poetry

Today I gave this talk to “Triad,” a group of Oregon State University faculty and retired faculty.

“Opening Up Malcolm” will be published next year in POETRY EAST.  “Blessing” was published last fall in RATTLE.  “A Summer Day” was published originally in SPIRITUS

A few months ago a friend told me a story, about an experience she had in a dissection class, with a cadaver, and as soon as I heard the phrase “Opening Up Malcolm,” I asked if I could turn the story into a poem.

Opening Up Malcolm

Who could have guessed

the cadaver would be someone

she had known

years before, a beloved teacher,

with his grizzled beard

and thinning hair,

or how beautiful he was

when they flipped him over

and slit him open

and the ganglion of nerves

at the base of the spine

spilled out into the air,

the Cauda Equina,

a gathering of filaments

for a moment so luminous,

so like pearl,

all the students wept

behind their masks?

     This is the little poem I want to start with, as an example, and as I’ve been thinking about it, I’ve been thinking that there are, let’s say, five ways that it’s like a prayer—that it is a prayer–and that the writing of it was a kind of spiritual practice.

     First, when you write a poem, as when you pray, you assume that there is great meaning in small and ordinary things.

     As a Christian I believe that the world is “charged with the grandeur of God,” as Gerard Manly Hopkins puts it, that because of the Incarnation Christ is lovely in 10,000 places, and so life, too, is a sacred text and prayer is autobiography and everything that happens is significant, especially the small and the ordinary.  This is the assumption of the ancient Christian prayer technique called the examen, that God speaks to us in our lives and that at the end of each day we pray by reflecting back on our moments of darkness and our moments of light.  This is the assumption of the ancient way of reading the Bible called lectio divina, “divine reading”, that the stories in scripture speak to us about what’s happening here and now, even to you and to me–that our own seas are being parted–we are being raised.

     That’s why I don’t just write about obviously spiritual things, though I often do, but why I often write about my dogs and about birds, about the woods, about dreams.

     Secular poets name this mystery in a different way, but the point is that there’s a mystery and that it gets revealed in the concrete, in image, and so people who pray do what poets do.  We pay attention, or try to.

     This is Walter Burghardt’s definition of prayer: “a long, loving look at the real.”

     Second, a prayer like a poem begins with a lump in the throat.

     This is what Robert Frost said about poems, that they always begin with a lump in the throat, which is to say that poetry doesn’t begin with ideas but with the wordless, oddly enough, begins and ends with something that can never be put into words but only pointed at.

     I’m a Catholic deacon, ordained to hatch, match and dispatch–baptize, marry, and bury.  I wear a collar sometimes and vestments sometimes, and I preach and serve at mass, and I visit the sick and do retreats.  But as a Catholic poet I don’t walk around with a Catholic doctrine in my head looking for things to illustrate it.  I begin with an image.  I begin with this feeling of falling in love, with some moment that has moved me somehow, and I never exactly know what it means.

     Here’s the poem again:

Opening Up Malcolm

Who could have guessed

the cadaver would be someone

she had known

years before, a beloved teacher,

with his grizzled beard

and thinning hair,

or how beautiful he was

when they flipped him over

and slit him open

and the ganglion of nerves

at the base of the spine

spilled out into the air,

the Cauda Equina,

a gathering of filaments

for a moment so luminous,

so like pearl,

all the students wept

behind their masks?

      Looking at it now I can see that once again I’ve written about something beautiful hidden in the body and in our ordinary life, something spiritual, I guess, and people are weeping behind their “masks,” behind their false selves, and death is a “teacher,” as this body is teacher.  I can see all kinds of meanings.  But I wasn’t thinking of those meanings as I was writing, and there’s not just one meaning, and you might interpret the poem differently than I do, and there’s always something in a poem, even a mediocre poem, that can’t be translated out.  The interpretation is always secondary, the poem is closer to the mystery, and this is the key to understanding what Christian and Jewish tradition has always seen as the secondary role of theology and doctrine.  All theology, David Tracy says, proclaims its “intrinsic inadequacy,” and that’s not just a new idea.  “Of course we don’t know what we’re talking about,” Augustine said in the fourth century.  “If we knew what we were talking about we wouldn’t be talking about God.”  The whole point of doctrine is to keep insisting that there’s something beyond human understanding.

     As George Dennis O’Brien puts it, what the angels announced above the stable in Bethlehem wasn’t a topic for conversation.

    

     Third, in prayer as in poetry we both lose ourselves and find ourselves.

     My mind wanders a lot when I try to pray.  I get bogged down in my own inner gossip, my own inner bureaucracy, and working on a poem helps me to focus on something else, and when the poem is working, it takes me out of myself entirely.  I’m the camera, not what’s being photographed.  And what’s odd about that and inevitably true is that at exactly the moment I forget about myself entirely I start to feel free and happy, I start to feel like myself, my true self.

     “I never completely forget myself except when I am writing,” Flannery O’Connor says, “and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing,” and this involves a tricky thing that doesn’t very often happen but sometimes does.  You try to “leave the outcome out of your personal considerations,” she says.  You don’t think about publication or praise.  You’re just caught up.

     Fourth, poetry like prayer is something you have to practice.

     In poetry as in prayer you have to wait for inspiration, you can’t just produce it on demand, but at the same time you have to set up a discipline, a routine, showing up every day at the same time in the same place and just gutting it out sometimes, just living through the many moments when you’re empty and dull.  I say that in poetry as in prayer I lose myself, but a lot of the time I don’t.  I’m stuck in my own mind.  I just sit there and feel bored or angry or depressed.  I just sit there obsessed with the outcome, lusting for attention.  Sometimes for long periods I even experience what the spiritual tradition calls desolation, complete emptiness and dryness.

      But practice is necessary and dryness is inevitable and even desolation is a gift, is understood by the tradition as having great spiritual content, if only because it reminds us of our need for grace, reminds us that we’re not spiritual athletes.  “Contradictions, humiliations, all the soul’s miseries, her burdens, her needs, everything is the direct effect of Our Father’s Love,” St Theresa of Lisieux says, because “through them she learns humility, she realizes her weakness.”  I think this is why a lot of people don’t stick with writing or with prayer, because they don’t want to face this darkness, this complexity, and I don’t blame them.  It’s hard as hell.  But that’s the challenge.  Poetry and prayer are both practices because you just have to keep working at them, day in and day out, exactly so you can keep realizing how finally nothing you do matters anyway.  All you can be is available.

     Finally, poetry is like prayer because it’s both completely useless and infinitely important.

     I’ve driven two hundred miles to read poems to six people.  I had several poems published in the last few months.  Who here has read them?  I wrote a poem last week, sitting alone in my study at the edge of the woods.  Who cares?  But I don’t ask that with bitterness but with a kind of joy, because the obscurity of the poet confers a real freedom and because lots of things we do are obscure, maybe everything.  Who cares when you throw a pot or plant a flower?  Who thinks about the quiet suffering or joy of any other person among all the billions alive today or who have ever lived except now and then and for a fleeting moment?

      But what I believe as a Christian or am called to believe, what I struggle to believe and sometimes do, is that we are all at the same time infinitely important, that every living thing matters, even cats, even amoebas, and that though I’m no better than anyone else I’m no worse, we all have our own small part to play, and that in fact every creative act, every healthy gesture, in some mysterious way helps advance the work of creation, which is still going on and always going on.  We have to approach everything we do as the Jesuit Anthony DeMello says we should approach prayer, with the idea that we do it not just for ourselves but “for all of creation, of which we are a part.”  Another Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin, imagines our mental action creating a kind of energy that helps the universe evolve:

     A thought, a material improvement, a harmony, a unique nuance of human love, the enchanting complexity of a smile or a glance—the spiritual success of the universe is bound up with the release of every possible energy in it.  Our smallest tasks contribute infinitesimally, at least indirectly, to the building of something definitive.  We serve to complete the work of creation, even by the humblest work of our hands.

There is an intricate ecology.  The voles eat the mushrooms and the owls eat the voles and the owls spread the spoors in their droppings and without the droppings the great trees wouldn’t grow.  And we are the mushrooms, we are the voles.  The droppings.  The spoor.

      Three more poems to conclude with, with more explicitly religious themes.  My experiences as a deacon have been a rich source of story for me as a poet, especially my experiences with death and dying, and these are three of those stories.

     The first one begins with a funny line but really I’m being quite serious and writing about something very sad and hard.

Blessing

I am called to bless a bathroom.  A young poet

has committed suicide there.  Her boyfriend found her

and tried to revive her.  He was soaked with blood

when the EMTs arrived, and then the police, and though

he’s moved out now, and the biological hazard team

has scrubbed the blood away, the landlord and the boyfriend

and the boyfriend’s father want some kind of further

cleansing, maybe a kind of magic.  But who am I to say?

So I drive to the complex, a warren of condominiums,

chalky and cheap, and I wander around until I find theirs,

and I knock on the door and introduce myself to the parents,

fifties, disheveled, in dirty sweatshirts and jeans, and

they take me down the hall, past boxes and piles of clothes.

The apartment is new, the bathroom small and bright.

I squeeze in by the toilet, stand against the wall, facing

the mirror, and say the prayers for the dead and the blessing

for a house, my voice echoing, and with a small, plastic

bottle begin to sprinkle the room with holy water.  The vanity.

The mirror.  The clean, fiberglass tub.  Perpetual light

shine upon her, oh Lord.  Amen.  The boyfriend couldn’t bear

to come.  His mother and father stand in the doorway, bowing

their heads.  And as I wave the bottle and say the words,

the cap flies off, it pops, bouncing into the bottom of the tub,

and I have to lean over to get it, picking it up off the slick,

shiny surface of the fiberglass.  May she rest in peace,

I say, embarrassed now, but alert, too.  Aware.  The words

as they echo sound so good to me in that hollow place,

and proper, and true.  May the souls of all the faithful departed

through the mercy of God rest in peace.  Then I turn, trace

the cross in the air, and give the final blessing–in my left hand

the cap, about the size of a dime, with a hole in the middle.

Like the prize in a box of crackerjacks.  A whistle, or a top.

      The key to this poem for me is the popping off of that top and how it bounced in the bathtub.  It took me a long time to get to that and describe that and I’m not exactly sure what it means.  I’m really not.  I’m not being a smart aleck in describing that.  I’m not being ironic.   I’m tired of irony.  I’m just trying to being honest, just trying to describe what actually happened, and somehow for me it’s meaningful, is what Augustine would call a “drop of time,” and in that drop I feel Christ lovely in ten thousand places, even in a bathroom, and the joy and the grace of this somehow exist simultaneously with the silliness and the sadness and the great grief, and every moment is tacky and ordinary and yet full of grace, full of meaning, and I name this Christ, I know this as Christ, and all I try to do is honor that and see that, take a long, loving look at that,  though I can’t finally put what I see and feel into words.

The Rosary Confuses My Dogs

When, walking in the woods,

I pull out my long black rosary,

the beads loop down and jingle

a little like the leash when I pull it out

to put the dogs back on.

And the dogs, when they hear it,

come running up,

heads cocked, tongues lolling.

No, I say.  It’s OK.

And they bound away again.

     This is what poetry is for me, and this is what prayer is.  They are the rosary and the leash.  They are the path and the bounding away from it.  They are the morning.  The trees.

A Summer Day

A ukulele band strums by the grave

of an old woman I never knew.

I lead the prayers, alb flapping,

helping to lay the body to rest,

and as the family lingers,

quietly walk away, down the hill

to another grave I remember from before.

It was winter then, and the oak was bare,

and the one we buried was a boy.

I keep thinking he’ll be cold,

the father said.  He’ll need his coat.

But it’s summer now, and the farmers

are haying in their yellow fields.

The dust of the harvest is softening the air.

And as I stand at the marker, looking out,

a feeling starts to come over me,

a kind of peace, almost like the peace

I prayed for up the hill, the peace of God,

which surpasses all understanding.

It spreads through my body like warmth.

I know.  I’m just saying what happened.

I’m just saying that it surprised me, too.

The farmers and the yellow fields.

The warm, summer wind.

The ukulele band, strumming still.

     This is how I think poetry is like prayer, how poetry is a spiritual practice.  Or at least, this is how writing poetry is a spiritual practice for me.  I’m just trying to describe what happens.  I’m just standing at the grave, looking out.  I’m just strumming my ukulele.