William Hedrington
1947-1971
Collected Poems
Bill Hedrington

The Voices

I was born on the downhill side, late in the year, in early December, in the light’s heavy dip and hesitation, when the old peoples prayed for beginning in the snow-salted fields and scattered bitterness of corn stalks; but though I came fatly of that gaunt race, though it was a different end and today that day, the fields untracked by supplicants, the corncribs many, and full, still I carry their disappointed dead buried in my body, and am the outspoken child of the silent generations of my cells— for O, they call with the old voices, in a millennium length of words, in the thousand year cries of the dead, that their lean voices, lost to these fields, may be gathered up and justified in me.

—Bill Hedrington, ca. 1968

This the Bill Hedrington web site, containing his collected poems.

Since this site first appeared, Bill’s collected work has also been published as an actual, physical book, On the Downhill Side, by Shambling Gate Press. Print copies, regrettably, have become difficult to find, but sometimes show up in online used-booksellers’ lists.

Bill was never satisfied with his work, and re-wrote it over and over. And he kept all his drafts, including tiny four-times-folded slips of paper that seem to have spent some time in a hip pocket, on a motorcycle, under a drenching rain. All this material was made available for this site, and for the print edition, by Darlene Knudtson, Bill’s sister, and her husband Ed, with whom Bill had left a number of his files, and to whom his papers were sent after his death.

The poems are given here, and in the book, in two groups: On the Downhill Side, a collection made by Bill himself sometime after the spring of 1970, and a collection of poems from other sources, assembled from Bill’s papers after his death.

Downhill Side is as good a text as we can have for the poems it contains, though there are, among Bill’s papers, some notes and drafts of further revisions to poems in this collection. These seem rather tentative and have not been used here.

Other Sources is arranged, to the extent ascertainable, in chronological order. It includes everything from juvenilia to works-in-progress; some student work, handed in and then apparently forgotten by Bill, has not been included. The texts of the poems in this collection are more difficult to establish, since many exist in multiple versions and these versions are often not datable. The versions presented here are what seem to be the latest complete texts. As with Downhill Side, no attempt has been made to incorporate scraps and fragments jotted down here and there, even though some of these may be later than the complete texts.

Recently (January 2026), through the kindness of Ana McGrath, Archives and Special Collections Librarian at New College, Bill’s undergraduate thesis, titled “The Voices (49 poems with prefatory essays)” became available to us. Most of the poems in the thesis were already included here and in the printed book, either in Downhill Side or Other Sources, but this additional manuscript source enabled us to add three poems to Other Sources. The “prefatory essays” themselves are interesting, and we have added them to the site as well, in holographic form.

The complete poems, comprising both sections of this site, can be downloaded in PDF format. Michael Smith’s memoir of Bill, originally published as the introduction to the book, can be downloaded in PDF or EPUB format.

The site is the work of Bruce Cleary, Jonathan Lundell, and Michael Smith. Visitors should note that the poems have been through a couple of generations of transcription, and we would be grateful to hear about any apparent typos.

The photograph of Bill was provided by David Tekler.

The poems are copyright 2002 by Darlene Knudtson. All rights to reproduce them in any way are reserved, except that persons visiting this website are permitted to make copies, either on paper or in electronic form, for their own personal use only.

Summary of online resources: