Post-Feminist Poetics II: Becky Hilliker and Yeats (Ephemera: Beginning the Work)

Connecting Ephemera with anything after Modernism (but before what I call Neo-Romanticism) is a strain. The chiasmus between Ephemera and the cinema moves the piece hesitantly, delicately towards post-modernity. But the deep-seated pathos, elegiac tone, and straightforward, linear narrativity of Ephemera (linear narrativity not precluding innovation on other formal and thematic levels) all chafe against the sardonic, ironic, corrosive, and yet ultimately heartless heart of post-modernity. Indeed, putting Ephemera on the hot-seat next to ordained post-modern products is a pointless exercise. With The Prelude and The Waste Land there is a point; by The Emperor of Ice Cream (as illustrative), there is none. Not to mention other American junk-heaps like Black Mountain and San Francisco Renaissance. Let’s skip, if we shall, to the Aughts in America, and the beginning of more action (live action) more germane. I have, in a manner of speaking, affixed to the many female artists of the Aughts (American stripe) to develop a new post-feministic mold or prototype they all happen to fit. There she stands before us, if you will: the Creatrix. As I have adumbrated the Creatrix-as-construct, and the entire formulation as a subset of Neo-Romanticism, the Creatrix feeds, as post-modernity did not (neither do multi-culturalism and academic feminism), on narratives of form and passion, delivered from stances of settled self-sufficiency. Grandstanding, proselytizing, or playing to a perceived crowd is thus eschewed.  Narratives connotate stories represented in a discernible way. Form and passion remain self-explanatory. An interesting narrative, as in Ephemera, is then accredited with a sense of innovation. Forms rendered interestingly, also innovation. Entropy into incomprehensibility, nothing. Formless forays into the obviously anti-aesthetic, also nothing.

So, about this live action I have been promising. The locale happens, interestingly, to be New England, and the name of the writer is Rebecca Hilliker. Let’s take a look at Catch, and discern if we might how conventional textual tactics can be made to serve innovative ends:

The wind turns the water into an animal
and the boat rides the back of swells,
bucking wetly.
My legs absorb the push and pull,
thinking only of the fish,
sleek and dripping on the line,
neon green parachute ballooning
from its mouth.

I arch my back
and the rod dives.
The fish lifts, slimy as an egg,
spinning like a ballerina
on a silver thread,
its marble eye mute,
fixed on white.

How many times
did you find this world,
blinded, terrified?
There are hands on you
and pliers in your mouth,
metallic, blood-washed.
How many times have you waited
for the water
while everything lurches around you,
brilliant white, like the inside
of a hospital, like the underbelly
of a dream, gasping
to break the surface
toward that cold & sudden light?

Like Ephemera, physiological tension or tautness makes the poem serve a visceral end of magnetism, fascination. It might also be said that magnetism and fascination in text are impossible without narrative to hook potentially engaged consciousness. This can be done with fulsome narrative, or what Roland Barthes refers to as bits of narrative; but the narrative sector must be filled in somehow. Why Catch creates an interesting chiasmus with Ephemera, is that in Ephemera, the sense of a tense, tautened physiology plays against a formal conceit: free-verse used to create aesthetic effects usually created by end-rhymes. In Catch, the tense, tautened physiology plays against an origin-seeking phenomenological fantasy, wherein the protagonist transubstantiates herself into animal form. A visual, rather than an aural, change. In Ephemera, an elegiac effect is created by two lovers parting ways, who stay discrete, do not meld. In Catch, a sense of disorientation or dementia is created (cinematic also, as in The Fly) by a lack of cognitive discretion. The protagonist has a sense of identification that brings the poem to an intense, incandescent, partially horrific crescendo. Ephemera remain genteel; Catch does not. The sense of live action that they share, shot by shot, succession by succession, connects both pieces to a textual continuum what brings texts to the brink of the sublime, when the sublime (as in Schopenhauer) is imposing, overwhelming, either gently so (Yeats) or luridly (Hilliker).

© Adam Fieled 2025