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Sunday
Poet and Sewanee English professor Jennifer Michael talked about “The Word Beyond the Words: Finding God in Poetry” for our church’s Adult Forum this past Sunday. She generously shared her notes with me for today’s column.
To establish both the theme and tenor of her talk, Jennifer read us Wendell Berry’s “I Go among the Trees,” which she followed with a minute of silence:
I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.
She then clarified how she would be discussing poetry:
We’re not going to be spending much time on the mechanics of poetry or an intellectual analysis of it. If such matters as rhyme, meter, metaphor, or symbol come up, that’s fine, but we’ll let it happen organically. I find that many adults, as well as college students, view poetry as mysterious, a foreign language or a code that only the teacher knows. I try to get them to listen to the poem, to let it tell them what they need to know. There’s a place for analysis, for the technical language, but none of it matters if you don’t connect to the poem in a spiritual way.
Her starting premise, she told us, is that “poetry participates in the divine act of creation,” after which she associated poetry with the creation story:
In Genesis, God creates with the words “Let there be,” and he calls each thing by name. In John’s gospel (which is a poem itself), there is the Word, the Logos. Our word “poet” comes from a Greek word meaning “maker,” so that in the Creed, God is actually “Poet of Heaven and Earth.”
She then turned to the British Romantics, her own scholarly focus:
According to Coleridge, we all recreate the world as we perceive it, whether we are poets or not, through the primary imagination. To truly look at the world around us is not merely to gather data through our senses, but as Wordsworth put it, “to see into the life of things.” I suggest that all poets are to some extent aware of this this creative power that I’m calling the divine logos, whether they are religious or not. The poets I’m drawn to, both past and contemporary, have the tendency to see the divine in all things: in nature and in humanity—not to see such a sharp divide between creator and creation.
This has led her to conclude that
God can speak to us through poems, regardless of the writer’s specific intention. The writer isn’t here, but the poem is, and we are. Make the poem your own, and at the same time, hold it loosely: be open to what it might say to you.
Reading poetry, Jennifer observed, differs from other kinds of reading, such as
when we read a newspaper for information, when we read the instructions to program our smart TV, when we read a light mystery for entertainment and escape. Indeed, it is more like reading scripture. We have to slow down, quiet ourselves, and enter its confined space, much as we go into our “closet” to pray.
With the mention of newspaper, she cited the well-known passage from William Carlos Williams’s “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
In past Sunday Forums, Jennifer noted, she has given talks on George Herbert, T.S. Eliot, and the Romantic poets. For her current talk, she said, she was turning to contemporary poets, including some not from the Christian tradition, because they all “use poetry both to find and to communicate their sense of the sacred.” All of them “share a general sense of the sacredness both of speaking and of listening.”
Reflecting back on Wendell Berry, she noted that, while his writings on agriculture and sustainable living “are polemical and sometimes controversial,” his Sabbath poems are “about the importance of finding a rhythm between work and rest”—a particular challenge in our 24/7 world. (“Wasn’t technology supposed to give us more free time?” she asked. “Now it often means we are always at work.”)
While Berry “doesn’t often talk explicitly about God in his poems,” Jennifer continued, “it’s clear that he sees us all as part of a created order that we continue to create.” She observed,
The Sabbath poems come out of his Sunday morning visits to the woods, which he sees as a Sabbath place, as opposed to the cleared field which is productive farmland. You need one to have the other.
And she read Berry’s “Whatever Is Foreseen in Joy”:
Whatever is foreseen in joy
Must be lived out from day to day.
Vision held open in the dark
By our ten thousand days of work.
Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hand must ache, the face must sweat.
And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we’re asleep.When we work well, a Sabbath mood
Rests on our day, and finds it good.
Following a collective discussion of the poem, she looked at Mary Oliver’s “Praying,” which we also discussed:
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
Jennifer pointed out that Oliver isn’t slighting blue irises here, given that she has written several poems on the flower. She just wants to acknowledge weeds as well, and I thought of the poet’s reference to “the reckless blossoms of weeds” (in “The Kitten”) and “What blazes the trail isn’t necessarily pretty” (“Skunk Cabbage”). I thought also of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation in his essay Nature, “Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight…”
To summarize her approach to nature, Jennfer quoted from Oliver’s poem “Sometimes”:
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
While time constraints didn’t allow Jennifer to share and discuss Jane Hirshfield’s “The Door,” I include her comments here. Jennifer writes that the poem
similarly treats listening as a doorway not just to knowledge of this world but to something transcendent. Hirshfield is not Christian but Buddhist in her orientation. She’s urging us to pay attention not only to things but to silences, to absences, to spaces”:
Here’s Hirshfield’s poem:
A note waterfalls steadily
through us,
just below hearing.
Or this early light
streaming through dusty glass:
what enters, enters like that,
unstoppable gift.
And yet there is also the other,
the breath-space held between any call
and its answer––
In the querying
first scuff of footstep,
the wood owls’ repeating,
the two-counting heart:
A little sabbath,
minnow whose brightness silvers past time.
The rest-note,
unwritten,
hinged between worlds,
that precedes change and allows it.
Jennifer is currently writing a book on poetic silences, in which she is exploring how poetry “speaks, and then it falls silent, and out of that silence it speaks again.”
Jennifer concluded the Forum by breaking us into groups to discuss poems that “help us imagine ourselves into the Scriptures.” The poems, which I’ll be sharing in future Sunday posts, were Mark Jarman’s “No One Understood the Final Meal” and “Cause Me To Hear”; Mary Karr’s “Descending Theology: The Resurrection” and “Meditatio”; and W. S. Merwin’s “Finding a Teacher.”
Following the talk, we adjourned to the church service, where we had the opportunity to listen to both the gorgeous poetry of the Episcopal liturgy and the silences between the words.
