Poetry & Spirit

No matter what your spiritual practice, poetry can deepen it.

Articles:

Hirshfield, Jane. "Spiritual Poetry."  Poetry Foundation.  June 28, 2006.  Web. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178390

Maitreyabandu.  "Thirteen Ways of Making Poetry a Spiritual Practice." Magma Journal.  c2013.  England.  http://magmapoetry.com/archive/magma-51/articles/13-ways-of-making-poetry-a-spiritual-practice/



These articles by Sheila Packa explore sacred texts and poetry. Each has links to source materials. The Poetry and Spirit Group @ UUCD for the Interfaith Group (2014).  The participants read selected sacred text(s) at each session and these were followed by writing exercises.

The Forms of Grief - Kaddish, Eulogy, Elegy, Requiem, and Poetry of Witness
http://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/01/forms-of-grief.html

Psalms, Laments, & Lamentations

https://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-abc-of-grief.html#more

Walt Whitman and Dharma - Bhagavad Gita
http://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/01/dharma-and-poetry.html

The Language of the Mystics - The Cloud of Unknowing, Mechthild von Magdeburg
http://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/01/poetry-language-of-mystics.html

Emily Dickinson: Poetry and Spirit - Emily's poems are based on a hymn structure
http://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/01/considering-emily-poetry-and.html

Carl Jung and Spirit of the Depth: Gnosticism and Art
http://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/01/spirit-of-depth.html

Poetry and the Spirit - Diving for the Pearl
http://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/01/poetry-and-spirit.html

Thunder of New Wings - New Beginnings and Margarite Porete - The Mirror of Simple Souls
http://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/02/thunder-of-new-wings.html

Echo & Lightning is a collection of ecstatic poems that trace the intersections between women and God: ascension and descent.  This book is the libretto for the voice and cello composition, here.  

Audio poems and cello:

Single poems:
Loveroot, Silk Thread  http://www.cellodreams.com/music/loverootsilkthread.mp3
The River Falls http://www.cellodreams.com/music/river.mp3

Sequences:
Section 1:
http://www.cellodreams.com/music/fearfuljourneypodcast.mp3
Section 2:
http://www.cellodreams.com/music/undertowpodcast.mp3

Marosa di Giorgio

In the Introduction to History of Violets, translator Jeannine Marie Pitas writes about the Uruguyuan poet Maroso di Giorgio (1932-2004): "Navigating the precarious terrain between recollection and creation, beauty and danger, religious transcendence and violent eroticism, her poetry brings a new world into being."  This sentence aptly describes the hyper-sensuality of this gifted poet. Although some reviewers have complained, in reviews of the recent publication by Ugly Duckling Presse, and perhaps found her too odd or hermetic or dwelling too much in childhood and fantasy, I find her work riveting.  

Leonardo Garet writes that she has created her own epic mythology: the first three books an account of creation, and the next three "the dance between Eros and Thanatos,"  and the last books tell the story of "the world on the other side of the looking glass."  This is a form of magical realism, and it brings the reader into a world that is innocent and erotic, dreamed and dangerous.

XX.
The daisies...were like deformed, circular birds with a single golden or silver head, surrounded by so many wings...burned the whole garden...the pungent fragrance of grapes, figs, honey, daisies set the whole house aflame. Because of them we were emboldened, like the insane, like drunks. And so we went on through the whole night, the dawn, the next morning and through the day, committing over and over again the loveliest of sins. 

This prose poem is from The History of Violets, and it illustrates the tenor and quality that the poet achieved.  It vibrates with a wild energy that reminds me of the liminal state Clarice Lispector induces.

Carolyn Forché

Poets pay attention to forms. A lament is a very old poetic form that expresses the grief of an individual or a community. Finnish shamans perform laments as did ancient Mesopotamian cultures. The Hebrew Bible contains examples the form. Nancy C. Lee writes: "Lament in the Hebrew Bible is an expression of sorrow, a description of distress, or a protest about injustice." It can be a dirge, a poem of sorrow, a prayer.

Laments are ritualized crying, and they occur in fixed and non-fixed forms, in ancient and contemporary poetry. Blue Hour by Carolyn Forché provides an eloquent example.

Poetry: the Spirit Boat

Poetry is rooted in old ritual.  I found an interesting blog, Spirit Boat, that explores shamanic tradition in Finland, both ancient and contemporary.  The Finnish word for shaman is noita or teitäjä. Tietää is an infinitive verb that means to know, tell, spell, bode, portend, or forebode. Teitäjä has the word "know" in its root; the word ending indicates one who does this. Similarly, the word oppia means to learn. Opettaja means teacher. In Finland, scholars have documented a very long tradition of shamanic practice. The title of the blog comes from Finnish cave drawings that depict figures in a vessel crossing to the spirit world. Leppä, or Harold Alden, points to the use of (oral tradition) poetry, cave drawings, carvings, and other arts as integral to shamanic practice.  The photograph here is a female Finno-Ugric shaman, date unknown. 

In English the word rune refers to "a mark or letter of mysterious or magic significance, or the small stones or pieces of bone used as divinatory symbols." The Finnish word runo translates as poem. In plural, it's runoja. In Finnish, a poet is a runoilija. In the photo to the right, rune-singers are performing the Kalevala stories, the oral storytelling tradition of Finland, a collection of creation stories, mystic adventures, wedding and folk poems, and incantations. These three performers are from Suistamo in the early 20th century. Playing the kantele is one of the most well-known singer of Kalevala songs, Iivana Shemeikka. Iivana Onoila and Konstantin Kuokka hold hands and sing astride the bench. 

The first written account of this practice of sitting on a bench in this way, hand in hand, was in 1778. Apparently, it was common to have two singers perform, one taking over when the other paused.  In "Body, Performance, and Agency in Kalevala Rune-Singing," Anna-Leena Siikala explores at length the performance style.  It makes me think of two people in a boat. This is intimate, and it's quite different than the practice of poetry performance nowadays.  I wonder if it might have a root with the Mongolian Tuvan throat-singers (mostly men) and Inuit throat-singers (mostly women). The Inuits I have seen perform in pairs, holding hands similar to the photographs of old Kalevala singers.  

This photograph shows another female poet from the past, a traditional rune singer Kaisa Vilhuinen. She lived in the Swedish part of 'Finnskogen' and died in 1941.  About the Kalevala, Anna-Leena Siikala writes:

The notion of intertextuality of Kalevala epic and incantations refers to the fact that these genres represent a larger field connected to the mythic knowledge of the other world performed by singers and seers. The concept of field has its advantages in incorporating communicative acts in the socially organized world.

The Kalevala combines genres. The Kalevala that we have today was transcribed by Elias Lönnröt in the late 1800s.  He did not collect all of the poems in the oral tradition. Some were lost. Different singers and different regions had variations. What he was able to gather became an epic. One can learn about the adventures of the magic singer Vainimoinen or about beer or ways to charm a bear (sometimes called "Honeypaws") or how to prepare for a wedding.  Siikala writes that the runoja (poems) pointed to the wider fields of knowledge: nature, farming, cultural ways and spiritual stories.

The Finnish culture bears resemblance to many Native cultures in the Americas.  One strong similarity is the way that both cultures considered many things--wind, stones--to be live beings. Each has a strong connection with the natural world.  Luonta is the Finnish noun that means nature. There is an interesting phrase in Finnish: Minä liikun luonnassa or Lounnassa liikuminen:  I like moving (or to move) in Nature. The words express the Finnish affinity for Nature and being outside.  Another strong element of the culture is the sauna (pronounced sow-na) -- it always was the first building erected on land.  The very first saunas were smoke saunas, but now it is mostly wood-fired or electric heat.  Water, stones, fire.  It is a place of cleansing, relaxation, and meditation. 

Sometimes, the old Finnish shamans would recite poems until they entered a trance state (called falling into a crack).  The metaphor of falling into a crack evokes a descent or being "between," and it describes well the process of writing poems. I consider poetry to be a spirit boat, in that poetry is a vessel or an object that holds the spirit. It seeks a mutuality of spirit, of one spirit speaking to another. Nowadays, poems are not necessarily written to be part of a religious ritual. At least mine are not.  However, writing poetry has become my spiritual practice. I honor its power of incantation and metaphor (metamorphosis).  

In performance, good poems hold the audience's attention. Many times, I've made final decisions about revision right before or onstage.  No other setting makes me more aware of the lines, individual words, and phrasings. My pencil slashes the paper, deleting every extraneous note, so the final result is precise and condensed. I believe the plays evolve into their best form through performance as well.  Often I perform poetry with Kathy McTavish on the cello, a much more powerful sound than the kantele. Occasionally I have performed poetry in dialogue with poet Ellie Schoenfeld.  One begins and then we take turns, selecting a response to the other's poem. It is a practice that is improvisional, demands deep listening in the moment, and I think it's similar to rune-singers. But we don't hold hands--or we haven't, yet. 

Thunder of New Wings

Often, I'm attuned to poetry's forms, but this essay considers its earlier stages, even of formlessness. It is difficult to separate the elements of writing that writers use. Vision, voice, and technique are interlocked, and the whole seems to exceed the sum of its parts. Lao Tze wrote:

Therefore having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short contrast each other:
High and low rest upon each other;
Voice and sound harmonize each other;
Front and back follow one another.

He says what cannot be spoken. It is the province of poetry to express the inexpressible. In exploring ways that "the spirit" can intersect with poetry, I wanted to bring together some thoughts about making new work. It is a creation story, somewhat abstracted, of the way that writers create objects made of language.     

In poetry, before the voice arrives, we attune to the world with our ears. Our ear gives us a sense wonder and awakens us. Our ear gives us the vowel sounds and cadences of the language we are born into, and we feel its rhythms in our body, listening comes before speech. The ear can pick up a tune. It is our ear that leads. A poem listens. Listen, a poem, titled "Beginning" by James Wright: 

Forms of Grief

Since Biblical lamentations, and even before, writers have poured their grief into writing.  The poems of grief seem to bring together the personal, cultural, political story together into a "social" form, meaning one designed for a wider audience. The poems of grief might fit into public discourse, but often the individual poem presents just one voice in one particular situation in one staggering loss.

The epitaph was chiseled onto headstones. The ode began as a heroic, ceremonial form and now, in current practice, exalts or celebrates a person or object. It does not have a particular form, but some poets have used meter and verse, sometimes sonnets.  The elegy, requiem, and kaddish forms offer their structures to poets.

In The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, the editors Eavan Boland and Mark Strand write:

In the traditional elegy, the grief the poet expresses is rarely a private one....In all societies death constitutes a cultural event--as well as an individual loss. That the elegy speaks to this: that it locates the cultural customs of death in whichever society it occurs, adds greatly to its power. The best elegies will always be sites of struggle between custom and decorum on one hand, and private feeling on the other.  

Many poems have honored the life and death of other poets.  W.H. Auden, in his poem "In Memory of W.B. Yeats:"

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives
A way of happening, a mouth.  

According to the American Academy of Poets, the elegy once was written in formal verse and reflected three stages of grief: grief and sorrow of the speaker, praise of the idealized dead, and consolation and solace. The regular rhythm and meter of this poem evokes the skilled language of Yeats and also provides some comment about the role of poetry itself and the moneyed culture that increasingly isolates and alienates its individuals.

Requiem is a musical composition adopted by poets.

Spirit of the Depth: Carl Jung and Poetry

As a poet, I've sometimes felt a sense of being joined in my work by a spirit or a muse. Of course, flow experience--the intense, creative focus when one is not conscious of time or events outside the door--feels spiritual.  At times, it's been a terrific struggle.  In its pursuit, I've gone through seismic changes.  In retrospect, it's been soul-making. Occasionally, I've had work that felt inspired, meaning in spiritus. So I ask what is the connection between spirituality and making art?

The poet Federico Garcia Lorca named and invoked the Duende, and the Duende created an almost atmospheric change. Neither muse nor angel, it was not a spirit (according to Lorca) as much as a struggle. The Duende did not bring gifts or even a livelihood.  It lent brilliance at the same time that it caused anguish.  He said it was "communication with God through the five senses." Lorca also explained:

...the duende wounds, and in trying to heal that wound that never heals, lies the strangeness, the inventiveness of a man’s work....
Seeking the duende, there is neither map nor discipline. We only know it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, rejects all the sweet geometry we understand, that it shatters styles and makes Goya, master of the greys, silvers and pinks of the finest English art, paint with his knees and fists in terrible bitumen blacks....

Edward Hirsch has written much about Lorca's concept of the Duende, and he offered the example of the singer Billie Holiday. The spirit seemed to rise from under the feet, in darkness, and quickens in proximity to death. It turned out that Carl Jung had his own spirit that he called the "Spirit of the Depth." Jung's spirit also represented an extreme psychic struggle.

According to Gerhard Hauptmann, "Poetry evokes out of words the resonance of the primordial word." This quote appears in Carl Jung's essay about psychoanalysis and poetry.  Carl Jung has indelibly marked the understanding of the human psyche and art with his concepts of dream work, the collective unconscious, and archetypes, and he was heavily influenced by Gnosticism.

In an introduction to Gnosticism, Stephan Hoeller explains: "[it] is the teaching based on Gnosis, the knowledge of transcendence arrived at by way of interior, intuitive means." Gnosticism, instead of blaming man, attributes suffering of people in the world to a flawed design.

Dharma and Poetry

Walt Whitman 1854

A Dialogue of Spirit

This is a dialogue I've created between the Bhagavad Gita and Walt Whitman.  To begin, the speakers must introduce themselves. The poet wrote these words in Leaves of Grass:  

I am the poet of the Body, and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into a new tongue. 

Whitman's voice is unmistakable.  He employs anaphoric lines, parallel structures, and expands himself across all borders of body and soul.  He does, as he says, graft and increase the pleasures, and the pains he does translate into a new tongue. He is without complaint and without woe. He embraces multitudes. Krishna says: One who knows Me as birth less, beginningless, and the supreme controller of all the worlds….

We hear Whitman's music as his voice rolls like thunder over the populated cities and over the prairies and mountains, from ocean to ocean. He addresses the multitudes, all people and presidents and God.  He also says much about methods and materials.

I will make the poems of materials, for I think they are
to be the most spiritual poems,
And I will make the poems of my body and of mortality,
For I think I shall then supply myself with the poems
of my soul and of immortality.

Poetry: The Language of Mystics

The language of mystics and the language of poets bear similarities. Paradox, metaphor, accumulating parallel syntax, negations, and silence are techniques used for the ineffable, for saying what cannot be said. In The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance, Dorothee Soelle describes the obstacle of language itself when it comes to describing a mystical experience. Ecstasy comes from the Greek word, ek-stasis, meaning to stand alongside or step outside. In the multiplicity of experience, among a commotion of things, the mystic experiences unity and peace. This experience has been named in different ways: wonder, joy, awe, amazement. Soelle says, “language is incapable of communicating the experience of oneness.” As Teresa of Avila says in her prayer: “Lord, give me other words.” These other words that mystics and poets use are so moving:
Written by a fourteenth century anonymous monk to instruct others in contemplation, The Cloud of Unknowing, seems to be based on the premise that it is impossible to know God, that the experience is best described as the Cloud of Unknowing.:  

When I say ‘darkness,’ I mean a privation of knowing…which is between you and your God….If ever you come to this cloud, and live and work in it, as I bid you, just as this cloud of unknowing is above you, between you and your God, in the same way you must put beneath you a cloud of forgetting, between you all the creatures that have ever been made.

Considering Emily: Poetry and the Spirit

Poetry has the ability to evoke and invoke the spirit.  Emily Dickinson said to her friend Higginson:  "If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it."  A poem becomes vivid and strong when it is grounded in the body:

Wild Nights! Wild Nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port, --
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart!


Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in Thee!

An ambiguity exists in this poem that allows it to cast more than one shadow. Mary Oliver has identified the ability to cast more than one shadow, to make multiple meanings, a characteristic of good poetry. The one to whom the poem is addressed is obscure, it could be a mortal or it could be an immortal.  In this ambiguity, the subject which could have very straightforward becomes figurative, becomes a metaphor.  The poet gains additional meanings.  Besides this, Emily Dickinson makes very effective use of repetition, rhyme, consonance and assonance (consonant and vowel sounds). Paul Valery says the difference between poetry and prose is physiological. The poem attends to meter, measure, and breath. "Wild Nights" has a definite, compact form. It's based on the liturgy, or the hymn stanza.  Emily Dickinson's work is distinctive and entirely her own--it reflects her individuality.

In addition, a good poem uses the visible image to give a glimpse of the invisible. She invokes.  In another poem, Emily Dickinson has made this quite clear and indisputable:

Poetry and the Spirit

To begin again with a new year, and to ask again what is this urge?  I write and write.  It's a habit, a discipline, a practice.

According to P. Yogananda, "Should you not find the pearl after one or two divings, do not blame the ocean! Blame your diving. You are not going deep enough."  In the morning, my walk takes me up the hill where I can see Lake Superior, blue as an opal, white with ice. I'm glad to see freighters anchored near the harbor or hear their horns as they signal to the lift bridge and the bridge signals back, but at this time of year, the ship traffic diminishes. The last ocean going vessel departed a few weeks ago.  The shoreline, with its hillocks of ice and wind off the lake, does not invite. Even in summer, to enter the water is to receive a shock of cold.  One steps on an unstable bottom, always different, a shifting pattern of sand and stones and driftwood. If I were to go deeper, the water would press against my chest and shoulders with its weight. I haven't dived in Lake Superior, but I do dive into writing. Sometimes I don't know what I am looking for. The surfaces of things distract, deflect, and distort. But Yogananda knows what it is: a pearl.  It's true. I seek a pearl that will become a poem or story.

My urge is twined, twinned with writing. The urge toward the spiritual is an urge to approach and search I-don't know-what.  It does not come easy.  First there is nothing, nothingness.  If it is not nothing, then it's impenetrable.  Writing may be a metaphor.  Initially, writing is difficult.  At some point, even within a flow of writing, a block occurs. One wants to do anything but write: laundry, email correspondence, chores.  It also occurs to me that the initial encounter with the spiritual can be an encounter with nothingness.  It is the "mystery" that which is impenetrable.

In my search today for poems to bring to the Poetry and the Spirit workshop, I discovered this one:

Stone

Go inside a stone.
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill --
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

-- Charles Simic
from News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness
chosen and introduced by Robert Bly

Good poetry has so much beauty: clear image and metaphor, a pleasing pattern, and multiple meanings. Simic enters the figurative in the first sentence.  "Go inside a stone./ That would be my way."  The first line is imperative, but the second line makes it something else, suddenly the imperative turns into a reflection about always having to do things that are hard. It becomes an acceptance, an embracing of the difficult.  In the lines, "From the outside the stone is a riddle:/ No one knows how to answer it," Simic approaches, as if he were beholding the impossible task, and then he enters in with a modal verb, "must," meaning an obligation or necessity.  This choice is in line with the first imperative verb, "Go."   It allows him to be outside and inside the stone simultaneously. In language, we have so much freedom. It allows us to penetrate the impenetrable.

So on this first day of the new year, I shall attempt to go inside the nothing, enter the impenetrable with language.  How does one begin, and how does one carry an image or metaphor throughout a poem? Writers say, "stay focused."  We try to achieve unity within the work.  We recognize this quality when we see it done well, but it does take practice. In the poem "Stone," Simic demonstrates unity. Does the spiritual also require this skill?  Are there rules?  Like in writing, I suspect one finds the rules as one goes. One finds a pattern. Some things work better than others.

As a writer, I know each piece of writing creates its own world with its own laws.  What works for one poem will not work for another.  What works for one writer won't work for another. What works for a poem may not work for an essay or fiction.  Each time the writer begins anew and must discover the rules of the new creative project as it unfolds.  Each new writing project requires a new strategy. This is why one must, at any stage, "give oneself permission to be a beginner."

I am prepared then to apply this same concept to the investigation of the spiritual.  So often the spiritual is described as a journey or path.  Is it?   In the poem,"There Is No Road," Machado says:

Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship's wake in the sea.

--Antonio Machado

In her essay "Spiritual Poetry," Jane Hirshfield writes: "Spiritual poems emerge in response to the central questions of human life--mortality and transience, isolation and alienation, the question of suffering in all its dimensions."  Of course, this is true for much writing. Art-making allows for an emotional investigation of a topic.

A British literary journal Magma posted an excellent article:  13 Ways of Making Poetry a Spiritual Practice. According to the author, Maitreyabandu, spiritual life is about developing empathy and insight and it demands that a person "engage with primary experience" and imagination.  Both needs a certain level of ascetism and "effort, application, and concentration."

In poetry, in the spiritual, I will be a traveler. If I follow a well established road, a road used by many, it will not be true to me. Formulas exist, and formulas sometimes work, but often fall short.  Each situation will present that which can not be solved by an existing formula, and so writers experiment, persist and take risks.  Everyday, the path I follow is new.  This must be the way.

To be continued....

P.S. If you live in the Duluth area, I invite you to come to Poetry and the Spirit group that I'll be facilitating with Rev. Bruce Johnson at UUCD.  Email me for details:  sheila@sheilapacka.com


Notes:

Bly, Robert. News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness.  Sierra Club Books. 1995.

Hirshfield, Jane. "Spiritual Poetry."  Poetry Foundation.  June 28, 2006.  Retrieved 1 Jan 2014.  Web.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178390

Machado, Antonio.  "There Is No Road."  Copyright 2013. White Pine Press. Buffalo, NY. Web. Retrieved 1 Jan 2014. http://www.whitepine.org/noroad.pdf

Maitreyabandu.  "Thirteen Ways of Making Poetry a Spiritual Practice." Magma Journal.  c2013.  England.  http://magmapoetry.com/archive/magma-51/articles/13-ways-of-making-poetry-a-spiritual-practice/

Yogananda, P.  Prayer Demands.  n.d. Web. Retrieved 1 Jan 2014. http://paramhansa-yogananda.npage.eu/whispers-from-eternity/prayer-demands-5.html

Concerning the Spiritual in Poetry

I've often thought that poetry is a language within the language. A good poem is atomic, essentially indivisible, unchangeable, whole, and irreducible. The use of metaphor and figurative elements, compression, and sound work upon the language in such a way to make it particularly effective and powerful. In poetry, I believe that spirit talks to spirit. Many writers and artists have felt this way.  

Wassily Kandinsky in Concerning the Spiritual in Art writes: "Literature, music and art are the first and most sensitive spheres in which this spiritual revolution makes itself felt."  In his examination of the writer Maeterlinck (Russian), Kandinsky says:

The apt use of a word (in its poetical meaning), repetition of this word, twice, three times or even more frequently, according to the need of the poem, will not only tend to intensify the inner harmony but also bring to light unsuspected spiritual properties of the word itself. . . the word which has two meanings, the first direct, the second indirect, is the pure material of poetry and of literature the material which these arts along can manipulate and through which they speak to the spirit. (Kandinsky, 15-16)

Kandinsky used color as if it were language; color communicated spiritual meaning. But many poets reach for images to do this.

Jane Hirschfield (editor of Women in Praise of the Sacred and Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry) observes women's poetry that is spiritual frequently offers images of the house.  She says: "spiritual fulfillment is not to be found outside the door of the self."  Just as she uses the image of door to express an idea, so do other women writers.  The house can express the self and its boundaries. "To become the authority of one’s own household is no small thing in many women’s lives, even now, and the lives of earlier women poets are almost always marked by some fracturing with the expectations and course of ordinary life. The same is often true for men, of course, especially mystics."

Poetry is not ordinary language--it's extra ordinary. Consider the words of Czeslaw Milosz from his "Ars Poetica":

The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

The house again serves as metaphor; it is not just the house but our movement in and out, others movement in and out, that enables him to express changefulness. Perhaps poets are architects of language.

Poetry is what we reach for to say what can not be said. It allows silence to speak. This is a spiritual quality. I don't believe that many good poets set out to say something spiritual; sermonizing never makes for a good poem. It will not preach, convert, admonish, or advise.  But a poem might serve as a prayer, an incantation, a song, a cathedral. It celebrates small things: a chicken coop, a red wheel barrow, a dog.

Why write poetry? What is it that drives a person to use this form? Many people avoid it. Poets generally find poetry is not much of a livelihood. Poetry is outside the market, and perhaps that is its value. It is outside of fashion. Its beauty is not the beauty of youth. It is not the big, fancy house in the exclusive neighborhood, but a humble abode.  Instead of a great view, it offers insight. A good poem will always be fresh, even if it was written centuries ago. As Paul Valery said, a poem is a mechanism that recreates the meaning anew each time it is read.

I want to be at home in poetry. I want to sit at the window and look into the branches of a white pine. Birds fly into the limbs, fly out in the rain, in the wind, in the light.


______________________
Hirschfield, Jane. "Spiritual Poetry."  June 28, 2006. Poetry Foundation. Web. March 22, 2013. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178390

Milosz, Cseslaw. "Ars Poetica." http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ars-poetica/

Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. Translated with an introduction by M.T.H. Sadler. c1977. Dover Publications, New York.

Poetry and Spiritual Practice: Work in Progress

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body… . from Preface to Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855)

Is writing a spiritual practice?  Maybe you believe in God or maybe you don't. To me, spirituality means "spirit mutuality."   This mutuality of spirit can be found in relationship with others, with animals, with things.   I seek this mutuality.   Regardless of one’s beliefs or lack of them, each usually finds oneself in need of healing one’s own spirit; not only that, each of us is needed to help heal the world, to somehow address violence, abuse, exploitation, environmental damage, war, and suffering.

Writing, among other things, can heal the spirit and contribute positively to the world. This is also true of making art, music and other creative pursuits. I’ve found parallels between poetry and spirituality in my years of writing practice. I speak from the perspective of a poet and the tradition of Unitarian Universalism. Obviously, writing and art-making provide a ritual, meditative process. Creative work (or play) allows one to stay or become receptive, open, and interactive. It’s more than that, however. Poems often employ paradox, metaphor and other devices. Anne Carson writes this:

My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.

To me, this expresses how the unanswerable questions, often addressed by religion, offer the poet a quest. The answers are likely personal, idiosyncratic, or even of temporary use, but the continual seeking is highly worthwhile.

In our world, the forces of creation and destruction exist in a dynamic, ebbing and flowing. I draw this as an image of a sphere deliberately to avoid either/or thinking. Creative work can confront the destructive, draw from the destructive, or assemble what has been destroyed into something new. In this sphere, the activity of creating, or the struggle to create, is useful to others. Creative work may, like many of our things, last longer than we do. Art is the one of the few things that we have left from cultures long gone. Poetry is, as Wislawa Szymborska says, “The revenge of the mortal hand.”


Spirit / Object

Original art, said Walter Benjamin, has an “aura” or a sense of being. It calls to us, we respond. I consider this response to be a spiritual response. I’ve been moved by many kinds of art and much poetry. Even the arrangements of stones called Inuksuit seem to embody a being. Poems have been called “tensile beings” or “perceptual objects.” Often they capture the contradictions or opposing forces (like paradox or opposites). They have a unique tension that makes them remarkable. Consider this excerpt of the poem “If the Owl Calls Again” by John Haines:



at dusk
from the island in the river
and it’s not too cold,

I’ll wait for the moon
to rise,
then take wing and glide
to meet him.

We will not speak,
but hooded against the frost
soar above
the alder flats, searching
with tawny eyes.

And then we’ll sit
in the shadowy spruce
and pick the bones
of careless mice….

Spirit can be many things, including one’s soul, one’s mood, the thing that animates the living being. It also suggests spirits, the supernatural perhaps. Ghosts, God, gods. The word spiritual has its roots in Middle English, Middle French, and Late Latin. From Latin, the word relates to “breathing, of wind, from spiritus.” (Merriam Webster) This last definition is much more attractive to me, and seems to suggest a much needed spaciousness.

The French poet Paul Valery said the difference between prose and poetry is physiological. Poems shape our breath and sound. “In…prose, the form in not preserved, does not outlive understanding, but dissolves in the light, for it has acted, it has made itself understood, it has lived.” He says, “But the poem, on the contrary, does not die for having been of use; it is purposely made to be reborn from its ashes and perpetually to become what it has been.” The body--the five senses and the breath—give poetry its life.

Poems are spirit / objects. They are made of sound and breath and truly good poems seem to have life—they bring us an experience, a body experience, and spirit or light. I listened to a talk by Gladys Naybenayash, a Native American teacher and a poet. “Somehow in all my poems, some spirits come in there....” she said. “I write about a bear and the spirit of the bear comes.”

Flow/ Resistance

Flow and resistance is another concept that is useful in the consideration of writing or spirituality. Simone Weil said, “Prayer is absolute unmixed attention.” Regular writing practice provides flow experience. What is it like? It gives you a sense of alertness without tension in your body, of being outside of time and open to a trusted source.

Poetry can slow or stop time. Poems may or may not be linear. Associations, often characteristic of poems, can bound over time and location with Seven League boots.

Writing is not necessarily easy. When we sit down to write, we battle endless distractions. Our families interrupt us. The phone rings. Our pets whimper for attention. Even without those, noises intrude, or our own impulses to surf the internet, clean the dust out of the corners, or fidget about doing meaningless tasks. Even when a writer gets past the “entry” phase, writing has its challenges. The edit phase is essential. We get too flowery, or abstract, or trivial and risk losing interest of the reader. Writers and nonwriters alike struggle to find the right words to say when we need to say them. Abstract ideas get in our way sometimes. A poet needs to break down the abstract into things more concrete.

Language can be an obstacle, but so is silence. How much have we lost by silences? Too often the price is far higher than we ever would think. Intolerable oppression operates well when people keep silence.

Language and silence also exist in equal and opposing forces. Image offers a way out. Image is much more easily transmitted, translated, and understood. It is the image that makes writing vivid.

Resistance: obstacles and challenges can reveal so much about our own needs and that of the work. Notice and honor the resistance! Consider the possible reasons for it. One might be taking the poem in the wrong direction. One might have another obstacle that has not yet been addressed. One might need to shift position, or approach, or change altogether.


Ambiguity/ Certainty

I use a phrase when I teach, and I tell students to “listen to the work.” This means that the poet attends to the words on the page to see the developing patterns, simply noticing what has been written and enhance the interesting aspects. Details are key elements in any creative work. Notice what has emerged, what is unexpected or surprising. In other words, pay deep attention. Allow the image or the pattern to lead you.

Questions that can be asked of poems: who is speaking? to whom is the poem addressed? This answer yields interesting things about the connections poets make. The poet may assume a mask, or may address reader as if the reader had a mask. Helen Vendler has examined the poetry of George Herbert, Walt Whitman and John Ashberry in regards to whom their poems are addressed. Herbert spoke to God, Whitman to the future reader, and Ashberry, a painter from the past. Each of these poets established a relationship of intimacy that transcended ordinary time and place.

Listen to this poem by Lisel Mueller, “‘Night Song”:

Among rocks, I am the loose one,
among arrows, I am the heart,
among daughters, I am the recluse,
among sons, the one who dies young.

Among answers, I am the question,
between lovers, I am the sword,
among scars, I am the fresh wound,
among confetti, the black flag.

Among shoes, I am the one with the pebble,
among days, the one that never comes,
among the bones you find on the beach
the one that sings was mine.

Poetry focuses on image and sound. It allows or wants a pattern of some kind. If you are writing poetry, you must search for this, and allow the form and the pattern to emerge organically, to grow as the work grows, not to be imposed on, but to be watered, fed, and given all the right conditions so that it grows strong. And so I suggest this approach to your own spiritual work (play). Do not use force or impose your will. Practice receptivity, openness, question your assumptions.

Ambiguity is one of the most pleasing aspects of poems. It occurs in a number of places in a poem—it could be in the use of space, a line break, a type of punctuation, a sound, or the use of a homonym. This quality allows you to return again and again to a poem and come away with new meaning each time.
Mary Oliver says that poetry is writing that casts more than one shadow.

Some people do not tolerate ambiguity well. It makes us uncomfortable and sometimes, we like to have certainty. I must also say that absolutes also can occur in poetry, for instance, in the use of particular form like a sonnet or a villanelle. Sometimes, bringing the poem into the constraints and limits of a form enlarges the poem. Sometimes it does not. One needs to experiment and evaluate, and then listen to the work.

Writing poems becomes intuitive, but I value critical thinking. This also exists as a dynamic, a sphere of thinking, critical evaluation, intuition, and perhaps another element that I would say joins the working artist, you or me. Magic, some might say, or the Muse: it is a spirit of creation. I can’t name what that element is. A sense of being joined is a powerful, spiritual experience.

Vision/ Revision

And last, I believe in another creative dynamic, vision/revision. To each person, something is revealed. None of us can see the whole at any time. We see some things, and infer that there is more that we cannot see. It is important to speak about one’s own vision. Listen to others’ visions. Form a writers group where you can read your own and listen to others’ work. Read other texts. I believe in the path of dialogue and in the beauty of an open mind. Don’t be afraid to change. Revision reflects a deepening understanding, more breadth, an acknowledgement that what we think of as truth is not fixed, but changing.

Thomas Moore, in the book Original Self, writes:

“The soul has its own set of rules, which are not the same as those
of life…the events of the soul are cyclic and repetitive. Familiar themes come round and round. The past is more important than the future. The
living and the dead have equal roles. Emotions and the sense of
meaning are paramount. Pleasures are deep, and pain can reach
the very foundations of our existence.”

To give an image to this idea, consider the lines from Ranier Maria Rilke:

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

Use writing practice to engage with your own life’s questions. Stephen Mitchell suggests improvising new versions of the prayers you spoke as a child. Spiritual practice calls us to the same deep listening to our experience and the world around us. I invite you to explore these in writing and to find the images that speak to you. Write about devotions or symbols that are meaningful. Consider the language of spirituality: transfiguration, crucifixion, miracles. Enter into these with your own images. The word artist has always been associated with freedom and unconventional thinking. So be an artist.

Writing discipline, like other disciplines, offers the opportunity for “absolute, unmixed attention” (called prayer), processes of creation (rituals) and connection with the self and the world (the work in progress).  The four spiritual dynamics, spirit/object, resistance/flow, ambiguity/certainty, and vision/revision,  can bring healing.  Using these dynamics with your material--that which is given to you--helps you engage in an interaction or exchange.   The last dynamic, vision / revision, provides an opportunity to reframe experience, to identify a cultural, historical and even mythic pattern.    In the Art of Possibility, Rosamunde and Benjamin Zander write: “Art, after all, is about rearranging us, creating surprising juxtapositions, emotional openings, startling presences, flight paths to the eternal.”


Bibliography:

Allen, Pat B. Art Is a Spiritual Path. Shambala, Boston, MA, c2005.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
c1936. Retrieved 04/07/2006. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosphy/works/ge/benjamin.htm


Carson, Anne. Glass, Irony, and God. New Directions. New York. c1995.

Moore, Thomas. Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality. HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. c2000.

Mayes, Frances. The Discovery of Poetry: A Field Guide to Reading and Writing Poems, Harcourt Publishers, New York, c2001.

Mitchell, Stephen. The Enlightened Mind: An Anthology of Sacred Prose,
HarperCollins, New York, c1991.

Mueller, Lisel. The Need to Hold Still. Louisiana State University Press. c1980.

Oliver, Mary. The Poetry Handbook. Houghton Mifflin Company, New York. c

Rilke, Ranier Maria. The Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. c1981.

Taylor, Dennis. "The Need for a Religious Literary Criticism." Religion and The Arts Journal. Boston College. c2006. Retrieved April 5, 2006.
http://www.bc.edu/publications/relarts/supplements/excerpts/v1-1taylor2/

Valery, Paul. The Art of Poetry. Denise Folliot, translator. Vintage Books, Random House, New York, First Vintage Edition 1961, c1958 Bollingen Foundation.

Vendler, Helen. Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman and Ashberry. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. c2005.

Zander, Rosamund Stone and Benjamin Zander. The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life. Penguin Books, New York, c2000.