A day before the start of Yom Kippur, my friend Aviya Kushner, brilliant poet and writer, posted on her Substack a piece on the great poet Yehuda Halevi (1075 – 1141) and the relevance of his work to Yom Kippur. That’s what inspired me to read, during the few hours away from synagogue, a little Halevi. The first poem of Halevi’s I landed on is “Heal Me, Lord.”
I’ve been reaching into my poetry shelves to take out poets I haven’t read in decades. This week it was Theodore Roethke’s turn. Browsing his six poetry collections, I of course find an abundance of themes: his childhood and relation to his father, love of a woman, various dimensions of the self, and more. But the poems I’m most drawn to are the ones where he expresses what I’d call his mysticism— his longing for and then union with the divine.
When my neighbor, composer David Liptak, was visiting earlier in the summer. I asked what he was currently composing, and he said, “I’ve set two poems by Marianne Moore: ‘The Fish’ and ‘A Jelly-Fish.’” I wasn’t familiar with Moore’s poems, so I immediately got from the library Becoming Marianne More: The Early Poems, 1907-1924, and turned to David’s two poems.
Do you know Wallace Stevens’s poem, with its strange title, “A Postcard from the Volcano”? It’s included in Ideas of Order, published first in a limited edition in July 1935 and then in a trade edition in October 1936. I reread it recently, and I was spellbound by its first stanza, macabre and sweet, the beginning of a story about memory and imagination.
It’s a dark poem; that’s for sure. Yet throughout, the poetry itself lessens the darkness. That recurring “have it,” the regular meter, the rhymings throughout (especially that “spaces”/“race is”), the alliterations, —these (to my mind) lighten the gloom. The poem is at once playful and deeply unsettling. Frost, in his mastery, truly has it both ways.
In the poem “Exile for the Sake of Redemption,” Yehoshua November dares to bring the Divine down to earth. This suggests that it is up to us as it is to God to “engage in activities that we imagine will enrich our future.” Teaching and learning are two of those activities. Poetry—writing and reading it—is another.
If you polled every last person in the world, I’m sure you’d find that, at one point or another, they’ve written a poem. Not the Haiku assigned in third grade. I’m thinking of the visceral thing composed on the edge of love. Maybe it’s never written down but goes on shaking about, caged in a dusty corner of the mind.
On the Poetry Foundation’s website page for Pattiann Rogers, we read that “She is noted for her ability to link the natural and scientific worlds in works filled with sensual imagery, spirituality, and a sense of awe.” And also that her books from 2004 through 2017 “continue to explore theological possibilities as revealed through the natural world.” Today, I want to follow this theme in a single volume: Generations (2004).
I’m rereading Paradise, Victoria Redel’s most recent collection of poems. Beginning with some midrashic poems, retellings of the story of the Garden of Eden, the book moves on to poems about family, childhood, adolescence, parenting, desire, aging, memory, menstruation, and more. Poems that, at a glance, don’t appear to have anything to do with paradise and the loss of paradise. Yet, on a fourth and fifth reading, I see how deeply connected some of the common experiences of, say, aging, are to the experience of being expelled from home.
My question throughout my reading of these three very different treatments of Hitler, has been: What theme—if any—unifies them, beyond the scandal of their subject? I suggest that that theme has to do with each work’s willingness to picture Hitler dramatically, as a figure of tragedy.
In his interview with Slant Books about his new poetry collection, titled Vanishments, Eric Pankey says: “In my poems, I tend to be drawn to moments where things that we perceive are just on the verge of perceptibility—a presence leaning toward absence, an absence coalescing into perhaps a presence. The poem, as an artform made of words, becomes the embodiment and articulation of that in-betweenness, instability, disequilibrium, imbalance.”
“I have never started a poem whose end I knew,” Robert Frost said, because “writing a poem is discovering.” But how do writers know when they’ve discovered the end? How do we know when a piece of writing is done, is the way we want it, the way it must be? Perhaps that’s why the Internet teems with advice for poets seeking counsel and support for dealing with this problem. I recall a thread that had the caption, “How the hell do I end a poem?”
In my poems, I tend to be drawn to moments where things that we perceive are just on the verge of perceptibility—a presence leaning toward absence, an absence coalescing into perhaps a presence. The poem, as an artform made of words, becomes the embodiment and articulation of that in-betweenness, instability, disequilibrium, imbalance. With a bit of language, I attempt to give shape to the ineffable, that which is beyond words.
W. D. Snodgrass’s master poetic work, The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle, was years in the making. Finally published in 1995, the work reflects his care in adjusting not only the tone but the shape of each character’s poetic speech to model his or her personal character. Speer’s stately, self-serving monologues are presented as a sequence of triangles (reflecting Speer the builder). Himmler’s dry monologues are divided into individual letters imprisoned in graph paper grids. And so on.
Lawrence’s “The Migration Series” is painted with Casein tempera, a paint derived from milk protein. HeLevi’s poems are composed of air from the lungs, the vibration of the vocal cords, and the shaping of sounds with the mouth and throat. The voice was translated into visual form, alphabetic writing, and was initially preserved in iron gall ink written on parchment or vellum. This poem, these paintings: wonders. The might of human imagination and artistry.
Fr. Murray Bodo is now in his eighties, but in this new collection his creative mind is as rich and fertile as ever—as it ranges over such subjects as favorite museums; Easter, Christmas, and other seasons; his New Mexico childhood, his travels, his aging.
The poetry of Texas writer Vassar Miller (1924-1998) isn’t as well-known as it should be—because, critics suggest, she was writing religious verse in a decidedly secular age. But I’ve long treasured my copy of her collected poems, If I Had Wheels or Love (1991). Miller was born with cerebral palsy, and her disability naturally finds its way into some of her poems—but many more are grounded in her Christian faith. It’s these that I want to look at in this post.
In my workshop, we’ll look at the roads taken in a few poems. We’ll linger over a line and consider the many different lines that could follow it. Call the move from one line to the next a bend in the road. As I hope we’ll see, the poet or writer chose one road to follow. She could just as easily have chosen another, taking a bend that would lead to… Well, the destination remains to be discovered!
I’ve come to realize that when I read poems, sometimes I focus too much on myself. In a way, that’s inevitable, and there’s nothing inherently bad or wrong about it. We read a poem and ask: How do I respond to this line, image, voice, poem? Does it speak to me? But the risk, the mistake, is neglecting also to ask: What’s this poem doing for the person who wrote it?
I’ve been reading the poems in Gary Fincke’s new poetry collection, For Now, We Have Been Spared, recently published by Slant Books. The poems draw me in, lure me into sitting with them. I’m especially drawn to the seven “sequences” in the book: series of six to sixteen poems elaborating a particular motif. There’s no point in trying to dash through them all in a single post, so I’m going to focus on one that I find especially engaging. It’s called “Plummeting.”