Tag Archives: Poetry

Who Am I?

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This question has haunted humankind for eons.  Most people resolve the issue readily be donning the “suit of clothes” proffered by their family/community but for many of us that necessary “fig leaf” ceases to work at some point and we begin to wrestle with the essential issues of identity inherent in the question.  I realize now that assuming an identity in my youth was challenging, even very early before I was even conscious.  The angst did not really become conscious until pre-adolescence, then it beat the hell out of me for several decades, before I gained the maturity to begin to wrestle with the issue with an increasingly mature spiritual grasp of the matter.

Now let me reassure you, if you get to even middle age and give too much thought to “who am I?” you might go to your physician and seek a pharmacological easy way out!  For the quest to answer that question is a process and the answer will come in realizing that the process…like all things that are “process”…will never be completed.  This involves real work, spiritual work, spiritual work that cannot be resolved by the “well-worn and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness” even if they come from your favorite holy book!

Here I want to share a lovely poem from a lovely soul that I left behind in Fayetteville, Arkansas just over two years when I moved to Taos, New Mexico, Sue Coppernoll.  I did not know her well, but well enough to know she was a fine poet and a keenly sensitive spirit whose spirituality, like mine, had its roots in very conservative fundamentalist Christianity.  Here Sue so eloquently captures the fragility of an identity, particularly in its early formulation, and the resolve she had to “carry on” even when life dealt her hard blows.

MEMORY

Words

Worked out with toothpicks

On the royal blue carpet

On the living room floor.

 

First

My name,

WILLIE FAYE

Biting my lip in concentrated effort

Laboriously arranging wooden sticks

Into recognizable patterns.

 

I’m Real!

I have substance.

See, there I am,

Right there on the floor.

WILLIE FAYE

That’s me, I exist, I AM.

 

My baby sister crawls

Onto and through

My toothpick words.

 

My heart is broken.

 

I gather up the scattered sticks

To begin again

The construction of my self.

 

WILLIE FAYE

 

 

I wish I’d have gotten to know Sue better.  This poignant expression of a child’s heart just past the threshold of coming “on line” into conscious existence is riveting.  And the child at that point is so vulnerable and the mirroring from “momma” and the rest of the family and world is so critical.  But this validation is never perfect and even then Sue recalled having the experience of clinicians call “ego integrity,” allowing her to repair the damage to a particular disappointment.  And though, as noted above, I do not know Sue well, I did get to know her well enough to know that life dealt her more than her share of the Shakespearean “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir too” and that she has continued to employ that “ego integrity” and is today a beautiful soul and a beautiful woman.  In the terms of Judeo-Christian tradition roots that she and I hailed from it is the “Spirit of God” that provides that “ego integrity” which is a Presence described in the New Testament as that “by which all things cohere”

Emily Dickinson was “visited” abruptly

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In my last posting, I shared an Emily Dickinson poem and put my twist on it, interpreting it to mean a “visitation” from the Spirit of God, a visitation that presented her with “difference.”

Most of us get this “visitation” over the span of a lifetime, sometimes starting with a conversion experience or a mystical experience. There are those, however, are visted more abruptly from time to time and find it very frightening. And I think the frightening nature of these “abrupt” visitations is why God approaches us gently most of the time as we can’t handle such approaches from the Divine.  (In the classic Jack Nicholson line, “You can’t handle the truth!”)

Here is another Emily Dickinson poem which, I think, expresses her having been visited abruptly on some occasion. It is vivid and harrowing.

The Master      

He fumbles at your spirit
        As players at the keys
Before they drop full music on;
       He stuns you by degrees,

Prepares your brittle substance
        For the ethereal blow,
By fainter hammers, further heard,
       Then nearer, then so slow

Your breath has time to straighten,
       Your brain to bubble cool,–
Deals one imperial thunderbolt
       That scalps your naked soul.

When winds take Forests in their Paws–
The Universe is still.

Pupplies and Flowers all Over the Place

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It was decades ago when a young tyke’s mother shared these words that her son had just recently spun together. I was just stunned as the image was so compelling and this was made even more so by the fact that the lad was no more than three or four years old at most.

This child’s world was still pristine and on a particular morning he had awakened to an intense awareness of the world’s beauty, later describing it to his mother as “puppies and flowers all over the place.” Now when I heard these words, I had long-since been jaded into submission by my culture but these words were evocative, they were “words fitly spoken” and they reached into my heart. They still do today and I have a hunch they will do the same with some of my readers.

I can faintly recall some of that pristine beauty of the world but only faintly. Very faintly. I think that very early on I had that beauty taken from me; or, to be honest, I willingly abdicated and opted to imbibe of the “well-words and ready phrases that built comfortable walls against the wilderness” that my world offered. It is always easier to do that than to maintain one’s reality, stick to an inherent virtue, and be true to one ’s self.

And look what that kid was doing that morning. He was having an intense, subjective moment and he was able to capture it and put it into words. That was a poetic moment. And here I want to share Archibald MacLeish’s description of poetic moments like that:

WORDS IN TIME

Bewildered with the broken tongue
of wakened angels in our sleep
then lost the music that was sung
and lost the light time cannot keep!
There is a moment when we lie
Bewildered, wakened out of sleep,
when light and sound and all reply:
that moment time must tame and keep.
That moment like a flight of birds
flung from the branches where they sleep,
the poet with a beat of words
flings into time for time to keep.

 

Words must be vibrant, alive, dynamic!

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A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules… Every language is an old growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities. ~ Wade Davies

This is why language is so rich and so worthy of exploring. Words can “open up” and reveal hidden meanings and can do so endlessly; and, as noted yesterday, this is the task of poets. The French philosopher Gabriel Marcel once wrote that words have meaning because they can “burgeon forth into regions beyond themselves.” But one has to be willing to let them open up, to “burgeon forth.”

Unfortunately, words can be (and often are) taken literally. No effort is taken to parse words and individuals who take this route are left with the “letter of the law.” And of course we remember what 2 Corinthians teaches: the letter killeth but the Spirit maketh alive.

Let me share from the profound wisdom of T. S. Eliot on the dynamic nature of language:

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them.
(The Four Quartets

 

The Power of the Word

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I love words! Words make us human. That ability to symbolize re our subjective experience and assign meaning to that domain is just incredibly fascinating to me. And as we assign meanings to our experience we find connection with others, we discover that they too use the same sounds to refer to the same experiences…more or less! And how did that ever happen and why does it continue? Yes, it is a neurological issue; but, ultimately it is a philosophical and spiritual issue.

(Let me share a relevant personal anecdote. Years ago in a casual conversation a friend of mine dropped an aside, “Well, our name is just a sound we learned to respond to.” This “word” of his spoke to me and continues to do so. It resonated and I realized what he meant, that my very name “Lewis” was merely a sound that “I” had learned to respond to at about the age of one and a half or two years. My “I” (a rudimentary ego) preceded that moment in some shape, form, or fashion but when I was able to associate that subjective experience with the sound “Lewis” I basically joined the human race.)

Poets are one of God’s gifts to us as they can play with words and teach us about meaning. They can use words and use them skillfully and artistically—with spiritual finesse—and usher us into realms of meaning which would otherwise be hidden. Here is a sample from one of them that I have discovered in the blog-o-sphere (enerihot.wordpress.com):

I Write Because
by Irene Toh

Here it comes: a manifesto.
I write because words are
necessary shadows, the way
they augment light that
shines on every thing.

I write because any object
may become a subject
by simple appreciation,
being talked about so
it becomes the light.

I write because after god,
we speak things into creation,
because day turns into night,
because after you there’s no
one who is truly you and
words are dying stars.

And then here is another example from one of my favorite poets, Carl Sandburg:

Precious Moments

Bright conversations are transient as rainbows.
Speech requires blood and air to make it.
Before the word comes off the end of the tongue,
While the diaphragms of flesh negotiate the word,
In the moment of doom when the word forms,
It is born, alive, registering an imprint—
Afterward it is a mummy, a dry fact, done and gone.
The warning holds yet: Speak now or forever hold your peace.
Ecce homo had meanings: Behold the man! Look at him! Dying he lives and speaks.

Intense emotions and surrendering

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E e Cummings said, “since feeling comes first, he who pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you.” Adrienne Rich noted, “When we enter touch, we enter touch completely.”
These two poets knew a lot about intense emotion, intense feeling. They knew a whole lot more about it than I do which is the reason they write poetry and I can’t manage to do it. The best I can do is quote the poetry of others! When I met my wife, I was always quoting poetry everywhere I went, and at one point she quipped, “Mad Arkansas hurt you into other people’s poetry.” (She was alluding to a line from W. H. Auden about W. B Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.”)
The following poem by Marriane Moore is about intense feeling also and she concludes that “he who feels strongly behaves.” So often intense feeling is associated with dissolute behavior and emotions run amok. And, that has its place. But, I do feel that “he who feels strongly (can) behave.”
And, another important point she makes, “in its surrendering, finds its continuing.” It is so important to surrender, to give up. And one of these days, perhaps, I will find the humility to accomplish this sublime task:
What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt, –
dumbly calling, deafly listening-that
in misfortune, even death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs

the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.

So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive,
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,

Hope in the Darkness

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Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame. (from “September 1, 1939”)

This is one of my favorite snippets of W. H. Auden‘s poetry.  I interpret “the Just” to be those who feel just, one might even say “justified”, those who are at peace with themselves and their Source and can communicate openly with other likeminded souls.  The same “negation and despair” besets these people that besets the rest of the human race, but these persons have found the grace to communicate openly.  And when they do so, they “cast an affirming flame.”

Our Debt to the Poets

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The poet, to whose mighty heart Heaven doth a quicker pulse impart,

Subdues that energy to scan Not his own course, but that of man.

Matthew Arnold here describes what I love about poets. They have such tremendous insight, not only about their own heart, but about the human condition. For if you understand one human heart, you pretty well have a grasp over the rest of them. Yes, a poet’s heart bears the burden of a “quicker pulse” and he/she uses words to subdue that energy and translate it into meaningful, verbal form. Most of us lost that “quicker pulse” early in our life as our heart became organized into the “right” way of perceiving and understanding the world. We must depend on the poets…and other artists…to teach us about other ways of looking at the world.

An Humble Prayer

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Here is a simple poem by Louis Untermeyer on the subject of prayer that I really like. Oh, if I could only write poetry!

Prayer
God, though this life is but a wraith,
Although we know not what we use,
Although we grope with little faith,
Give me the heart to fight – and lose.
Ever insurgent let me be,
Make me more daring than devout;
From sleek contentment keep me free,
And fill me with a buoyant doubt.
Open my eyes to vision girt
With beauty, and with with wonder lit –
But let me always see the dirt,
And all that spawn and die in it.
Open my ears to music; let
Me thrill with Spring’s first flutes and drums –
But never let me dare forget
The bitter ballads of the slums.
From compromise and things half-done,
Keep me, with stern and stubborn pride;
And when, at last, the fight is won,
God, keep me still unsatisfied.
– Louis Untermeyer

Paean to Wendell Berry

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Wendell Berry is one of my favorite contemporary poets. He is a farmer and a poet as well as a retired professor from the University of Kentucky. His love of nature enriches his poetry. Here is one of my favorite of his poems:

To the Holy Spirit

O Thou, far off and here, whole and broken,
Who in necessity and in bounty wait,
Whose truth is light and dark, mute though spoken
By Thy wide grace show me Thy narrow gate.

I also highly recommend “The Peace of Wild Things” which you can find on the internet with a Google search. I recently answered a friend’s question, “How would you define grace” with the quotation of this poem. And I love his poem entitled “Marriage” which describes the torture of intimate relationship— “it is to be broken. It is to be torn open. It is not to be reached and come to rest in ever.”