Alli Warren, Little Hill

As if sexuality were nothing but a catalog of holes

What would it mean for ears to find their own will? (“SCRAMBLED EGGS”)

Bay Area poet and editor Alli Warren’s latest is Little Hill (San Francisco CA: City Lights Books, 2020), following her award-winning debut, Here Come the Warm Jets (City Lights, 2013) and I Love It Though (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2017), as well as numerous chapbooks. Little Hill is composed as seven extended poems, stretching beyond an accumulation of short lines into a trajectory of moments, thoughts and activity. Warren’s stretches have echoes of the Frank O’Hara “I did this, I did that” notation, but utilizing such as a way to place her concerns at the forefront of that lyric. “Worms make culture in the dirt,” she writes, as part of “VISUAL LITTER,” “We could not be convinced the land was not collective // We drink from it bathe in it and eat around it [.]” The collection, as well as the title poem, takes its name, according to the author’s notes, “from the city of El Cerrito, where I live on Ohlone land (www.muwekma.org) on a street which meets the hill—before colonization, indigenous Ohlone lived along the creek at the base of this hill.”

How do you teach a dog to bark

You don’t?

I say hi to myself

In the mirror

Or is that not a mirror?

The air is full and you are not here

I put my hand through the oak

I use my fingers

To make the object do what I want

I don’t apologize because it is a machine

And I hate machines

I apologize to the bee

I find near-dead on the carpet

And to the leaf

I take down from its dancing string

But not to the machine (“SEBASTOPOL”)

Little Hill is an exploration of space, but one just as much cultural, political and social. Warren works the minutae of small moments, stretched as far as possible across a great distance, attentive to the immediate as the whole of the universe. “Someone on this block is breathing,” she writes, as part of the title poem, “As if they cannot breathe // Some man is yelling, slamming something // a large metal box with a brick? // I am in the spindly chair // Listening from behind a fence [.]” In an interview posted online at The Believer on April 14, 2020, conducted by Ted Dodson, they speak to the longer stretches of her current lyric:

BLVR: But also thought is elongated across this book, thematically almost. Every poem in this book is long. In your previous books, Here Come the Warm Jets and I Love It Though, the poems were much shorter. You’ve described these earlier poems to me as comparatively flippant. I mean, I love those shorter poems, and I don’t necessarily read them as flippant, but there’s a certain quality to length that’s difficult to replicate otherwise. Does a longer poem give you a different sort of access, or was the compulsion just to write long?

AW: I wanted to do something different. I worried I would write the same kind of poem over and over if I didn’t intentionally try to switch it up. I actually just got a larger notebook to see what would happen. That seems to have made a difference, simple as it sounds. The first long poem I wrote was “Moveable C,” and I remember sitting down and being like, “just put down a thought that’s true to you in this moment.” I’d never started with that impulse before. And you know, the world has always been horrible and unjust, but it felt important to me at that point to make myself clearer, where I stand. Like, I worried some of the lines in my previous books could be misinterpreted. It was important to me to set down in writing my feelings about all the terrible, endless injustices of this world, in case anyone might get the wrong idea. I guess it turns out I have a lot of feelings around that because the lines got longer and so did the poems.