H L Hix – författare

H L Hix’s poetry collections have not been merely collections. Each fulfils a vision that creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts: each poem contributes to a sequence, each sequence talks to another. For readers already acquainted with Hix’s ambitions, then, the subtitle “Obsessionals” (instead of “Selected Poems”) will need no explanation: from collections that don’t just collect, what sense would it make for a selection just to select?Hix’s poems were already at work rewriting and recontextualizing the language of others, language from sources as various as fragments of Pythagoras, apocryphal gospels, and speeches of George W. Bush. In First Fire, Then Birds, Hix keeps at the task, recontextualizing his own poems, creating a revision (seeing anew) and recomposition (putting together afresh) of an already distinctive body of work.

Against the busy background of the "e;information age"e; and the "e;anthropocene,"e; where's poetry? It might seem invisible, irrelevant, but Demonstrategy proves it as salient as ever, and more urgent. In paired essays about poetry in the world and the world in poetry, Demonstrategy finds poetry's pulse steady and strong.

Presents work by poets of three generations: William Heyen, H.L. Hix, and Dante Di Stefano. It was Di Stefano’s new book, Lullaby with Incendiary Device, which inspired this tribute to three generations. Lullaby is deeply immersed in a soon-to-be-realised future, in which Di Stefano’s daughter faces an array of 21st century challenges. For the last half-century, Heyen’s poetry has explored world history, from Nature, to Native Americans, to the Holocaust and the atom bomb, the Iraq Wars, to the British Royals. In this book, Heyen presents another entry into his Holocaust opus, The Nazi Patrol. H.L. Hix’s work is also inextricably involved with the world as seen in a recent collection, American Anger, which explores the psychology of rage underneath recent political turmoil, yet it also turns inward, creating new forms to join the world and the inner life. This theme is most prominent here, in How It Is That We.

Ley lines mark alignments of sacred sites such as ridgetops and ancient megaliths and create pathways between them. This book too marks alignments and creates pathways, but its sacred sites are not monuments, they're artworks and poems. Its various forms of exchange between writers and artists offer unique access to contemporary art, poetry, and the creative process. In this unique anthology, working poets respond to questions about their recent books, painters and other artists offer statements about their work, and writers respond to artworks. These offerings and exchanges are juxtaposed so as to speak to one another in a capacious, resonant dialogue. The result is a broad-minded and inclusive poetics, a vision of creative work as a constituent of personal and civic life. Anyone who nurtures the creative impulse will enjoy Ley Lines and return to it again and again. Writing students, art students, and any reader engaged in artistic practice will find in Ley Lines not a how-to manual or step-by-step instruction but an inexhaustible vein of instructive reflection on imaginative work and the creative life.

“Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” wrote Walt Whitman. Poets H. L. Hix and Jonathan Weinert adopted Whitman’s declaration as a guiding principle for Ghost Smoke. In this “Song of Themself,” Hix and Weinert merge their voices to create a spirited book-length hybrid poem that meditates on distance, listening, finitude, and different kinds of love. Fabricated of material collected from over two decades of correspondence and collaboration, Ghost Smoke borrows the structure of a crown of sonnets, completing a circuit that seeks to defeat the standard distinctions between question and answer, presence and absence, self and other. Is it possible to find a language that can allow us to become more porous to one another, to listen more deeply to one another and to respond in kind? Can we become each other’s ghosts, open to and inhabited by one another? What happens to us, and what happens between us, if we do?