My poetry often wrestles with the spiritual, but seldom through nature. Not formal religion, and seldom through worship. Regardless, I hope that my readers sense that, though the angles at which I approach this subject can be acute and vary widely, their target remains the same. The tension between science and belief is constant. The parallels are striking and have provided a lifetime of points of entry into my poetry.
The poems we hear in Tim Hunt’s new collection embody, for me, Jack Kerouac’s teaching: that to accept loss forever is, paradoxically, to embrace it in the present—to treat it as an ever-present reality, one that reveals unexpected beauty and solace, but only if we become part of that revelation.
Ever since I first read Pattiann Rogers’s poem “On the Way to Early Morning Mass” (in her 2001 collection Song of the World Becoming), I’ve been enthralled by it. But I haven’t tried to move through it slowly, line by line. That’s what I want to do in this post.
Reading the poems in Betsy K. Brown’s debut collection, City Nave, feels like exploring a city with train stations, deserts, and cathedrals made of words. The book is filled with descriptions of buildings, cities, and landscapes—even those poems that don’t describe the urban give architecture to abstractions and people and wildernesses through her command of form and fascination with space.
And right there is the ageless appeal of Ben Jonson: a wit that never rests, never ceases to “deceive their malice”—the “their” in this case being all of us who tend to react without thinking to the words we hear and say and so doom ourselves to a fate of lonely, narrow literalism.
This essay isn’t political. It’s about the heart. It’s about the spirit, bruised, battered. It’s about friends, this essay. They feel agitated. They feel helpless. They are limiting their exposure to the minute-by-minute updates. They are turning off their news feeds. Or they are obsessively refreshing their screens. Fueling and refueling their rage, their fear, their despair.
Here’s the first stanza of a poem by Wilfrid Owen, titled “Exposure,” that I highlight when my Introduction to the Lyric course moves into the modern era. Owen was killed in action, age twenty-five, on November 4, 1918, a week before World War I came to a halt. It’s grim, tormented, and tragic, but I think students should learn about the literature of war and hear the expressive power of Owen’s voice in his writing.
My interest is in expressing, to the best of my ability, the richness of human experience. When people sum up experience in narrow ways, when they claim sure knowledge of a world that is, in final analysis, beyond human knowing, when they claim that life is void of meaning—though, so often, we experience a sense of fullness every day—they are in a flight from meaning, in my sense of things.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been taking down from my poetry shelves poets I haven’t read in a long time. The most recent I’ve reached for is Wallace Stevens. When I opened his Collected Poems, my first instinct was to turn to the famous “Sunday Morning” and “The Idea of Order at Key West.” But then I thought: No, these are early poems. I wonder what Stevens’s late poems are like. So I flipped to the back of the book — and was fascinated by what I found there.
Listening without thinking about what you are hearing or reading requires discipline and restraint. Whenever you find yourself thinking—agreeing or arguing, praising or scorning, composing and rehearsing your response—you need to let that go and return to what’s being said or sung, just that. But it’s difficult if not impossible to stop thinking’s chariot once its wheels start turning.
Karl Shapiro was a leading poet of his time: winner of the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for his collection V-Letter and Other Poems, Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for 1946-1947, editor of Poetry magazine from 1950 to 1954. And he was included in the 1956 anthology Fifteen Modern American Poets, along with poets like Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, and Theodore Roethke.
I’m interested in and intrigued by a poem titled “The Realm of Spirit,” where Michael Fried depicts the predicament he encountered as a poet—not so much in writing poems but, rather, in bringing them to light, making them public. The poem is from his 2004 collection The Next Bend in the Road.
Canadian poet Richard Osler’s new poetry volume, What Holiness Can I Bring? is shadowed by death. Several poems express his grief over the death of a close friend. Then while Osler was in the midst of writing the poems that became this book, he learned that his own death was near: he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. So, naturally, he began composing poems on this diagnosis and its implications.
“The stations of the cross” is a Roman Catholic devotion in which fourteen scenes depicting Christ on his way to crucifixion are recalled and pondered: his scourging, for instance, or his encounter with Pilate. Morrissey’s poem is titled Stations of the Cross (no “the”), suggesting parallel sites where “the cross” may be found. In addition to the immediate reference to Jesus’ historical suffering one may also read an implied immediate environment of school violence and beyond that innumerable instances of scapegoats and victimization in the wider world.
I’m browsing my poetry shelves looking for poets I haven’t read in a while. And there, practically jumping into my hand, is E. E. Cummings’s Poems 1923-1954. I also found him in both my editions of The Oxford Book of American Verse (1950 and 1976). And right away in the Oxford selections I come to his poem about driving his new car.
I picked Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 mostly because, at the time, the sonnet’s edgy tone about the drive to tamp down the earthly passions–—something I was personally dealing with at the time!-—cohered to my own struggles. I scrawled the poem in cursive on notebook paper over and over, trying to memorize it, and in memorizing it, it became a part of me—a part of my body, really
The literary critic Stanley Fish has lamented that when poets are not taught in classrooms, they cease to exist. That’s extreme, but there’s some truth to it, and among modern American poets, a case in point is Robinson Jeffers. He’s rarely on syllabi, and it has been this way for a long time. But at his best, Jeffers is a powerful Nature poet. He’s well worth reading, studying, and learning from.
Close-reading any poem by Wallace Stevens can look like hard, dizzying work, but it can become a happy romp rather than a baffled slog if you can do it with a friend who loves language as much as you do. I know this because I have such a friend, one whom I recently invited to Zoom with me through Stevens’s “Note on Moonlight.”
Here’s a poem by Yvor Winters (1900-1968), written during World War II, when California was on guard against possible attacks by the Japanese navy and air force. I’d like to lead you through this poem, and share a lesson I learned from reading and thinking about it.
Turning: an, if not the, essential act of Jewish life. Teshuvah, we call it. Repentance, it’s translated. “Teshuvah,” writes Rabbi Alan Lew, is “a Hebrew word that we struggle to translate. We call it repentance. We call it return. We call it a turning. It is all of these things and none of these things. It is a word that points us to the realm beyond language, the realm of pure motion and form.”