Living Wittily

Why I Miss Seamus Heaney

I miss Seamus Heaney. Not that I knew him, or met him. I only know him through his poems, a couple of documentaries, and a book of interviews. But I miss him. Yes I can read his poetry, some of it I know by heart. Some of his poetry about his father, his upbringing in the country, his shrewd and qualified love for the land expressed in poem after poem - these I read, and can reread to my heart's content.

But I still miss him. By which I mean I can see clearly the emtpy spaces in our landscape left by his passing. By which I mean my sadness that there will be no further words which so wisely cherish and humanely critique this fragile, frightening complexity of human life in all its potential for ambiguity.

I miss him, by which I mean the indefinable lift given to our hearts when we know that there are writers who understand, who care, for whom human tragedy is not always an inevitable given, and whose moral rigour is reserved for the unnecessary cruelties and intransigent prejudices of human behaviour.

I miss him because his own experience of a troubled land created a poet whose compassion and forgivingness are often given words in poems which are universal in their healing and appealing power, teaching through words those human feelings that are the ultimate glory of human community, in which love is lived out in generous and consistent goodwill, humane judgement and a passionate commitment to the other.

I miss Seamus Heaney, but I have his poems, like this one below, which does for me what a good poem should do. 

 

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Seamus Heaney

R S Thomas, the Expanding Universe and the Crucified God.

R S Thomas is best known as the poet of the absence of God, or at least of the presence of God made most acute by his absence. When he is in an angry interrogative mood he besiges the customer services department of the Divine, and with a determination and articulation that makes it difficult to pacify him, let alone satisfy him.

Tell Us

We have had names for you:

The Thunderer, the Almighty

Hunter, Lord of the snowflake

and the sabre-toothed tiger.

One name we have held back

unable to reconcile it

with the mosquito, the tidal wave,

the black hole into which

time will fall. You have answered

us with the image of yourself

on a hewn tree, suffering

injustice, pardoning it;

pointing as though in either direction:horrifying us

with the possibility of dislocation.

Ah, love, with your arms out

wide, tell us how much more

they must still be stretched

to embrace a universe drawing

away from  us at the speed of light.

...

There is a surprising softness, even sympathy in the portrayal of love crucified, of God spreadeagled and hung in the ultimacy of human pain as it stretches to enfold the whole creation. The last five lines are the reluctant recognition of the poet that infinite suffering is beyond finite comprehension, and therefore the supreme scandal of Christian faith, that the stretched arms of the crucified Jesus are the embracing arms of God holding the universe in being and drawing all that is into the reconciling embrace of the Creator.

This poem echoes some of my own thought and feeling as I've lived within the text of Colossians 1.15-20. That hymn to Christ gives a theological vision which is complemented by Thomas's poem, and the poet's sense of God crucified underlies the cosmic oxymoron that is foolishness to rational minds, and yet is the wisdom of the redeeming God.

Denise Levertov and Why Questions are as Much a Means of Grace as Answers

The cliche that as you grow older you discover you have more questions than answers is just that - a cliche. I'm not sure how many of us are ever so deep core sure of the answers in the same way we feel the poignancy, pain, excitement or apprehension on hearing, sensing, being addressed by, the questions that matter most.

Anyway, for myself the question has always been one of the grace gifts of God. It's the question that creates the possibility of growth, is likely to initiate change, is a first step in a new direction, an invitation to movement rather than stuckness, an opportunity to be different and perhaps, to make a difference. One of the many gift graces in Denise Levetov's poetry is her patience with questions and her impatience with answers. It is seen in her instinct for the transformative imperative of the interrogative mood, and her tireless vigilance to ensure that proffered answers could stand the scrutiny of integrity, humanity, justice and compassion. I could relinquish many other poets, and their disappearance would leave me the poorer.

For those who want to learn to look at the world, and look within, and look above and beyond, Levertov's ouevre is not in the category of the important, but the indispensable. Her voice is an essential accompaniment on my own search for questions that do justice to the most intractable issues the human community faces today. Here is one of her poems, pointing to a via negativa, not of theology, but of how we cherish, hold and pay gentle attention to the mystery and miracle of being here. The title uses the indefinite article - this is not once for all gift, it is gift in the present continuous. The "Yes, perhaps is neither question nor answer, but an affirmation of that wonderful place in between, in which as human beings we live, and move, and have our being.

A Gift

Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers 
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps 
this gift is your answer.

Levertov's Political Poetry; Moral Vigilance, Protest and the Determination not to Despair.

 Making Peace

Denise Levertov.

A voice from the dark called out,

“The poets must give us

imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar

imagination of disaster. Peace, not only

the absence of war.”

But peace, like a poem,

is not there ahead of itself,

can’t be imagined before it is made,

can’t be known except

in the words of its making,

grammar of justice,

syntax of mutual aid.

A feeling towards it,

dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have

until we begin to utter its metaphors,

learning them as we speak.

A line of peace might appear

if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

questioned our needs, allowed

long pauses. . . .

A cadence of peace might balance its weight

on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,

an energy field more intense than war,

might pulse then,

stanza by stanza into the world,

each act of living

one of its words, each word

a vibration of light—facets

of the forming crystal.

 

Graeme asked what I thought about Levertov's political poetry, and her commitment to addressing public issues in the public square. I think she answers the questions in this poem. As a committed poet she wrote out of her experience and when she became a political and peace activist then it was inevitable, and essential that her poetry would reflect that experience if it was to continue to be the authentic voice of the poet. And what this poem celebrates and demonstrates is the power of words to transform and renew, to articulate and to interrogate, to be instuments of justice and the building blocks of peace.

 

I read this poem yesterday, just after reading online the revelations about children being deliberately targeted by snipers in Syria. See here. Such egregious behaviour appals and outrages; more than that it encourages that most lethal of responses, despair. However. The image in my mind of a human being, staring intently through a telescopic sight, focusing clearly on the face of a child, and believing that by pulling the trigger he is doing something meaningful and praiseworthy for some morally insane master, is so revolting that despair is the last emotion I am likely to feel.

 

Against such images of the hidden sniper looking at a closeup of a childs face, and ending that child's life by moving his finger one inch, let poets write, artists paint, singers sing. The evil and irony that the word 'sight' can mean to look closely and see, and also to center a target for destruction, is precisely the ambiguity and tragedy of human life and language that perhaps the poet captures best.

 

Levertov's famous essay, and her book of the title, 'The Poet in the World' is a manifesto for engagement, involvement, commitment and an existential even visceral protest against all such inhumane practices. But, however inhumane, it is nevertheless a human being who pulls the trigger - and that is the tragedy of evil that has to be addressed, and by human beings who will not despair, will not be silent, and will not respond to such atrocity in kind.

 

Kyrie eleison,

Christe eleison,

Kirie eleison.

The Sapphire at the Fountain's Heart: Denise Levertov and What the Restless Self Misses.

The photo is of a burn running off Glen Dye, filled with melted snow water, and peaty brown. Had I taken time I'd probably have seen some small fish in it, but standing on the bridge looking down I was simply captivated by the play of light on water, the sound of water on stones, and the wild freedom of tumbling water as a sacrament of life and the extravagant brilliance of grace.

Which brings me to Denise Levertov once more. It's always presumptuous to say more than we know, even if we are getting carried away with our admiration and enthusiasm. I wouldn't dare suggest this is Denise Levetov's best poem, nor that it is the one which captures most faithfully her own search for that elusive inner acknowledgement we might call faith. But it is a poem she chose to begin her essay exploration of poetry as 'Work that Enfaiths'. And it is the poem that her biographer suggests has a clear autobiographical reference to her own faith journey. (Dana Greene, p 185).

In any case it is a poem which gives words to those recurring moments of fleeting uncertainty, that follow on the occasional encounter with God, and in which recognition, awareness and captured attention come as a gift for which we are unprepared. Second thoughts and rationalisations, the onward push of life's circumstances and the busyness of our inner lives, and the sheer elusiveness of the transcendent when we seek to recapture it, make such heightened joy hard to maintain over time. Perhaps because olrdinary experience tells us such extraordinary joy is too good to be true, whatever true means.

Few poets I have read combine Levertov's honest searching, persistent longing and determined doubting as a complex intersection of themes as Levertov does in her later poetry. And this poem, speaks to that condition when, in our most honest moments we confess, "Lord I believe, help thou mine unbelief". The question which ends the poem, in its poignancy and possibility, is Levertov's version of what the author of The Colud of Unknowing meant by 'the dart of longing love.'

This is a beautiful poem.

Flickering Mind

Lord, not you,
it is I who am absent.
At first
belief was a joy I kept in secret,
stealing alone
into sacred places:
a quick glance, and away -- and back,
circling.
I have long since uttered your name
but now
I elude your presence.
I stop
to think about you, and my mind
at once
like a minnow darts away,
darts
into the shadows, into gleams that fret
unceasing over
the river's purling and passing.
Not for one second
will my self hold still, but wanders
anywhere,
everywhere it can turn.  Not you,
it is I am absent.
You are the stream, the fish, the light,
the pulsing shadow,
you the unchanging presence, in whom all
moves and changes.
How can I focus my flickering, perceive
at the fountain's heart
the sapphire I know is there?

"the throng's clamour recedes...." The Life and Poetry of Denise Levertov

Dana Greene's biography of Denise Levertov is both a labour of love and a significant work of contextual literary criticism. For the first time I've found that some of Levertov's poetry is dated and placed exactly in the life circumstances she was facing, which makes the biographical details at times harshly revealing of her vulnerability, relational crises, insecurity and yet; which also show us the slow, even late maturing of one whose late poetry became expansive towards that in ordinary life which gives life its mystery, and that which is transcendent which gives that mystery teleological significance. 

This was a woman searching for meaning. All her life also a woman hungry for approval yet determinedly independent, disinterested in the claims of traditional faith expressions but moving, perhaps drawn inexorably, towards a vision of God and the world in which her primary concerns for justice and peace, wholeness and purpose, human brokenness as a given and human wholeness as a journey towards rather than a destination reached, all came together in a fusion of horizons. Out of that fusion comes some of her very finest poetry.

Readers of this blog know Levertov is in my canon of writers whose words take with utmost seriousness the role of the poet as the one who enables to see, and as one who believes the imagination is one of the most powerful moral forces of the human mind. 

PRIMARY WONDER

Days pass when I forget the mystery.

Problems insoluble and problems offering

their own ignored solutions

jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber

along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing

their colored clothes; caps and bells.

                                                    And then

once more the quiet mystery

is present to me, the throng's clamor

recedes:  the mystery

that there is anything, anything at all,

let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,

rather than void: and that, 0 Lord,

Creator, Hallowed one, You still,

hour by hour sustain it.

-- Denise Levertov

A Week of Poems that "do it", Whatever "It" Might Be - Sunday

Every Riven Thing

God goes, belonging to every riven thing He's made
Sing his being simply by being
The thing it is:
Stone and tree and sky,
Man who sees and sings and wonders why

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing He's made,
Means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
Trying to will himself into the stillness where

God goes belonging. To every riven thing He's made
There is given one shade
Shaped exactly to the thing itself:
Under the tree a darker tree;
Under the man the only man to see

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made
The things that bring Him near,
Made the mind that makes Him go.
A part of what man knows,
Apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing He's made.

Christian Wiman

I've been reading Wiman for a few years now. This is a poem that needs little comment other than to hear the author read it here.

This comes from an astonishing interview with Wiman recalling his life growing up in Texas. If you want to hear the full interview with Krista Tippett it's over here.

As a taster of how this remarkable man's mind works, here's just one quote:

I am convinced that the same God that might call me to sing of God at one time might call me at another to sing of godlessness. Sometimes when I think of all of this energy that's going on, all of these different people trying to find some way of naming and sharing their belief, I think it may be the case that God calls some people to unbelief in order that faith can take new forms.

....................................................

The photo above was taken on Inverbervie beach - those smooth, sea shaped stones are amongst my favourite things in Scotland. I can happily meander along that rocky beach taking pleasure in the coulours, shapes, arrangement and sound of those stones being pushed and pulled by the waves. The phot below is of another of God's creatures who likes the same beach.

A Week of Poems That Do "It", Whatever "It" Might Be - Monday

Time for a mary Oliver poem. In fact this week I'll post a poem a day from my favourite poets. Hard to reduce them to seven, and I wouldn't want to say that these this week are the top seven - but they are seven I read often, sometimes deeply, and seldom disappointingly. I'll indulge myself by combining the poems with a photo - not because the photo holds a candle to the poem, just because I...well, just because!

This first poem is like the flip side of a Psalm of Lament. Often enough I'm a sharp eyed observer of life's apparent negatives; a conscientious barometer of my own inner climate; an alert listener to the background noise of life to hear the rumbling bass more clearly than the melody. And this poem, like many of Mary Oliver's, is a perspective changing poem, an equilibrium restoring poem, a rhythm of words and syntax of lightness that awakens gratitude.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mindful, Mary Oliver

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for -
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world -
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant -
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these -
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

...............................

On a different note entirely, well maybe not entirely different - see here

Every Riven Thing. The Poems of Christian Wiman. Review

My God my bright abyss

int which all my longing will not go

once more I come to the edge of all I know

and believing nothing believe in this:

 And there the poem ends. And this unfinished poem is the beginning of a remarkably moving, wise and luminous book. Christian Wiman is a poet critic and a poet whose writing sometimes sounds as if each word is melded onto metal like arc welding. The image is deliberate; in his latest collection, Every Riven Thing, Wiman's poetry flashes with quite remarkable intensity, urgency and honesty in the face of human mortality.

 

This is Wiman's first published collection since he was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and given a future with just enough hope to make each day a gift, and each tomorrow precariously uncertain. 

There comes a time when time is not enough:
a hand takes hold or a hand lets go; cells swarm,
cease; high and cryless a white bird blazes beyond

itself, to be itself, burning unconsumed.

Poem after poem, Wiman looks straight into the ambiguity of things and the contingency and givenness of circumstance, the fragility and tenacity of our hold on life, and tells what is seen, or not seen. What gives these poems their unsettling potency, also ironically makes them vehicles of hope and future possibility. Wiman believes in God. But forget faith as panacea, or God as postulated rescuer. This is faith rooted in a willed agnosticism about the providence and purposes of God. God is not the answer, but the question; God is not the solution, neither the problem. God simply is, but is to be trusted. There is a 'though he slay me yet will I trust him' defiance in some of these poems that carries far more authentic currency than thick volumes of so called Christian poetry. Here's a sample:

This Mind of Dying

God let me give you now this mind of dying
fevering me back
into consciousness of all I lack
and of that consciousness becoming proud:

There are keener griefs than God.
They come quietly, and in plain daylight,
leaving us with nothing, and the means to feel it.

My God my grief forgive my grief tamed in language
to a fear that I can bear.
Make of my anguish
more than I can make. Lord, hear my prayer.

Rarely have I read 21st century poetry that comes so close to the best metaphysical poetry of the 17th Century. George Herbert would have been proud to write that, except I doubt there was an ounce of pride in that country parson. But here is a poem that is complaint and prayer, lament and petition, human voice and words seeking divine understanding and help. It is hard to imagine a more luminous darkness than is contained in those 11 lines of a heart's suffering, having had enough.

I've always argued that the finest poetry takes us nearer the pastoral realities of Christian  ministry than most any other literature. Reading that poem we are allowed to look inside a heart afraid to trust and afraid not to, anguished at the thought of death and holding on to hope in the God who accompanies the grief - an d we rightly take of our shoes, and kneel. This is poetic truth distilled from a courageous soul. Another poem, 'Hammer is the Prayer', which begins, 'There is no consolation in the thought of God', then works towards precisely what consolation there kight yet be, and finishes with the couplet:

peace came to the hinterlands of our minds,

too remote to know, but peace nonetheless.

If I were to attempt any summary of these diamond cut poems, these two lines would have to do. They are the poet's own words, and as he goes on living, writing, fighting and working, may he know 'peace nonetheless'.

( This book is not reviewed for the publisher or any Journal - it's reviewed here simply because I think his work deserves to be better known.)

White Water Discipleship

One of the great blessings of reading is knowing where to find those writers who speak to our condition. And within the work of a favourite writer one or two lines which say more in few words than we could say in an entire volume. Mary Oliver is a good companion just now. And the poem below speaks of many things, but particularly the risk and cost of love; the temptation to play safe; the fear of commitment; and then the reckless rushing towards joy that may only come once in your life.

And the command, for that's what it is, to row towards the waterfall, is one of the most telling metaphors I know for the precarious risks of life's ultimate commitments. Risk aversion is the way to loneliness and diminishment in human relationships; even risk assessment betrays a caution that avoids the white water rapids in favour of drifting with the safer currents. When it comes to following Jesus, I could well hear him say, when you hear the roar and rumble and taste the mist, "Row, row for your life towards it!"

West Wind #2

You are young.  So you know everything.  You leap
into the boat and begin rowing.  But listen to me.
Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without
any doubt, I talk directly to your soul.  Listen to me.
Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and
your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to
me.  There is life without love.  It is not worth a bent
penny, or a scuffed shoe.  It is not worth the body of a
dead dog nine days unburied.  When you hear, a mile
away and still out of sight, the churn of the water
as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the
sharp rocks – when you hear that unmistakable
pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth
and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls
plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life
toward it.

~ Mary Oliver ~