thank god for the poets, misfits, writers, artists and musicians...

I love poetry. For years I didn't know that I did. I was knocked over, moved to tears and consumed with an inexplicable joy from time to time by certain songs. The combination of sound, rhythm and lyrics often lifted me into a state of awe. Or grief. Or pure, giddy delight. But it wasn't until one cold, rainy late spring night at a Borders Bookstore in Westlake, Ohio that I grasped how much poetry mattered to me. In an anthology used by Robert Bly in his retreats for men, The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, I stood weeping while reading "Sometimes a Man Stands Up During Supper" by Rainer Maria Rilke:

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house,
dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.

After 15 years of marriage I had separated from the mother of my beloved daughters. It was a frightening and lonely journey of trust to say good-bye. I knew it was a matter of life or death for me, but hated leaving my children behind. (In a very short time they came to live with me.) I was wracked with guilt and shame. And, at the same time, I was convinced that I had to move through the anguish towards something resembling new life. Reading Rilke in that store felt like someone had stripped me naked and left me to fend for myself alone. There was the hint of healing in his words - walking in the dark towards a church in the East - but no guarantees. All that was certain was that the alternative was death within the dishes of familiarity. So I stood by myself and wept in that now defunct Borders - giving thanks to God that someone else grasped my anguish -  even a dead German poet I knew nothing about.

In that same volume, Bly wrote in the introduction: "How does the work of men connect to poetry? To this day in Kazakhstan roomfuls of men sit listening to a poet chant long narratives. We recall the importance of poetry in the lives of Norse farmers, Icelandic shepherds, Greek olive growers and fishermen... the question becomes how do the life of men and the life of a culture connect to poetry?" 

While our European-American tradition questions and argues, and has to teach poetry to sullen students in English classes, other cultures - speaking Spanish, Russian, Arabic to say nothing of the many tongues of African and the Indian subcontinent - grow up inside poems, drenched through with poetic metaphors and rhythms. As we learn to criticize, to take a poem apart, to get its meaning, they learn to listen and to recite. By drawing this sharp distinction with other cultures, we are pointing to a defect in ours. We live in a poetically underdeveloped
nation. Men blame their own lives for a deficiency in the culture. For, without the fanciful delicacy and the powerful truths that poems convey, emotions and imagination flatten out. There's a lack of spirit, of vision. The loss in the heart appears as a loss of heart to take up the great cultural challenges that are a part of every man's citizenship. It is in this sense that we have come to think that working in poetry and myth with men is a therapy of the culture at its psychic roots.

Some ten years before my meltdown in Borders, I was walking in the sunshine down Nevsky Prospekt in what was then Soviet Leningrad. It was in the heady early days of "glasnost" when a young man approached me outside of a hard currency bookstore. Once he had determined I was a tourist, he asked if I might purchase for him a volume of poems by Anna Ahkmatova, a small book that was available to everyone except Soviet citizens. He was forbidden to shop in this store. I was moved by his intensity and willingness to approach me, even in this more open culture, for a book of poems. I was cautious, but glad to oblige, and bought two copies. Both in Russian. One for him and one for me - even though I had no knowledge at the time of why Ahkmatova mattered. 

In time I learned that Anna Ahkmatova was one of Russia's brilliant poets who kept writing through the reign of Soviet terror. Every night she was compelled by Soviet secret police to sit in her well lit apartment window while her son was held in a gulag so the commissars of culture could be certain she had not committed suicide. Stalin and his devils were afraid that should she give into despair and take her life, the common people would revolt. An excerpt from her "Requiem" cuts to the chase.

…I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):

“Can you describe this?”

And I said: “I can.”

Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.”

There are other stories of poems to tell, too: meeting Bly in Tucson at a reading where he shared without a break for 90 minutes yet it only felt like five, hearing Billy Collins read "Lanyard" for the first time one night in NYC, being enthralled by a volume of my lover's poems - new and old - that spoke to me of a burden I could never have imagined, falling in love with the poems of ancient Israel's King David, stumbling upon Mary Oliver, hearing Jane Hirshfield, rediscovering Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Scot Cairns and Lou Reed. And I must be clear not to forget Carrie Newcomer. Just yesterday, while prayerfully exploring ways to celebrate the wedding of my oldest friend in creation who will marry a beloved friend from our time in high school next month in California, I came upon "Why We Are Here" in Newcomer's little book, A Permeable Life.

She stood looking out the doorway
Poised to step out into whatever comes next.
Although I knew that I could not go with her
I could keep her company while waiting,
Bear witness to the preparing,
And maybe rub her tired shoulders
Which I know is absolutely nothing
And absolutely everything.

Maybe that is why we are here:
To rub shoulders and play cards,
To be a place to launch,
And a place to land,
To murmur on the pone late at night,
And to say,
"This I love"
And
"This I saw."

For years I have cherished this "poem" by Paul of Tarsus although for most of my life I never knew it as poetry. But now I do - and it rings true. 

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. 

But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.  And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Thank God for the poets and the way through the darkness they have offered to me. Maybe to you, too?

St. Paul by Gracie Morbitzer @ https://www.etsy.com/sg-en/listing/551279935/st-paul-modern-icon-5x7-print