Adam Penna

It’s been more than a year since my last post.  It’s been a year and three months, almost to the day.  This doesn’t mean I haven’t wanted to.  I’ve tried.  About a half-dozen drafts, begun and aborted, exist.  But the more I wrote, the less committed I was to what I was writing.  I said to Sarah the other day that I feel as if I’ve said everything I wanted to say here and to say more would feel redundant.  It is perhaps more accurate to say that I’ve said all I mean to say about the things I have been saying.  More importantly, the way I have been saying the things I have been saying no longer suits the why of why I write.  Or something like that.

So it must be the New Year’s blood coursing through me then, because I’ve decided to resurrect several old projects.  This blog is only one of them.  I’ve relaunched Best Poem, the little magazine I started some years ago.  I’ve reached back into the archives to discover some of the old poems I wrote aren’t so dusty and musty after all.  I’ve collected them into a manuscript.  And I’ve submitted a few of those poems to find that at least two editors agree with my assessment.  I’ve started to run again, too.  Something has changed.

To call this change revision, however, would be wrong, since I’m not changed much.  I see all that I have seen with the same eyes.  These birds are the same birds I catalogued and named, when I lived in the cottage on Shelter Island and was happy.  These trees are the ones I attempted to resemble when the big storm came to tear up our lives.  But what bird remains a bird, what tree remains a tree, after the winds die down and the beautiful day is revealed again?  After a while, those wings and limbs get tired and would rather shrug than fly or leave.

I’ve struggled against things as they are.  I’m speaking mostly now about my personal life but I’m also talking about my professional and artistic lives.  I’ve desired for things to be other than they are, and now, I don’t know – maybe it’s because I turned 39 this year, or maybe it’s the dawning of wisdom – I’m not struggling so much.  I still would have had things turn out differently from how they have turned out, but maybe now – and this is where poetry comes in – maybe now, I’ve concluded something else.

I still can’t say what it is, but I sense it.  It’s there.  A presence, a residue of the old life remains, and it colors everything.  But the most recent dye, whose saturation overwhelmed the entire palette, has faded some.  Time, Rilke says, doesn’t heal all things.  Rather, it puts everything in its proper place.  The catastrophes of this year feel so much more catastrophic than they are.  They are catastrophic, but where they fit in the constellation of catastrophes and joys isn’t quite clear to us yet.  That’s Rilke’s reasoning, not mine exactly.  But I get it.  I see where it suits.

Poetry has taught me one thing of enduring value, and that is to rely on revision.  The older I get, the more difficult it becomes to be elastic.  This is as true of my hamstrings as it is of my spirit.  And when either is wounded, it takes longer and longer to recover.  And it feels sometimes as if I would rather not recover at all.  The way seems too long, the journey to health too difficult.  But something carries me, pushes me along – I don’t know whether this thing is divine or not, but still it pushes – and I find myself cured, healed.  I’m not the thing I was, and I’m not what I used to be before all that.  I am a split thing.  I am a split thing re-joined.

I look at the poems I’ve written over the last several years, and I see the splitting, and I see the crazy scars, where those wounds healed over.  And I see where the weakened parts buckled under further pressure.  And I see where I limped along, dragging the distorted extremity behind me.  But I see, too, where I stand now.  It’s winter, so the shadow stretches a long way.  It touches the house.  It lies on the lawn and on the stoop.  It points the direction I must go.  It turns with me.  It is a friend, a companion.  It is a reminder that there is still time to love.

I can’t love in the old way, the way that failed.  But I can love in the way that now seems to me most genuine.  And that is what poetry teaches beyond everything else.  It cautions us against returning to old lies and mistakes.  But it also reminds us that there are new ways, new paths, new routes to love.  And until every one has been exhausted, it isn’t time to die.  It must be time to live.

I feel differently about poetry these days.  It’s hard to say just how, except to say that I don’t feel the same.  I wonder what that means, but I’m not sure it matters much.  I write less, I think less, I care less.  At times it feels like peace or what I might have imagined peace felt like before I felt like this.  The wind draws on the blinds, a plane passes overhead, the cat announces, “I am here!”  I might have run to scribble these into a poem, and then follow each thought as each thought comes, and finally try to hear what it is that troubles me or what calls to me for celebration or praise.  But it seems praise enough merely to register the sensations, and if anything troubles me it isn’t more than the obvious, which is, after all, no more or less than most people’s troubles.  Life is unsatisfying here, my will wasn’t enough there, I wanted more and gave less where I might have given everything.

Maybe it isn’t poetry I feel differently about.  But it seems as if I’ve crossed some threshold.  “What next?” I ask, and I’m not surprised by what comes.  Or, if I am surprised, I am no longer surprised by the surprise.  This world is marvelous.  These ten thousand things, as the Chinese say, are all marvels to behold.  And I might even add to this marvelous world yet one more testament.  Here a new book begins.  Its first page says, “I know before I know.”  Its last line I might already read.  If this sounds cryptic, it is because my first perceptions or my first attempts at articulating always are.  I know that now about myself, and would ask you – whoever you are – not to be surprised or put off or worried.  Soon I’ll say exactly what I mean.  By then, for me anyway, it will be all but untrue.  It will be a fact.  For now it is so alive in me no words touch it.  And the ones that come close don’t suffice.

I remember when I first decided to be a poet.  Or rather, when I first thought: I could do that.  It seemed as if I had merely found a name for a thing I had known a long time.  Eventually, I set out to cultivate that thing.  Now it sits with me, both a part of me and something besides.  I might have called it, in a previous post, that which is divine.  But that seems silly to me now.  That would only be a trope.  It would be the finger pointing to the moon and not the moon.  And this leads me to the question: Having seen the thing, do all the songs about it dissolve?  Must they?  Should they?  It seems, at least, that a poetry which might be called the poetry of return would have to be different from the poetry of setting out.  Perhaps this is where the real poetry begins.  Where seeing becomes vision!  Where everything is always what it is and something else.  The poetry that preceded this pointed to this.  It was a groping in a dark world, which is now illuminated.

I have thought that the use of poetry, for the conscientious poet, is to provide a kind of paradise, where a listening might occur.  There the poet, according to one theory, becomes better for having arrived.  According to a later theory, the poet becomes better than he otherwise would have been.  According to this new understanding, if it is so new, the poet, having seen the best and worst, thinks nothing of either.  He greets calamity and good news with equanimity.  For him, each step is a step closer to the end.  And what is that end?  If he knows, he doesn’t say.  Why should he?  His work lies before him to do.  So he does it.  It is the simple work of putting one foot in front of the other.  If he set out, he must return.  What he came to find, he found.  If he should be still walking at dusk, what he goes to meet will greet him like a friend.  It may be the last surprise he can hope to have.  It won’t be one because he didn’t expect it but because he did, and it came like a promise fulfilled.

I hope that, arriving where I have to go, I don’t spoil the homecoming.  I want to recognize it and fail to utter a sound.  Let me step into my vision the way a sleepwalker steps into his bed.  I have been that man once.  I will be him again.  My body waits for me where I left it.  My wife, my love, the few good things I know in this world, lie there, too.  This is prayer which springs spontaneously to the lips and tastes, not like ashes and not like honey, but something both sweeter and bitterer than either of these, until who can say which sensation is which.  It occurs to me now to mention something I saw and wondered at last year: a sparrow, the old song sparrow from the hedge, sitting by the rose bush, watching sunset.  I know he knew all there was to know.  This, I thought, has nothing to do with poetry.  This is something else.  Next time I’ll keep even that thought away and wave at all attempts at articulation, until the air is clear.

My attitudes about poetry can leave my students a little confused.  But I’m not sure this confusion is always genuine.  It seems sometimes a kind of resistance, which insists on a holding fast to a belief long after it has been revealed to be unsound or inadequate.  This resistance stems from two possible causes: 1) immature powers of reasoning, which for most adolescents is developmentally appropriate, and 2) a desire for mystery.  Obviously—or maybe not so obviously—the second of the two causes is less harmful than the first.  Everyone must cultivate a desire for mystery, and finding it, defend it even against reason.  But in a student both of these attitudes are self-defeating.  Teachers of higher education work diligently to help students develop sufficient powers of reason and some, perhaps incidentally, encourage the feeling of wonder, which may be more essential to happiness, assuming happiness and not understanding is the chief end of life.  I’m not so sure happiness alone is enough, and we may do better to be a little more forceful about the necessity for inquiry and, ultimately, inquiry whose aim is to change students from the things they were to the things they still might be.

If this language sounds religious, it should.  There, too, a great misunderstanding lies.  People turn to religion for comfort, and for many it provides exactly what they want.  For some, though far fewer, it provides exactly what they need.  But the promise of religion, in the highest sense, doesn’t guarantee happiness any more than it promises miracles.  What it does promise is to bring a person closer to God, and when I use the word promise here I must do so loosely or perhaps it is more accurate to say strictly, since the word promise is related to the word mission.  A promise is that which is sent before the desired object arrives.  For too many the promise becomes confused with the mission.  They follow John the Baptist into the desert and leave before the miracle arrives.  One goes into the desert not to find the desert, though one’s life may be made better there than it otherwise would have been.  One goes into the desert, or wilderness, to find God.  And the same is true of church or of the bible.  If you go to the bible to find the bible or to church to find the church, you may be successful and you may be happy, but it will not be the truth, and therefore, will not be what you need.

A student studies to find something, too.  In the case of poetry, whether led to it, dragged to it, or attracted to it, the aim isn’t simply to read poetry and figure out the puzzle of patterned language.  The verse techniques, which independently mean little or nothing, are as far as most students and teachers are likely to go.  Many of them go this far only to discover they are as confused as they had been before and many prefer it this way.  A similar phenomenon occurs with math.  Students taking courses in mathematics find it difficult.  Some find the equations impossible.  And so they give up, and thereafter are made satisfied by accepting, as if it were a fact, that they are simply no good at math.  The difference between math and poetry—and I’m not certain why this is—is that students often blame poetry for their confusion and not themselves.  It is because of this that I try to emphasize not the verse techniques of a poem, but something else.  I ask: Why would someone learn to do something so difficult and, according to your experience, so undesirable?  Certainly, I say, it isn’t so that a teacher of poetry like me might torture you with learning it.

I ask myself the same question.  I have been asking it now as long as I have been writing poetry.  Why do it?  The answer has changed over the years, and I suspect that the moment I can answer the question satisfactorily I will cease to write poetry.  (I definitely will cease to write essays about poetry.)  What I have concluded so far is this.  Poetry is always a question in search of an answer.  And, as each poem begins with a question, each poem offers an answer.  The better the answer, the more successful the poem.  The purpose of a poetic career or, one might say, a poetic life is to come closer and closer to a real, true and genuine answer, which causes one to be satisfied with what is.  It is, therefore, the aim of poetry to reconcile one to the truth.  It is to move one’s heart closer to the center of being.  If poetry, or some other way, doesn’t do it, it will not happen.  Many would be just as well off if this centering never occurred.  Consciousness for them remains dim and weak.  Their condition, then, parallels that of animals.  If resistance to poetry comes from the desire not to know, it may be better that a teacher doesn’t fight against it.  Who would be willing to move a sleeping child from the darkness of its room to the harsh and noisy light of the world?

Yet it is exactly this, which teachers are asked to do.  “Wake up” is the call each student hears, whether he understands or not.  There is no danger either of waking up and finding the mystery of existence vanished, as if it were always and only a dream.  The wider one’s eyes open, the more mysterious the world appears.  Poetry’s one message may be this and this only.  One increases the accuracy and the toughness of one’s reason, as a poet or a reader of poetry, to conclude that reason isn’t enough, that what one finds through experience is wider than perception, and that each of the world’s ten thousand things is shot through with marvel.

Until this process begins for an individual, he acts from ignorance and whatever he claims to love or hate, respect or disclaim remains for him half in darkness.  Indeed, he himself remains half in darkness.  What he knows about himself is the least one might know.  What he understands about himself is almost nothing.  Of his weaknesses he thinks too little, and of his strengths he thinks too much.  He is in error about the world, and concludes it is a malicious place or a paradise without knowing what this might mean.  He looks once and finds this aspect of his life wanting, but what can he do about it?  He tries to find fulfillment in his relationships only to experience frustration and disappointment.  Poetry reconciles error.  If the teacher tells us to wake up, poetry tells us that we wake to dream.  Even our pains are illusory.  Nothing touches what is essential in us.  Could we align our consciousnesses with that essence, then we too might stand aloof from the comings and goings which distress us and match every disaster with serene detachment.

Every poet’s career leads him toward this center and away from the periphery.  A student might read a poet’s work from first sonnet to last song and see how he progresses.  In this way, the student understands the possibility of his own journey.  His life, which seemed before a calamity, suddenly transforms.  These errors weren’t errors at all, but something better, truer.  If his will weakens, that is good.  If he drowns, this is better.  His still body will be carried away, and soon it moves over the falls and follows the current where it dumps into the sea.  There he discovers what wonders lie to be found, and how he might have missed them all had he clung to some rock or root to be pummeled by the choppy waters and assaulted by debris.  These things came to loosen him from fear and error.  They are much more his guides than the people safe on the shore, who called and urged, Hold on!  What could they know of his condition, whose feet are planted in sand?

Poetry isn’t religion, but it does engage the spirit.  It is in poetry that one might find the humility necessary for true happiness.  Our frailty and weakness are revealed to us in the long struggle with the art or poetry, and the strength and power of the world, of which we are a part, is measured and felt most by the perceptions poetry inspires.  I said above that the aim of religion is to bring one closer to God.  Here I will say the same is true of poetry.  Poetry neither confirms nor disconfirms God’s existence because it isn’t philosophy or theology.  Rather, like the monk, the poet comes to love God, and not the God of one denomination or another, but the God, whose love moves the universe.  Having confirmed this love and perhaps having redefined it as a result of his experience, the poet returns to us, his arms full of that bounty though his wings may be a little singed and his limp more pronounced.

One goes to poetry not to find poetry, but to find that which poetry invokes.  I am saying here that that experience is the experience of the divine, and it is in us.  The poet, like the hermit, retires from the petty concerns and worries of the world, so that he might conclude finally that this world is the only world, where he might fare so well.  His disappointments are his only.   Where they become another’s, they aren’t disappointments at all.   Rather, each new failure is also an opportunity for consolation.  From the center of one’s being all is one, and we see how fortune’s wheel moves and that nothing whatsoever can be wrong.  Even death, when it comes, comes as a mercy.  What hell is there for those who know our lives begin and end with an act of love?  Search for it, and it appears everywhere.  Fail to search, and still it finds you, whether or not you are ready for it, whether or not you recognize the angel and find the strength to say, Here I am!  What could be more mysterious, more useful, than the notion that our prayers are heard and answered?  What you have called love has only been self-regard.  Let the scope of love widen and soon even the meanest days shine as brilliantly as a star, and the deeds, which seemed like inconstancy or cruelty, are just what one needs to be set free.  This is the joy that finds us, when we live a poetic life.

Early this winter, I was startled by a flock of starlings.  They had been nesting in the cypress tree which flanks the garage, and when I came around the corner with the trash cans they flew out from hiding.  They hadn’t been there until the moment I came upon them.  And, even for a moment after, they weren’t there.  Only, they seemed the intense and violent thunder of wings.  I watched as they circled the house.  A group of those black bodies lit first curiously in the bare maple, and a few on the roof to watch me.  I could feel their eyes on me.  Each of those speckled bodies seemed to have a hundred eyes, and the tree itself seemed alive with eyes.  When I first realized, or perhaps it was a moment before I realized, what they were, I raised my arms over my head, as if to praise the miracle of flight.  I was as much praising the miracle of wonder, which seems the best part of consciousness.  It springs from us and startles, too.

Even in the worst of moods and times, I don’t tend to lose this capacity.  Wonder may not lift me from what troubles me most, but I feel it nevertheless.  No numbness numbs enough that, when out walking in the field, I don’t feel elated at the sight of the hawk circling or perched in a dark limb.  And the snake, when it appears suddenly at my feet, parts the obscuring blades of my heart, too, when I see it and recoil and watch as it darts away.  It had been wondering at the sun.  Its belly had found its desire there on the beaten earth of the path, and now a new necessity leads it away.

There is the sense, now that I’m old enough to look back on my childhood with a certain wonder usually reserved for things outside the self, that I may have drunk my portion of astonishment.  But it doesn’t seem to work like this.  Perhaps there are some who become filled with less and less wonder – what would the antithesis of wonder be, anyway? – and it is they who venerate childhood, and say those were the best times of their lives.  Erroneously, they conclude that things were simpler then.  Nothing is simple about childhood.  The world is too large and we too small.  Now I walk out underneath the moon, and see it.  And I say, Hello!  And it seems as if she would answer.  I know she doesn’t follow me, but I relish a visit midnight when I am restless and can’t sleep.  She fills the house.  I am not alone.

But what if I woke tomorrow, and no matter how loudly they thundered, the wings failed to lift me away from my chores and my responsibilities?  I have had the great and solemn privilege – I call it this because of what comfort came as the result of the experiences – to watch two close friends die from disease, and both experiences taught me that death isn’t a threshold we cross.  One day we are alive, the next dead.  Rather, we die in stages.  One friend lost the power of speech over the course of an hour.  When I called to say, I’m coming to see you, he could answer, was sentient and happy to greet me, but when I arrived, he couldn’t say anymore, though he seemed to recognize me and liked it that I stroked his hair.  The other did the most peculiar thing.  Even after he was bedridden and couldn’t articulate sense, he continued to drag on an invisible cigarette and comb his hair with his hand to cover a bald spot.  These gestures, I concluded, were so deeply ingrained they were the hardest to shake loose, though eventually they were shaken and, like leaves, flew away.

If wonder goes from me, I hope that it should be the last, and that if my tongues fails first, some gesture, like praying hands or a crooking of my finger, remains to suggest I find this world as miraculous as any imagined one.  I can’t believe in an afterlife, but that isn’t because I lack faith.  I don’t.  But to me faith is action, and so when my body ceases to move and do, and my will evaporates, then there will be nothing left of me but a few words scribbled on a few happy pages.  Let these then be the testament not only that I felt wonder, but that wonder is the best part of life.  It was the best part of my life because when all else abandoned me, wonder remained close, a friend.  The callus that grows to protect us from what would kill us kills us, too.  How can I say, I am alive, if when I see the groundhog emerge in spring, I don’t swell with the sense that at least one species of wonder rises from the ground, as if from death.

As a child, I never learned how to pray.  My parents aren’t religious, and I can’t remember a single instance, when my mother or father uttered the word God.  And yet despite this fact, I have cultivated, through the art of poetry mostly, a reverence for the divine.  When I read poems I look for a similar reverence and find, more often than not, that there is a correlation between a good poem and what might superficially be called piety.  Not the insincere pretending, which anyone might do to seem good, but a kind of goodness, which is good for, well, goodness sake.  This goodness is beyond mere talk of right and wrong, and it certainly isn’t concerned much with social justice.  Poets who labor under the assumption that goodness comes from a desire to do good in the world miss the goodness I mean here.  Their fight is always with the material world, and while it may be true that one’s material circumstances matter, it is more true that this is but another case of treating the symptom rather than curing the disease.  For poetry to be earnest in the best sense of that word – and this is equally or doubly true of prayer – one must start from an urgency.

Last night, I was reading A.R. Ammons’ poems from the book A Coast of Trees, and was struck once again at how much like prayer those poems seem.  When Ammons repeats that “this is just a place,” or asks, “Who will mourn the dead the dead mourned?”, I am reminded of the Pascal Pensee on Diversion.  I bring this up now because Pascal mentions the need for diversion as a means to keep men from thinking about mortality.  If poetry is to penetrate the surface of things and come close to touching the divine, it must reach beyond diversion.  All good poetry does.  And what is prayer but an attempt to reach beyond diversion?  Contemplation, meditation, all acts of true scholarship–these activities of the mind draw attention to causes, perhaps even the cause.  It is in the elegy “Easter Morning” that Ammons most breaks through to touch the answer.  Like with many poets, it is far away from institutions and governments and libraries and schools that he hears it.  In other poems it is the mountain that talks.  But here it is the image of two raptors, one circling and the other doubling back and, finally, both fly on.  All losses, the poem would indicate, are temporary.  The image and Ammons’ vision suggest that those who we lose catch up to us, or we to them.  The finding may be, not so much the doubling back of the dead to this place, but is perhaps – this seems to jive more with reason – that to die is different from what we expected.  It is not loss, but doubling back.

This is Whitman’s point, too, when he contemplates the grass brought to him by the child.  One might argue that Ammons has been influenced by Whitman, but that would miss the truth which every poet knows and, if you have ever prayed in earnest, you have come to understand, too, and that is this.  The answers we need come from the questions we ask and the attitudes we take.  If one needs consoling, one will be consoled.  This is why Christ blesses those who mourn.  It is the desire for consolation, which invokes.  What honest prayer or honest poem has ever come from anything less than this need?  This isn’t prayer or poetry which can be taught.  This isn’t the sort of consolation which might come as the result of a particular policy or ceremony, but indeed, it is all there is of faith.

For me, faith has always been the measure of what I do.  It is an action.  But poetry and, therefore, prayer – because for me, there is no difference between the two – are the ends of faith.  Or, perhaps it is better to say, that faith is the end of prayer and poetry.  It doesn’t matter if the poem asks for strength or praises that which is wonderful.  It doesn’t matter if the poem comes from a profound loss or even more profound despair.  What matters is that one summons the courage to meet the answer where it lies.  True humility is knowing where one thing begins and another ends.  A poet’s job is to know where his poetry ends and his life begins.  And the few and lucky and, perhaps, blessed, for whom these lines are blurred, become the saints in whose utterances we catch a glimpse of that which his ends aimed to find.

They say that one ought never pray for oneself.  Emerson says it is malicious to do so.  But I don’t know how one could do otherwise.  In order to understand my meaning, it would be necessary to understand that for a prayer to be a prayer and a poem to be a poem, the need has to be so absolute and the answer so far beyond the reach of he who asks, that it can’t be fulfilled any other way.  Who would take the long and difficult pass, if the shorter distance would suffice?  The poetry I mean, and the prayer I mean, can’t be learned by rote, but must be forced upon us.  If I have placed my faith in poetry to make me a happier, better man, that faith has not been misplaced.  How could it have been placed elsewhere?  A poem or a prayer is the last resort.  It soothes when nothing else can or will.