Follow up comments from yesterday’s H&H gathering:

“The sound of the words is the first primitive pleasure in poetry.” Edward Hirsch

“In poetry you must love the words, the ideas and images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all.” Wallace Stevens

♦ ♦ ♦

The poet’s vocation is a sort of reverse incarnation and the engaged reader agrees to participate in this reversal and in the subsequent poetic-spiritual spiral that it engenders. Whereas the movement of the incarnation is the Word becomes flesh, the movement of poetry is the flesh becomes word. The potential of both if not the motive force of each is to give us back our lives, or said differently, to give us new life.

Poet Ed Hirsch is convinced that “the kind of experience—the kind of knowledge—one gets from poetry cannot be duplicated elsewhere. The spiritual life wants articulation—it wants embodiment in language. The physical life wants the spirit” (Hirsch, 6). In the poetic relationship between the poet and the reader, flesh becomes word so that through the word we might see and embody in a new way the truth of our own lives.

In order for this to happen, the reader of poetry has to be as personally engaged in and as vulnerable to the poem as the divine was engaged in and vulnerable to the self-emptying act of the incarnation. St. Paul writes:

Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance. (Phil. 2:6-8)

To those who find poetry a waste of time, boring, intimidating, or incomprehensible I admit engaging a poem requires intention and work. But it’s not meant to be grit-your-teeth work. It’s not grasping for divinity. It is difficult, I believe, less for the intellectual effort it requires of us than for the intimate involvement it asks of us. What intimate relationship does not? And since, as Rilke points out “. . . poems are not. . . simply emotions. . . —they are experiences,” then what is asked of us in this encounter with poetry is the willingness and commitment to bring our whole being, our entire life, our past experiences to the interaction. Hirsch writes:

Reading poetry is a way of connecting through the medium of language—more deeply with yourself even as you connect more deeply with another. The poem delivers on our spiritual lives precisely because it simultaneously gives us the gift of intimacy and interiority, privacy and participation. (emphasis mine)

He continues:

Reading poetry is for me an act of the most immense intimacy, of intimate immensity. I am shocked by what I see in the poem but also by what the poem finds in me. It activates my secret world, commands my inner life (Hirsch, 5, 8).

It is as a medium of encounter, as a way of connecting, as a means of activating our inner life and being open to seeing what is found there, that poetry is a spiritual practice.

Here is another poem by Raymond Carver. See what this finds or awakens in you.
What the Doctor Said

He said it doesn’t look good
he said it looks bad in fact real bad
he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before
I quit counting them
I said I’m glad I wouldn’t want to know
about any more being there than that
he said are you a religious man do you kneel down
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help
when you come to a waterfall
mist blowing against your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I’m real sorry he said
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said something else
I didn’t catch and not knowing what else to do
and not wanting him to have to repeat it
and me to have to fully digest it
I just looked at him
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who’d just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may have even thanked him habit being so strong♦

pax,
Dan