The Delicacy of Belief: Richard Hillman and the Poetics of Intimacy
(a text prepared for the launch of Richard Hillman’s Raw Nerve, Friend in Hand Hotel, Cowper Street, Glebe, Saturday, 19 December 2009)

If you sit still you will hear things. If you sit still and through your own stillness and silence achieve a sort of invisibility. Invisibility can be a curse for you cease to exist. Yet at the same time the world can open up, like strange buds that never before have issued forth or seen the light of day. The bizarre is more than daring. It’s brazen, shameless, inexplicable.

You were born in the States, 17 years ago, he says to her
You arrived from the States, what, 5 days ago

She says nothing. What can she say? I can imagine her nodding her big eyes. It’s not agreement necessarily, just a way of making do, surviving even

Baggage is the  most important thing, he continues
Baggage is the most important thing and you can never deal with the baggage
So I decided, I decided to have a girlfriend with no baggage
A girlfriend who had nothing
No past
No boyfriend
No nothing

I’m wondering if he’s talking about the girl off on my left, the girl with the big eyes and vaguely Hispanic looking

The verbatim report, which this is, is intended to be believed. It is one thing, of course, to believe the unbelievable (it was his male interlocutor who came up with the remarks about gods and neck braces and dental drills coupled with a story about a hairdresser who, by mistake, snipped off his sacred ponytail. ‘I awoke next morning to find it missing’, he told us. ‘No matter, it is of no account. When it grows long enough it is a simple matter to return to the sacred.’

An interesting theme, this, the return to the sacred; and – my suspicions aroused – the strategies of the spurious.
The spurious is full of confidential disclosures. This is why, I suppose, we talk of ‘confidence men’ and ‘confidence tricksters’.

Richard is no confidence trickster or if he is he’s a very clever one. Richard is not to be overheard; he either announces or he doesn’t announce at all. When he does announce it’s with a delicacy and assuredness that can’t be anticipated. Richard is not about making believable the unbelievable; it’s about allowing the believable to remain believable, and, if this means anything, to extend its range. Perhaps we should say its reach. The believable does not always have a voice. That is what I mean. It’s about extending the range of the utterable, and not so much the form and shape of utterance but the actual content of utterance. Such utterance cannot often be directly parleyed or parlayed. It involves hesitation, maybe a shake of the head, even a frown, something like bewilderment. Yes, maybe bewilderment itself. Yet when the words are found, when the image unleashed, the gesture, the movement caught, with precision, this bewilderment disappears, leaving no trace. Its residue, if there is any, is where I have already suggested it is: in a sort of delicacy. This is not feeling so much as sensibility. The assuredness comes from accuracy. The target is struck exactly and the HELP becomes unnecessary, an anachronism, the residue of a former state1.

We do not need to stress the autobiographical nature of this work. It doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Publishing, putting things out, is a way of dealing with things, of clearing a space for future movement, a ‘forgetting’ through an actual enshrining of memory.

It is important always to refer back to the poet’s actual words. As a matter of something like rigour I chose pages at random: pp 13, 14, 27, 49, 73. These are the passages that seized my attention. I like flat diction and here the diction is flat. It isn’t always true of Richard’s work; not even mostly.

I watch birds swallowing mouthfuls
but they do not grow heavy.
Perhaps words are lighter than feathers
(“23 January 1999, early morning”, p.14)

At home, she looks up to me as if I know where
she’s been, and speaks about lost and found in one
over-flowing breath, and each word opens and
closes until all she can think about is tomorrow
(‘The Fall”, p.49)

You leave, you walk, you run,
you scramble for an exit,
you panic, you don’t panic,
you take your children with you
under your arms like photo albums,
and never look back.
(“The Raw Nerve”, p.73)

I congratulate Richard and his publishers on the appearance of this handsome production. Well done to all involved. It thank those of you who have come to add your presence to the occasion. I’m sure it is much appreciated. I hereby announce Raw Nerve launched – or should it be exposed!

John von Sturmer
Friend in Hand Hotel
58 Cowper Street, Glebe