I’m enchanted by Richard Chess’s new poetry collection, The Loneliest Monk. And by the loneliest monk himself. Though not all the poems are about this (imagined) monk, I want to focus here on some that are—or at least seem to be. Chess, I should say at the start, is not a monk. But he is a practicing Jew and a poet often reaching for the mystical—qualities that his loneliest monk character shares.
In her poem “Jazz at Bradley’s,” Enid Shomer writes of “the darkness / that must be swallowed to make a song.” As we read through her latest poetry collection, we get a good sense of the darkness she has experienced in her life. She is the daughter of a cruel father. Growing up at a time when women’s roles were narrowly prescribed, she was an independent, ambitious, brilliant young woman. She has recently been living with serious health challenges. She has indeed swallowed plenty of darkness.
In Caroline Fraser’s nonfiction book Murderland, there are charts and metrics, there are photographs, and I wondered about how many other investigators and resources that Fraser must have pulled into her quest in order to develop this vast canvas—the very project she describes in this book’s opening, the effort to pull a thread of yarn from one tragedy to the next, as in a detective’s crime scene map.
In his tenth volume of poetry to date—titled Sing Me a Song, She Said—acclaimed poet and biographer extraordinaire Paul Mariani (born 1940) delves into his childhood and youth in a working-class family in New York City, his evolving relationship with reading and writing, often with spiritual resonance, and—with arresting candor—the tribulations of old age.
The truth is there wouldn’t be much poetry without my faith. It all began when I was living in Beacon in a proto novitiate for young Marianists back in 1956-7. There was a poetry contest given by an order of nuns, with first prize being ten dollars. No one knew much about poetry, so I took out a book which explained scansion and wrote a sonnet focused on Good Friday. Then, at Manhattan College, poems about John the Baptist.
George Dardess’s recent post, “Imagining Mutability,” prompted me to turn to other poems about mutability. That’s one of the rewards of a good close reading: it begins a dialogue and guides us from one literary work to others. I remembered Rupert Brooke’s sonnet “Mutability,” included in 1914 and Other Poems, published in May 1915, a month after he passed away from blood poisoning aboard a hospital ship off the coast of Skyros in the Aegean Sea.
That’s what I asked myself when I first glimpsed the Latin title of Pope Leo’s recent Encyclical: Magnifica Humanitas. The meaning of those words seemed to me clear, at least in English: “Magnificent Humanity.” But then immediately I was puzzled. What “Humanity”? We cruel, self-destructive creatures? And “magnificent”? What is the Pope talking about? Do the Pope and I live on the same planet? With our persecutions of each other, our greed, our racism, our wars, our trashing of our environment—“magnificent”?
Sometimes when people ask me what my favorite film is I say Alice in the Cities, which is a film that Wim Wenders made in 1973, shooting footage all over the US and then also, notoriously, at least to me, in the city of Wuppertal, Germany, which is sometimes described as being located in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region. That’s important to me because the greater Ruhr valley is the part of Germany that often reminds me of the Rust Belt regions of the US, including the area of southern Michigan and, importantly, at least to me, of Detroit, which happens to be the city in which I currently live.
I recently went to a group exhibition put on by New York City’s Arthouse 2B, a Catholic artist collective. Now I need to admit that, as a Catholic, I have reservations about self-consciously Catholic art. I do not object to it per se; it just seems that whenever we get together like this the results are… lame. So I was delighted and surprised when my favorite work in the exhibit was a piece of straightforward devotional art: Yukiyo Nagata’s “Offering.”
If you asked me who my favorite contemporary comic poet is, I wouldn’t hesitate a second. It’s Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003. Not that all his poems are comic—but those are the ones I keep returning to, the ones I’ll talk about in this post. Actually, comedy isn’t easy to talk about. But I think it will help if I offer you some of what I see as Collins’s favorite categories of poems.
I’ve reached the age when I need to brace myself before scanning the obituary page, lest I come across the name of someone I knew personally. I recently wrote on my website about the passing of my dear friend and favorite bookseller, Warren Farha, whom Greg Wolfe eulogized on this blog. This week, I pause to remember another man whose work and friendship altered my life for the better: Robert Coles, who died on June 4 at the age of 97.
In the art museum on the Wellesley College campus, there’s a painting by Paul Cezanne that I’d like to tell you about, titled “Portrait Romantique.” It’s 19 ½ by 17 ½ inches, from early in his career, sometime in 1868-70. Like everything he painted, it rewards careful study, an approach similar to the close reading we bring to literary works.
I was pretty lonely as a child. We lived far from town, surrounded by endless rolling wheat fields and tangled pockets of forest. The roads were mostly dirt. Certain trees, abandoned houses, and all sorts of interesting empty places became nearly as important to me as living, breathing friends. Some approximation of all that had to make it into my story. Places have meaning.
One way I’ve found to escape or at least ease the angst that thoughts of mutability arouse in me is to check in on what others before us, and especially poets, have had to say about the word and the anxiety underlying it. Two great English poets, from very different eras, come quickly to my mind: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and Edmund Spenser (1552-1599).
Phyllis Wheatley’s 18th century poem piqued my curiosity about subsequent American poets of “sable race”—especially women. So I went to The Poetry Foundation website (my go-to source for poets and poems) and spent several enjoyable days searching for and reading these poets.
The Jewish poet Hayim Nahman Bialik calls upon his bird to “Sing and tell me, my little bird, / of marvels in distant places.” It’s a bit hard for me to envision the “marvels” of Israel at the moment. Like many Jewish people, I’m distraught about Israel right now. In “To the Bird,” Bialik imagines an idealized place. It’s a “land of the sun,” a place “of wonders from where / spring springs eternal,” a “land where almonds and date palms bud.”
In 1920, the Swiss artist and all around maniac of wandering lines, Paul Klee, painted a work that came to be known as the Angelus Novus. I’ll tell you a somewhat shameful story about the history of this painting and the history of me. I learned about the painting by reading Walter Benjamin, as have many. The Angelus Novus appears and plays an important role in Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History.
In the days since Warren Farha passed away, suddenly, at the age of 70—a man I knew and loved for nearly 35 years—the overwhelming sense-impression that floods my memory is the way he used to hug me.
Today we’re more Emersonian than ever. We maintain that everyone is unique, that the primary task of life is to discover and give expression to the singular self each of us is meant to become. But can we define and understand ourselves in isolation, illuminated as though we existed alone? We’re social from the beginning, in networks of relationships, dependencies, affections, and obligations.
Fortunately, after a few weeks the acute pain began to subside. Now I am returning to another obstacle, deceptively comforting, that gets in the way of my perceiving and experiencing the Divine in the work of Her creation: familiarity. Leah Goldberg’s prayer-poem, translated from Hebrew by Annie Kantar, reminds me that I am not alone in living with a dulled awareness of the amazing gift of life itself.