Rick Hilles is the author of Brother Salvage, winner of the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, also named the 2006 Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord Magazine (now ForeWord Reviews, which celebrates independent and small press publishing), and A Map of the Lost World (2012), currently a finalist for the 2013 Ohioana Book Award, both with the University of Pittsburgh Press. He has been the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a Camargo Fellowship, and, most recently, a 2013 Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry from the Tennessee Arts Commission. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, Paris Review, Ploughshares,and Salmagundi. He lives in Nashville and is an assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt University.



                                             Rick Hilles interview, with John Hoppenthaler


Rick, the sequence represented here, Seven for the Last Words of X, came about after you were asked by Dean Whiteside, conductor of the Nashville Sinfonietta, to write seven poems for a performance of Haydn's piece for orchestra inspired by the last seven utterances of Christ. Can you please tell us more about how this collaboration started? What were your thoughts about it? It seems a monumental sort of thing to do.

First, an admission: …Over a decade ago (in January 2002), I saw the performance Mark Strand gave (in Ann Arbor, Michigan) with the Brentano String Quartet of the seven poems that he’d been commissioned to write for a performance of Haydn’s piece, and I fondly remember the experience. (Though I don’t remember saying this exactly, in the back of my mind, I must have said something like: “…Oh well, there is another fine thing that you will never do!”)

So when Dean Whiteside approached me about doing the same thing for the Nashville Sinfonietta, I was honored, of course, but also somewhat taken aback. (“Hasn’t this already been done?” I thought. Then wrote as much to Dean.) But he was persistent. He really wanted new poems. There was the part of me that wanted to decline, from the onset. (Thinking the whole task either too monumental or simply impossible. Especially in the time frame: …I remember reading after I had accepted the task, thankfully, that it took Mark Strand a year to write the poems. I had one summer to do them.) Then the voice—born more of delight at the idea, and wonder, and gratitude at being asked at all!—eventually won out. In the end, I am so glad that I did it. If it weren’t for Dean, and his patiently determined encouraging way, these poems would not exist. So my abiding gratitude goes to him! And to Emma Dansak, one of my most naturally gifted former students (now a graduate student in the music school at the University of Michigan) who first put the bee in Dean’s ear to contact me.


Haydn’s piece, according to music journalist James Reel, was written in 1785 “after a Spanish canon commissioned Haydn to write an orchestral work that would stimulate a congregation to religious meditation during Lenten services at a particular church in Cadiz.” He goes on to write that “this, the church of Santa Cueva, occupied a cave, and for the season every wall, window, and pillar was draped in black, with a single lantern providing scant illumination. The service would begin with an overture, then the bishop would give a sermon on one of the seven last utterances of Christ on the cross. The orchestra would play a slow movement inspired by the subject, then the bishop would deliver a sermon on another of Christ's last utterances, and so forth.” How much of this gets into your poems, and how much research on the piece’s history did you do during the composition process?


A cave would have been amazing. (But imagine the potential fire code violations!)

In a sense, many of the terms were already set: … the performance would take place at Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music—all proceeds going to the Shade Tree Clinic. (For those interested in learning more about this wonderful organization).

Aside from our departure from the original setting, I took seriously the original impulse of wanting to write poems (if not sermons) that would “stimulate” listeners to meditate on matters of the spirit, if not specifically of any one religious variety.

At a certain point, I wanted the poems to work autonomously—even in the absence of Haydn’s music.


Both you and your colleague at Vanderbilt, Mark Jarman, are known for poetry that reckons with matters of religion and faith. What are the difficulties you encounter while writing such poems and how does your own sense of religiosity frame or otherwise inform these poems?

It’s funny: I’ve never heard myself characterized as being a poet “known for poetry that reckons with matters of religion and faith.” (If it’s true, and even if it’s not, it’s nice to be known for anything worthwhile.) I do know that I’m honored to be thought of in the same breath as my friend and colleague, Mark Jarman, who I think is among our best and most brilliant poets now writing.

So you ask: How does my own sense of religiosity frame the poems I write? When it comes to “my own sense of religiosity,” if anything I’m something of a ‘secular ecstatic’. (I believe that phrase belongs to poet, Stanley Kunitz.) For the better part of a decade now, I’ve lived in the so-called “Bible belt,” and I have had occasion to describe myself as a spiritual person (whatever this may mean) without any particular affiliation. (Like a turtle, maybe I wear my “church home” on my back?) That said, interesting enough, sometimes when I am writing (and what I think is one of the not so easily articulated gifts of being a lifelong student of the imagination, while one is opening within the imaginative possibilities) all options suddenly seem on the table, but in an entirely different way. Which may be why, the more I lived with Haydn’s music, and thought about various things of our moment (Global warming, a friend in medical distress, even the then impending anniversary of the “I Have A Dream” speech and the march on Washington), I felt closer to Haydn’s music (and its spiritual aspirations, as I am able to connect to them) than I have ever felt before.


I imagine that one might be lured into giving one’s artistic self away to the composer’s strong presence and the music’s original intention; however, it doesn’t feel to me like you’ve done this. Instead you negotiate with the music and bring into the collaboration that which defines you as an artist. I suspect, for example Haydn would not have been thinking of manatees, the Pacific coast, or medical ethics as he composed the piece. How conscious were you about having these poems being yours and not Haydn’s? Or were you thinking they needed to be yours AND Haydn’s?

At some point, on an unconscious (or maybe preconscious?) level, I wanted to translate my sense of Haydn’s spiritual purpose—and the beauty I saw in the possibility of it—into poetry. At this point, I was already in my element. (In a sense, like a beach walk my wife and I took once at sunset in St. Augustine, Florida, I was writing toward the sense of when the dorsal fins of proved to be a mother and baby dolphin, moving in their element, suddenly appeared and, for a while, walking beside us—in their element, but at our pace—before almost as quickly moving on.)


So, this collaboration was performed at the end of August 2013 at Vanderbilt's Blair School of Music. How did it go?

I think the whole performance went very well. Michael Hime, a Senior Lecturer in the Blair School of Music (with a wonderfully expressive, resonant, baritone voice) read the poem. …When we first met to go over the poem, he asked me to read it to him, and when I did, he very kindly said that he could fake an illness the night of the show, if I wanted him to do so. It was an extremely generous offer. But Dean had a vision for the performance, that the three of us would be a part of it, I said; after meeting Michael, and taking an instant shine to him, I knew that he was the one to read the poem aloud.


What else is going on with Rick Hilles these days?

I’m back to school, teaching both the graduate and undergraduates at Vanderbilt, which has really been a total joy. I’m working on a new manuscript, called The Far Wall, which is very nearly done. And just this week (on Tuesday, September 24^th) my wife and I celebrated our eighth wedding anniversary. Though we all know what to give for the silver and gold anniversaries, and that the first year is something involving paper, it seems that the eighth year of my marriage, at any rate, is about giving each other a new roof (as I’m reminded by the sounds of hammering and scampering feet above my head as I write this!). Thank you, John, for all the wonderful questions. If time weren’t such an impatient muse, I’d have been glad to have taken much longer with them all!