Dialogue sermon by Thom Ward and Dick Gilbert
RSG: We live in a prosaic age. There is little "memorable speech," one definition of poetry. It is time to recover the poetic spirit. But it may be difficult. As Carl Sandburg said "Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air."
It's not as if we could simply have a sermon on poetry or go home, read a poem and experience religious depth. There is a New Yorker cartoon which suggests that is not all there is to it. A man bursts through doorway of home carrying five enormous volumes under his arm, declaring to his wife, who sits with a magazine on the couch: "It's National Poetry Month, Marion, and by God we're gonna read some poetry."[1]
The problem as I see it is that we lose so much of living when we succumb to a flat world of merely practical being. We need a little poetry in our lives - meaning - imagination which helps us realize that we do walk on holy ground.
That is not easy for me. I am a doer, an activist. I like to get things done. There is what I hope is a creative tension in me between this desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. The activist in me resonates to this Marge Piercy poem "To Be of Use" (copyright protected poems are not printed here).
Poet W. H. Auden wrote of poetry that it "makes nothing happen," that it "survives in the valley of its making where executives would never want to tamper."
Must everything we do be "useful"? In a utilitarian age what is the use - or the purpose - of poetry? That is why I have invited poet Thom Ward to talk with me about this. He has a poem which inspired this sermon dialogue and gives one poetic perspective to answer the question, "Why don't you do something useful?
TW: ... yes Dick, to be of use, to wed art to the vicissitudes of life, to cry out for work that is real, but then again, as Frost said, for problems with answers we go to medicine and law, but for problems with no answers we look to poetry (by the way is a problem with a specific answer really a true problem?...) Well one summer day two years back I faced a true problem, the problem of aesthetic inertia, and after eight hours of writing and revising and producing nothing, papers strewn around our living room, the lawn mower and paint cans and brushes still waiting for my arrival, my wife came home at dusk with our 3 kids, exhausted and cranky, after a day of errands and run-around, the groceries spilling from the bags as she hauled them in, and looking over at me and my impractical mess ... shouted out "Damn it honey, why don't you do something useful!...." Ah, as William Gass says, every philosophical catastrophe is a literary opportunity. Thanks to Barb I had now had a golden thread to follow, a way through the cloud of unknowing to move from surprise to surprise, discovery to discovery ... and so I began to write this poem ---
Do Something Useful
my wife says and often, though she
should know better as I've always
lacked the moxie, the toolbox talent
of the men who rebuild engines,solder pipes, fix cantankerous
appliances and understand how most
thingamajigs work. Such guys
don't need manuals, assembly instructions.Like Achilles they've been dipped
in a river of turpentine. What
every woman wants, they can accomplish:
drywall, staple gun, the thrill of the boltentering the nut. Do something useful.
The shingles are warped, the windowpanes
shot. She's right, yet ought to recall
there's the strength of envisioning
a predicament past its trouble,
the raw intelligence that lets one part
locate another, et cetera, et cetera.
Simply put: you possess such forceOr you don't. Darling, let's be blunt.
When it comes to home repairs
There's nothing mythic about me, nothing
Hephaestian like my neighbors who forgetheir own shields and while the arrows
pop and Troy smolders, I miss
all the action for I am incapable
of sawing my way out of the horse.
RSG: Thom, I guess I'm just caught up in this world of production - if we don't produce something - something tangible - something we can use - we're not doing our fair share. But thinking about it more carefully, I have to conclude that poetry and religion - the poet and the preacher - have similar work - they both deal with the insubstantial and the impractical. Neither of us creates anything necessary for survival - at least for physical survival - and yet I like to think we do some of the most important work of the world - we focus attention on the world of meaning and being.
You gave me a very provocative piece of thought from writer and cellis Marc Salzman that helps us realize that our kind - preachers and poets - are not so much problem solvers or the question answerers as we are those who pose the problems and ask the questions - even though our solutions are quite imperfect.
"For me, art and music are alike in that they are about creating dissonance and then feeling compelled form within to resolve it. Bach literally could not stand leaving a dissonant harmony unresolved. In ordinary life, we face dissonances every day which we can't resolve - there's not enough time, we don't have the authority or the influence or the knowledge. But when we write or listen or read or play we relive the experience of making the journey from chaos to order, and that feeds us, reminds us, heartens us, gives us courage to face all the journey's where there is no such promise. And that's why Bach's suites are stories."
TW: ... but we must also remember a very little of anything can go a long way in a work of art, that a poem can communicate before its fully understood, that, quite often, the reader, through his or her faithful encounters with the poem, actually "finishes" the verse, thus, validating the idea that the task of the poet is not to impose intent into the language, but to follow nuance and rhythm, syllable and silence .... Perhaps our most "purposeful" or "useful" accomplishments in language are when we let the so-called meaning in a poem pursue a particular set of sounds, and not vice-versa. Here's a gorgeous, effortless lyric that praises the gift of "unuse", unmeaning and unknowing. From his collection Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey, Hayden Carruth's "The Brook"...
Insert "The Brook"
RSG: O. K., I'm convinced that there must be in life some uselessness - or, should we say - something that is not useful in the ordinary sense. What is there about poetry that so appeals to that side of us? Poetry is "memorable speech" - words and phrases that are engraved in our consciousness. I can recall my father - who never went beyond 8th grade - reciting poem after poem from memory. I could never do that. I'm left with snatches, and phrases and stanzas. Is this need for poetry archtypal? Is it engrained in our very being? In some more than others? Why poetry?
TW: ....I have often wrestled with such questions, as any viable artist must, for better of worst. A few years back the Democrat & Chronicle asked me a write a piece celebrating the first National Poetry Month (which arrives each April, when "The world is mud-luscious" and "puddle-wonderful," as cummings said). The D & C folk asked me why there is a resurgence of the reading of contemporary and modern poetry, an explosion in attendance in high school and collegiate creative writing programs etc. and so I wrote.....
Insert article "Find Authenticity of Life, Language in Poetry" Thom Ward
RSG: I have a few poems from my "fire-cave self." There are a few poets that have written poems that are among the few things I would take with me on that desert island - for a survival far different from the kind of survival of T.V. fame. I need poetry for physic and spiritual survival.
e. e. cummings is one of those poets - he takes ordinary words and puts them in extraordinary combinations in order to make us pay attention to them. I couldn't figure him out at first - I'm still not sure I could interpret him - but that's not necessary. I have only to enjoy him.
He once said, "beauty's now is more than dying's when." The poet brings us to the urgency of the now - the moment in which we're living. Perhaps my favorite cummings poem - by the way, he was the son of a Unitarian Universalist minister - is religious in both tone and content. I regard myself as a mystical religious humanist, but I can dig "god language" too.
I thank you God by e. e. cummings
Two weeks ago a member of the congretation was reminded of these words of Robert Frost during the sermon: "The figure a poem makes - it begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love." Feeling and wisdom - feeling and wisdom.
A few years ago I read poet Donald Hall's book Life Works - not really poetry, but a poetic examination of life itself. He helps us remember we are whole beings - not different kinds of being inhabiting one body - which is what our fractured world tries to tell us. He wrote an essay with a great title for poetry - "The Unsayable Said." It helps us understand why poetry in such an essential part of us.
From THE UNSAYABLE SAID by Donald Hall
Poems are pleasure first: bodily pleasure, a deliciousness of the senses. Mostly, poems end by saying something (even the unsayable) but they start as the body's joy, like making love. Sometimes a poem remains a small pleasing sensation:
Bah, bah, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes, sir. Yes, sir.
Three bags full.
Maybe these words once referred to taxation, but we hear them now without being tempted to paraphrase. Instead, we chew on them, taste them, and dance to them. This banquet or ballet starts in the crib, before arithmetic or thought. Everyone was once an infant who took mouth-pleasure in gurgle and shriek, accompanied by muscle-joy as our small limbs clenched and unclenched. Poetry starts from the crib; a thousand years later, John Donne makes lovers into compasses, T. S. Eliot contemplates the still point of the turning world, and Elizabeth Bishop remembers sitting as a child in the dentist's waiting room; but if these poets did not retain the mouth-pleasure of a baby's autistic utterance - pleasure in vowels on the tongue, pleasure in changes of changes of volume and pause: Bah, bah, black sheep - we would not hear their meditations and urgencies. The body is poetry's door; the sounds of words - throbing in legs and arms; rich in the mouth - let us into the house.
TW: ....and later on in the essay Hall says this: Yet it's true: When we read poems we often feel more emotion than we can reasonably account for. If this little poem pleases us much, it pleases us more than paraphrase can explain. (To paraphrase this poem we are driven to synonyms - "Through the wide unclosed portal" - which serve only to show that synonyms do not exist.) Feeling bodily pleasure and fulfillment, feeling rightness beyond reason, feeling contentment or even bliss - we cannot account for the extremity of our satisfaction. By its art of saying the unsayable, poetry produces a response in excess of the discernible stimulus.
Pursuing the architectural analogy, I want to call this response the secret room. Friends of ours bought an old house in the country, a warren of small rooms, and after they furnished it and settled down, they became aware that their floor plan made no sense. Peeling off some wallpaper they found a door that pried open to reveal a tiny room, sealed off and hidden, goodness knows why: They found no corpses nor stolen goods. The unsayable builds a secret room, in the best poems, which shows in the excess feeling over paraphrase. This room is not a Hidden Meaning, to be paraphrased by the intellect; it conceals itself from reasonable explanation. The secret room is something to acknowledge, accept and honor in a silence of ascent; the secret room is where the unsayable gathers, and it is poetry's uniqueness.
...I love that idea of the secret room, the secret places or local brilliances in a poem the poet hopes to discover in the process of writing, revision and distance from the poem...
As everyone here knows, this life is so abundant, offers us so many possibilities (Eden is, as Joseph Campbell says), and I suspect that sensibility was blazingly apparent to me during my wife's pregnancy with our son Taryn, a pregnancy where I, so mesmerized by the pre-natal experience, was not of much use at all, (unless you call continual questions to the midwifes about forceps and ultrasound useful). In any case, during the pregnancy and after I worked on a collection of poems to present this most secret of secret rooms as I imagined it. Here is a poem called "Sharps & Flats" which I'd like to read today in honor of Ed Schell and all our wonderful choirs....
Sharps and Flats by Thom Ward
These evenings, as the street lights
heat the air with their yellow hum,
we lie down, naked and happy.
I hover over her belly and sing
into her womb. Broadway hits.
Folk songs. Brave hymns.
Mixing verses with refrains,
dropping lines, pausing
to retrieve words I once knew,
"Simple Gifts" and "Edelweiss,"
"Follow The Drinking Gourd."
For the old man is awaitin'
for to carry you to freedom....
My voice unsure, wandering
the treble clef's high plateau,
sinking through the bass clef's
ancient bog. "Old Man River,"
"Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."
After a dozen half-finished songs,
the lyrics now more elusive,
I fall back on a little tra-la-la,
do-be-do, Louie Armstrong, Bessie Smith,
each note sweet as mother's milk,
da-da-da-ing my way into Bach's
clavichord, Copeland's timpani.
All this music he acknowledges,
punches and flutter kicks,
the crown of his head rolling
closer to my voice, pushing out
toward these notes I offer
so that he might understand
how abundant this life is
with its pianos and drums,
violins, harps and horns,
old men humming on porches,
young girls singing in fast
convertibles, arias and quartets,
all of us, one time or another, arms
thrown over somebody's neck,
baying into our beers -
"Clementine" .... "O, Danny Boy"
"We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder."
... but we don't want to forget the painstaking reality of pregnancies which the woman works through so courageously, and the man tries to "identify with." In any case, as my wife was yelling at me for my latest bungling (which was deserving of much yelling, let it be known), I couldn't help think of that wonderful little poem by William Carlos Williams, written in the early 20th century, those seemingly ordinary plums which metaphor into all of our sensual and spiritual desires. The poem is (and many of you know it)
TW recite "This is Just to Say" by Dr. William Carlos Williams. ... now on that particularly humid summer day in July of 1995, Williams' spry language came back to me and I fled from my wife, toward my desk to write:
Like the Doctor
This is just to say
I put your favorite
maternity dress
in the dryer
with the socks and shorts,
on the chance you'd have it
by lunch. Forgive me.
It's easier to iron now,
so warm and so small.
RSG: There is a sense in which poetry doesn't have to make sense. There are rhymes without reasons, words without explanation, poems that can't be justified except to enjoy them, poets who seem not to make sense. But without them we are impoverished.
Wallace Stevens is one of my favorites - though I sometimes find him obscure. He says that the poet and poetry are not about knowledge, not about faith (though I might quibble with him here), but about imagination - what he calls "the carnival of the imagination." Poetry, he says, is not really about reason, but about intuition and intuition cannot be justified. But Stevens says of the function of the poet is "to help people to live their lives."[2]
He goes on to say the poet is not one who helps us out of the confusion in which we find ourselves, but excites the imagination. I think of his poem "The Emperor of Ice Cream," - which is a little like being a minister - or a poet. Our lives melt away - we are emperors only of ice cream. But there I go again, trying to make sense of the poem - trying to justify it. I don't know if that's what he meant. It doesn't matter. I just enjoy the image. "Of all the arts, said John Malcolm Brinnan, "poetry is the most gloriously useless and most necessary."
The Emperor of Ice Cream
...as memorable as Stevens' rollicking language is for its own sensual sake, there are many times when we look to poetry because it is the only language capable of lighting up our fire-cave selves. Often times prose or expository speech seem insufficient, too laden with the twin attendants of use and purpose, to speak to the ambiguities and ambivalences, challenges and difficulties, the trauma which shadows our lives. And so in need of some kind of deeper spiritual or emotional sustenance, a nourishment to lead us beyond the passable truths of our common vernacular toward a moment of synchronic time - a moment of pure presence, of heart-intelligence, we turn to poetry, poetry as a blessing or a prayer.
Insert Jane Kenyon's "Let Evening Come"
RSG and TW: Amen.
RSG: When T. S. Eliot was at Harvard and in residence at Eliot House, a reading of his poetry there was attended by the young James Luther Adams, probably the outstanding Unitarian Universalist theologian of the 20th century, and later professor at Harvard Divinity School. Adams reported that following Eliot's reading of one of his poems an undergraduate asked,
TW: "Mr. Eliot, would you tell us what it means?"
RSG: Eliot asked in turn, "Did you hear me read it?"
TW: "Yes, sir," was the reply.
RSG: "Then be grateful, be grateful," Eliot responded.[3] And we are.
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