Jack, interesting because I have an MFA in Poetry and published a book when I was younger. Let me flesh this out a bit.
Poetry, like almost everything else in our culture, has been commodified (or sucked into the Machine). Students take on enormous debt to learn the art of writing, get out of school and also try to become teachers in MF…
Jack, interesting because I have an MFA in Poetry and published a book when I was younger. Let me flesh this out a bit.
Poetry, like almost everything else in our culture, has been commodified (or sucked into the Machine). Students take on enormous debt to learn the art of writing, get out of school and also try to become teachers in MFA programs charging the next round of students enormous sums of money. Teachers also have consumers for their poetry in their students, because who else reads or buys poetry anymore? Round and round it goes…
And poetry as a result has become cheap (think Bonhoeffer’s cheap grace as an analogy), politicized, and worst of all boring in its fake revolutions.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe you mean something deeper. The great poets (generally speaking, not just writers of verse) whose hearts have been softened and have touched their own souls in a way that they can universalize that and communicate it to others so that their hearts also soften and perhaps touch something eternal.
If I’m almost correct in your thinking, I agree wholeheartedly. The world needs softer hearts touching the eternal. You saw Paul’s essay today. I don’t disagree with what he’s saying at all, but the idea of “poets” and caves and hermitages (even connected in clusters of not too close micro-sketes) is more appealing to me personally than political answers, even if the politics is only superficial. The problem of political structures, even on a small human scale, is that the devil easily corrupts through power and pride. Political structures are the epitome of power and pride. And so, even soft political structures can become too easily corrupted and corrupting destroying the project. And lastly I don’t think God has set any of us out to change the world. Christ’s call is to change ourselves. We know what the world is, and we know how it ends. None of us are going to change that except on the most tiny scale. Perhaps ourselves, our family, a few friends. Any larger project is dreadfully close to filling oneself up with pride.
I think, broadly speaking, we can think of God as a poet. Christ and the Holy Spirit as well if we dig in. Perhaps we can become poets too (true poets) by touching a piece of the heavenly home we are all called to through the intense prayer and the grace of communion that only a hesychastic or ascetical life brings? I don’t know the answer to this. It’s what I’m exploring in the last chapter of my life though.
“Man enters the space of mental stillness when his soul is filled with the energy of repentance and the Spirit of God. Then, enclosed in his little cell ‘as in a palace’, he sits on a small stool which becomes a throne of Cherubim from whence he watches over his heart with the words of the Jesus Prayer.
However, one does not easily reach such a state. For this ascetic labor, constant tension is required. Man’s spirit might be still, but in order to stand in this stillness it is in constant tension. An electric wire seems lifeless, but if touched, the current flowing through it is lethal; so too the Hesychast may seem lifeless in the eyes of the world, but a mighty, rushing current of life runs through him. In the eyes of God, he is indeed ‘alive’, carrying within him ‘life in abundance’.” Hesychasm
It makes me wonder whether this deeper poetry is a form of seeing and expressing the sacramental cosmos. Without it expressed poetry withers and dies. Which is what happened.
Beautiful! You are the perfect person to discuss this with. It is interesting to hear your experience with getting an MFA in poetry. I dated a woman long ago who had gotten a PhD in poetry. It was interesting, to say the least, to compare her approach and understanding with my own amateur interests. Often very different.
But you have expressed my point very well. I am looking for the poetry beneath the poetry. Which consists of an implicit and intuitive combination of myth, philosophy, theology, practice, metaphor, insight, etc. Or rather the underground river (ocean?) by which all the above are fed. Beneath that, as I fathom it, is a deep, infinite silence. How can we cast our little rod and reel into those depths? It is from this that the deep poetry emerges. This is what we all resonate with and seek. I have thought about it for a long time and am trying to articulate it more completely.
I am drawn to the Classical Chinese poets (albeit in a very amateur way. I make no pretense to having a real knowledge). I only know it in translation, but nonetheless something shines often shines through. It isn't merely talking about life, it is life. If that makes any sense. Any some of the Zen Hermit poets, e.g. Han Shan, seem to get at "consider the birds of the air" as a way of life better than I have seen elsewhere. I think it is a source of renewal for Christian poetry, in both in the standard sense, and in the deeper sense as we are using it here.
Are you aware of any contemporary poets that approach this? I know that might be a difficult request, given how vague I am being. Or a writings about poetry that touch on this?
Jack, I don’t write anymore. I worked on a second book for 15 years. All of the poems but one were published in significant literary journals, but by then the poetry world had passed me by. There was zero interest in poetry as prayer, as reaching towards the eternal. So I stopped cold. Quit drinking. Converted to Orthodoxy, which I’ve come to see as almost incompatible with most contemporary poetry which is more concerned with the self and politics. Or at least that’s the way it was headed. I haven’t read anything new in a decade.
Now I reach toward the eternal through stillness, not words.
Contemporary American Poetry is about the young and their revolutions and pride and self. Orthodoxy is the opposite. It’s about the elders and Fathers and the tradition and humility and the other. Totally different ways of looking at the world.
You’ve probably read the Catholic priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, but if not he was a fantastic poet and had a great early influence on me. Not contemporary though. Bei Dao is a well regarded contemporary Chinese poet that has stillness at the center of his work, and to my ear the fulcrum of that stillness is spiritual. He’s older now. My teacher LS Asekoff, though an atheist, always had a deeply spiritual undertone to his work. He’s in his 80s now, and no longer writes either. Franz Wright had a spiritual tension in his early work even through the self destruction and pain, and then converted to Catholicism at the end of his life and wrote some beautifully religious work before he died. Nathaniel Mackey is more experimental, but to my mind the best living African American poet. He has a spiritual sense to his work, but hidden away in the experimentation. Kind of like Coltrane or Pharoah Sanders did in Jazz, and I think Mackey would cite them as influences in his work. As sole literary editor of the legendary Hambone magazine, he always supported my work through the years. The great German Rilke is not a contemporary poet, but if you haven’t read the Duino Elegies they are incredible. Opening of 1st elegy:
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.
Tim- I understand about not writing. I got my BFA in Music Composition. A few years back I decided to hang it up. The whole music scene was just poisonous and found it spiritually degrading to continue to involve myself. I do sing in the two-man choir at Liturgy up here at the monastery. Which is a great joy.
I do know Hopkins. At the moment in my very early draft on getting the poetry right I am using a line of his as the title. That is always subject to change. But he seems to me to be the perfect poet for what am I groping toward--a sacrament poet and a nature poet. I read a lot of Rilke when I was younger, and his The Man Watching had the deepest resonance for me.
I know nothing at all of contemporary Chinese poetry but Bei Dao seems to be an interesting extension of classical poetry. I may get a copy of some his work at some point. Thank you for the recommendation.
In thinking about the poetry beneath the poetry--a poetics of stillness--it is that part of us which is actually in contact with reality. From the world around us to intuitions of the Divine. Our current machine poetics is divorced from reality, as you say, it is about, "about the young and their revolutions and pride and self". It is the deep poetics that drives it. A deep poetics that is very shallow, if I may phrase it so paradoxically. I wonder how this might be shifted.
I am also a long time reader of TS Eliot. I find the trajectory of his whole body of work--from the powerless despair of Prufrock to the mysticism of The Four Quartets--as very relevant to what I have been meditating on lately. There is a record there of at least one man's exit from the wasteland. What would be the version of it for our day?
Anyway, thank you for the discussion. I hope it is at least a little bit warmer up in Montana.
Jack, interesting because I have an MFA in Poetry and published a book when I was younger. Let me flesh this out a bit.
Poetry, like almost everything else in our culture, has been commodified (or sucked into the Machine). Students take on enormous debt to learn the art of writing, get out of school and also try to become teachers in MFA programs charging the next round of students enormous sums of money. Teachers also have consumers for their poetry in their students, because who else reads or buys poetry anymore? Round and round it goes…
And poetry as a result has become cheap (think Bonhoeffer’s cheap grace as an analogy), politicized, and worst of all boring in its fake revolutions.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe you mean something deeper. The great poets (generally speaking, not just writers of verse) whose hearts have been softened and have touched their own souls in a way that they can universalize that and communicate it to others so that their hearts also soften and perhaps touch something eternal.
If I’m almost correct in your thinking, I agree wholeheartedly. The world needs softer hearts touching the eternal. You saw Paul’s essay today. I don’t disagree with what he’s saying at all, but the idea of “poets” and caves and hermitages (even connected in clusters of not too close micro-sketes) is more appealing to me personally than political answers, even if the politics is only superficial. The problem of political structures, even on a small human scale, is that the devil easily corrupts through power and pride. Political structures are the epitome of power and pride. And so, even soft political structures can become too easily corrupted and corrupting destroying the project. And lastly I don’t think God has set any of us out to change the world. Christ’s call is to change ourselves. We know what the world is, and we know how it ends. None of us are going to change that except on the most tiny scale. Perhaps ourselves, our family, a few friends. Any larger project is dreadfully close to filling oneself up with pride.
I think, broadly speaking, we can think of God as a poet. Christ and the Holy Spirit as well if we dig in. Perhaps we can become poets too (true poets) by touching a piece of the heavenly home we are all called to through the intense prayer and the grace of communion that only a hesychastic or ascetical life brings? I don’t know the answer to this. It’s what I’m exploring in the last chapter of my life though.
Now this is poetry!
“Man enters the space of mental stillness when his soul is filled with the energy of repentance and the Spirit of God. Then, enclosed in his little cell ‘as in a palace’, he sits on a small stool which becomes a throne of Cherubim from whence he watches over his heart with the words of the Jesus Prayer.
However, one does not easily reach such a state. For this ascetic labor, constant tension is required. Man’s spirit might be still, but in order to stand in this stillness it is in constant tension. An electric wire seems lifeless, but if touched, the current flowing through it is lethal; so too the Hesychast may seem lifeless in the eyes of the world, but a mighty, rushing current of life runs through him. In the eyes of God, he is indeed ‘alive’, carrying within him ‘life in abundance’.” Hesychasm
It makes me wonder whether this deeper poetry is a form of seeing and expressing the sacramental cosmos. Without it expressed poetry withers and dies. Which is what happened.
Indeed!
Love the electric wire illustration
Yes! And Amen!
Tim-
Beautiful! You are the perfect person to discuss this with. It is interesting to hear your experience with getting an MFA in poetry. I dated a woman long ago who had gotten a PhD in poetry. It was interesting, to say the least, to compare her approach and understanding with my own amateur interests. Often very different.
But you have expressed my point very well. I am looking for the poetry beneath the poetry. Which consists of an implicit and intuitive combination of myth, philosophy, theology, practice, metaphor, insight, etc. Or rather the underground river (ocean?) by which all the above are fed. Beneath that, as I fathom it, is a deep, infinite silence. How can we cast our little rod and reel into those depths? It is from this that the deep poetry emerges. This is what we all resonate with and seek. I have thought about it for a long time and am trying to articulate it more completely.
I am drawn to the Classical Chinese poets (albeit in a very amateur way. I make no pretense to having a real knowledge). I only know it in translation, but nonetheless something shines often shines through. It isn't merely talking about life, it is life. If that makes any sense. Any some of the Zen Hermit poets, e.g. Han Shan, seem to get at "consider the birds of the air" as a way of life better than I have seen elsewhere. I think it is a source of renewal for Christian poetry, in both in the standard sense, and in the deeper sense as we are using it here.
Are you aware of any contemporary poets that approach this? I know that might be a difficult request, given how vague I am being. Or a writings about poetry that touch on this?
Do you still write? -Jack
Jack, I don’t write anymore. I worked on a second book for 15 years. All of the poems but one were published in significant literary journals, but by then the poetry world had passed me by. There was zero interest in poetry as prayer, as reaching towards the eternal. So I stopped cold. Quit drinking. Converted to Orthodoxy, which I’ve come to see as almost incompatible with most contemporary poetry which is more concerned with the self and politics. Or at least that’s the way it was headed. I haven’t read anything new in a decade.
Now I reach toward the eternal through stillness, not words.
Contemporary American Poetry is about the young and their revolutions and pride and self. Orthodoxy is the opposite. It’s about the elders and Fathers and the tradition and humility and the other. Totally different ways of looking at the world.
You’ve probably read the Catholic priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, but if not he was a fantastic poet and had a great early influence on me. Not contemporary though. Bei Dao is a well regarded contemporary Chinese poet that has stillness at the center of his work, and to my ear the fulcrum of that stillness is spiritual. He’s older now. My teacher LS Asekoff, though an atheist, always had a deeply spiritual undertone to his work. He’s in his 80s now, and no longer writes either. Franz Wright had a spiritual tension in his early work even through the self destruction and pain, and then converted to Catholicism at the end of his life and wrote some beautifully religious work before he died. Nathaniel Mackey is more experimental, but to my mind the best living African American poet. He has a spiritual sense to his work, but hidden away in the experimentation. Kind of like Coltrane or Pharoah Sanders did in Jazz, and I think Mackey would cite them as influences in his work. As sole literary editor of the legendary Hambone magazine, he always supported my work through the years. The great German Rilke is not a contemporary poet, but if you haven’t read the Duino Elegies they are incredible. Opening of 1st elegy:
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.
Tim- I understand about not writing. I got my BFA in Music Composition. A few years back I decided to hang it up. The whole music scene was just poisonous and found it spiritually degrading to continue to involve myself. I do sing in the two-man choir at Liturgy up here at the monastery. Which is a great joy.
I do know Hopkins. At the moment in my very early draft on getting the poetry right I am using a line of his as the title. That is always subject to change. But he seems to me to be the perfect poet for what am I groping toward--a sacrament poet and a nature poet. I read a lot of Rilke when I was younger, and his The Man Watching had the deepest resonance for me.
I know nothing at all of contemporary Chinese poetry but Bei Dao seems to be an interesting extension of classical poetry. I may get a copy of some his work at some point. Thank you for the recommendation.
In thinking about the poetry beneath the poetry--a poetics of stillness--it is that part of us which is actually in contact with reality. From the world around us to intuitions of the Divine. Our current machine poetics is divorced from reality, as you say, it is about, "about the young and their revolutions and pride and self". It is the deep poetics that drives it. A deep poetics that is very shallow, if I may phrase it so paradoxically. I wonder how this might be shifted.
I am also a long time reader of TS Eliot. I find the trajectory of his whole body of work--from the powerless despair of Prufrock to the mysticism of The Four Quartets--as very relevant to what I have been meditating on lately. There is a record there of at least one man's exit from the wasteland. What would be the version of it for our day?
Anyway, thank you for the discussion. I hope it is at least a little bit warmer up in Montana.
-Jack