day 30: These Poems, She Said, by Robert Bringhurst

It seems fitting to close out National Poetry Month with "These Poems, She Said," by Robert Bringhurst, as it was Christian Wiman's recitation of this poem on the OnBeing podcast that sparked my desire to be better at speaking poetry out loud. I'm really happy with how this particular recording turned out.

I gained some lovely intangible things from doing this month-long project. (I did get better at reading poetry out-loud, I think - or at least I started to like my own voice a little more, which was my original goal, anyway). Mostly, I have noticed that lines from these poems have worn grooves in my mind, and I find myself running through them over and over again.

which the sky turns the color of ash. and we all know how that one goes, don't we? ...dressed in Sunday clothes, and dropped with a soft thump. to remember this moment otherwise. what was your word, Jesus? the two of us sat down. the sea gives way to river; both are everywhere. how many loved your moments of glad grace. what would you call his feelings for the words that leave him rich and orphaned and beloved? how you make the new street yours. touch me, remind me who I am. I want to know even our limits. out of which every intact thing comes, into which every intact thing finally goes. 

I also had a lot more conversations than normal with people about writing and poetry, which was very nice.

-

This is reminding me that, as Annie Dillard said, how we spend our days is - of course - how we spend our lives. Or, to use language familiar to my child-self: out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks. Or to put it another way: where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Early this month while I was trying to explain why I love poetry to my parents, I felt, ironically enough, lost for words. Finally, after what felt a bit like talking around and around the heart of the thing, I paused. I had just said that a poem could be something beautiful and small, a little perfect thing to carry around in your head that might be difficult or sad, lovely or painful - a luminous little fragment that you could remember, carry, hold, to remind you that you are alive - and I couldn't think of any better way to talk about it. My dad said, "[It's] kind of like scripture," his voice settling just on the statement side of the question/statement inflection.

Yeah, I thought then (and still do). Yeah.

Kind of.

Yes and no.

How to say what I mean...

I suppose that it's true I treat good literature with the same sort of care and attention that some people treat the Bible. And also true that I like looking for the beautiful, lyrical sections of the Bible to read - the things that stick in my head the easiest are chunks of the Psalms, the structured bits of the creation story (and it was evening, and it was morning: the fifth day... etc), the little luminous verses at the beginning of John (in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God). And I think that I meet the Spirit on the page, and I am not too concerned if the Spirit wants to lead me on a wild goose chase & meet me in a poem on any weekday night.

That brief exchange with my dad has been niggling in the back of my head all month, though, sitting not-quite-right with me. I've been trying to figure out why, and maybe I have the first inklings of an answer. Two things have been coming to mind as I think about that idea of poetry being like scripture:

1.) These lines I read just a few days ago:

There are no right words
if by right we mean perfect
if by perfect we mean able to save us.

2.) A memory of a literature class at EMU, with a professor who said that love lets us see the world as it ought to be, rather than as it is.


I love poetry because the poems I read are in love with the world. They "expand the amount of reality available" to me, as Christian Wiman would say. They let me see the world as it could be; they give me a sense of what redemption looks like, sounds like, feels like, which sometimes is a remnant grove grown bright with praise, and sometimes is stars in a wilderness of stars, and sometimes is a laughing voice saying mostly, I wanted to love, and we all know how that one goes, don't we? Slowly.

But the poems can't save me on their own. The love that animates them has to come from somewhere outside them.

My prof at EMU might have said that they are pointing towards Reality-with-a-capital-R; failingly, flailingly, getting the words wrong sometimes, but trying nonetheless. Not Reality themselves, though, which is what Jacqueline Berger's poem was reminding me of.

...But then again, maybe it is good, sometimes, to read scripture more like poetry. To remember that no text is Holy on its own; that the Spirit in whom we live and move and have our being exists outside of the limits of our words.

_

I bring my celebration of National Poetry Month to a close with an excerpt from The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis. Maybe this will get at what I was trying to say a little more clearly.

‘I should like to paint this.’ said the Ghost. 

‘I wouldn’t bother about that just at present if I were you.’ replied the Spirit. 

‘Look here, isn’t one going to be allowed to go on painting?’ 

‘Looking comes first.’ 

‘But I’ve had my look. I’ve seen just what I want to do. God!–I wish I’d thought of bringing my things with me!’ 

The Spirit shook his head, scattering light from his hair as he did so. ‘That sort of thing’s no good here,’ he said. 

‘What do you mean?’ said the Ghost. 

‘When you painted on earth–at least in your earlier days–it was because you caught glimpses of Heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too. But here you are having the thing itself. It is from here that the messages came. There is no good telling us about this country, for we see it already. In fact, we see it better than you do.’ 

‘Then there's never going to be any point in painting here?’ 

‘I don’t say that. When you’ve grown into a Person (it’s all right, we all had to do it) there’ll be some things which you’ll see better than anyone else. One of the things you’ll want to do will be to tell us about them. But not yet. At present your business is to see. Come and see. He is endless. Come and feed.’ 

There was a little pause. ‘That will be delightful,’ said the Ghost presently in a rather dull voice. 

‘Come then’ said the Spirit offering it his arm. 

‘How soon do you think I could begin painting?’ it asked. 

The Spirit broke into laughter. ‘Don’t you see you’ll never paint at all if that’s what you’re thinking about?’ he said. 

‘What do you mean?’ asked the Ghost. 

‘Why, if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you’ll never learn to see the country.’ 

‘But that’s just how a real artist is interested in the country.’ 

‘No. You’re forgetting,’ said the Spirit. ‘That was not how you began. Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light.’ 

‘Oh, that’s ages ago,’ said the Ghost. ‘One grows out of that. Of course, you haven’t seen my later works. One becomes more and more interested in paint for its own sake.’ 

‘One does, indeed. I also have had to recover from that. It was all a snare. Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there, but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. For it doesn’t stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower–become interested in their own personalities and then in nothing but their own reputations.’ 

‘I don’t think I’m much troubled in that way,’ said the Ghost stiffly. 

‘That’s excellent,’ said the Spirit. ‘Not many of us had quite got over it when we first arrived. But if there is any of that inflammation left it will be cured when you come to the fountain.’ 

‘What fountain’s that?’ 

‘It is up there in the mountains,’ said the Spirit. ‘Very cold and clear, between two green hills. A little like Lethe. When you have drunk of it you forget forever all proprietorship in your own works. You enjoy them just as if they were someone else’s: without pride and without modesty.’

                                                                    -C.S. Lewis, from The Great Divorce

 -

These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
who would leave his wife and child because
they made noise in his study. These are the poems
of a man who would murder his mother to claim
the inheritance. These are the poems of a man
like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not
comprehend but which nevertheless
offended me. These are the poems of a man
who would rather sleep with himself than with women,
she said. These are the poems of a man
with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s
hands, woven of water and logic
and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These
poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant
as elm leaves, which if they love love only
the wide blue sky and the air and the idea
of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,
and not a beginning. Love means love
of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.
These poems, she said....
                                              You are, he said,
beautiful.
              That is not love, she said rightly.

day 29: Proverbs & Tiny Psalms, by Antonio Machado

Today was supposed to be "Late Fragment" by Raymond Carver, but I couldn't get a recording I was happy with. So instead I bring you an excerpt of "Proverbs & Tiny Psalms" by Antonio Machado (translation from the Robert Bly collection The Soul is Here For Its Own Joy).

Yo amo a Jesús, que nos dijo:
Cielo y tierra pasarán.
Cuando cielo y tierra pasen
mi palabra quedará.
¿Cuál fue, Jesús, tu palabra?
¿Amor? ¿Perdón? ¿Caridad?
Todas tus palabras fueron
una palabra: Velad.

day 28: Learning to Sing in Parts, by Jean Janzen

Thia asked me once, my second year at EMU, why I loved singing hymns. I was still trying to figure that out, really; I knew that I loved the hymn sing on the first Monday of every month up in Martin Chapel, but I was still trying to explain to myself why I had fallen head-over-heels in love with the blue hymnal, the process of gathering, the standing in circles.

It came to me all at once as I was sitting there on the top bunk in my dim little room on the first floor of Maplewood. 

Because of the singing in parts.

It's not that there's anything wrong with praise songs, I said, my voice settling into certainty. But there's something missing in them. They make it feel like you can be a Christian on your own.

When I sing a hymn, I can't help but remember the way I need others. I am an alto, and not a very strong one - if I sing a hymn alone, I am missing the melody, and even if I gather with a bunch of sopranos, it still won't be quite right. When I sing in a circle where every part has people who know the next note, though ... it is the most beautiful thing. It is shivery-beautiful, a feeling like a sun in your chest, something huge and bright and burning. It is an embodied remembrance that I am part of something larger than my self; it is an embodied remembrance that the church is one body with many parts.

And, maybe even more than this, singing hymns reminds me that spirituality is something learned. I got better at holding my  pitch against the others, the more I practiced. There are a few songs - not many, but a few - that I can sing the alto line to on my own, holding against the melody even if there are no other altos standing near me. 

-

My conscious understanding of being part of this thing called "church" is only something like a decade old, and in that time I have been a close witness to more than one rending of a body that is supposed to be the example of unity. This has not been easy or pleasant. It has been made less easy and less pleasant by the belief that unity means no dissension, no difference in praxis or belief. 

The hymn stands up against this oversimplification. The songs in minor keys, the ones with aching, unresolved bits, are beautiful. And the dissonance is not trivial, mean-spirited, or due to a mis-reading of the text. The dissonance has a purpose, which is to make the song interesting and - miracle & mystery - to make it beautiful.

Yes, even so. To make it beautiful.

-

But then two, three, even four tones
at once, my father sorting and joining
their varied voice into a rich and layered
flow. How to hold against the other pitches?
This is the world’s secret, he confides,
to enter and be close, yet separate.

                                         - from "Learning to Sing in Parts," by Jean Janzen

what i learned (a few musings, a year later)

sitting on the grass by the fountain today, watching friends of mine graduate from EMU, i was thinking about what i've learned in the year since my own graduation.

i've learned that i am capable of moving anywhere and figuring stuff out; of surviving. that i want to thrive; that this takes its own sort of work, separate from the work of day-to-day survival. that relationships are really important, and loneliness is really common. i've learned that i want to live in a small town. i've learned that i want to know my neighbors. i've learned that i don't think it's a good idea to move hundreds of miles away for the sake of a job, and that i don't want to live more than half a day's journey away from my family. 

 i've learned that i want to invest more time into writing. i've learned that i don't think i want to have a job - no matter how much i like it, or how important i think the work is - that will have more than 45 hours/week. i feel, if this is possible, even more curious about the world than when i was in college. i feel greedy about my time. i want time to think and write and learn and pray. i want to give my life away to people, not ideas. i want to keep bits of my life for myself, too, which is what i mean when i say i am greedy about my time. i have so much to do, so much i want to do and see. i've learned that if i try hard i can learn pretty much anything. guitar is fun. i learned a lot of fingerpicking skills. i want to be better; i want to play both guitar parts of "Bloom" at speed; same with all the Jon Foreman songs; I want to figure out the tab for "Santa Fe Dream."

i learned i can make granola and pizza and cinnamon rolls, if i take the time. 

DFW was right - a lot of adult life is banality; a lot of adult life is boredom, routine, and petty frustration. And he was also right that i have the choice in how i see it, how i interact with that reality.

i miss Early Church. i miss eating with people. i miss feeling seen and known and wanted.

i've learned a lot about proteins, and electronic circuitry, and how science works. also about government, and bureaucracy, and white-collar culture.

life doesn't get less opaque. i suppose i will be wandering in the dark woods of error for quite some time.

day 27: The Failure of Language, by Jacqueline Berger

I have such a funny relationship with this poem. I love it about as much as I have loved any poem, and it also carries with it memories of all sorts of failures; failures of communication, of relationships, of love.

"We keep circling around the failure of language," I wrote to a friend last fall. And yet we keep trying -

because sometimes the tool must be bent to work.

because there are no right words, 
if by right we mean perfect.

because language honors what is vanishing, and slows the leaving, and deepens everything - our sense of loss, our sense of wonder, our awareness of life.

-

"I wrap it in newspaper and add it to the box marked Kitchen."

That line contains the whole thrust of the poem; taking the real object, the solid weight of the glass, and obscuring it with print, tucking it away in a box labeled with a word. 

A failure, certainly. An action (both packing up the kitchen and writing about it) that won't save her friend, or do much to push against the uncontrollability of life; the description can't even give a good image of what the glass looked like. 

And yet. It (packing up the kitchen, writing about it) says I love you even better than the phrase "I love you," the phrase the poet worries has lost all meaning, being asked to stand for so many unspoken particulars. 

Everything is going to be fine. What she means, as language fails her, is I love you. 

The whole poem is shouting it.

day 26: Half-and-half, by Naomi Shihab Nye

day 25: "i am a little church(no great cathedral), by e.e. cummings

day 24: Touch Me, by Stanley Kunitz

This is turning into a theme - here’s another poem with a voice speaking from middle/old age; still, for some reason, it feels less strange to read this one as if it were my own voice than the Charles Wright poem.

Favorite lines?

“What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.”

I like how Stanley Kunitz talks about writing and poetry. He's the one I quoted earlier this month saying that young poets these days write for the page and not the ear. Here are some other interesting things he's said:

"So often, when you're stumped, the temptation is just to back down, but when you feel this is complicated or so tenuous that there's no way you could say it, you have to persuade yourself that you can say it, that there is a way of saying it, that there's nothing that is unsayable. And this gives you strength for the next time.

"I want to perfect my craft so I won't have to tell lies. The poem, by its very nature, holds the possibility of revelation, and revelation doesn't come easy. You have to fight for it. There is that moment when you suddenly open a door and enter into the room of the unspeakable.”

*

“There's grammar in my bones!”

*

from the Paris Review

KUNITZ

 I want the energy to be concentrated in my nouns and verbs, and I write mostly in trimeters, since my natural span of breath seems to be three beats. It seems to me so natural now that I scarcely ever feel the need for a longer line. Sometimes I keep a little clock going when people talk to me and I notice they too are speaking in trimeters.

At my age, after you're done—or ruefully think you're done—with the nagging anxieties and complications of your youth, what is there left for you to confront but the great simplicities? I never tire of birdsong and sky and weather. I want to write poems that are natural, luminous, deep, spare. I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world.

INTERVIEWER

At forty you still thought of yourself as a stranger?

KUNITZ

I'm reminded of a passage in a letter from Henry James in reply to a young admirer of his. This was late in his life. “You ask me from what port I embark? That port is my essential loneliness.”

INTERVIEWER

Your earlier poems have been accused—I should say that is the right word—of being overly intellectual . . .

KUNITZ

[laughs] . . .which is nonsense.

INTERVIEWER

One of your poems—“The Science of the Night”—has a passage: “We are not souls but systems, and we move / In clouds of our unknowing”. Is that a direct reference to the text by the medieval religious mystic?

KUNITZ

Yes. The Cloud of Unknowing—haunting phrase. But, sure, I think that what we strive for is to move from the world of our immediate knowing, our limited range of information, into the unknown. My poems don't come easy—I have to fight for them. In my struggle I have the sense of swimming underwater towards some kind of light and open air that will be saving. Redemption is a theme that concerns me. We have to learn how to live with our frailties. The best people I know are inadequate and unashamed.

INTERVIEWER

Frost talks about the poet, or himself rather, as a performer, as an athlete is a performer. In what sense do you mean that writing is a performance?

KUNITZ

A trapeze artist on his high wire is performing and defying death at the same time. He's doing more than showing off his skill; he's using his skill to stay alive. Art demands that sense of risk, of danger. But few artists in any period risk their lives. The truth is they're not on a high enough wire. This makes me think of an incident in my childhood. In the woods behind our house in Worcester was an abandoned quarry—you'll find mention of it in “The Testing-Tree.” This deep-cut quarry had a sheer granite face. I visited it almost every day, alone in the woods, and in my magic Keds I'd try to climb it, till the height made me dizzy. I was always testing myself. There was nobody to watch me. I was testing myself to see how high I could go. There was very little ledge, almost nothing to hold on to. Occasionally I'd find a plant or a few blades of tough grass in the crevices, but the surface was almost vertical, with only the most precarious toehold. One day I was out there and I climbed—oh, it was a triumph!—almost to the top. And then I couldn't get down. I couldn't go up or down. I just clung there that whole afternoon and through the long night. Next morning the police and fire department found me. They put up a ladder and brought me down. I must say my mother didn't appreciate that I was inventing a metaphor for poetry.

INTERVIEWER

Not many poets writing during the early years of your career were attracted to science?

KUNITZ

And no wonder. After a quarter of a century I still have to explain to audiences what I am doing with the metaphor of the red shift in “The Science of the Night.” Such terminology ought to be just as common knowledge as the myths were in ancient Greece. The vocabulary of modern science is fascinating—I read everything I can find about pulsars and black holes and charm and quarks—but, by and large, the vocabulary remains exclusive and specialized. The more we know about the universe, the less understandable it becomes. The classic world had more reality than ours. At least it thought it understood what reality was. In 1948, I recall, Niels Bohr visited Bennington and drew a neat picture of neutrons and protons on the blackboard. In the question period that followed I asked him, “Is this really the structure of the atom, or is it your metaphor for the present state of our information about it?” He preferred then not to accept that distinction. Today a diagram of the atom would look vastly different, more complicated, and I would not need to repeat the question.

INTERVIEWER

Scientists think their metaphors are not heuristic.

KUNITZ

The popular impression is that their metaphors are real and the poet's metaphors are unreal. But both are trying to find metaphors for reality. It always haunts me that human beings were accumulating experience and knowledge in their bodies before they had a language. That's where our oldest wisdom is. The language of the imagination is a body language. That's why poetry is resistant to abstractions.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you suppose the metaphors of scientists are taken with much more seriousness than those of poets?

KUNITZ

Because we live in a pragmatic society, and the effects of science are evident, whereas the consequences of poetry are invisible. How many truly believe that if poetry were to be suppressed, the light of our civilization would go out?

...One of the reasons I write poems is that they make revelation possible. I sometimes think I ought to spend the rest of my life writing a single poem whose action reaches an epiphany only at the point of exhaustion, in the combustion of the whole life, and continues and renews, until it blows away like a puff of milkweed. Anybody who remains a poet throughout a lifetime, who is still a poet let us say at sixty, has a terrible will to survive. He has already died a million times and at a certain age he faces this imperative need to be reborn.

...Evil has become a product of manufacture, it is built into our whole industrial and political system, it is being manufactured every day, it is rolling off the assembly lines, it is being sold in the stores, it pollutes the air. And it's not a person!

Perhaps the way to cope with the adversary is to confront him in ourselves. We have to fight for our little bit of health. We have to make our living and dying important again. And the living and dying of others. Isn't that what poetry is about?

day 23: The Shell of a Hermit Crab, by James Wright

I feel about this poem kind of how I feel about Bon Iver's music - I don't really get what it's saying, but I love it because it's beautiful.

...darkly I touch his fragile scars,
so far away, so delicate,
stars in a wilderness of stars.

day 22: Finally will it not be enough, by Wendell Berry

This poem always makes me think of heaven. I remember walking near sunset the winter that my friend Moriah died of cancer - now over four years ago - and thinking of this poem.

"You will remember, watching the clouds, the future of love."


This book of poems (A Timbered Choir: Sabbath Poems 1979-1997) was the first book of poems I ever owned, I think - a gift for my high school graduation. It is well-loved & well-marked, and I had a terrible time picking just one thing to read. But I think that I might love this poem best.

Well. Except, maybe, for this tiny poem that is the very last page in the book:

There is a day when the road
neither comes nor goes,
and the way is not a way
but a place.

Which also, now that I think about it, makes me think of heaven.

day 21: When You Are Old, by W.B. Yeats

sooo, this didn't exactly go as planned. I meant to do 20 days in a row of poems from books I own and then jump into 10 other poems I love from random other sources. But I traveled to Harrisonburg for Easter and was a bit short on time, so I put up a pre-recorded poem on Friday, Saturday, & Sunday. It would have been perfect (if missing the commentary) if not for the fact that Soundcloud was having issues on Friday when I tried to upload my poem #20 (a Sabbath poem by Wendell Berry).

In short, my schedule that I put together for myself was supposed to be 18: Richard Siken, 19: Christian Wiman, 20: Wendell Berry. But #20 got messed up. And though I saved three of the best poems for last, those were the poems that got short-shrift on the commentary front. I'm planning on going back at some point and adding a paragraph or two to those days, so stay tuned.


"When You Are Old" is a poem I memorized last year when I took 80 Works for the second time. I love it for its structure, rhythm, and rhyme; for the beauty of its language.

"How many loved your moments of glad grace
and loved your beauty with love false or true
but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you
and loved the sorrows of your changing face..."

I feel a bit of kinship with the person being spoken to in the poem; I like to imagine that I have a pilgrim soul.



Some photos from my weekend:

The best thing, maybe, was being in Early Church and having so many people to greet, so many people who looked happy to see me. Someone in leadership at EC said "Emily's here!" during the 'greeting-guests' time, which I wasn't expecting, but which made me so, so happy. It is good to be seen; to be wanted.

day 20: The Illiterate, by William Meredith

Iterating sonnets for the win!

day 19: 2047 Grace Street, by Christian Wiman

...I say God and mean more 

than the bright abyss that opens in that word. 

I say world and mean less 

than the abstract oblivion of atoms 

out of which every intact thing emerges, 

into which every intact thing finally goes.
-from 2047 Grace Street, by Christian Wiman


I have been nattering on incessantly about Christian Wiman for months to friends of mine who experience the presence of God through the avenue of poetry. I think he's pretty great.

I was talking once this winter with Thia about a few different authors we love and the different ways they seem to live (or have lived, past tense) in the world. David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen were two of the writers we were talking about, and I remember saying that I felt like their writing was covering over a strange, deep-seated sort of existential fear. I was remembering a review of a DFW novel I had read where the reviewer said something like "Wallace is a very clever writer who writes for very clever boys who have never learned how to feel anything." I don't think that review was entirely true, or very fair, because my sense of DFW has always been that he felt everything so much that he had to separate himself from the world by the use and mastery of language - as if by standing apart and perfectly describing something, he could contain the overwhelming feelings inside the page. Nevertheless, there was something true about it, I think. And Jonathan Franzen had an interview with TIME where he said something about thinking, once, that he ought to adopt a kid; the catch was that he thought having a kid would improve his writing, give him another avenue into seeing the world and writing about it.

This is a mark, I remember saying to Thia, of a man who is terrified.

*

Christian Wiman was interviewed in On Being and talked about three events that split his life wide open when he was in his late 30s. He started writing again, after a long drought; he fell in love and got married; and he was diagnosed with a rare and incurable blood cancer on the day of his 39th birthday. In the course of his conversation on the podcast, he talked about a belief he once held, a belief from before these three events, which was that a life devoted to poetry demanded the willingness to give up all other things. Now, though, he continued, he had come to the conclusion that devotion demanded he give up even that idea.

What he means, I think, is that if a person is willing to give up their life for the sake of their art, then they will end up not really living at all. In the end, ironically, the art that they were sacrificing for will be the thing that suffers.

He read a poem he had written from before his diagnosis, and said something really interesting to me. He said that the poem he read was written by someone who was afraid. He has called it a love poem by a person who is incapable of love. The strange and lovely thing is that he seems less afraid now than he was then, even though he has been very close to death, and will probably die much younger than he should.

In talking about a novel by E.M. Forster, Wendell Berry once said, "The great reassurance of Forster’s novel is the wholeheartedness of his language. It is to begin with a language not disturbed by mystery, by things unseen. But Forster’s interest throughout is in soul-sustaining habitations: houses, households, earthly places where lives can be made and loved. In defense of such dwellings he uses, without irony or apology, the vocabulary that I have depended on in this talk: truth, nature, imagination, affection, love, hope, beauty, joy. Those words are hard to keep still within definitions; they make the dictionary hum like a beehive. But in such words, in their resonance within their histories and in their associations with one another, we find our indispensable humanity, without which we are lost and in danger." (emphasis mine) I think one thing underlying the fear that I sense sometimes in DFW's and Franzen's work is an inability or unwillingness to use this sort of language; and it follows from this that there is an inability or unwillingness to entertain the notion of other hard-to-define words, words like spirit or soul.

I guess that what I am saying is that the thing I love about Christian Wiman is how he has opened himself to the use of these words & ideas, even though the era that he is writing in does not trust these concepts. It feels like a brave and hopeful act for the (now past) editor of a journal like Poetry to write and speak honestly about love and hope, death and fear; to write a book about belief that is straightforward enough for his editor to say "There is too much Christ in this chapter."

*

One other thing that is striking to me is how he talks about love. "...the notion that love could open up the world for you in that way. We just published a poem in the magazine by a poet named Spencer Reece, who's become an Anglican priest, as it happens. He's talking about the whole poem is an elegy for someone he knew and is trying to get at the truth of his life. And he says, "All I know is that the more he loved me, the more I loved the world." I think in any genuine love, and it's not simply romantic love …We tend to think of love as closing out the world and we can only see the face of the beloved. You know, everything else goes quiet or goes numb. But actually what I experienced was that — and I've experienced it again with my children — is that the love demanded to be something else. It demanded to be expressed beyond the expression of the participants. You know, it kept demanding more."

It reminds me of a class I took at EMU about the poetry of Dante & Milton; my professor constantly talking about this question: "What is the civic duty of love?" 

What he meant by that question was that love has the potential to open us wider, rather than close us in. That, if we chose to let it, love will let us see the world as it has potential to be, rather than as it is. And this can spur us into action to try to make this better world around us...the "civic duty of love," if you will. (Wendell Berry again: "Young lovers see a vision of the world redeemed by love. That is the truest thing they ever see, for without it life is death.")

*

From the transcript of the On Being podcast:

"Right. And that has helped me to at least understand those terms somewhat and to explain to myself why I do need some sort of structures in my life. I do need to go to church. I need specifically religious elements in my life. I find that if I just turn all of my spiritual impulses — if I let them be solitary, as I am comfortable in being, I'm comfortable sitting reading books and trying to pray and meditating. Inevitably, if that energy is not focused outward, it becomes despairing. It turns in on itself and I will look up in a couple of months and I find that I'm in despair. So I think that one of the ways that we know that our spiritual inclinations are valid is that they lead us out of ourselves.

"I am a Christian. I believe that Christ comes alive in communion between people, and sometimes I'll think all kinds of things are wrong with my life. You know, my job is messing me up, my writing is messed up, something's messed up, and then I'll have a conversation with someone about a religious topic or it's spiritually informed in some way and it's honest. And even if we don't get anywhere, even if we disagree, the air has been cleared in me and I realize that, in some ways, that I was dealing with all these things that weren't bedrock, you know. They weren't the ground of my being, and I'm trying to take care of the structures on top instead of the ground of my being. And I find that often all you need is some kind of conversation with someone, even if it's just expressing pure anxiety."

*

The following is from this beautiful essay:

Then one morning we found ourselves going to church. Found ourselves. That’s exactly what it felt like, in both senses of the phrase, as if some impulse in each of us had finally been catalyzed into action, so that we were casting aside the Sunday paper and moving toward the door with barely a word between us; and as if, once inside the church, we were discovering exactly where and who we were meant to be. That first service was excruciating, in that it seemed to tear all wounds wide open, and it was profoundly comforting, in that it seemed to offer the only possible balm. What I remember of that Sunday, though, and of the Sundays that immediately followed, is less the services themselves than the walks we took afterwards, and less the specifics of the conversations we had about God, always about God, than the moments of silent, and what felt like sacred, attentiveness those conversations led to: an iron sky and the lake so calm it seemed thickened; the El blasting past with its rain of sparks and brief, lost faces; the broad leaves and white blooms of a catalpa on our street, Grace Street, and under the tree a seethe of something that was just barely still a bird, quick with life beyond its own.

I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be leaving the earth sooner than I had thought. Quite the contrary, I find life thriving in me, and not in an aestheticizing Death-is-the-mother-of-beauty sort of way either, for what extreme grief has given me is the very thing it seemed at first to obliterate: a sense of life beyond the moment, a sense of hope. This is not simply hope for my own life, though I do have that. It is not a hope for heaven or any sort of explainable afterlife, unless by those things one means simply the ghost of wholeness that our inborn sense of brokenness creates and sustains, some ultimate love that our truest temporal ones goad us toward. This I do believe in, and by this I live, in what the apostle Paul called “hope toward God.”

“It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy,” [Simone] Weil writes, “in order to find reality through suffering.” This is certainly true to my own experience. I was not wrong all those years to believe that suffering is at the very center of our existence, and that there can be no untranquilized life that does not fully confront this fact. The mistake lay in thinking grief the means of confrontation, rather than love. To come to this realization is not to be suddenly “at ease in the world.” I don’t really think it’s possible for humans to be at the same time conscious and comfortable. Though we may be moved by nature to thoughts of grace, though art can tease our minds toward eternity and love’s abundance make us dream a love that does not end, these intuitions come only through the earth, and the earth we know only in passing, and only by passing. I would qualify Weil’s statement somewhat, then, by saying that reality, be it of this world or another, is not something one finds and then retains for good. It must be newly discovered daily, and newly lost.

So now I bow my head and try to pray in the mornings, not because I don’t doubt the reality of what I have experienced, but because I do, and with an intensity that, because to once feel the presence of God is to feel His absence all the more acutely, is actually more anguishing and difficult than any “existential anxiety” I have ever known. I go to church on Sundays, not to dispel this doubt but to expend its energy, because faith is not a state of mind but an action in the world, a movement toward the world. How charged this one hour of the week is for me, and how I cherish it, though not one whit more than the hours I have with my wife, with friends, or in solitude, trying to learn how to inhabit time so completely that there might be no distinction between life and belief, attention and devotion. And out of all these efforts at faith and love, out of my own inevitable failures at both, I have begun to write poems again. But the language I have now to call on God is not only language, and the wall on which I make my taps and scratches is no longer a cell but this whole prodigal and all too perishable world in which I find myself, very much alive, and not at all alone. As I approach the first anniversary of my diagnosis, as I approach whatever pain is ahead of me, I am trying to get as close to this wall as possible. And I am listening with all I am.

day 18: Meanwhile, by Richard Siken

Richard Siken, master of words. His book of poems, Crush, is the one Louise Glück said made her feel like the top of her head had been taken off. How's that for an endorsement?

His poetry looks beautiful on the page - he does cool stuff with line breaks - but it also sounds excellent. I had a hard time choosing which poem to read.

day 17: Love and Strange Horses - Intima', by Nathalie Handal

My life is so strange. Today I had a little poster-making-party sitting at my work desk, nodding my head along to Maroon 5 and writing the introduction to my “Regulatory Influence of Mg on P2X2/6 Receptors” poster. There are so many things I have learned in the past few months that I never imagined would be part of my life; learning that pop rock assists my concentration abilities is on that list.

Moving on to Nathalie Handal. This poem from Love and Strange Horses is broken into 9 sections, numbered from 0 to 8 in arabic numerals. I chose to read them in Arabic - hopefully no native Arabic speaker ever stumbles across my blog, I’m sure that my accent is terrible. ;) For those listening, this is what you will hear:

 

sifr (zero)

wahid (one)

tnein (two)

tlati (three)

arbah (four)

hamza (five)

seté (six)

sebah (seven)

tamani (eight)

Also, I should note that Intima' is an Arabic word that means belonging.

day 16: Dogfish, by Mary Oliver

an excerpt from "Dogfish" ...

                                    *

Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don't we? 

Slowly 

                                    * 

the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.

                                    *

day 15: Meaning, by Czesław Miłosz

Czesław Miłosz is a Lithuanian-born poet who wrote in Polish. He won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. He lived through both world wars, spending the years of World War II in Warsaw, Poland. During this time he worked with and wrote for an anti-Nazi organization. Later, he moved to the US, where he taught in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley.

I found this Paris Review interview with him about a year ago and still think it's brilliant.

INTERVIEWER

Is poetry the proper realm for philosophy?

MILOSZ

It depends what kind of philosophy.

INTERVIEWER

What kind have you found appropriate for your poetry?

MILOSZ

There are some kinds of philosophy that remind me of the circumstance of driving at night and having a hare jump in front of the lights. The hare doesn’t know how to get out of the beam of light, he runs straight ahead. I am interested in the kind of philosophy that would be useful to the hare in that instance.

*

INTERVIEWER

You have grappled in your poetry with the question of how a good god can permit evil in the world. Can we justify God through reason, through poetry?

MILOSZ

Shestov said that there are questions that shouldn’t be asked because we have no answers. Simone Weil defended contradiction by what she referred to as a “lever of transcendence.” I myself have been all contradiction; I am composed of contradictions, which is why poetry is a better form for me than philosophy.

*

 MILOSZ

This has been a constant problem for me. Literature is born out of a desire to be truthful—not to hide anything and not to present oneself as somebody else. Yet when you write there are certain obligations, what I call laws of form. You cannot tell everything. Of course, it’s true that people talk too much and without restraint. But poetry imposes certain restraints. Nevertheless, there is always the feeling that you didn’t unveil yourself enough. A book is finished and appears and I feel, Well, next time I will unveil myself. And when the next book appears, I have the same feeling. And then your life ends, and that’s it.

*

 MILOSZ

I write for an ideal person who is a kind of alter ego. I don’t care about being more accessible. I assess whether my poems have what is necessary, what is proper. I follow my need for rhythm and order, and my struggle against chaos and nothingness to translate as many aspects of reality as possible into a form.

INTERVIEWER

You have called poetry “the passionate pursuit of the real." Have you ever in your work attained “the real”?

MILOSZ

The real, by which I mean God, continues to remain unfathomable.

***

Oh, I almost forgot: The introduction to the book of poems by Milosz that I own (Selected and last poems 1931-2004) is written by Seamus Heaney. Part of the reason I picked the poem "Meaning" to read is because of that introduction, where Heaney talks about Milosz believing in the holy force of his art.


"...His life and works were founded upon faith in 'A word wakened by lips that perish.'

This first artistic principle was clearly related to the last Gospel of the Mass, the In principio of St. John: 'In the beginning was the Word.' Inexorably then, through his pursuit of poetic vocation, his study of what such pursuit entailed, and the unremitting, abounding yield of his habit of composition, he developed a fierce conviction about the holy force of his art, how poetry was called upon to combat death and nothingness, to be 'A tireless messenger who runs and runs/Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,/And calls out, protests, screams.'"

day 14: in the middle of traffic at Church and Gerrard, I notice someone, by Dionne Brand

what to say about this poem...prose poetry, hm, it's not really my thing, generally. the poem is in a block, I guess I should say, because it won't be obvious just by hearing it read aloud. it is like a paragraph, no indentations, no stanza breaks. I like how poems with short, spare lines look on the page, and the block of a prose poem can be intimidatingly dense (although you'd think the multi-page paragraphs of Infinite Jest would have cured me of that specific fear).

but anyway, I do like Dionne Brand's book Land to Light On. the whole book belongs together, like Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris, but again, I picked one that I thought would sound good on it's own.

Here is some biographical information about Brand, if you are interested.

day 13: Prospect Park, Holy Week, by Julia Kasdorf

It seemed appropriate to record "Prospect Park, Holy Week," today, Palm Sunday.

day 12: I Still Have Everything You Gave Me, by Naomi Shihab Nye

This poem by Naomi Shihab Nye is from an Anthology called The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women.

I actually gave this anthology away when I graduated from EMU, but I decided I would read this poem instead of one from a book of poems by Chris Martin that I bought at Gift & Thrift, because his poems don't really work at all for being read aloud. They are like the extreme version of what Stanley Kunitz was saying about poets writing for the page and not the ear. 

"I Still Have Everything You Gave Me" is pretty much the anthem for all unrequited loves. I remember reading it with friends at EMU and at various points we would all just sort of groan dramatically. 

"I do not ache," the poet says. "I would not trade."

"Yeah right," we all responded, flopping our angst-ridden bodies over our beds, or couches, or whatever horizontal surface was available at the time.

**

In other news, I had a dear friend visit me today from Lancaster. We met at Camp Hebron, although we weren't super close during the two summers we worked together. We laugh sometimes about how we didn't realize we were kindred spirits until after we had moved out of geographical proximity to each other; it's okay, though, we've conversed quite well via letter.

I made cinnamon rolls this morning. (The Housemate would be so impressed with me if she were here). I didn't have powdered sugar to make a glaze, so I just made a clear glaze with granulated sugar & water, which worked okay although it was less pretty than a white glaze would have been.

Then we traveled downtown to see the cherry blossoms. So beautiful. Also, so crowded. :)

My letter-writing kindred spirit & I have many things in common - for example, a love of poetry & beauty, an ability to enter conversations on Christian spirituality through these loves, and a recent and profound fascination with the poet Christian Wiman.

I'd like to note here that I was totally vindicated on my labeling of Charles Bukowski as The Hipster Poet. She mentioned Bukowski today and sort of nonchalantly said something about how she wanted to read him more, but he was the current hipster poet on Tumblr so she was putting it off for a while. "What?" I said, disbelieving my ears (she told me earlier that she hadn't read my blog all last week because of all the craziness that comes with end-of-semester happenings in your last semester of college). "You said that without reading what I wrote, right?"

"Yeah," she said, looking at me quizzically.

I laughed, and held out a hand for a high-five.

We had so many interesting conversations during the day, often circling around how we are currently interacting with Jesus and writing and life, and touching at some point this evening on the poet Osip Mandelstam, whose work Wiman has translated from Russian. This Mandelstam poem seems appropriate to share on this day of cherry blossoms:

 And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear,

    Myself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree.

    It was all leaflife and starshower, unerring, self-shattering power,

    And it was all aimed at me.

    What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth?

    What is being? What is truth?

    Blossoms rupture and rapture the air,

    All hover and hammer,

    Time intensified and time intolerable, sweetness raveling rot.

    It is now. It is not.  

We also visited the Smithsonian Museum of African Art. I was enthralled with this little carved crucifix.

All in all, a pretty lovely Saturday.