An Activity of the Spirit with Many Names

Posted on February 19, 2009 by Adam Penna

To write poems before midlife begins, really, is nothing much.  Nothing truly vital competes for one’s consciousness like it will soon.  And the longer we make adolescence, the less a risk writing poetry is for as long as one depends on the various supports of the world.  But once one becomes unsponsored – and it is in midlife that this becomes the case, or might become the case – to steal a moment or two from the tumult of being to scribble a song, a gripe about the world or a hymn of praise, becomes akin to the most heroic feats.  It is the triumph of the spirit over the requirements of an adult life, whose adult duties include the all of everything or so it can sometimes seem.  Of course, there is something illusory about the adult experience, just as the experience of childhood is also a dream.  No one person is responsible for it all.  And yet that is the experience a husband or a wife has, or a father or a mother records.  I have said elsewhere that an adult poetry must be as vital, as attractive and as relentless as life itself.  It is only this full-throated poetry that might justify the sacrifice writing poetry, beyond the meridian, requires.  It must spring from the spirit’s necessity.

When Dante ends the New Life, he claims that he will begin writing a poem for Beatrice when his powers are equal to the task.  The young man, the one who writes the very impressive little book of sonnets and songs, must wait until his consciousness blossoms fully before he can address the larger subject of the largest of loves.  But it is his exile from the sphere of adult doings –  Dante was cast out of Florence, just as his midlife began – that allows Dante to become a party of one.  Every poet, in his heart, makes this decision or comes to this conclusion.  He nurtures a part of his consciousness which is apart from the goings-on of the adult world.  This part grows big, and when it does, it sees what is.  The best and healthiest of these –what else can one call it but the spirit itself–the best of these spirits come to know love, the big love of the universe, fiercer and more merciful than our puny human love, but also exactly the measure of pity one needs to learn to love one’s neighbors, for instance.

Grief, profound grief, can cause a similar exile and revelation.  I’m thinking now of C.S. Lewis’ little book reflecting on his wife’s death.  There he comes to many bright conclusions.  Of course, one’s consciousness might have to be predisposed to the poetic spirit, but a predisposition isn’t enough.  One must choose to tend to that place apart.  Thoreau and Emerson, I think, would call this apartness solitude.  A religious might call it paradise or Eden, the right now, which is an always and forever, but also a nowhere and a never.  It is this sphere, which on the surface seems least useful to the world.  It is curtailed by instruction and experience, until in many it atrophies.  It is the sense of wonder and awe and terrific fear, which causes one to lose one’s breath.  It is not for everyone to cultivate this garden.  For some, it would make little sense.  Their desire for the large and wondrous is quenched by the little the world offers in this regard.  But for those who would have more, or who must have more – because some blow has shoved them back – poetry becomes the very courage necessary for reintegration, though not into the whole again, where one is merely a part, but toward wholeness, where one is both the missing shard and the healed vessel.

The process I am describing isn’t, as some might think, a journey from partness to apartness and back to partness.  Rather, it is a realizing of apartness and, following that realization, another comes, which is the point of it all.  Poetry, I used to think, was how it had to be done.  Still, this is true for me.  Then, I thought merely it was the best way to reach this end.  I’m not prepared now to say this at all.  Rather, I would conclude that poetry, real and true poetry, is how each poet becomes a party of one.  If one wants to, one might say that poetry is a trope for something larger and without a name.  That which “flees” as Dickinson says.  Or say that it is an activity of the spirit with many names.  I don’t mean to make this more serious than it needs to be.  I’d rather not risk sounding like a zealot or a mystic.  I think there is something altogether practical about poetry, as there is in participating in religious ceremonies.  But one doesn’t begin writing poetry for practical reasons.  And certainly, one doesn’t continue to write poems, when so much else requires so much of one’s energies, because of some imagined gain.  The gains of poetry are essential in that they touch the most genuine qualities, and only when they do are they poetry.

Every poem is a labor of love.  And all love is heroic.  Mothers are heroic, fathers are heroic, husbands and wives and children are heroic.  And it is what is poetry in them that causes them to act as if there were no distance between themselves and another.  Poetry clears a space for love to blossom.  It is like prayer.  It is a country church or a chapel, where one learns the words which light the world.  There the candles are lit.  The incense burn on the altar, and the congregation all kneel at once, all stand at once, all sing in harmony.  Even the thin or old or poor voices contribute to the song.  And the sleeping child wakes.  His eyes are open.  He smiles or he cries, and he is soothed.

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On Dante’s Inferno, Cantos V & XV

Posted on February 13, 2009 by Adam Penna

I’ve been reading Dante lately, and have been meaning to say something about him on this blog.  Then a friend emailed me, asking about a few things related to the Inferno.  I thought I would paste my response here, since it pretty much sums up what I have been thinking.  My friend was particularly interested in cantos V and XV, so my comments revolve around the characters of Brunetto Latini and the famous lovers Francesca and Paolo.  Those unfamiliar with the two cantos can follow the links here and here and find them.  The translations to which I am referring in the text of the email are different from the one to which I have directed you.  I am reading Musa.  These belong to Cary.

Here is my email:

The two passages you mention at the end of your email are two of the most famous and two of the most interesting in this canticle. Brunetto Latini is suffering the punishment of the sodomites. I read a biography of Dante recently, which suggested that there is no material evidence nor circumstantial evidence to suggest that Latini was a homosexual. But, for me, that is neither here nor there. Dante places him in this particular round for a reason. It’s our job to figure out what that reason is. (This reminds me of a scene in a movie I saw recently, a documentary about a monastery in France. The monks were discussing the manner in which they utilize the holy water. One compares their method to those of another order. An elder monk says: “The gesture is a symbol. If we find something wrong with it, there is something wrong with us. We should ask why it troubles us.” I guess the beam is in their eye.) Anyway the point here is: Dante, in his vision, doesn’t make mistakes. In some ways, this can be said of every poet.

Latini was a Florentine intellectual, and Dante’s mentor. Or one of Dante’s mentors, and one report suggests the relationship wasn’t as close as Dante seems to indicate in this canto. What is interesting to me about this canto comes in the final lines, where Dante gives us the image of Latini returning to his punishment, as if one who wins. Of course, Latini hasn’t won. He has lost. Big time. In hell, one must abandon all hope. All hope of ever knowing God. This, ultimately, is what Dante is after. And it is what he finds. Through his love of Beatrice, he comes to know God.

I think I said to you once that all poetic activity is the search for the divine. For Dante, this god is the Christian God, a god of infinite mercy and infinite wrath. But ultimately he is a just God.  Latini must suffer for his sins, as Francesca and Paolo must for theirs, despite Dante’s personal feelings. Clearly, in hell anyway, he rejoices in God’s judgment sometimes. Take for instance the episode with Filipo Argenti. Here Dante enthusiastically supports the punishment and relishes participating in the divine justice. But with the illicit lovers in V, and Latini in XV, Dante’s reaction is more ambivalent. He outright faints at the end of V. But in XV he seems to master his grief with that triumphant poetic image of Latini winning the prize. It is as if Dante would have us, if only momentarily, see Latini as he would like to remember him.

In some ways, all of the souls in hell get what they want, and that is their punishment. If one loses the good of intellect and turns from God, one sacrifices one’s eternal life and, in this case anyway, makes eternal that which ought to be ephemeral. In the case you mention, at the end of your email [here my friend quotes the passage from canto V, where Dante imagines the lustful whirling around like a flock of starlings], what Dante describes isn’t love but lust. Love roots in the heart and flowers in the mind. Lust roots lower in the body, is bestial and flowers in the genitals. Sin is punished by sin. It’s like a saying which says of an asshole: his punishment is he’ll have to be himself his whole life. The asshole’s transgression is his punishment. The lustful are punished by eternal lust. A burning, which feels pleasant enough, while it lasts, as long as there is the promise of release. This release will never come to them. Forever they will be lashed about by the upheaval of the loins.

What’s interesting is that Dante feels sympathy for these two. And so do we. Like with Latini, though in this case it is the shade herself who pronounces the lines, the image of the two lovers closing the book and reading no more that day – and you know what that means – moves us deeply. And it is for that seeming sweetness they are punished. One might argue that what they feel is love, and I’m not sure Dante would altogether disagree, but if it is love it is love of the wrong thing, which is what causes one to become lost in a dark wood. If the universe is moved by love, which is Dante’s final revelation, then even hell’s governing principle is love. This is a love larger and fiercer than the one we typically experience. It has to be because, while our puny love must move us to do what, in most cases, amounts to the ordinary tasks of this or that sacrifice, God’s love must move the all of everything.

Just a brief note. Technically, hell is where God and his love are absent. However, a thing might be measured by the hole it leaves, when it leaves. It is part of the Gnostic tradition, I think, to explain the existence of evil in this way. Evil is the space God made so that he might know himself by what he isn’t. It occurs to me now that this is a good reason we might love our neighbor. He is what we aren’t. We come to know ourselves by serving others, by loving others, by forgiving others.

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It Must Root in the Heart

Posted on January 29, 2009 by Adam Penna

Poetry requires living a real life.  This means daily interaction with the real world with its real requirements, and its real people with their real demands.  It is poetry, which becomes a kind of hermitage, a walled-off garden, in which a soul can reflect upon the world’s goings-on, and her responsibilities to act or not act in response to these goings-on.  This isn’t to say that I’m not grateful for this spell of freedom.  But freedom is useful and desirable only in relation to its opposite, which is duty.

I am writing.  But the writing is less satisfying and has even become for me a kind of duty.  If I am not typing away or scribbling in my notebook or tending to one or more of the day’s chores, which I have set up for myself, then I begin to feel like it will all get away from me.  I suspect that much of this will work itself out over the course of the sabbatical, and that I will be able, like I used to be able, to find a kind of liberty, where there isn’t a counterbalance of duty, and all the gestures and motions of the day will be joyful.  This is the liberty of childhood, which we can repossess again, from time to time, in snatches.  But only in snatches.  Once the sabbatical ends, so too will this attitude toward the world.

It occurs to me now that I have entered into an agreement with my employers, which on the surface seems to benefit me, but in the end may not do either of us any good.  They, who possessed no portion of my imaginative life before, possess more of it than I would like now.  If poetry is to remain sacred to me, then it must remain apart from my duty to feed and clothe myself.  It ought to be in opposition to the desire for praise and respect.  It must root in the heart and branch out from there.  Its password must be love and not obligation.

This is the beginning of an argument for a poetry, which is quite different from the kind we’re used to seeing.  It would require no defense, like the ones which surface now and then and always seem like a dreadful compromise.  Its success would be evident.  Neither can this poetry require 1) a sequestering from the world, nor 2) a child’s attitude toward it, whether that be of fear or wonder.  It must be a poetry of adults for adults.  What else can sustain a man but the love of a woman, and what sustains a woman but the love of a man?  And the same is true for homosexual relationships and the closest friendships between all people.

There is a place for fear and wonder, but these must be experienced in the heart of an adult.  Poetry must fill the adult heart, which is big and powerful and healthy.  This love must be fully grown, or else it will always need defending.  Or else it will always need to compromise itself.  Think of the awful pull of our daily lives, and you will begin to see what I mean.  Poetry must be equally attractive, equally vital, equally relentless.  We must feel that without it, we couldn’t live.  This is a goal worth aiming for.  All other poetry would be too cute, weak or irrelevant.  It would require pretty arguments and generous grants.  No temple can be built on that.

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One Use for Poetry

Posted on January 22, 2009 by Adam Penna

Poetry.  I, too, dislike it, Marianne Moore says.  But one would have to be a fool to take her seriously.  Her stance, in the poem, is of course 1) rhetorical and 2) ironic.  A modernist  must, if she wants to be taken seriously, assume both of these positions to preserve her earnest nature.  That, it seems to me, is one use of poetry that doesn’t receive much attention.  Poetry acts as a kind of arena, where deadly serious play can be practiced.  In that arena, one exercises the essential gestures of life.  Therefore, if one looks closely at a poem one may find the genuine.  I guess, in most cases, the very least would be the genuine urge to get IT right.  And IT, in this case, would be life, the living of life.

It is safe in poetry to question one’s most sincerest convictions.  In the world it isn’t so safe.  Our convictions must be, to a certain extent, fixed and tested, because convictions lead to actions and, as I’ve heard it said, there is no telling where action may lead.  A good poet, who has managed to tests his convictions, might even come to possess a kind of second-sight.  I’m not talking about fortunetelling here.  Not even close.  What I’m saying is that the experience of concentration – the kind of concentration poetry requires – is the recognition, with every twist and turn, that one has been here before.  Everything seems suddenly familiar.  The serendipitous becomes the everyday.  It is a wonder, thereafter, that one missed the obvious connections between things, and not the other way around.

After poetry, one might be surprised that the world ever seemed threatening or strange.  That jostling in the brush isn’t a monster.  It is a friend.  Perhaps he comes to bring you bad news, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a friend.  And should that news stop your heart, consider it a mercy, because to have survived the shock would have been worse.  We are the strangers in this world, desiring speech from the incommunicable mass, as Steven puts it.  The world means us neither harm nor good.  It’s kisses are sweet always to a part of us, the part that is nature’s kin.

The center of being isn’t far away. It is quite close, and yet it might take a lifetime of prodding the dark to touch it.  Then, what would that experience be?  I think an earnest and more or less fearless individual might touch the center, the core, many times and still misunderstand the experience.  Once it comes as a shock, once it comes as universal love, once it comes as fatigue.  But it is the same experience.  And it doesn’t seem to matter how prepared one is for the rendezvous.  That which is genuine always outshines all prefatory exercises.  And each experience, whether more or less intense, finds a new person and leaves a newer person still.

The hope of poetry is that one, at last, utters something true, that one speaks words equal to experience.  Only the best poets achieve a poetry like this.  Most never understand the question and, finding some style which suits them, continue in that spirit or, worse still, never settle the matter of style and think changing costumes alters the creature inside.  Only the genuine experience rightly named and understood alters the creature inside.  And the alterations I mean aren’t changes so much as they are recognitions.  The successful poet sees what is and, as a result of this seeing, changes his understanding of what he thinks he is to what he is actually, whether that be a luminous angel or some paltry nude.

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Some Notes on Thomas Merton & His Poetry

Posted on January 13, 2009 by Adam Penna

I’m participating in a writing group, whose aim is to study the works of Thomas Merton.  We will meet every other Tuesday, for about three months or so, to discuss original essays inspired by the writings of the Trappist monk and poet.  I was first introduced to Merton a few years ago.  I don’t remember how, though I suspect it was from reading something else, and seeing his name, and thinking: why not?  The book may have been the American Book of Religious Poetry, co-edited by Harold Bloom.  I know I read Merton’s poems in the book, which I liked well-enough.  At least, I liked them well-enough to begin reading what turned out to be a pretty impressive body of work.  Merton was prolific if nothing else.

I started with Thoughts in Solitude, I think, and then moved on to New Seeds of Contemplation, eventually getting to his spiritual autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain.  I’ve read other Merton works, from a treaties on Bernard of Clairvaux to translations from The Wisdom of the Desert Fathers.  The last I like very much, and keep next to my bed on my nightstand, which is really less a nightstand than a bookshelf.

If you’ve never read Merton, but would like a taste, I might recommend a book called Dialogues with Silence, a collection of prayers and drawings.  It’s a handsome book.

But I haven’t begun writing this post merely to talk about my reading habits.

The title of this blog, or the subtitle, is Starting from Poetry.  The idea, for me anyway, is that one ought to start from poetry.  Obviously, this gives terrific authority to poetry.  I might have instead called it Starting from Reality, because I’m not always sure where one begins and the other ends.  It should be clear from this that when I say poetry, I don’t mean verse or the sort of thing one finds typically in a poetry anthology.  I mean, perhaps – in the best cases – what those poems aim to find.  I mean more what Dickinson means, when she says: True Poems–flee.  Or what Stevens means, when he suggests that poetry, like prayer, ought to be practice in times of solitude and silence, as in the earliest morning.

I’ve read Merton’s poems, and have found them lacking.  At least, they don’t quite do for me what I want poetry to do.  He is much more the poet, as far as I’m concerned, when he is writing these intense meditations in a book like New Seeds of Contemplation.  It seem that Merton the poet – and this isn’t always true, but it is true enough – separates, for a good portion of his career, the act of contemplation, which for him was holy and a means of uniting the soul to the beloved, from the act of writing a poem.  His poems seem, instead, to be a literary endeavor.  It may be that his religious and political convictions prohibited him from participating as fully as he might have in the act of poetry, when he was writing poetry.

I suspect there will be some who argue that I have got this all wrong.  That’s fine.  I might have it all wrong, and I welcome a swat if I deserve one.  However, tastes are tastes, and there is probably little anyone else can do to help me see the virtue I desire in Merton’s poetry.  I might, after a few years or months, come back to Merton’s poems and find, indeed, what I had been looking for and failed to discover now.  That has happened to me many times before.  And, who knows, perhaps my understanding of what poetry is and does will change.  This, too, has happened before, though less frequently and less dramatically.  Usually, this change is a correction or a refining and not a refutation of former convictions, though this happens.

But back to Merton.

This Christmas, I read a very compelling and convincing book on Merton’s poetry by a poet named Fred Smock.  The book’s basic argument is that Merton’s peace work gave shape to the poetry.  And, according to the preface, the book “considers poetry as an act of political engagement.”  Smock’s approach to writing the book – the pages consist of rather small, chapter-like meditations – is essentially a poetic approach.  I suspect, though I can’t know, that he wrote the preface and settled on his argument only after most if not all of the book was written.  In other words, he discovered his thesis as a result of the reflective act of writing the book and thinking about Merton’s poems.  Equally possible is the chance that the thesis was an inevitable one.  Smock’s temperament and experience couldn’t lead him to any other conclusion, and Merton’s work couldn’t either.

However, what Smock considers a strength of Merton’s poetry, I consider a flaw.  Or, if not a flaw, then something else, but not poetry.  It’s not that I think poets ought to steer clear of political engagement.  American poets, because we live in a democracy, have an obligation to explore political themes.  Nor do I think that poets shouldn’t, wherever possible, advocate for peace.  An argument for peace, to be convincing, must be poetical.  But it seems to me that these make poor aims for poetry.  Suggesting that these are the aims of poetry, reduces poetry to a mere literary endeavor.  A kind of rhetoric, which serves an altogether human argument.  If the argument for peace comes as a result of aiming for poetry, then so be it.  If a political poem points beyond the merely political, then terrific.  However, the proper aim of poetry is poetry, that larger realm, which – again as Stevens put it – must have the force of reality or none at all.

I’m not saying that Merton doesn’t do this.  That he doesn’t aim beyond the merely literary.  I just mean to say that if he is successful as a poet, the study of his poetry must find in his poems, where they touch the mystery, that which “flees.”  There are such places.  Many places even.  However, in the final analysis, the film of Merton’s convictions, both political and religious, may be thick enough to keep him from being consumed by that which he touches, and ultimately, may be too opaque to let us follow and touch, where he might have gone.

After reading some of the above, I realize now that there is still another possibility for the subtitle of this blog, which may be more accurate still, and that is: Starting for Poetry.  Even here, one might like to touch, what is just beyond one’s reach.

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Readings, Readings, Readings

Posted on January 10, 2009 by Adam Penna

As much as I dislike giving them, readings are a necessary part of poetry.  A poem is meant to be heard and, further, meant to be heard by an audience.  Plus, they are, readings are convenient – is that the right word? – opportunities to begin the process of gathering a collection together.  Picking and choosing which poems work together and in what order, and then testing that order and those poems by reading them to an audience hastens the long and tedious process – the part of the process that takes the longest for me to complete, by the way – of making a coherent collection.

I’m scheduled to read tonight at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor.  It’s one of my favorite places in the world, and the shop is run by two women, who I admire terrifically and like a lot.  I probably read there once a year or so.  It seems that whatever work I’m working on doesn’t really exist for me until I read it there.  I owe the publication of The Love of a Sleeper to a Canio’s reading.  It was after a reading there last fall (’07) that George Held suggested I submit a manuscript to Finishing Line.  I did, and the rest is history.

But still, the part of poetry I like the most isn’t the reading.  It is the making.  The initial coming together of a poem.  I just wrote one a few minutes ago, which – though I’m sure flawed in many, many ways – came together just like that.  (Insert Snap! here.)  One word led to the next to the next to the next, until, voila, a poem came into being.  The poem is about a kind of diminished joy, one felt not in victory but in the impotence of defeat.  There is a joy to be found there, too.  And it is a more commonly experienced joy, though frequently – more often than not – it is overlooked or misnamed.  That idea, the misnaming of experience, interests me most in poetry.  Each poem is, I think, an opportunity to get it right.  The naming of a thing, which – without its label – can’t be comprehended.  It can be felt, but not totally understood.  Or even – and this may be truer – partially understood.  We are always walking around in the dark, and words, well, are the light of the world, to paraphrase Stevens.

I don’t want to overstate the case here.  Poetry isn’t the only way to name one’s experiences.  It may not even be the best way.  But it is, without a doubt and certain beyond dispute, the way poets come to understand.  And I used to be fond of thinking that this placed poets above and beyond their fellow men and women, because they attempted to name in particular language what others were willing to take second- or even third-hand.  But now I wonder if it isn’t some essential flaw in them, a sensitivity too fond, which requires them to reach for equilibrium.  

Maybe this isn’t quite what I mean either.  Maybe poetry is a noble effort, even the noblest of efforts, only its benefits are sorely overestimated and too highly prized.  Maybe the aim of poetry, beyond reflection and revision, is to strip us as naked as possible, so that we might be whipped by the wind.  So that we might see, indeed, what actually is, who we actually are, this mingling of spirit and dust.

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Revise, Revise

Posted on January 8, 2009 by Adam Penna

At the end of Rilke’s poem on the busted up bust of Apollo, he concludes: You must change your life.  The idea is that, after looking at this vital work of art, one that retains all its power despite or even because of its condition, the poet feels less alive, and therefore must start living.  Not only does Rilke redefine what it means to be alive – in other words, living means more than breathing in and out, sleeping, feeding and copulating – but he points out the aim of all good art, and that is, to offer us the opportunity to get busy living or get busy dying.

So what does that have to do with this newest incarnation of my blog?

A lot.

I’m not new to blogging.  I started my first blog – this one – in like August of ’07.  The idea, then, was to visit every day or so, and say a few things about poetry and poets.  I was scheduled to teach a class on the art of poetry in the fall, and so I thought the blog might supplement my lectures, and, if nothing else, it would be a good way for me to gather my thoughts before I walked into the classroom – where I prefer to be spontaneous, rather than read from lecture notes – so that when I did walk into the classroom, I wouldn’t be flying blind.  Not that I mind flying blind.  Actually, I kind of like it and have discovered I’m at my best when I do, but I thought it might be a good thing for students, blah, blah, blah.

I did this for a while.  That is, until I realized none of my students were visiting the site, as far as I could tell and as most of the discussion in class more or less proved.  And not only weren’t any of my students visiting, but judging by the search terms which led to the site, the students who were may have been interested for reasons which are less than noble, if you catch my drift.  If you don’t, then I’ll speak plainly.  The posts on the site were being plagiarized.

So I stopped.  I backed up the posts I had posted, deleted everything and decided enough of that.  The next semester I used the same blog address for another reason, and the semester after, still another.  I like the idea of a blog as class supplement, and will probably use it again in the future to update students about this or that, or post images, distribute texts, etc.  But not here, and certainly not now.  Why?  Because I’m on sabbatical.

I might talk more about what a sabbatical is later, for those who don’t know – assuming anyone reads this – but for now, let’s just say and let this definition suffice, that a sabbatical is a rest.  Or that’s what it’s supposed to be.  The word sabbatical is related to the word sabbath, which is the seventh day of the Jewish week, where Jews, like God after the creation, stop what they’re doing and rest.  It’s funny, but when you think about how civilized a concept that is, it reveals how uncivilized many of our lives are.  Is there a day you set a side for no other reason than rest?  Most people can’t say there is.  And a day off from work isn’t that same thing as rest.

Even my rest isn’t rest entirely.  In order to be granted a sabbatical I had to prove that what I would be doing instead of teaching would equal full-time work.  This I don’t mind because being a full-time poet requires both less and more than being a full-time English prof.  And the less that work requires allows more time and energy for the more that poetry requires.  Anyway, the point is this: one of the objects of a day of rest is reflection, and the point of reflection, as far as I can figure, is revision.  That is, an opportunity to conclude: You must change your life.

Well, changing your life isn’t so easy.  But changing your blog is.  So I’ve started there.  My aim here is to visit not necessarily every day and say a few words about what is what.  I suspect many of the posts will relate to poetry, but I’m sure the posts will be more wide ranging than that.  And, if I do it right, the effort will lead to the kind of opportunity I’m looking to find.

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