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…
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, 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