From fragments to powerful feelings

 

“The kinds of things that poetry can offer are timeless - mainly the kind of compression it offers of powerful language, powerful feelings and images, and, you know, the inner experience becoming outer.” – Brenda Hillman

 

Born in Tucson, Ariz., on this date in 1951, Hillman is the author of 11 collections of poetry, including Bright Existence; Practical Water, for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, and Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which earned her both the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Northern California Book Award for Poetry.  Her most recent book is 2024’s In a Few Minutes Before Later.

 

A “writer” of poetry since age 9, Hillman is known for poems that draw on elements of found texts and documents, personal meditation, and observation on everything from geology to spirituality.

 

Recipient of the 2025 PEN Oakland "Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award," she also serves as the Olivia Filippi Chair in Poetry at Saint Mary’s College of California and is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.  

                                              

“The techniques of contemporary poetry are probably the techniques of your daily life,” she says.   “I don't know a single person who goes into the grocery store and thinks in complete sentences.  We often think in fragments, we think in little lists, we think in non-sequiturs, we think in feelings that may not match up with each other.”