i” that attempts to diminish its referent and decenter the human subject’s position in respect to other beings.

The centralized human condition is challenged in the poem “Angrily Standing Outside in the Wind”. There, Hillman experiments with the notion of the self and draws our attention to the previously mentioned pronoun:

The shorter “i” stood under the cork trees, the taller “I” remained rather passive; the brendas were angry at the greed […]

The “I” is severed into two entities. The narration is later continued through the two “brendas”, individual manifestations of Brenda Hillman’s self. This strategy moves Hillman away from the self-centered mode of experiencing and relaying. When instead of speaking in the first-person singular, she writes “we thought”, she confronts the constraints put on us by our own perception. The moment an attempt is made to split the self, suddenly there is no room left in our usual self-absorbed spot, and we are forced to move and stand outside.

In the poem “Species Prepare to Exist after Money”, Hillman once again decenters the self in order to contest the conventional hierarchy of beings. Wood rats and crows also “come to life” through Hillman’s anthropomorphic metaphors. But they are not the only life forms given agency. The poem highlights the microbiologically justified fact that bacteria are not simple organisms mindlessly pushing through matter. On the contrary, they are active beings, they have agency, and even though we cannot comprehend their language, they communicate, too. They do so through quorum sensing that enables them to modulate their density by means of gene regulation. The poem illustrates this phenomenon with a description of bacteria who communicate by color; for example, bioluminescence is one of the examples of quorum sensing. Other instances include biofilm formation or virulence – the ability to cause harm to host cells.

After listing the shades in which bacteria communicate, Hillman mentions how humans assign meaning to those colors, pointing out our often ineffectual attempts at understanding the significance and meaning coded in the language of non-humans. Interestingly, this fragment can be used against the poet herself. After all, Hillman’s poetry attempts to interpret the languages of non-human species and translate their communication into our language, which could be seen as discrimination in favor of the human perspective. However, I can see the reason behind this anthropocentrism. Hillman’s texts pay attention to the differences between all the species and their respective means of communication. The poems convey the impossibility of a given species to assume a different perspective than its own – and it holds true of humankind too. Hillman’s poetry puts forward a solution to the egocentric point of view – namely, acknowledging that other beings have their own perspectives and languages.

Her technique is rather unique. Instead of imposing the anthropocentric viewpoint to comprehend the experiences of other beings, she uses the anthropocentric discourse as a translating tool in order to communicate these experiences. In such a way, she does not put herself in a position of power, but makes room for other voices and outlooks. For example, Hillman’s method can be seen put into practice when she abandons conventional metaphors which attribute human properties to nonhumans. In the poem “Extra Hidden Life, among the Days”, Hillman talks about extremophiles – organisms able to survive and even flourish in extreme environments. Some of those organisms have the ability to break down matter and since they are the only ones capable of doing so at certain extreme conditions they are used as tools for removing environmental pollutants. In the poem, Hillman compares extremophiles used by people in bioremediation with workers who protest against their working conditions. The workers’ revolt and ability to survive despite the harsh working conditions correspond with the astounding resistance of the tiny organisms to high and low temperatures or high pressure. The two existences, human and non-human, share their endurance. Hillman overturns the anthropocentric hierarchy by ascribing non-human characteristics to humans.

The second part of “Species Prepare to Exist after Money” starts with memories of her father and their relationship. As the topic shifts, so do the metaphors. The speaker says that her father thought her to be a sensible person and would often say that she had “the chemical for sensible”. The metaphors have turned around and now the properties of bacteria communicating through chemicals are projected onto the human heroine.

Although all of the metaphors are born from Hillman’s perspective, she does not reside at the center of the poem. There is no hierarchy between the juxtaposed entities. They all belong to her experience and are interwoven, giving each other meaning. And yet, the focus is shifted and distributed among various beings present in the text.

The view of humanity as an epicenter of the world is challenged once more towards the end of the poem which refers to James Joyce’s daughter, struggling with mental illness. Hillman includes Joyce’s comment on the deteriorating condition of his daughter who allegedly “turned away/ from that battered cabman’s face, the world.” The poet is not able to turn away from the world so she concludes: “- i didn’t turn away because i don’t know/ where it is, it is all over,”.

Our assumed centralized position can lead us to believe that we are separate from our surroundings, but how can we turn away from something we are in fact part of? We humans, our civilization, technology, and cities, are just as much part of nature as any forest, field, or lake. We cannot turn away from the world, because anywhere we turn the world will be there, and even if we try to do so, we will end up harming not only others, but also ourselves. If one part of the world is forgotten or dismissed, the other parts to which we would turn will someday disappear.

The idea that we are somehow outside of nature can also make us blind to the amazing agency that the non-humans possess. When we see ourselves as the only subjects in this world we might start to think that the world cannot exist without us, as if our perception and role was greater than that of other beings. That is a misconception, since we are not the only beings that make up the world. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing shows in her book The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) that non-human creatures are also active participants in world-making: “landscapes more generally are products of unintentional design, that is, the overlapping world-making activities of many agents, human and not human. […] Humans join others in making landscapes of unintentional design.” For example, when writing about Jakob von Uexküll’s descriptions of how a tick experiences the world, Tsing notes: “Working with the tick’s sensory abilities, such as its ability to detect the heat of a mammal [...] Uexküll showed that a tick knows and makes worlds. His approach brought landscapes to life as scenes of sensuous activity; creatures were not to be treated as inert objects but as knowing subjects.” And when we look at the extremophiles from Brenda Hillman’s poem “Extra Hidden Life, among the Days” and how vibrantly active and interactive with their surroundings they are, it is hard to think of humans as the only agents in this world. Hillman suggests that we might not be as essential for Earth’s well-being as we may believe:

i think of extremophiles , chemolithoautotrophs & others with power for changing not-life into lives , of those that eat rock & fire in volcanoes , before the death of the world but after the death of a human

In this vision, life on Earth continues and is just as vibrant and busy without humans. The poem questions the ostensible superiority of the human species, but at the same time it reminds us that we will not be able to go on if other inhabitants of the earth disappear.

It is possible to think of the term “our planet” in two ways: on one hand it can mean that the space we inhabit belongs to humans; on the other, that it belongs to humans as well as non-humans. But the notion of property involved in this phrase is a part of the human world only. When Hillman asks in the title of her poem: “Whose Woods These Are We Think”, the question brings up the issue of how humans, once again, through a self-given right, put such a strong emphasis on their importance in the world. We see ourselves as separate from the rest of the universe that makes us feel as the sole owners of the Earth. We forget, however, that our bodies are always entangled in the Earth’s life-sustaining systems. Karen Barad talks of this entanglement in the preface to Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007): “To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair.” She then concludes that this intra-action “mak[es] it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past and future.” We cannot escape this net of connections. Nature is also us.

Hillman’s “Beneath a Dying Coast Live Oak” further exemplifies this connectedness, together with the great sadness that comes when it is ignored:

there was the love you could not ive without, & you had lost it, though you stood inside the life that gave you life–

She highlights the fact that we are not standing outside, being separate from the world, but we are rather inside, as one of nature’s components. And because of this unity of beings, it is impossible to live without some attention and respect for one another. If it is lost, then we are lost too.

Extra Hidden Life, among the Days pays close attention to the often overlooked beings that slip unnoticed through our everyday life. Brenda Hillman stays mindful of those unobtrusive life forms and understands the importance of their existence. She stresses how closely our experience is connected with the experiences of other species; and that we are inseparable as we form one ecosystem. By marking the significance of all beings, Hillman distances herself from the human ego and rejects the anthropocentric position, giving more room for other beings. Her poems urge us to rethink the position and space we so often take up in the world. Hillman’s poetry is a manifesto of standing together with other inhabitants of the Earth, whom we too often mistake for our tenants.