Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
Gerard Manley Hopkins and Jane Hicks
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Winner of the 2015 James Still Poetry Award from the Appalachian Writers Association, Jane Hicks has addressed the politics of war, family, and extractive industries throughout her writing career. A longtime teacher in the Sullivan County School System of upper East Tennessee, Hicks describes her introduction to poetry as a knowing gift from a devoted elementary school teacher, Myrtle Foust:
“[She] was my second-grade teacher, and every day she read us poetry. If you had ever been in her class, every year, until you graduated eighth grade and some for even longer, you would get a birthday card from her. On the inside she would copy poems, individualized for each student. . . . [S]he instilled a love of reading and poetry in her students.” (Fox 48)
Referring to Hopkins as her “first literary love,” Hicks recalls her teacher’s sharing Hopkins’s “The Windhover” with her class: “You don’t have to understand the words. Ride the rhythm” (Fox 49); Hicks also preserves this memory as an initiating engagement in creation: “At art time, we crafted Christmas paper, careful kept, / reborn as tissue kites” (“My Second-Grade Teacher Reads Gerard Manley Hopkins” 1-2); the speaker describes a hawk’s swooping among those kites and how, returning them to the classroom from recess, the teacher invites them to blend that experience with the music of Hopkins’s verse: “‘Listen with your heart,’ she said. ‘Ride the words / like a hawk rides the wind or kites dance free’” (7-8). One cannot help but note the close association between the brief comment in her interview and Hicks’ expression of the kindred idea in her verse: “You don’t have to understand the words” becomes “Listen with your heart,” an allusion to the music of Hopkins’s verse and an assurance of an emotional resonance between the children’s experience and Hopkins’s expression of praise. As the poem concludes, the former student looks back and marvels at the powerful consequences of that lesson: “So I rode words that galloped on springs, swept off, soared again, / fell into now, cloaked in vermilion, / newest in my heart-cache of words” (9-11, poet’s emphasis). This last stanza reveals key lessons in the speaker’s experience, the notion of treasured words transcending mere vocabulary acquisition, because the speaker now articulates her immersion in inscape she has experienced as a child.
In this analysis of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s influence on Jane Hicks’s poetry, numerous examples from throughout her career illustrate her adapting many of Hopkins’s characteristic poetic devices, such as his devotion and variation of fixed form, his experimentation with sprung rhythm, and especially his reliance on assonance to preserve tonal music in the lines, often echoing the vowel sounds in the attendant enjambment, and his reliance on closely related vowel sounds as well, as in the falling off in “fold, fallow, and plough” from “Pied Beauty.” Jane Hicks has adapted and celebrated the sounds of the Appalachian voice through the model of Hopkins’s verse.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
A member of the East Tennessee State University Department of Literature and Language, Thomas Alan Holmes has published his poetry and scholarship in numerous journals, including The Journal of Appalachian Studies, The Appalachian Journal, and Appalachian Heritage. With Will Wright and Dan Westover, he is currently preparing The Fire that Breaks: Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Poetic Legacies, to be released in June 2018 from Clemson University Press.
Gerard Manley Hopkins and Jane Hicks
Winner of the 2015 James Still Poetry Award from the Appalachian Writers Association, Jane Hicks has addressed the politics of war, family, and extractive industries throughout her writing career. A longtime teacher in the Sullivan County School System of upper East Tennessee, Hicks describes her introduction to poetry as a knowing gift from a devoted elementary school teacher, Myrtle Foust:
“[She] was my second-grade teacher, and every day she read us poetry. If you had ever been in her class, every year, until you graduated eighth grade and some for even longer, you would get a birthday card from her. On the inside she would copy poems, individualized for each student. . . . [S]he instilled a love of reading and poetry in her students.” (Fox 48)
Referring to Hopkins as her “first literary love,” Hicks recalls her teacher’s sharing Hopkins’s “The Windhover” with her class: “You don’t have to understand the words. Ride the rhythm” (Fox 49); Hicks also preserves this memory as an initiating engagement in creation: “At art time, we crafted Christmas paper, careful kept, / reborn as tissue kites” (“My Second-Grade Teacher Reads Gerard Manley Hopkins” 1-2); the speaker describes a hawk’s swooping among those kites and how, returning them to the classroom from recess, the teacher invites them to blend that experience with the music of Hopkins’s verse: “‘Listen with your heart,’ she said. ‘Ride the words / like a hawk rides the wind or kites dance free’” (7-8). One cannot help but note the close association between the brief comment in her interview and Hicks’ expression of the kindred idea in her verse: “You don’t have to understand the words” becomes “Listen with your heart,” an allusion to the music of Hopkins’s verse and an assurance of an emotional resonance between the children’s experience and Hopkins’s expression of praise. As the poem concludes, the former student looks back and marvels at the powerful consequences of that lesson: “So I rode words that galloped on springs, swept off, soared again, / fell into now, cloaked in vermilion, / newest in my heart-cache of words” (9-11, poet’s emphasis). This last stanza reveals key lessons in the speaker’s experience, the notion of treasured words transcending mere vocabulary acquisition, because the speaker now articulates her immersion in inscape she has experienced as a child.
In this analysis of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s influence on Jane Hicks’s poetry, numerous examples from throughout her career illustrate her adapting many of Hopkins’s characteristic poetic devices, such as his devotion and variation of fixed form, his experimentation with sprung rhythm, and especially his reliance on assonance to preserve tonal music in the lines, often echoing the vowel sounds in the attendant enjambment, and his reliance on closely related vowel sounds as well, as in the falling off in “fold, fallow, and plough” from “Pied Beauty.” Jane Hicks has adapted and celebrated the sounds of the Appalachian voice through the model of Hopkins’s verse.
