Styrofoam Cup by Brenda Hillman
Styrofoam Cup
Brenda Hillmanthou still unravished thou
thou, thou bride
thou unstill,
thou unravished unbride
unthou unbride
SELECTED BY SANDRA LIM
Many smart things have been said about this poem, but I love it chiefly for how it hits that unreasoning pleasure of lyric rightness. Sure, it makes Keats’s famous ode tumble around in ever newer frames of thought, but it’s not just a witty act of mind.
This poem is also sensuous, existential, chemical, wayward. Keats’s poem and Hillman’s poem both evaporate and reappear, express quickening and desertion.
Though it borrows from an older poem, “Styrofoam Cup” feels deeply original and felt in how it finds an emotional and intellectual reality in the materials of its time.
ABOUT SANDRA LIM
Sandra Lim is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection The Curious Thing (W.W. Norton). She is a recipient of the 2023 Jackson Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Cascadia by Brenda Hillman, published by Wesleyan University Press, 2001. (Available direct from Wesleyan University Press • Also on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“These poems use the geography of California as metaphor for exploring fundamental pressures and issues of everyday life.
Named for the ancient landform that preceded present-day California, Brenda Hillman’s Cascadia creates from geological turbulence a fluid poetics of place. The book is Hillman’s sixth collection and her most wide-ranging. The problem the book poses is nothing less than a phenomenology of transformation. In her previous work, Hillman’s investigations of alchemy and of contemporary life have created their own distinct mythologies, and here she turns to the first of the four basic elements, earth, to demonstrate a visionary science with a combination of lightness, wit and force.
Embodied in syntax as unpredictable as the earth’s movements, these poetic forms speak to and query the landforms as the line between faith and science blurs. Short lyrics inspired by the California missions, each with a retablo of punctuation, reflect on the solitude and history of the sign as it moves through the quotidian. Set among these lyrics, each of the three long poems in the book presents an aspect of Hillman’s topography. By the end of this powerful work, a new state is visible: a Modernist poetics, subjected to immense internal pressures, above and beneath unsettled ground, has emerged in original shapes” (Source)
ABOUT BRENDA HILLMAN
Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona, on March 27, 1951. She was educated at Pomona College and received her MFA at the University of Iowa. Her upbringing in a deeply religious Baptist family surfaces in many of her poems, especially those that appear in Loose Sugar (1997) and the California mission poems of Cascadia (2001). She is the author of eleven poetry collections published by Wesleyan University Press, In a Few Minutes Before Later (2022), and of Three Talks (2022), a finalist… (more)
Read more poems by Brenda Hillman • Find books by this poet on Amazon • Bookshop • Or view my library
ENDNOTES
- This is Day 16 of Poems We Carry, celebrating the 20th anniversary of Read A Little Poetry—a living archive I’ve nurtured for two decades. For this milestone series, I invited writers I deeply admire to share poems that have meant something to them over time.
- Explore other works in pursuit of: identity • desire • fragmentation • Or browse the index
- If this work resonates with you, please consider supporting the archive. Thank you for reading.
