Roxi Power talks with Brenda Hillman, winner this month of the Northern California Book Reviewers’ Fred Cody Award  for Lifetime Achievement, about her 11th book of poetry with Wesleyan University Press, In a Few Minutes Before Later.   We discuss her new trans-genre tetralogy about time: how to find calm during the Anthropocene by being in time in multiple ways: sinking into the micro-minutes; performing micro-activism; and celebrating the microbiome. We explore her influences–from Blake to Bergson, Clare to Baudelaire, as well as the less celebrated moss, owls, and wood rats that appear frequently in her eco-poetry.  Alive with humor, witness, creative design and punctuation–what Forrest Gander calls “typographical expressionism”--Hillman’s poetry teaches us how to abide in crisis from Covid to California fires, living in paradox as a way to transcend despair.

Brenda Hillman shares the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award with with Isabel Allende, Daniel Ellsberg, Michael Pollan, Ishmael Reed, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Alice Walker and others. Winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the International Griffin Poetry Prize (for Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, 2013), the Northern California Book Award (for Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, 2018) and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Academy of American Poets, Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona and has been an active part of the Bay Area literary community since 1975.  

She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems for Shambhala Press, and co-edited and co-translated several books.  She is director of the Poetry Program at the Community of Writers in Olympic Valley and is on the regular poetry staff ad Napa Valley Writers Conference. Hillman just retired from teaching in the MFA Program at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, CA.  She has worked as an activist for social and environmental justice. She is a mother, grandmother, and is married to poet, Robert Hass. 

Photograph by Robert Hass.