New and Selected Essays

by Denise Levertov

  The other category of poems of which I want to speak dares to approach spiritual longing and spiritual experience in a way that is more direct, since it is frankly about the quest for or the encounter with God. It might be called more abstract—except that it is a mistake to suppose an experience is abstract merely because it is not predominantly sensory. Predominantly is a key word, for it is not that these poems eschew concrete and sensuous imagery. But their focus is different. More of the poets who come to mind in relation to this kind of poem are well-known. Milosz, probably the greatest of living poets, is among them, as are R. S. Thomas, another profound older voice, Wendell Berry (whose range includes both my categories and often combines them, though his country is rural rather than wild), and Charles Wright, a poet whose diction incorporates many theological terms and references and whose exciting poetry is permeated by a longing for mystical revelation, for ecstasy, “I want to be bruised by God,” he wrote in “China Trace” a few years ago:

  I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out

  I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.

  I want to be entered and picked clean.

  Other poets I’m thinking of are little-known.

  While, if any known belief-system provides the center for the poems of wild nature, it would be Buddhist or Native American, the poems I am thinking of now have a Christian or Jewish context. Their authors don’t necessarily claim faith, but that is the frame of reference. Some of these poems deal with the struggle between faith and doubt, some with moments of epiphany; some are explorations and illuminations of Biblical scenes or sayings. And unlike the poems in the first group (with the exception of Kaplinski), some of these poems are known to me only through translations—but translations which truly appear to have ferried poetry safely across from language to language. There is considerable variety of style and tone among them, whether translated or written in English.

  The Chicano poet Ben Sáenz, in his collection Calendar of Dust (Broken Moon, 1991) writes in “Easter: Mesilla, N.M., 1962,” of a childhood encounter with a grandmother’s certitude that marked him for life. He has told of the ride to Mass:

  in a red pickup, bright and red and waxed

  for the special occasion. Clean, polished as

  apples, the yellow-dressed girls in front

  with Mom and Dad; the boys in back, our

  hair blowing free

  and of the Mass itself. Then:

  Mass ending, we running to the truck,

  shiny as shoes going dancing. Dad

  driving us to see my grandmother. There,

  at her house, I asked about the new word

  I’d heard: resurrection. “Death,

  death,” she said, her hands moving downward,

  “the cross—that is death.” And then she

  laughed: “The dead will rise.” Her upturned

  palms moved skyward as she spoke. “The dead

  will rise.” She moved her hands toward me,

  wrapped my face with touches, and

  laughed again. The dead will rise.

  Lucille Clifton is one of the illuminators of scripture. She has written, for example, a whole series of short poems on the life of the Virgin Mary, others on the life of Jesus or in the voices of other personages of the Gospels, all translated into a diction that enables us to see them as Black—whether African American or West Indian—just as the icons from Solentiname in Guatemala enable us to see them as Central American, restoring universality to what has too often been depicted in wholly Northern European terms—those blond, bland, Holy Families of undertakers’ Christmas calendars. Her St. John the Baptist says (in a poem just called “john”):

  somebody coming in blackness

  like a star

  and the world be a great bush

  on his head

  and his eyes be fire

  in the city

  and his mouth be true as time

  he be calling the people brother

  even in the prison

  even in the jail

  i’m just only a baptist preacher

  somebody bigger than me coming

  in blackness like a star

  In her poem “good friday” Christ says:

  i rise up above my self

  like a fish flying

  men will be gods

  if they want it

  The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski’s poem, “Kierkegaard on Hegel,” implies that men, humans, do not want it—they don’t dare to want it.

  Kierkegaard on Hegel

  Kierkegaard said of Hegel: He reminds me of someone

  who builds an enormous castle but lives himself

  in a storehouse next to the construction.

  The mind, by the same token, dwells in

  the modest quarters of the skull,

  and those glorious states

  which were promised us are covered

  with spiderwebs, for the time being we should enjoy

  a cramped cell in the jailhouse, a prisoner’s song,

  the good mood of a customs officer, the fist

  of a cop. We live in longing. In our dreams,

  locks and bolts open up. Who didn’t find shelter

  in the huge looks to the small. God

  is the smallest poppy seed in the world,

  bursting with greatness.

  As I myself have tried to say in a poem or two, our wings hang unused on our shoulders, a dead weight. Only in dreams, Zagajewski seems to be saying, do we approach God, who is at once minute and vast, an unreleased potentiality like the unparalleled power to grow contained in the mustard-seed of the parable. We “live in longing,” not present to ourselves and therefore not present to the divine—this is what afflicts our species. That at least is my reading of this poem after looking at what Kierkegaard wrote of Hegel in Either/Or. In another poem, “He Acts,” Zagajewski seems to envision God not as absent, and certainly not dead, but not to be found in the familiar places of Judeo-Christian tradition.

  He Acts

  He acts, in splendor and in darkness,

  in the roar of waterfalls and in the silence of sleep,

  but not as your well-protected shepherds

  would have it. He looks for the longest line,

  the road so circuitous

  it is barely visible, and fades away

  in suffering. Only blind men, only

  owls feel sometimes its dwindling trace

  under their eyelids.

  A number of David Shaddock’s poems take up the ancient Jewish tradition which Arthur Waskow (who wrote an afterword for a group of them) has called “God-wrestling.” In section XI of “In This Place Where Something’s Missing Lives” Shaddock writes:

  In the space between the pink plum-blossoms

  and the thick leaves of the loquat tree,

  a grey February sky is burst by beams of gold light.

  I want to leave off this dialogue

  with a God I can’t be sure exists

  and go into that light.

  But I cannot. Inside my chest

  is a fist, clenching darkness,

  that has been shaking for a thousand years.

  Towhees dive past the window.

  Their God is not the God of the Jews.

  No Hasid, laughing and dancing,

  is as oblivious as a bird.

  And no bird shoulders the world’s sorrow

  like a Zaddik, lifting the bride’s chair at a wedding.

  I want to lay down my burden.

  But even joy remembers and burns

  like a Yahrtzeit candle in my chest.

  And in Section VII:

  The white phosphorous bombs.

  The bone-seeking fire.

  The robber bullets and swinging batons,

  the trainwheels cutting a man’s legs.

  I do not accuse You.

  I live uneasily with my despair.

  Yet some days I am stil
l moved to hope,

  against the news of perpetual pogrom,

  that something other than this fist

  in men’s hearts will prevail.

  Elohim, God of mercy,

  is it in hoping that You exist,

  that You exist,

  this longing itself

  Your in-dwelling spark?

  Czeslaw Milosz’s profound doubt is one face of the gold coin of his great poems; the other face is the whole culture of belief in which his life, with its studies and affiliations, is rooted. The doubts of a wholly secular mind and its life-experience have no context, no ground, no substantial referents. Belief has to accompany doubt for doubt to be serious. “It is better to praise God in misfortune, thinking He did not act, though He could have,” Milosz writes in “Before Majesty”: “Unanswered is our prayer….” Another stanza of this poem says, “A weak human mercy walks in the corridors of hospitals and is like a halfthawed winter”—and the last line is, “And I, who am I, a believer, dancing before the All Holy?” In the poem “On Prayer” he writes:

  You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.

  All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge

  And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,

  Above landscapes the color of ripe gold

  Transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.

  That bridge leads to the shore of Reversal

  Where everything is just the opposite and the word is

  Unveils a meaning we hardly envisioned.

  Notice: I say we; there, every one, separately.

  Feels compassion for others entangled in the flesh

  And knows that if there is no other shore

  They will walk that aerial bridge all the same.

  And he follows this in Unattainable Earth, published in 1986, with a quote from his unde Oscar de Lubicz Milosz: “To wait for faith in order to be able to pray is to put the cart before the horse. Our way leads from the physical to the spiritual.” This is reminiscent of that prayer of St. Anselm which says, “I do not seek to understand so that I may believe, but I believe so that I may understand; and what is more, I believe that unless I do believe I shall not understand.”

  Amid the savagery, stupidity, and corruption we of the late 20th century see around us, confronted with an over-expanded technology and an atrophied sense of moral responsibility, the poetic vision of God is almost always a somber, shadowed one even in those most committed to faith. The Welsh poet R. S. Thomas, who is an Anglican priest, ends “Pilgrimages” with the question,

  … Was the pilgrimage

  I made to come to my own

  self, to learn that in times

  like these and for one like me

  God will never be plain and

  out there, but dark rather and

  inexplicable, as though he were in here?

  Harlow Clark, a young Western poet living in Utah, has written of the olive tree in a way that moved me:

  The Olive

  This Tree is light to the world,

  Its fruit light to the mind,

  Fire to the lamp, calm to troubled waters.

  The fruit bears its fire by being crushed:

  Salt well in a stone box.

  Add purgatives—vinegar is good.

  Let sit.

  Crush between two grinding stones driven by a mule

  Kissed by a whip

  Till the skins break

  Repeat to the lees, then burn the mash on a torch.

  If the oil enlightens your soul

  You will see the beaten traveller

  There, by the side of the road, as you head down to Jericho.

  Pour it on his broken skin.

  This man, light of endless worlds,

  Praying near the trunk

  Feels the branches enfolding him,

  Folding him in—kneading, pressing

  Till the skin breaks and it is not oil

  Which will spill on ground that will shake tomorrow

  Like waves tossing the boat

  His nearby friends dream they are sleeping in—unaware

  A friend will whip him with a kiss

  Enemies whip nails through his palms and wrists

  and spear him up a sponge of vinegar through his ribs.

  After the healing has all flowed out

  Layer him in linen

  Salt him away in a stone room

  Post sentinels to guard the rock that guards the room

  That guards the shroud that keeps the dead

  Dead—till the earth rolls the death stone like a boat

  Tossed in stormy dreams and the empty cloths fold themselves

  And Mary hears her name spoken

  Not by the gardener.

  But first, now, the tree draws him closer, tighter

  Glowing in the approaching torchlight

  As if dripping oil.

  Opening with the properties of all olive trees, the poem zeroes in on a particular tree in the Garden of Gethsemane; and from there moves to focus on Jesus in the garden, close to the tree; by the end of the poem, so closely have He and the tree been mutually embraced, we are led not only to see in the tree an archetype of the Cross, but, as it opposes its own glow to “the approaching torchlight” (to return to the opening line), to see Jesus as olive tree, “light to the world”—so that the composition has a kind of circularity.

  Eugene Warren (who also publishes as Gene Doty) writes of the fear that doesn’t want to know about the Passion, that just doesn’t want to have to hear about it:

  A signature

  —went into the world like a shining knife—

  they don’t like the blood,

  the rusty nails crookt

  with gore

  the hot gush

  out of split skin

  & the hot wind like boild sand,

  a bath of grainy steam

  the wildness, a black sun

  & the shaking

  is terrific

  they don’t like

  the stench of death,

  not even rich heaped manure

  rotting for the garden

  (delicate glaze of blossom formed

  of dung translated into cells of sweet)

  they don’t like the body coming

  back like that, wounds open

  to sun & air, walking around,

  they don’t like not being able to vanish

  Another poet not widely known, Kathleen Norris, has a poem called “Imperatives” in which she simply—and brilliantly—collages essential words and phrases from what Jesus is recorded to have said:

  Imperatives

  Look at the birds

  Consider the lilies

  Drink ye all of it

  Ask

  Seek

  Knock

  Enter by the narrow gate

  Do not be anxious

  Judge not; do not give dogs what is holy

  Go: be it done for you

  Do not be afraid

  Maiden, arise

  Young man, I say, arise

  Stretch out your hand

  Stand up, be still

  Rise, let us be going …

  Love.

  Forgive.

  Remember me.

  It brings the “found poem” to a level one never expected it to aspire to, much less reach.

  The fact that poems such as any of these (both those of homage to wild nature and those of doubt and faith) are being written and are being read, and that there is indeed, in so many writers and readers, that “deep spiritual longing” Jorie Graham speaks of, seems to underscore the irrelevance to literature, for both writer and reader, of the kind of criticism currently prevalent in the academic world —a criticism which treats works of art as if they were diagrams or merely means provided for the exercise of analysis, rather than what they are: testimonies of lived life, which is what writers have a vocation to give, and readers (including those who write) have a need to
receive. Those I have cited provide only a scant sampling of what I, as one hungry reader, have been happy to receive in the last year or two; and I have no anxiety about the supply of such nourishment. There will be more.

  * * *

  Given as the 1991 Paul Zweig Memorial Lecture at Poets’ House, New York City.

  On Williams’ Triadic Line, or How to Dance on Variable Feet

  (1984)

  ALTHOUGH SO MUCH CRITICAL literature on William Carlos Williams has accumulated and continues to proliferate, that part of it which concerns his prosody typically applies a tin ear, or no ear at all, to the sounds of his poems and to the relation of sound, and especially rhythm, to the nuances of significant expression. The common reader who approaches Williams without the intervention of critical mediators frequently responds with instinctive understanding; but a great many persons first encounter him in the classroom, where—if the instructor is strongly influenced by the secondary material—mistaken concepts, confidently asserted, too often lead them astray.

  The old evaluation of Williams as a homespun Imagist dies hard: the red wheelbarrow is trundled on stage at every “Introduction to Modern Poetry” course, year after year, at college after college. And “The Yachts,” admired by the academics of twenty or more years ago less for itself than for its atypicality, which enabled them to patronize Williams with a “can do good work if he tries” school-report, retains its contrasting place in the anthologies. In recent years, his stock having risen so far above what it was in his lifetime, the focus has shifted to his prosodic theories and to the poems, from The Desert Music on, in which he demonstrated them. But just what constitutes a “variable foot” evidently puzzles the critics, often to the point where it is dismissed, after a brief pro forma attempt to define it, as an obsessive illusion of his old age.

  I have not read the entire body of Williams criticism, but from the books and articles I have read I derive the impression that this bafflement is due primarily to a failure to recognize that the variable foot is not a matter of stress patterns but of duration in time.

  Reed Whittemore for example (William Carlos Williams: Poet from Jersey) seems to come closer than many to understanding this measure when he quotes Yvor Winters on “the foot in free verse”—“one heavily accented syllable, an unlimited number of unaccented syllables, and an unlimited number of syllables of secondary accent”—in a context which assumes that this clustering of a variable number of syllables around a central beat, though it was to be found in poems written long before Williams proclaimed the variable foot as a discovery, nevertheless describes the phenomenon. But this formulation is at best only a partial description; and Winters’ assumption that the focus of such a cluster was the central heavily accented syllable, while applicable to “free verse” and perhaps (as I shall set forth later) to Williams’ earlier poems, does not apply—as Whittemore tries to make it do—to the consciously written variable foot and triadic line of the later Williams. Winters, in his 1947 In Defense of Reason, had chosen to scan Williams’ “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime,” from the early 1920s; he did so by marking what he heard as its strong stresses (which to his ear turn out to be consistently two to a line). Whittemore comments that by 1955 the major change Williams would have made in those lines “would not have been in the syllable count but the spacing” (into triads), because by the 1950s Williams “was not thinking syllable by syllable* but unit by unit so that each triad was really a threesome of ones.” And he then proceeds to more or less dismiss this “spatial” arrangement, as he calls it, as less significant than Williams liked to think. But whether or not Williams’ concept and practice of the variable foot are of vital importance for modern poets and poetry in general, their significance is not “spatial” (and thus visual) but temporal and auditory. (Perhaps that’s what Whittemore means by saying Williams was “thinking unit by unit” but I don’t think he makes it clear.)