Greg Hill : part one

Greg Hill is a writer and an adjunct professor of English in Connecticut, United States. His work has been published in the anthology Myth & Metamorphosis published by Penteract Press, and has appeared in dozens of literary magazines including Past Ten, Atlas & Alice, Otoliths, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Life and Legends, and Cheap Pop. He has an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and an MALS in Creative Writing from Dartmouth College. In the free time afforded to a father of three young children, he experiments with composing music using cryptographic constraints. Twitter: @PrimeArepo. Website: https://www.gregjhill.com.

Photo credit: KJ Hill

Has your consideration of poetry changed since you began?

Elementary school teachers read aloud poems by Shel Silverstein and books by Dr. Seuss. I heard song lyrics on the radio. I watched classmates stand and share anagrams they’d written that were based on their first names. I was indoctrinated to a basic definition of poetry as rhyming lines aimed at a youth audience. As a child, I experienced poetry roughly in the same way I was exposed to mathematics or history or science. They were elements of the classroom experience, not lifelong passions ignited by any single moment of action. 

I wrote poetry in middle school for class assignments, and, somehow and inexplicably, just kept writing poetry after those projects were turned in. In high school, I wrote sonnets for fun—to see how many of the weekly vocabulary words I could squeeze into the fourteen lines (Can I fit “magnanimous” and “pusillanimous” in the same quatrain?), or to try and summarize whichever scenes of Julius Caesar we were reading that week in class. In one year, when I turned fifteen, I wrote more sonnets than Shakespeare. The quality was embarrassing, but quantity—repetition—is important for developing a skill; I was unintentionally training myself to become dedicated to the discipline of writing and to thinking in terms of form.

In college and in the first several years after, I wrote pieces which were bizarre and maybe creative, but which I thought were not poetry. I invented nonce forms with challenging constraints without knowing those terms. I set up conceptual rules and followed them to the poems’ conclusions. Perhaps fortuitously, I was naïve. I had never heard of conceptual writing. The thought did not occur to me that I could invent a form and that the work could be considered poetry. I did not understand that I could help myself to my own definitions of writing. To discover later, on my own, that there was a world of poetry that did not conform to the simplest definitions, was to realize there were communities of poets with whom I knew I was a kindred spirit, but from whom I was still an island, removed. I like being an island. But building bridges to those communities is now an important impulse for me.