Gerald Morris's Blog
December 2, 2016
Incarnation and Poetry
As we enter the season of Advent, anticipating the celebration of Christ’s Incarnation, it strikes me that poetry bears some taste of that miracle. Like Christ himself, and to a lesser extent the Bible, poetry is both divine and human, breathed from above and at the same time molded of flesh. And both elements are necessary.
But I should start with the Christian teaching. The miracle of Incarnation (the en-fleshment of God) is most integral to our understanding of Christ. We teach that Jesus of Nazareth was nothing less than God, wholly divine, and yet was at the same time truly and wholly human. This is logical nonsense, of course, which is entirely the point. Humanity’s case has always been far too desperate for us to be rescued from ourselves by means of logic. This Incarnation business does, of course, make the practical business of following Christ complex, requiring constant attention, for as Christ is divine, then he is and should be a model for us all to emulate, but as he was human he is not. Thus his teachings, his attitude toward women, outcasts, lepers, poor people, and religious hypocrites should be normative to us, his maleness, singleness, Jewishness seem to me to be part of the accident of being human in a specific form and context. Just because he was male, for instance, does not mean every follower of Christ must also be male. Thus we have to decide at every point whether this or that feature of Christ is a reflection of his divinity or his humanity.
The same sort of thing is true of the inspired scriptures, though to a very different degree. Although some of my Christian brothers and sisters seem to treat it so, the Bible is not as thoroughly infused with divinity as is the Incarnate Christ. The divine inspiration of scripture breaks forth in flashes, through cracks in the human and culturally conditioned stories, poems, and laws that comprise the book. It thus becomes all the more important to us to be able to discern whether we are reading one of those eternal flashes of divinity or a reflection of human context of the Bible’s composition. When the Book of Exodus presents God in the burning bush as “I am who I am,” instead of a namable God that can be distinguished clearly from the other named gods, we sense something divine breaking through the Bible’s cultural milieu. On the other hand, when the Book of Joshua presents Israel’s failure to destroy utterly all Canaanite men, women, and children as a grievous sin deserving of judgment, we sense that here we may be dealing with a cultural mindset rather than the mind of God.
But in both cases – the Incarnate Word and the inspired word – it is essential that divinity be clothed in clay. Yes, it makes it more difficult for us to decide which features or passages we are to adopt as building blocks of our own faith and which ones we should set aside as background, but as soon as you take away the physical, temporal, sensual, corruptible, tangible, and occasionally smelly traces of humanity, you have ruined everything. The effort to etherealize faith, to remove the taint of human frailty from it, inevitably turns it into an elitist philosophy for self-consciously clever people who know themselves to be more spiritually attuned than the Great Unwashed Mass of Humanity. True faith is breathed by God above, but it must be breathed into the seeps and swamps of our own malodorous clay, or it’s pointless.
Kind of like poetry. No literary genre is as frequently referred to as “inspired” as is poetry. No other is so often thought of as ethereal, spiritual, even divine. Only poetry has a tradition of calling on the muses at the beginning of the work, drawing attention to its otherworldly source and prophetic nature. And no artistic genre is more often used by pretentious aesthetes as proof of their more “spiritual” sensibilities as is poetry. And yet this is only true of poetry aficionados (defined here as the sort of poetry reading snot who uses the word aficionado instead of “fan”). Poets themselves are obsessed with the sensual image, with capturing the sounds and smells and physical reality of their subjects. Poets, as far as I can tell, never try to rise above sordid physical humanity. The sensual image is the building block of the poem, not the feeling or the concept or the spiritual essence. Without the clay of physical reality, poets have nothing but breath, and for a poem, breath without a body is as dead as a body without breath.
So I come back to Christianity’s steadfast, even stubborn, adherence to the physical. The Incarnation of Christ – the enfolding of divinity in the mudbrick matter of humanity – is non-negotiable, as is the wound-bearing, fish-eating, fire-making, tangible physical reality of Christ’s Resurrection.
Christians sometimes forget this. But poets get it.
DEMIURGEby D. H. Lawrence
They say that reality exists only in the spiritthat corporal existence is a kind of deaththat pure being is bodilessthat the idea of the form precedes the form substantial.
But what nonsense it is!as if any Mind could have imagined a lobsterdozing in the under-deeps, then reaching out a savage and iron claw!
Even the mind of God can only imaginethose things that have become themselves:bodies and presences, here and now, creatures with a foothold in creation even if it is only a lobster on tip-toe.
Religion knows better than philosophy.Religion knows that Jesus was never Jesustill he was born from a womb, and ate soup and breadand grew up, and became, in the wonder of creation, Jesus,with a body and with needs, and a lovely spirit.
ON BELIEF IN THE PHYSICAL RESURRECTION OF JESUS by Denise Levertov
It is for all ‘literalists of the imagination,’ poets or not,that miracle is possible, possible and essential.Are some intricate minds nourished on concept,as epiphytes flourish high in the canopy? Can theysubsist on the light, on the half of metaphor that’s notgrounded in dust, grit, heavy carnal clay?Do signs contain and utter, for them all the realitythat they need? Resurrection, for them, an internal power, but not a matter of flesh?For the others, of whom I am one, miracles (ultimate need, breadof life) are miracles just because people so tuned to the humdrum laws:gravity, mortality – can’t open to symbol’s powerunless convinced of its ground, its roots in bone and blood.We must feel the pulse in the wound to believethat ‘with God all things are possible,’taste bread at Emmaus that warm handsbroke and blessed.
But I should start with the Christian teaching. The miracle of Incarnation (the en-fleshment of God) is most integral to our understanding of Christ. We teach that Jesus of Nazareth was nothing less than God, wholly divine, and yet was at the same time truly and wholly human. This is logical nonsense, of course, which is entirely the point. Humanity’s case has always been far too desperate for us to be rescued from ourselves by means of logic. This Incarnation business does, of course, make the practical business of following Christ complex, requiring constant attention, for as Christ is divine, then he is and should be a model for us all to emulate, but as he was human he is not. Thus his teachings, his attitude toward women, outcasts, lepers, poor people, and religious hypocrites should be normative to us, his maleness, singleness, Jewishness seem to me to be part of the accident of being human in a specific form and context. Just because he was male, for instance, does not mean every follower of Christ must also be male. Thus we have to decide at every point whether this or that feature of Christ is a reflection of his divinity or his humanity.
The same sort of thing is true of the inspired scriptures, though to a very different degree. Although some of my Christian brothers and sisters seem to treat it so, the Bible is not as thoroughly infused with divinity as is the Incarnate Christ. The divine inspiration of scripture breaks forth in flashes, through cracks in the human and culturally conditioned stories, poems, and laws that comprise the book. It thus becomes all the more important to us to be able to discern whether we are reading one of those eternal flashes of divinity or a reflection of human context of the Bible’s composition. When the Book of Exodus presents God in the burning bush as “I am who I am,” instead of a namable God that can be distinguished clearly from the other named gods, we sense something divine breaking through the Bible’s cultural milieu. On the other hand, when the Book of Joshua presents Israel’s failure to destroy utterly all Canaanite men, women, and children as a grievous sin deserving of judgment, we sense that here we may be dealing with a cultural mindset rather than the mind of God.
But in both cases – the Incarnate Word and the inspired word – it is essential that divinity be clothed in clay. Yes, it makes it more difficult for us to decide which features or passages we are to adopt as building blocks of our own faith and which ones we should set aside as background, but as soon as you take away the physical, temporal, sensual, corruptible, tangible, and occasionally smelly traces of humanity, you have ruined everything. The effort to etherealize faith, to remove the taint of human frailty from it, inevitably turns it into an elitist philosophy for self-consciously clever people who know themselves to be more spiritually attuned than the Great Unwashed Mass of Humanity. True faith is breathed by God above, but it must be breathed into the seeps and swamps of our own malodorous clay, or it’s pointless.
Kind of like poetry. No literary genre is as frequently referred to as “inspired” as is poetry. No other is so often thought of as ethereal, spiritual, even divine. Only poetry has a tradition of calling on the muses at the beginning of the work, drawing attention to its otherworldly source and prophetic nature. And no artistic genre is more often used by pretentious aesthetes as proof of their more “spiritual” sensibilities as is poetry. And yet this is only true of poetry aficionados (defined here as the sort of poetry reading snot who uses the word aficionado instead of “fan”). Poets themselves are obsessed with the sensual image, with capturing the sounds and smells and physical reality of their subjects. Poets, as far as I can tell, never try to rise above sordid physical humanity. The sensual image is the building block of the poem, not the feeling or the concept or the spiritual essence. Without the clay of physical reality, poets have nothing but breath, and for a poem, breath without a body is as dead as a body without breath.
So I come back to Christianity’s steadfast, even stubborn, adherence to the physical. The Incarnation of Christ – the enfolding of divinity in the mudbrick matter of humanity – is non-negotiable, as is the wound-bearing, fish-eating, fire-making, tangible physical reality of Christ’s Resurrection.
Christians sometimes forget this. But poets get it.
DEMIURGEby D. H. Lawrence
They say that reality exists only in the spiritthat corporal existence is a kind of deaththat pure being is bodilessthat the idea of the form precedes the form substantial.
But what nonsense it is!as if any Mind could have imagined a lobsterdozing in the under-deeps, then reaching out a savage and iron claw!
Even the mind of God can only imaginethose things that have become themselves:bodies and presences, here and now, creatures with a foothold in creation even if it is only a lobster on tip-toe.
Religion knows better than philosophy.Religion knows that Jesus was never Jesustill he was born from a womb, and ate soup and breadand grew up, and became, in the wonder of creation, Jesus,with a body and with needs, and a lovely spirit.
ON BELIEF IN THE PHYSICAL RESURRECTION OF JESUS by Denise Levertov
It is for all ‘literalists of the imagination,’ poets or not,that miracle is possible, possible and essential.Are some intricate minds nourished on concept,as epiphytes flourish high in the canopy? Can theysubsist on the light, on the half of metaphor that’s notgrounded in dust, grit, heavy carnal clay?Do signs contain and utter, for them all the realitythat they need? Resurrection, for them, an internal power, but not a matter of flesh?For the others, of whom I am one, miracles (ultimate need, breadof life) are miracles just because people so tuned to the humdrum laws:gravity, mortality – can’t open to symbol’s powerunless convinced of its ground, its roots in bone and blood.We must feel the pulse in the wound to believethat ‘with God all things are possible,’taste bread at Emmaus that warm handsbroke and blessed.
September 25, 2016
On Devotional Poetry
I’m reading George Herbert this week. Now, as I began this year of reading poetry for my morning devotional time in lieu of the Bible, I determined that this did not mean I was going to read “devotional poetry,” i.e. poetry with religiously uplifting content. I was simply going to read good poetry, regardless of its subject matter, and see where that led. But of course, some good poetry is devotional in its matter. For instance, everything that Herbert ever wrote.
And I’ve always liked Herbert. I like his simplicity and his care to make his rhythms match the content of his poems (ragged, halting lines in moments of stress and flowing lines for his peaceful resolutions). He has some breathtaking individual lines and several perfect little poems, such as “Prayer” (I) and “Love” (III). But perhaps the main reason I’ve always liked him in the past was that he is, in fact, a devotional poet, and unlike so many in the genre, he’s good. He’s skilled enough to be read and studied in secular literature classes, but he is completely devout. Herbert wrote as a private devotional discipline. His major work wasn’t published until after his death.
This, it seemed to me in my twenties, might be the way to reconcile my love of poetry with my faith and calling to ministry. Here was a Country Parson writing enduring verse about and to his God as a spiritual exercise. Along with the American poet/Puritan minister Edward Taylor, who did much the same thing, Herbert seemed to offer a synthesis of my two loves. In seminary, when I had a weekend pastorate three and half hours away from school, I followed Taylor’s example and wrote a poetic Communion meditations on Saturday nights before serving the Lord’s Supper the next day. My poems were not as good as Herbert’s (or even Taylor’s), but they were definitely devotional.
This time, though, something is bothering me about Herbert’s devotional poetry. As I read through his poems, it disturbs me to note how many of them end tidily, with a neat and generally conventional thought tying everything up at the end. Even where Herbert begins a poem with angry and honest questioning, he can’t bear to simply the leave the questions out there. He always has to resolve his questions with an orderly, smooth couplet. And at that point his poems feel somehow less poetic, or even less true.
I just can’t help feeling that the role of poetry is not to solve problems but simply to lay them bare. Essays and scientific treatises and how-to books set out to present solutions, but my own conviction is that the most that poetry should do along those lines is look at problems with new eyes. Even the psalms don’t generally try to resolve questions. Sure, there are some that end tidily (e.g. 13, 23, 121) and others that trace the psalmist’s journey from doubt to faith (73), but there are just as many that end with anguished prayers unanswered (39, 89) and still others that appear about to close neatly only to end on a jarring note (51, 137, 139). And even if the psalms were more superficially reassuring than they are, they would at least have the excuse that they were composed for corporate worship. The fact that Herbert’s poems, composed in private dialogue with God, wrap up with a more determined return to orthodoxy than do the psalms, composed for public worship, seems very wrong to me.
Fortunately, I’m mixing up my Herbert with some Denise Levertov. She’s as limpidly clear as Herbert in style and, like Herbert, more complex beneath the surface. Unlike Herbert, though, she is comfortable with ambiguity in both her verse and her faith. A comparison might be helpful. One of Herbert’s most anthologized poems is “The Collar,” in which he grumbles about the chafing yoke of God’s calling – which in his case is understood in terms of his ministerial role. As usual, though, his doubts are resolved, or at any rate suppressed, at the end:
I struck the board, and cried, "No more; I will abroad! What? shall I ever sigh and pine? My lines and life are free, free as the road, Loose as the wind, as large as store. Shall I be still in suit? Have I no harvest but a thorn To let me blood, and not restore What I have lost with cordial fruit? Sure there was wine Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn Before my tears did drown it. Is the year only lost to me? Have I no bays to crown it, No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted? All wasted? Not so, my heart; but there is fruit, And thou hast hands. Recover all thy sigh-blown age On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage, Thy rope of sands, Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee Good cable, to enforce and draw, And be thy law, While thou didst wink and wouldst not see. Away! take heed; I will abroad. Call in thy death's-head there; tie up thy fears; He that forbears To suit and serve his need Deserves his load." But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild At every word, Methought I heard one calling, Child! And I replied My Lord.
In sharp contrast, though, is Levertov’s little poem “The Thread.” In many ways, this shares a world with “The Collar.” Here, too, the poet senses an external calling of sorts – even describes it in terms of a tugging around the neck – but exactly what this calling is, or from whom, is left unspoken, and no need is expressed either to resist or to surrender to its pressure.
Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me - a thread
or net of threads
finer than cobweb and as
elastic. I haven't tried
the strength of it. No barbed hook
pierced and tore me. Was it
not long ago this thread
began to draw me? Or
way back? Was I
born with its knot about my
neck, a bridle? Not fear
but a stirring
of wonder makes me
catch my breath when I feel
the tug of it when I thought
it had loosened itself and gone.
Or maybe it’s just that Levertov’s experience of pulling, stirring, calling is more familiar to me than Herbert’s rant against grim duty. Either way, “The Thread” – whatever it’s about – was, to me, devotional.
And I’ve always liked Herbert. I like his simplicity and his care to make his rhythms match the content of his poems (ragged, halting lines in moments of stress and flowing lines for his peaceful resolutions). He has some breathtaking individual lines and several perfect little poems, such as “Prayer” (I) and “Love” (III). But perhaps the main reason I’ve always liked him in the past was that he is, in fact, a devotional poet, and unlike so many in the genre, he’s good. He’s skilled enough to be read and studied in secular literature classes, but he is completely devout. Herbert wrote as a private devotional discipline. His major work wasn’t published until after his death.
This, it seemed to me in my twenties, might be the way to reconcile my love of poetry with my faith and calling to ministry. Here was a Country Parson writing enduring verse about and to his God as a spiritual exercise. Along with the American poet/Puritan minister Edward Taylor, who did much the same thing, Herbert seemed to offer a synthesis of my two loves. In seminary, when I had a weekend pastorate three and half hours away from school, I followed Taylor’s example and wrote a poetic Communion meditations on Saturday nights before serving the Lord’s Supper the next day. My poems were not as good as Herbert’s (or even Taylor’s), but they were definitely devotional.
This time, though, something is bothering me about Herbert’s devotional poetry. As I read through his poems, it disturbs me to note how many of them end tidily, with a neat and generally conventional thought tying everything up at the end. Even where Herbert begins a poem with angry and honest questioning, he can’t bear to simply the leave the questions out there. He always has to resolve his questions with an orderly, smooth couplet. And at that point his poems feel somehow less poetic, or even less true.
I just can’t help feeling that the role of poetry is not to solve problems but simply to lay them bare. Essays and scientific treatises and how-to books set out to present solutions, but my own conviction is that the most that poetry should do along those lines is look at problems with new eyes. Even the psalms don’t generally try to resolve questions. Sure, there are some that end tidily (e.g. 13, 23, 121) and others that trace the psalmist’s journey from doubt to faith (73), but there are just as many that end with anguished prayers unanswered (39, 89) and still others that appear about to close neatly only to end on a jarring note (51, 137, 139). And even if the psalms were more superficially reassuring than they are, they would at least have the excuse that they were composed for corporate worship. The fact that Herbert’s poems, composed in private dialogue with God, wrap up with a more determined return to orthodoxy than do the psalms, composed for public worship, seems very wrong to me.
Fortunately, I’m mixing up my Herbert with some Denise Levertov. She’s as limpidly clear as Herbert in style and, like Herbert, more complex beneath the surface. Unlike Herbert, though, she is comfortable with ambiguity in both her verse and her faith. A comparison might be helpful. One of Herbert’s most anthologized poems is “The Collar,” in which he grumbles about the chafing yoke of God’s calling – which in his case is understood in terms of his ministerial role. As usual, though, his doubts are resolved, or at any rate suppressed, at the end:
I struck the board, and cried, "No more; I will abroad! What? shall I ever sigh and pine? My lines and life are free, free as the road, Loose as the wind, as large as store. Shall I be still in suit? Have I no harvest but a thorn To let me blood, and not restore What I have lost with cordial fruit? Sure there was wine Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn Before my tears did drown it. Is the year only lost to me? Have I no bays to crown it, No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted? All wasted? Not so, my heart; but there is fruit, And thou hast hands. Recover all thy sigh-blown age On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage, Thy rope of sands, Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee Good cable, to enforce and draw, And be thy law, While thou didst wink and wouldst not see. Away! take heed; I will abroad. Call in thy death's-head there; tie up thy fears; He that forbears To suit and serve his need Deserves his load." But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild At every word, Methought I heard one calling, Child! And I replied My Lord.
In sharp contrast, though, is Levertov’s little poem “The Thread.” In many ways, this shares a world with “The Collar.” Here, too, the poet senses an external calling of sorts – even describes it in terms of a tugging around the neck – but exactly what this calling is, or from whom, is left unspoken, and no need is expressed either to resist or to surrender to its pressure.
Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me - a thread
or net of threads
finer than cobweb and as
elastic. I haven't tried
the strength of it. No barbed hook
pierced and tore me. Was it
not long ago this thread
began to draw me? Or
way back? Was I
born with its knot about my
neck, a bridle? Not fear
but a stirring
of wonder makes me
catch my breath when I feel
the tug of it when I thought
it had loosened itself and gone.
Or maybe it’s just that Levertov’s experience of pulling, stirring, calling is more familiar to me than Herbert’s rant against grim duty. Either way, “The Thread” – whatever it’s about – was, to me, devotional.
July 20, 2016
From the Devotional Journal
I moved a bookshelf to a different room a couple of days ago, which involved of course looking at all the books (fun) and dusting the shelves behind where the books usually stand (less fun). I did find some stuff back there, though. There was twelve cents, which still puzzles me. How do coins accidentally fall behind a row of books? And I found a roll of papers – yellow half-sheets held together with a disintegrating rubber band.
I didn’t have to look to see what these were. I recognized those yellow sheets. They were from the little journal that I used to write my devotional reflections in after my morning Bible reading. In college. Over thirty years ago. And I saved them because . . . um . . . I might someday want to read the devotional thoughts of twenty-one year old me in order to . . . um . . . because . . .
I read one. From 16 December 1984. In that journal entry, I was fretting over the conflict between my love of literature and my calling to ministry. I wrote, “Always my love for literature and writing has been the alternative for me – what I would do if God had not called me into missions.” But something I had read that morning in Isaiah 50 had inspired me to wonder if perhaps I might somehow be able to combine my passion with my calling. Perhaps my love of words might enable me to be a better missionary.
I was so earnest. So clueless. So full of the importance of my calling. I had dreamed of being a writer my entire childhood, but in my mind that dream had simply had to be put aside after that week at Glorieta Baptist Conference Center when I responded to a call to go overseas as a missionary of the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. The SBC was in the middle of “Bold Mission Thrust” at that time, a campaign to reach the world for Jesus by the year 2000. All by ourselves, as I recall. And we called this campaign Bold Mission Thrust. Really. I wasn’t the only one who was earnest in those days. And clueless.
I never became a missionary for the SBC. It turns out that by the time I finished seminary earnestness of calling was no longer enough. It had to be accompanied by a doctrinal conformity that I couldn’t offer. Evidently, you didn’t want to boldly thrust the wrong sort of missions on the world. So instead I wrote novels. And I tell stories. As a pastor, I sometimes think I hardly ever do anything else.
The Lord God has given methe tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. (Isaiah 50:4).
In 1984, I was worried there might not be a place for my literary passions in the religious calling I took so seriously. In 2016, here’s what I did with the sheaf of yellow papers from 1984. I leafed through them once quickly, trying to read as little as possible (what I did read was painful), then threw them out. The reason I leafed through them was because I remember that occasionally I used to write poems in my devotional journal. There weren’t any there, but there had been – that might have been worth keeping.
June 17, 2016
Look What I Can Do
17 June 2016
In earlier posts on this blog related to my year of poetic “quiet times,” I have already reflected on how poetry is the ideal medium for considering God, i.e. for theology. God being, by definition, beyond our explanation, it is only appropriate that God be explored in a medium that embraces impression, experience, and mystery rather than explication.
It doesn’t always work, though. This month I have been reading Gerard Manly Hopkins. Perfect, right? The Jesuit priest who nevertheless wrote daring poetry in a ground-breaking style that shattered the staid, plodding Victorian verse of his time. And all his poetry was religious! All of it! I mean, didn’t he burn all of his secular poetry once he became a priest and vow that he would only write poetry that his religious superiors approved? It couldn’t get any better, could it?
Um.
I’ve realized I don’t actually care for Hopkins. He really is a brilliant stylist – no argument there. And some of his poems, especially those like “Carrion Comfort” that struggle with depression, are minor masterpieces. But – forgive me, every one of my college English professors – most of the time he seems to be saying some very dull stuff. The first poem in my collection (The Wreck of the Deutschland) is his maudlin elegy to five Franciscan nuns who drowned in a shipwreck, an event that is way sadder than the drowning of all the sailors who were also on that ship, what with the nuns being virgins and religious and all that. I skipped that one this time through. I’ve read it before. But this morning was his lengthy meditation on how the Virgin Mary is like air. Really. Or take his perhaps most often anthologized poem:
The Windhover To Christ our Lord
I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king- Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
It is, without question, a tour-de-force of imagery and poetic language, sung brokenly in halting rhythms that capture the swoop and dive of the falcon. But – and I can’t believe I’m even asking this – what does it mean? Well, in terms of summarizing its content, I see three options. The first is charitable, the second neutral, and the third cynical. In order, they are:
1. I saw a falcon today. It was glorious, and it made me feel the same glory I feel when I consider Christ my King.
2. I saw a falcon today, and I wrote this poem. Then I tacked Christ onto a subtitle, because I’m, you know, a priest.
3. I saw a falcon today. Look what I can do with words.
The thing is, none of the above is particularly profound. Even the charitable summary has basically the same import as a motivational poster in a Catholic classroom. The poem is well worth reading, but it’s actually more worth memorizing and quoting. It’s in mouthing the rhythms that we feel the poem’s heart – whether we actually follow the meaning or not. It’s a lot like Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Bells,” which was so beloved on the 19th century elocution circuit. Again, a tour-de-force of poetic language, but if you ask about its meaning, you end up with this:
1. Different bells make different sounds. Look what I can do with words.
I’ll be done with Hopkins soon. His corpus is not large, no doubt on account of burning all his cool pre-clerical stuff (and aren’t we glad Donne didn’t do that?), so I’m not complaining. But it still can’t come too soon for me. I know I’m supposed to love Hopkins as the only truly creative Victorian. I just don’t.
You know what’s worse? I kind of like Tennyson.
In earlier posts on this blog related to my year of poetic “quiet times,” I have already reflected on how poetry is the ideal medium for considering God, i.e. for theology. God being, by definition, beyond our explanation, it is only appropriate that God be explored in a medium that embraces impression, experience, and mystery rather than explication.
It doesn’t always work, though. This month I have been reading Gerard Manly Hopkins. Perfect, right? The Jesuit priest who nevertheless wrote daring poetry in a ground-breaking style that shattered the staid, plodding Victorian verse of his time. And all his poetry was religious! All of it! I mean, didn’t he burn all of his secular poetry once he became a priest and vow that he would only write poetry that his religious superiors approved? It couldn’t get any better, could it?
Um.
I’ve realized I don’t actually care for Hopkins. He really is a brilliant stylist – no argument there. And some of his poems, especially those like “Carrion Comfort” that struggle with depression, are minor masterpieces. But – forgive me, every one of my college English professors – most of the time he seems to be saying some very dull stuff. The first poem in my collection (The Wreck of the Deutschland) is his maudlin elegy to five Franciscan nuns who drowned in a shipwreck, an event that is way sadder than the drowning of all the sailors who were also on that ship, what with the nuns being virgins and religious and all that. I skipped that one this time through. I’ve read it before. But this morning was his lengthy meditation on how the Virgin Mary is like air. Really. Or take his perhaps most often anthologized poem:
The Windhover To Christ our Lord
I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king- Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
It is, without question, a tour-de-force of imagery and poetic language, sung brokenly in halting rhythms that capture the swoop and dive of the falcon. But – and I can’t believe I’m even asking this – what does it mean? Well, in terms of summarizing its content, I see three options. The first is charitable, the second neutral, and the third cynical. In order, they are:
1. I saw a falcon today. It was glorious, and it made me feel the same glory I feel when I consider Christ my King.
2. I saw a falcon today, and I wrote this poem. Then I tacked Christ onto a subtitle, because I’m, you know, a priest.
3. I saw a falcon today. Look what I can do with words.
The thing is, none of the above is particularly profound. Even the charitable summary has basically the same import as a motivational poster in a Catholic classroom. The poem is well worth reading, but it’s actually more worth memorizing and quoting. It’s in mouthing the rhythms that we feel the poem’s heart – whether we actually follow the meaning or not. It’s a lot like Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Bells,” which was so beloved on the 19th century elocution circuit. Again, a tour-de-force of poetic language, but if you ask about its meaning, you end up with this:
1. Different bells make different sounds. Look what I can do with words.
I’ll be done with Hopkins soon. His corpus is not large, no doubt on account of burning all his cool pre-clerical stuff (and aren’t we glad Donne didn’t do that?), so I’m not complaining. But it still can’t come too soon for me. I know I’m supposed to love Hopkins as the only truly creative Victorian. I just don’t.
You know what’s worse? I kind of like Tennyson.
March 11, 2016
On Secular Mystery
10 March 2016
In my last post, I explained (an exercise in the unnecessary) how poetry is a particularly apt vehicle for writing about divine mysteries, inasmuch as poetry is simultaneously self-disclosing and self-concealing. It was made for mystery. This explains both why so much religious writing is done in poetry and why religious writing without poetry is often so unsatisfying.
But what if we turn that around? What about poetry that is not religious writing? After all, we no longer inhabit an overtly religio-form world, and while we certainly still have poets who pursue faith through their verse, our poets today are likely to claim no religious faith at all. Without the ready-made mystery of faith, what does a secular poet write about? If poetry is ideal for expressing hidden depths, where does the secular poet seek those depths? What hiddenness inspires an atheist poet?
This doesn’t actually seem to be a problem. Poets who eschew the built-in source of mystery that is a religious faith nevertheless seem to have no trouble at all finding depths to explore. Whitman sings of himself and finds his own soul inexhaustibly filled with meaning (and somehow, unlike many of his imitators, manages to do so without becoming revoltingly self-obsessed and arrogant). Others explore individual facets of human life: death, relationships, love. All of these involve more than enough mystery to warrant poetic expression.
As it happens, though, I’m currently reading through Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems, and not only does he appear to explore this precise question – what is the deep meaning for a poet to explore in a post-religious world? – but offers his own answer.
A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.Take the moral law and make a nave of itAnd from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,The conscience is converted into palms,Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.We agree in principle. That's clear. But takeThe opposing law and make a peristyle,And from the peristyle project a masqueBeyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,Is equally converted into palms,Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,Madame, we are where we began. Allow,Therefore, that in the planetary sceneYour disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,Proud of such novelties of the sublime,Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,May, merely may, madame, whip from themselvesA jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.This will make widows wince. But fictive thingsWink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.
One advantage of reading poetry simply because I want to is that I never have to read other people’s explanations of what poems mean. I intend never to read such stuff again. That being the case, I intend never in this blog to offer that which I myself will not read. All I will do is point to Stevens’s suggestion that religious fervor may arise from more than one source (the dullest of which is morality). Either way it manifests itself in fictive things – or, simply, poetry. The mystery is not just a feature of the content, but of the expression.
In practice, Stevens celebrates the mystery of the ordinary thing seen in a new light. From “The Comedian as the Letter C”:
The melon should have apposite ritual,Performed in verd apparel, and the peach,When its black branches came to bad, belle day,Should have an incantation. and again,When piled on salvers its aroma steeped The summer, it should have a sacramentAnd celebration.
In tiny vignettes, or “anecdotes,” Stevens casts images on the wall and leaves them to be pondered or merely experienced. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” simply offers thirteen different gasps of recognition – Yes, I remember feeling that once – arbitrarily organized around the theme of blackbirds. The mystery is not what is there, but what is evoked.
And then there’s the glorious “Sunday Morning,” which begins with a languid Sunday morning on a sunny veranda. Perhaps raised in church, though, the woman there turns her thoughts reluctantly “to silent Palestine, / Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.” She thinks:
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?What is divinity if it can comeOnly in silent shadows and in dreams?Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,In pungent fruit and bright, green wings or elseIn any balm or beauty of the earth,Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?Divinity must live within herself . . .
But is it enough?
She says, “But in contentment I still feelThe need of some imperishable bliss.”Death is the mother of beauty; hence from herAlone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams And our desires . . .
Maybe it is enough, though. In experiencing Stevens’s musings my own faith has been stirred, even when he turns away from the traditional forms that I still cherish. So what if he is experiencing mystery in the smell of ripe fruit on a sunny day with a green cockatoo nearby? I recognize the mystery, and it is holy. So what if Stevens organizes a chaos around a jar on a hillside in Tennessee? He has identified the chaos and responded by seeking an internal meaning beneath the visible reality.
The defining element is mystery, and I care more whether mystery is found than where. Some people, it seems to me, start out seeking within themselves, but if they do so without awe and a quest for mystery find only a shell in the shape of a human. Others start out seeking beyond themselves, looking for God, but if they pursue that quest without awe and a sense of mystery find only a distant tyrant.
But those who seek God with a sense of mystery end up finding themselves. And those who seek with awe in the mystery of themselves end up finding God.
In my last post, I explained (an exercise in the unnecessary) how poetry is a particularly apt vehicle for writing about divine mysteries, inasmuch as poetry is simultaneously self-disclosing and self-concealing. It was made for mystery. This explains both why so much religious writing is done in poetry and why religious writing without poetry is often so unsatisfying.
But what if we turn that around? What about poetry that is not religious writing? After all, we no longer inhabit an overtly religio-form world, and while we certainly still have poets who pursue faith through their verse, our poets today are likely to claim no religious faith at all. Without the ready-made mystery of faith, what does a secular poet write about? If poetry is ideal for expressing hidden depths, where does the secular poet seek those depths? What hiddenness inspires an atheist poet?
This doesn’t actually seem to be a problem. Poets who eschew the built-in source of mystery that is a religious faith nevertheless seem to have no trouble at all finding depths to explore. Whitman sings of himself and finds his own soul inexhaustibly filled with meaning (and somehow, unlike many of his imitators, manages to do so without becoming revoltingly self-obsessed and arrogant). Others explore individual facets of human life: death, relationships, love. All of these involve more than enough mystery to warrant poetic expression.
As it happens, though, I’m currently reading through Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems, and not only does he appear to explore this precise question – what is the deep meaning for a poet to explore in a post-religious world? – but offers his own answer.
A High-Toned Old Christian Woman
Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.Take the moral law and make a nave of itAnd from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,The conscience is converted into palms,Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.We agree in principle. That's clear. But takeThe opposing law and make a peristyle,And from the peristyle project a masqueBeyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,Is equally converted into palms,Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,Madame, we are where we began. Allow,Therefore, that in the planetary sceneYour disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,Proud of such novelties of the sublime,Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,May, merely may, madame, whip from themselvesA jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.This will make widows wince. But fictive thingsWink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.
One advantage of reading poetry simply because I want to is that I never have to read other people’s explanations of what poems mean. I intend never to read such stuff again. That being the case, I intend never in this blog to offer that which I myself will not read. All I will do is point to Stevens’s suggestion that religious fervor may arise from more than one source (the dullest of which is morality). Either way it manifests itself in fictive things – or, simply, poetry. The mystery is not just a feature of the content, but of the expression.
In practice, Stevens celebrates the mystery of the ordinary thing seen in a new light. From “The Comedian as the Letter C”:
The melon should have apposite ritual,Performed in verd apparel, and the peach,When its black branches came to bad, belle day,Should have an incantation. and again,When piled on salvers its aroma steeped The summer, it should have a sacramentAnd celebration.
In tiny vignettes, or “anecdotes,” Stevens casts images on the wall and leaves them to be pondered or merely experienced. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” simply offers thirteen different gasps of recognition – Yes, I remember feeling that once – arbitrarily organized around the theme of blackbirds. The mystery is not what is there, but what is evoked.
And then there’s the glorious “Sunday Morning,” which begins with a languid Sunday morning on a sunny veranda. Perhaps raised in church, though, the woman there turns her thoughts reluctantly “to silent Palestine, / Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.” She thinks:
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?What is divinity if it can comeOnly in silent shadows and in dreams?Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,In pungent fruit and bright, green wings or elseIn any balm or beauty of the earth,Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?Divinity must live within herself . . .
But is it enough?
She says, “But in contentment I still feelThe need of some imperishable bliss.”Death is the mother of beauty; hence from herAlone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams And our desires . . .
Maybe it is enough, though. In experiencing Stevens’s musings my own faith has been stirred, even when he turns away from the traditional forms that I still cherish. So what if he is experiencing mystery in the smell of ripe fruit on a sunny day with a green cockatoo nearby? I recognize the mystery, and it is holy. So what if Stevens organizes a chaos around a jar on a hillside in Tennessee? He has identified the chaos and responded by seeking an internal meaning beneath the visible reality.
The defining element is mystery, and I care more whether mystery is found than where. Some people, it seems to me, start out seeking within themselves, but if they do so without awe and a quest for mystery find only a shell in the shape of a human. Others start out seeking beyond themselves, looking for God, but if they pursue that quest without awe and a sense of mystery find only a distant tyrant.
But those who seek God with a sense of mystery end up finding themselves. And those who seek with awe in the mystery of themselves end up finding God.
February 27, 2016
Speaking Religious Mystery
27 February 2016
Science, then, is grammar. And power to it,that noble, necessary enterprise!Praise be for ophthalmalogy and yetit can’t tell all that’s in a lover’s eyes.The world poem, if parsed, will not revealits meanings one and all and settle matters.What we know, we never know in full,for all around our best interpretersvases are dancing, spirits flying free.Everything that shatters, everything that scatters,everything that matters is a mystery.
- from “Mystery” by Greg Alan Brownderville in Gust, 2011
So far in this year of reading and musing on poetry (in lieu of scripture), I have written a good bit about the mystery of poetry. The apparent meaning of a poem, if there is one, is only on the surface. Beneath it are hidden depths; the surface meaning is like a quilt over the top of perfumed silken sheets, or like a scab. The deeper encounter may be elusive and indeed may never be plumbed, but it is there. It is what distinguishes poetry from narrative and, even more, from expositional prose.
That multivalence is also what makes poetry ideal for religious writing. After all, religion points toward that which transcends our understanding, because it is either beyond our ken or beneath and supporting it. So, a written form that withholds meaning even as it reveals is perfect for religion. Poetry, like faith, invites exploration rather than provides explanation. We all sense intuitively that poetry would be an inappropriate genre for a scientific paper; why do we not also recognize that expository prose is inadequate for writing about God?
This is hardly a new insight, of course. Throughout history, poetry has been the preferred instrument for writing about divine mysteries. Psalmists and prophets, the writers of the Upanishads and Hindu epics, Taoist sages and Zen monks, metaphysical poets and hymnists: all have gravitated instinctively toward poetic speech to express faith. Even the dreadful Puritans, bless their little hearts, occasionally managed to step beyond their volumes of forgettable sermons (a redundant phrase if there ever was one) to express their devotion in lasting verse. I’m thinking here, of course, of Milton, but even more of the Connecticut Puritan minister, Edward Taylor, quietly writing enduring poetic reflections on the mystery of Communion as a part of his weekly preparation for worship, poems that he then squirrelled away in boxes lest anyone should discover his worldly weakness for verse.
(By the way, Taylor was quite right to do this. When one writes of religious mystery, using language that embraces mystery, one opens oneself to the possibility of unexpected, even unwelcome, meanings. It is as if admitting that the divine transcends our ability to capture its essence in words is equally an admission that our carefully formulated and officially formalized creeds may have it all wrong. A poet is never more than a few steps away from heresy.)
So, in a sense, my project for this year is not so impious as it sounds. In putting aside my Bible readings in favor of a morning hour with poetry, I am only trading substance for mode. The Bible is, I still believe, the appropriate source to encounter the content of faith, but faith is more than content. This year I am learning again the medium of faith, the only mode of writing that by its very nature embodies the foundation of religious experience: mystery.
Science, then, is grammar. And power to it,that noble, necessary enterprise!Praise be for ophthalmalogy and yetit can’t tell all that’s in a lover’s eyes.The world poem, if parsed, will not revealits meanings one and all and settle matters.What we know, we never know in full,for all around our best interpretersvases are dancing, spirits flying free.Everything that shatters, everything that scatters,everything that matters is a mystery.
- from “Mystery” by Greg Alan Brownderville in Gust, 2011
So far in this year of reading and musing on poetry (in lieu of scripture), I have written a good bit about the mystery of poetry. The apparent meaning of a poem, if there is one, is only on the surface. Beneath it are hidden depths; the surface meaning is like a quilt over the top of perfumed silken sheets, or like a scab. The deeper encounter may be elusive and indeed may never be plumbed, but it is there. It is what distinguishes poetry from narrative and, even more, from expositional prose.
That multivalence is also what makes poetry ideal for religious writing. After all, religion points toward that which transcends our understanding, because it is either beyond our ken or beneath and supporting it. So, a written form that withholds meaning even as it reveals is perfect for religion. Poetry, like faith, invites exploration rather than provides explanation. We all sense intuitively that poetry would be an inappropriate genre for a scientific paper; why do we not also recognize that expository prose is inadequate for writing about God?
This is hardly a new insight, of course. Throughout history, poetry has been the preferred instrument for writing about divine mysteries. Psalmists and prophets, the writers of the Upanishads and Hindu epics, Taoist sages and Zen monks, metaphysical poets and hymnists: all have gravitated instinctively toward poetic speech to express faith. Even the dreadful Puritans, bless their little hearts, occasionally managed to step beyond their volumes of forgettable sermons (a redundant phrase if there ever was one) to express their devotion in lasting verse. I’m thinking here, of course, of Milton, but even more of the Connecticut Puritan minister, Edward Taylor, quietly writing enduring poetic reflections on the mystery of Communion as a part of his weekly preparation for worship, poems that he then squirrelled away in boxes lest anyone should discover his worldly weakness for verse.
(By the way, Taylor was quite right to do this. When one writes of religious mystery, using language that embraces mystery, one opens oneself to the possibility of unexpected, even unwelcome, meanings. It is as if admitting that the divine transcends our ability to capture its essence in words is equally an admission that our carefully formulated and officially formalized creeds may have it all wrong. A poet is never more than a few steps away from heresy.)
So, in a sense, my project for this year is not so impious as it sounds. In putting aside my Bible readings in favor of a morning hour with poetry, I am only trading substance for mode. The Bible is, I still believe, the appropriate source to encounter the content of faith, but faith is more than content. This year I am learning again the medium of faith, the only mode of writing that by its very nature embodies the foundation of religious experience: mystery.
February 7, 2016
Poetry and Understanding (III, and Last)
8 February 2016
A postscript on this train of thought on understanding the content of poetry (the caboose, I suppose) before I head home after weeks away from the office and face my inbox.
When I was in high school, in Norman, Oklahoma, I worked on the school newspaper. I wrote a humor column, but also worked on typing and layout and printing headlines (which in 1981 involved an honest-to-God darkroom) and whatever else needed to be done. Another contributor to the paper was our poetry editor, Archie.
Archie’s job was to select poems from student submissions, so as to highlight the creativity of NHS students. Unfortunately, since nobody from the student body actually submitted any poems, the poetry page basically highlighted the creativity of Archie. Archie’s poetic muse was whichever one inspires very short free verse lyrics that appear to have been created by playing “Poetic Word Boggle” while drunk. Archie frequently complained that no one else submitted any poems, but his own inspiration never let him down, and there was always a poetry section.
Anyway, one day, hanging around the newspaper workroom, several of us decided to put together some poetic submissions for Archie. Collecting random words from whatever we could see without going to the bother of moving from our chairs, we wrote them out in the studiously erratic line lengths and random indentations that are the marks of adolescent free verse and submitted them under the name “Joy Gibson” – a friend of mine from a previous high school, which was a very long way from Norman. I recall only one line, the poetic gem Paper towels on a chalkboard.
Over the course of that year, “Joy” submitted quite a bit of random-word poetry, all of which was printed. Archie grew almost frantic, trying to find out who this kindred spirit might be. I think he was half in love with her. Sorry, Joy. And sorry, Archie. It was a stupid and cruel prank that I hope you never discovered. Your silly but harmless attempts to craft an identity out of what your romanticized idea of poetry were no more ridiculous than any of our stumbling adolescent attempts to invent ourselves. That was the year I wore a chocolate brown beret every single day, after all.
But our prank does raise one more issue as I think about the relationship of a poem to its conceptual content. There does have to be something there. It may be obscure – very often it is – but there should be some meaning, and it should be to some degree accessible to someone other than the poet. The things submitted by “Joy Gibson” weren’t poetry because they contained no meaning at all, not even to those who put the words on the paper. Archie’s poems were either not poetry at all or were very bad poetry because whatever they meant to him, that meaning was inaccessible to everyone else. I assume that they did hold some meaning to Archie, but whatever key it was that connected the random phrases of Archie’s verse, that key was held only by Archie, who never shared. Certainly nothing in his poetry itself betrayed any hint of it.
I have in this series of reflections compared reading poetry well to meeting a new person. We encounter the person, we may or may not connect at once on the surface, but we sense that there is something more there. Often we feel that hidden something is worth getting to know, and so we begin an acquaintance that may become a friendship. Other times, what we sense beneath the surface repels us rather than attracts us. If so, then we do not pursue the relationship. But whether we are interested or not, something is there. The same is true for poetry, with one difference: whereas there is always more than meets the eye with people, One can’t say that for poems. Some, indeed many, are completely vacuous and devoid of content. If this is the case, if there is no hint of anything beyond random bits of sound and diction arranged on a page, then like the “Joy Gibson” submissions, it is not poetry but something dressed up to look like it.
Now I am aware that there are those who would argue strenuously that the meaning of the poem is whatever the reader finds there, regardless of any meanings the poet might have intended – that in fact, poetic intentions are completely irrelevant, because all that matters is what the reader imagines he or she discovers. “Found poetry” is the deepest sort of poetry, set free from the constraints of ideology and the tyranny of conceptual meaning. Under this critical philosophy, I am wrong: there does not have to be any original meaning in the poem at all. As I say, I have heard all this. But I don’t think we need to take these critic theorists seriously, inasmuch as they already take themselves quite seriously enough. I recommend that they gather together in a (preferably soundproofed) room to read the laundering instructions on each other’s clothes until they are transfigured in a blinding flash of aesthetic superiority.
But for the rest of us, reading a poem actually is about discovering meaning – just the kind of meaning that we find in relationships, not the sort one seeks from a textbook. It does take time and work, and sometimes it may not be worth it.
But here’s the thing . . . sometimes it is.
A postscript on this train of thought on understanding the content of poetry (the caboose, I suppose) before I head home after weeks away from the office and face my inbox.
When I was in high school, in Norman, Oklahoma, I worked on the school newspaper. I wrote a humor column, but also worked on typing and layout and printing headlines (which in 1981 involved an honest-to-God darkroom) and whatever else needed to be done. Another contributor to the paper was our poetry editor, Archie.
Archie’s job was to select poems from student submissions, so as to highlight the creativity of NHS students. Unfortunately, since nobody from the student body actually submitted any poems, the poetry page basically highlighted the creativity of Archie. Archie’s poetic muse was whichever one inspires very short free verse lyrics that appear to have been created by playing “Poetic Word Boggle” while drunk. Archie frequently complained that no one else submitted any poems, but his own inspiration never let him down, and there was always a poetry section.
Anyway, one day, hanging around the newspaper workroom, several of us decided to put together some poetic submissions for Archie. Collecting random words from whatever we could see without going to the bother of moving from our chairs, we wrote them out in the studiously erratic line lengths and random indentations that are the marks of adolescent free verse and submitted them under the name “Joy Gibson” – a friend of mine from a previous high school, which was a very long way from Norman. I recall only one line, the poetic gem Paper towels on a chalkboard.
Over the course of that year, “Joy” submitted quite a bit of random-word poetry, all of which was printed. Archie grew almost frantic, trying to find out who this kindred spirit might be. I think he was half in love with her. Sorry, Joy. And sorry, Archie. It was a stupid and cruel prank that I hope you never discovered. Your silly but harmless attempts to craft an identity out of what your romanticized idea of poetry were no more ridiculous than any of our stumbling adolescent attempts to invent ourselves. That was the year I wore a chocolate brown beret every single day, after all.
But our prank does raise one more issue as I think about the relationship of a poem to its conceptual content. There does have to be something there. It may be obscure – very often it is – but there should be some meaning, and it should be to some degree accessible to someone other than the poet. The things submitted by “Joy Gibson” weren’t poetry because they contained no meaning at all, not even to those who put the words on the paper. Archie’s poems were either not poetry at all or were very bad poetry because whatever they meant to him, that meaning was inaccessible to everyone else. I assume that they did hold some meaning to Archie, but whatever key it was that connected the random phrases of Archie’s verse, that key was held only by Archie, who never shared. Certainly nothing in his poetry itself betrayed any hint of it.
I have in this series of reflections compared reading poetry well to meeting a new person. We encounter the person, we may or may not connect at once on the surface, but we sense that there is something more there. Often we feel that hidden something is worth getting to know, and so we begin an acquaintance that may become a friendship. Other times, what we sense beneath the surface repels us rather than attracts us. If so, then we do not pursue the relationship. But whether we are interested or not, something is there. The same is true for poetry, with one difference: whereas there is always more than meets the eye with people, One can’t say that for poems. Some, indeed many, are completely vacuous and devoid of content. If this is the case, if there is no hint of anything beyond random bits of sound and diction arranged on a page, then like the “Joy Gibson” submissions, it is not poetry but something dressed up to look like it.
Now I am aware that there are those who would argue strenuously that the meaning of the poem is whatever the reader finds there, regardless of any meanings the poet might have intended – that in fact, poetic intentions are completely irrelevant, because all that matters is what the reader imagines he or she discovers. “Found poetry” is the deepest sort of poetry, set free from the constraints of ideology and the tyranny of conceptual meaning. Under this critical philosophy, I am wrong: there does not have to be any original meaning in the poem at all. As I say, I have heard all this. But I don’t think we need to take these critic theorists seriously, inasmuch as they already take themselves quite seriously enough. I recommend that they gather together in a (preferably soundproofed) room to read the laundering instructions on each other’s clothes until they are transfigured in a blinding flash of aesthetic superiority.
But for the rest of us, reading a poem actually is about discovering meaning – just the kind of meaning that we find in relationships, not the sort one seeks from a textbook. It does take time and work, and sometimes it may not be worth it.
But here’s the thing . . . sometimes it is.
February 4, 2016
Poetry and Understanding (II)
4 February 2016
I’ve just said we should not approach poetry as if the goal were merely to understand it. Why not? What happens if we do?
The first thing we get, already mentioned in my first post on the question, is annoyance. When someone reads a poem with the goal of mastering its meaning, expecting the text to do what it can to facilitate that goal, that reader will soon be frustrated. The poem is far more likely to throw up stumbling blocks to comprehension – convoluted sentence structure, complex diction, strange (or invented) vocabulary – and in every way possible draw attention away from the sense of the poem and force the reader to pay attention to the fact that she is reading a poem.
Martin Heidegger makes this point in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” where he distinguishes between “equipmental” language and the language of poetry. Equipmental language has an external purpose and in order to serve that purpose must stay in the background. One is not supposed to notice the language of an expository text, just as one is not supposed to notice one’s shoes. If you are aware of your shoes, then they are not doing their job, and if you are aware of the diction used in a newspaper column, it needed a better editor. Poetry is not like that. At every stage, poetry calls attention to itself, stepping into the foreground and forcing external meaning into the shadows, calling attention to itself as art – that is, declaring that it is significant because of what it is, and not just because of what it does.
(Once again, note the similarity between encountering poetry and meeting people. While all humans have greater depth than can be seen in one superficial encounter, there are certainly those who do their best to be equipmental, defining themselves entirely in terms of their employment. These people are very dull. A poem written for a clear polemical purpose inevitably feels less interesting as a poem, and a man who defines himself entirely as a minister or engineer or doctor or poet is equally uninteresting as a person.)
So, reading a poem equipmentally leads to frustration, as one looks for understanding and is thwarted. But there is an even worse result of reading poetry equipmentally, and oddly enough, this one is made those who understand poetry.
You see, one can learn certain techniques that facilitate greater understanding of a poem’s content. One can learn to pay attention to the rhythms, to the verse structures, to enjambment, to wordplay and so on. People who master some of these techniques are going to be less frustrated by the obstacles of poetry and will understand poems better. The problem is that when people learn how to understand poetry but still labor under the misapprehension that understanding is the point, they invariably become insufferable snots. “Those plebeians don’t understand poetry as I do,” is their attitude. In short, they’ve turned reading poetry into a sort of word puzzle that they can do better than other people, and their pronouncements on the real meaning of this poem or that have the smug tone of someone saying, “Oh, I used to do the New York Times Sunday Crossword – in pen, of course – but lately I’ve found them to be ridiculously easy.” Yes, these people are able to dredge more meaning from a poem – sometimes even meanings that the poet herself or himself might recognize – but they’ve still missed the point every bit as much as the person who tossed the poem aside in frustration. Again, the point is not to understand the poem but to encounter it, and greater understanding is no guarantee of a more meaningful encounter.
In the end, these smug, poetically-literate elitists do more damage to poetry than do those who don’t understand it at all. A poetic snob is to poetry what a streetcorner evangelist is to Christianity – a bane – because the most reasonable and appropriate response to both is, “Why would I want to do something that associates me with that asshole?”
But when we put aside our need to understand poetry and read a poem with the same sort of expectation with which we encounter a new person – willing to be enriched by the acquaintaince but expecting it to take a while – then we are reading poetry as it should be read. Poetry may be the only written genre where it’s completely acceptable to say, “I like this! I don’t understand it, but I like it!”
Not just acceptable, in fact, but ideal.
I’ve just said we should not approach poetry as if the goal were merely to understand it. Why not? What happens if we do?
The first thing we get, already mentioned in my first post on the question, is annoyance. When someone reads a poem with the goal of mastering its meaning, expecting the text to do what it can to facilitate that goal, that reader will soon be frustrated. The poem is far more likely to throw up stumbling blocks to comprehension – convoluted sentence structure, complex diction, strange (or invented) vocabulary – and in every way possible draw attention away from the sense of the poem and force the reader to pay attention to the fact that she is reading a poem.
Martin Heidegger makes this point in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” where he distinguishes between “equipmental” language and the language of poetry. Equipmental language has an external purpose and in order to serve that purpose must stay in the background. One is not supposed to notice the language of an expository text, just as one is not supposed to notice one’s shoes. If you are aware of your shoes, then they are not doing their job, and if you are aware of the diction used in a newspaper column, it needed a better editor. Poetry is not like that. At every stage, poetry calls attention to itself, stepping into the foreground and forcing external meaning into the shadows, calling attention to itself as art – that is, declaring that it is significant because of what it is, and not just because of what it does.
(Once again, note the similarity between encountering poetry and meeting people. While all humans have greater depth than can be seen in one superficial encounter, there are certainly those who do their best to be equipmental, defining themselves entirely in terms of their employment. These people are very dull. A poem written for a clear polemical purpose inevitably feels less interesting as a poem, and a man who defines himself entirely as a minister or engineer or doctor or poet is equally uninteresting as a person.)
So, reading a poem equipmentally leads to frustration, as one looks for understanding and is thwarted. But there is an even worse result of reading poetry equipmentally, and oddly enough, this one is made those who understand poetry.
You see, one can learn certain techniques that facilitate greater understanding of a poem’s content. One can learn to pay attention to the rhythms, to the verse structures, to enjambment, to wordplay and so on. People who master some of these techniques are going to be less frustrated by the obstacles of poetry and will understand poems better. The problem is that when people learn how to understand poetry but still labor under the misapprehension that understanding is the point, they invariably become insufferable snots. “Those plebeians don’t understand poetry as I do,” is their attitude. In short, they’ve turned reading poetry into a sort of word puzzle that they can do better than other people, and their pronouncements on the real meaning of this poem or that have the smug tone of someone saying, “Oh, I used to do the New York Times Sunday Crossword – in pen, of course – but lately I’ve found them to be ridiculously easy.” Yes, these people are able to dredge more meaning from a poem – sometimes even meanings that the poet herself or himself might recognize – but they’ve still missed the point every bit as much as the person who tossed the poem aside in frustration. Again, the point is not to understand the poem but to encounter it, and greater understanding is no guarantee of a more meaningful encounter.
In the end, these smug, poetically-literate elitists do more damage to poetry than do those who don’t understand it at all. A poetic snob is to poetry what a streetcorner evangelist is to Christianity – a bane – because the most reasonable and appropriate response to both is, “Why would I want to do something that associates me with that asshole?”
But when we put aside our need to understand poetry and read a poem with the same sort of expectation with which we encounter a new person – willing to be enriched by the acquaintaince but expecting it to take a while – then we are reading poetry as it should be read. Poetry may be the only written genre where it’s completely acceptable to say, “I like this! I don’t understand it, but I like it!”
Not just acceptable, in fact, but ideal.
February 2, 2016
Poetry and Understanding (I)
28 January 2016
The past couple of weeks have been a change of pace for me, hiking and then touring in New Zealand. I’ve continued reading poetry, though – finishing Plath’s Ariel and New Zealand poet Sam Hunt’s Chords. Hunt’s poetry was a refreshing change from Plath’s in that I usually had some idea what each poem was about after one reading. Not always, but still . . .
This led me to think about one of the struggles that we all have with poetry: simply put, it is hard to understand, which can be irritating. It is no fun to read something then put it down and say, “What the hell was that about?” We like to understand. When we read something we can’t help feeling that we’re supposed to understand it, and there’s no denying that that’s not always our experience when reading poetry.
I realize that as an English major and writer and literary person, the sort who still reads poetry on purpose without anyone assigning it, I’m not supposed to complain about poetry’s opacity. I’m supposed to embrace it. When other people wonder why poets can’tjust say what they mean I’m supposed to smile smugly and patronizingly, implying that I’m one of those in the know. At the very least, I’m not supposed to agree with such Philistines. But a part of me does. The truth is, while I do like Plath, my favorites of her poems were the ones I thought I came close to understanding. And Plath isn’t even the worst. I recall how, in college, when I read assigned poems by Hart Crane and John Ashbery, I found myself eagerly underlining not the lines that were especially beautiful or powerful but the occasional ones that almost made sense, and I can’t help feeling that that’s lowering the appreciation bar a little too much. I haven’t gone back to try Crane or Ashbery since then.
It hasn’t always been this way, of course. Opacity has not always been valued, or even tolerated, in poetry. Pope could write
True art is nature to advantage dress’t, What oft was thought but ne’er so well express’t
and describe poetry as if it were simply the best way to communicate a message. But even then it wasn’t that easy. Even in times when poetry was expected to be clear, the poems that are remembered from those times are always the ones that, beneath their superficial clarity, also bore hidden depths of meaning. In short, whether a poem appears to be clear or not, it is a part of the definition of good poetry that it . . . well, it’s just hard to understand.
So here’s what I’ve been thinking: we are right that poetry is opaque, but we are misguided when we complain about it. It’s not surprising that we should do so, of course. We have been trained by our intellectual world to treat every other area of written communication as something to master and appropriate for our own purposes. We read for practical, stated purposes: to learn something, say, or for diversion. Either way, one measure of a written work’s success is the speed with which we are able to get our money’s worth from it. Thus we expect clarity, facility, smoothness of style, and – if the goal is to learn – a few charts and graphs that summarize the text for us and make it unnecessary for us to read at all. This is how the demands of our lives in the information age have trained us to read, and if that’s how we approach text, it’s not at all surprising that we find poetry frustrating. But that is not the fault of the poetry; it is the fault of the mindset we bring to the poem. We are not supposed to understand a poem. Again, we are not supposed to understand a poem. We are suppose to meet it.
Archibald MacLeish, in “Ars Poetica,” wrote
A poem should not mean But be.
That line – as indeed the rest of the stunning poem – is itself an example of what I’m talking about. The line offers the suggestion of something important and true, but absolutely no clarity, and no two people reading it (or one person reading it a twice a few years apart) will understand it the same way. It does not explain but suggest. But at least one thing it suggests to me at this reading is that the encounter with a poem takes place not in the arena of written communication but in that of Being. In other words, reading a poem is less like reading another sort of text than it is like meeting a new person.
Think about the experience of meeting people for the first time. Some people come across as fairly transparent. What you see is evidently what you get, and within minutes you can make a determination about that person: “What a delightful woman!” or “Why are you telling a stranger about your ex-girlfriend? You are a needy person with poor social skills.” It is the same with many poems; some are easily accessible at a first encounter. But – also like poems – no person is really just what you see on the surface: even the most “superficial” person has hidden depths. Other people are harder to read at an initial encounter or even frankly puzzling and contradictory. Some of these are intriguing and invite closer acquaintance. Others come across as pompous or elitist and not worth the expenditure of any more effort. Just like poetry.
So, yes, poetry is hard. Some appears relatively easy, but even that is deceptive. To encounter a poem for all it is worth will always take effort and often time. Like people. Because poems don’t mean; they are.
Ars PoeticaArchibald MacLeish
A poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit,
DumbAs old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stoneOf casement ledges where the moss has grown—
A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.
*
A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releasesTwig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves, Memory by memory the mind—
A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs.
*
A poem should be equal to:Not true.
For all the history of griefAn empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For loveThe leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean
But be
The past couple of weeks have been a change of pace for me, hiking and then touring in New Zealand. I’ve continued reading poetry, though – finishing Plath’s Ariel and New Zealand poet Sam Hunt’s Chords. Hunt’s poetry was a refreshing change from Plath’s in that I usually had some idea what each poem was about after one reading. Not always, but still . . .
This led me to think about one of the struggles that we all have with poetry: simply put, it is hard to understand, which can be irritating. It is no fun to read something then put it down and say, “What the hell was that about?” We like to understand. When we read something we can’t help feeling that we’re supposed to understand it, and there’s no denying that that’s not always our experience when reading poetry.
I realize that as an English major and writer and literary person, the sort who still reads poetry on purpose without anyone assigning it, I’m not supposed to complain about poetry’s opacity. I’m supposed to embrace it. When other people wonder why poets can’tjust say what they mean I’m supposed to smile smugly and patronizingly, implying that I’m one of those in the know. At the very least, I’m not supposed to agree with such Philistines. But a part of me does. The truth is, while I do like Plath, my favorites of her poems were the ones I thought I came close to understanding. And Plath isn’t even the worst. I recall how, in college, when I read assigned poems by Hart Crane and John Ashbery, I found myself eagerly underlining not the lines that were especially beautiful or powerful but the occasional ones that almost made sense, and I can’t help feeling that that’s lowering the appreciation bar a little too much. I haven’t gone back to try Crane or Ashbery since then.
It hasn’t always been this way, of course. Opacity has not always been valued, or even tolerated, in poetry. Pope could write
True art is nature to advantage dress’t, What oft was thought but ne’er so well express’t
and describe poetry as if it were simply the best way to communicate a message. But even then it wasn’t that easy. Even in times when poetry was expected to be clear, the poems that are remembered from those times are always the ones that, beneath their superficial clarity, also bore hidden depths of meaning. In short, whether a poem appears to be clear or not, it is a part of the definition of good poetry that it . . . well, it’s just hard to understand.
So here’s what I’ve been thinking: we are right that poetry is opaque, but we are misguided when we complain about it. It’s not surprising that we should do so, of course. We have been trained by our intellectual world to treat every other area of written communication as something to master and appropriate for our own purposes. We read for practical, stated purposes: to learn something, say, or for diversion. Either way, one measure of a written work’s success is the speed with which we are able to get our money’s worth from it. Thus we expect clarity, facility, smoothness of style, and – if the goal is to learn – a few charts and graphs that summarize the text for us and make it unnecessary for us to read at all. This is how the demands of our lives in the information age have trained us to read, and if that’s how we approach text, it’s not at all surprising that we find poetry frustrating. But that is not the fault of the poetry; it is the fault of the mindset we bring to the poem. We are not supposed to understand a poem. Again, we are not supposed to understand a poem. We are suppose to meet it.
Archibald MacLeish, in “Ars Poetica,” wrote
A poem should not mean But be.
That line – as indeed the rest of the stunning poem – is itself an example of what I’m talking about. The line offers the suggestion of something important and true, but absolutely no clarity, and no two people reading it (or one person reading it a twice a few years apart) will understand it the same way. It does not explain but suggest. But at least one thing it suggests to me at this reading is that the encounter with a poem takes place not in the arena of written communication but in that of Being. In other words, reading a poem is less like reading another sort of text than it is like meeting a new person.
Think about the experience of meeting people for the first time. Some people come across as fairly transparent. What you see is evidently what you get, and within minutes you can make a determination about that person: “What a delightful woman!” or “Why are you telling a stranger about your ex-girlfriend? You are a needy person with poor social skills.” It is the same with many poems; some are easily accessible at a first encounter. But – also like poems – no person is really just what you see on the surface: even the most “superficial” person has hidden depths. Other people are harder to read at an initial encounter or even frankly puzzling and contradictory. Some of these are intriguing and invite closer acquaintance. Others come across as pompous or elitist and not worth the expenditure of any more effort. Just like poetry.
So, yes, poetry is hard. Some appears relatively easy, but even that is deceptive. To encounter a poem for all it is worth will always take effort and often time. Like people. Because poems don’t mean; they are.
Ars PoeticaArchibald MacLeish
A poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit,
DumbAs old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stoneOf casement ledges where the moss has grown—
A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.
*
A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releasesTwig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves, Memory by memory the mind—
A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs.
*
A poem should be equal to:Not true.
For all the history of griefAn empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For loveThe leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—
A poem should not mean
But be
February 1, 2016
Ocean Rock
30 January 2016
Off the eastern coast of New Zealand’s South Island
Ocean Rock
The ocean rock withstands the smashing wavesThat spray and scatter breakers into foamIn vain assault. The stone stands steadfast. NoMere billow can disturb its crags and caves.(A photo, printed glossy triple-sizeAdorned with motivation – “Know your mind!”Or “Individuality” – could findA home before indifferent classroom eyes.)
The stone itself does not – no, cannot – thinkHow vast the sea behind the puny sprayThat strokes its sides, nor does it shrinkBefore the patient aeons, has no wayTo know the sand it rules is but the smearOf mighty boulders from another year.
Off the eastern coast of New Zealand’s South Island
Ocean Rock
The ocean rock withstands the smashing wavesThat spray and scatter breakers into foamIn vain assault. The stone stands steadfast. NoMere billow can disturb its crags and caves.(A photo, printed glossy triple-sizeAdorned with motivation – “Know your mind!”Or “Individuality” – could findA home before indifferent classroom eyes.)
The stone itself does not – no, cannot – thinkHow vast the sea behind the puny sprayThat strokes its sides, nor does it shrinkBefore the patient aeons, has no wayTo know the sand it rules is but the smearOf mighty boulders from another year.
Gerald Morris's Blog
- Gerald Morris's profile
- 496 followers
Gerald Morris isn't a Goodreads Author
(yet),
but they
do have a blog,
so here are some recent posts imported from
their feed.
