Hugh Creighton Hill

Acrostic without lights

Porticos and portcullises, backcloth of the cultured life
loggias and pergolas and stone Arcadian dignity
arrange me statically along a line of personal history
intended before my time, so far as I know, to frame me
now and for ever in quiet dedication.

The photograph is hallucination: such poses
halt and redirect a mind otherwise confused and amazed,
opaque, hammered into pattern; imposed from outside
under an alien oligarchy: for the present avalanche of spite

gathers in the lull and pours and tumbles in the storm
huge and incoherent, vehement, violent, inhumanly human
to crush, to age, to harass and always to humiliate –
such is the fact, the confounded norm, of quotidian horror.

Oh, that a dream might live, the moonlit guitars to entangle
nocturnes in the daylight of blackbirds and thrushes.
Early and late the rectangle of apprehension fences
normality with an incomprehensible madness:
tangible walls of hate grow like the beanstalk, piercing
elysian suppositions above walls of infantile fancy,
reaching to hell over hell to bring down ogres
incredibly vocal, incalculably vicious, their lineaments
neolithic with rage, and combining in a flush of terror
Gothic imps, Polyphemus, and blaspheming satyrs.

May both abominable visions dissolve, may squalid fog
yield to autumnal mists, and daubed walls drop like leaves!

Failure is nothing compared with the crippled mind:
inheritance droops, the proud discomfited heart
flags in its regular beat, the soul aspiring towards truth
tails off in compromise when days bring only the night :
is there no home for hurt ambition, no hospitable porch
embroidered with clematis where anxiety can sit
the live-long hours in harmless contemplation
holding a life-long wish in both numb hands?
Yesterday’s shame still lingers: today is for living,
eavesdropping, suspecting and fearing and work:
and all my vague tomorrows exist in a trembling faith
retching or praying or singing, or calm in the light.

another poem from Hill. This one is from a Glasgow poetry magazine circa 1956, which Peter Manson put on-line. This is another "kind of" stage in the revival of modernism, pre-Migrant. It is "The Poet". The acrostic inside the poem reads "Plain thoughts on entering my fiftieth year". The modernist elements interest me, although the autobiographical theme is fairly conventional, could even be 16th C. The poem post-dates his pamphlet, Some propositions from the universal theorem.
I have just discovered that the publisher which issued "Some propositions" was run by Robert Cooper. He ran Artisan. "In the early 1950s, still living in Liverpool, Robert Cooper edited a ‘little magazine’ (as they are known) of poetry entitled Artisan. He also set up a press called Heron, which published, alongside Artisan, a number of collections of poetry, including work by Vincent Ferrini and Alan Brownjohn’s debut. The second issue of Artisan (Spring 1953), ‘Nine American Poets’, was dedicated to the verse of Robert Creeley and Charles Olson[.]" In 1957, he went to university - giving up his job as a journalist to better himself. I think he was doing, around 1954, what Migrant were doing in 1960. But in 1957 he gave up that activity. Migrant got a lot further. The other factor is the arrival of texts. The "neo-modernist" things got going with "City" and "Briggflatts". The texts available in 1954 just weren’t so impressive. But, arguably, the new creativity followed the arrival of an ecology in which it could breathe - in the form of an audience and of publishing outlets. So we should consider also "The Poet" (the Glasgow magzine) and Artisan.