Many people have written about Wendell Berry, the prolific author and agrarian advocate, since his death on August 31 this year. Berry, of course, wrote a great deal himself, leaving us much to reflect on in his many essays, poetry collections, and fiction. I’ve shared my own thoughts on his legacy elsewhere, but that assessment—like so many others—doesn’t capture the essence of the man I came to call my friend.
Scott Cairns’s latest poetry collection, Against Certainty, just published by Slant Books, is his twelfth book of poems. Cairns touches on many motifs in this new book—including “nous” (or the mind), travel, and his cancer. But for this post I want to focus on the major theme that runs through the collection: prayer.
I’d say that a good many poems in this book and previous books wrestle with prayer. I wouldn’t characterize my disposition as suggesting that prayer ever goes unanswered, but I would say that prayer as petition has come to seem a waste of time, and perhaps a waste of prayer. If prayer does anything, I’d say it offers brief moments of communion.
In John F. Dean’s poem “The Paltry Ego,” time teaches that experience impinges upon us and eludes comprehension. As children, we can build and “pilot” a boat; as we grow older, we encounter the unexpected, jolts to mind and nerve that alienate us from ourselves. Life is a long journey with twists and turns and complications, as is this poem, which is a single sentence we move through, negotiate, and seek to apprehend.
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 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.
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.
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.”
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.
I’m reading Robert Cording’s latest poetry collection, What’s Possible: New & Selected Poems. In the “Selected Poems” sections, we get a survey of Cording’s long, celebrated poetic career, ranging from Life-List in 1987 through Without My Asking in 2019. Cording actually published a subsequent book that he doesn’t include selections from: In the Unwalled City (2022). The reason for this omission is that the section of “New” poems in What’s Possible continues the theme of the 2022 collection: Cording’s grief over the recent death of his thirty-one-year-old son, Daniel.
I’ve always felt my work centered on the inextricable nature of joy and sorrow. I’d say the selection of poems drew on three aspects: that for me the ordinary world is extraordinary; that what’s extraordinary is we live in a creation that need not be, but is; and that our work is, as Gary Snyder has said, to make the real world as real as possible. To me that involves my attempts, however often I’ve failed, to see the world and not my “idea” of the world, as Wallace Stevens put it. I have always felt the unearthly earthliness of the world I live in and I hope the poems I’ve chosen reflect that in myriad ways.
Yes, I know: a flat-out contradiction. How can space be eloquent? or speak at all? Space is a nothing, isn’t it? An absence. A way of indicating a separation. The words around it speak, not the space itself. But if you think that way, you’ll find yourself challenged to think otherwise by the recently published This and That: Short Poems of Zen Master Ryokan, translated by Stan Ziobro and John Slater.
Narcissus, one of many mythical figures in Latin poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is too important a character in our lives today to be dismissed as a word-jumble. That’s because Narcissus’s story forms the basis for the psychological malady called narcissism. It’s a malady characterized in one dictionary as “excessive interest in or admiration of oneself and one’s physical appearance.” Maybe close reading Narcissus’s story will help us figure out who is who the next time we look in the mirror.
When we read a poem closely, including its formal features, we may, if we are so inclined, experience the Divine in the poem’s details. If nothing else, when we read a poem closely, we encounter the brilliance of human creativity. And if that’s not a direct experience of the breath—or soul, another meaning of the word nishmat—of every living thing, the breath that the Divine breathed into each of us, I don’t know what is.
After reading Dr. Samuel Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” again and again over many years, and reading it again now, I don’t find it depressing at all. Quite the opposite. I find it invigorating. And that’s in large part due to its language, maybe especially to its vigorous, often surprising adjective-noun combinations.