With an host of furious fancies,
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear
And a horse of air
To the wilderness I wander.
Anonymous, “Tom O’Bedlam’s Song,” c. 1620
We live in an unpoetic century. It is, as James Matthew Wilson has observed, an “age of unmaking.” Poetic language—skillfully made, strong, and intended to elevate and please its participants—is at an ebb. The high public oratory of even half a century ago has vanished from our discourse, replaced by cliché. No longer are we inscribing public buildings with treasured sayings or lofty ideals. The mainstream art and literature communities, rather than stewarding the best of their traditions, wage ideological war on them. The project of post-modern deconstruction has moved to its only possible terminus: a sour slosh of creative irrelevance, personal despair, and cultural suicide. Even our vulgarities lack imagination.
In such a situation, there is a special delight to be found in doing the “wrong” thing. Perhaps today’s rebels are not those bucking tradition but those following Ezra Pound’s impassioned plea to “make it new.” Perhaps to rebel today means to believe that some things are sacred and worthy of one’s very life, to furiously resist the commodification and corporatization of the common good, to work to thwart the culture of death in all its forms, and to joyfully work to love and keep what is Real in a world wishing to Pretend.
A Small Defiance
The manufacturers of empty thoughts
Whose pillow is the coin, whose bed the cloud,
Have massed themselves, arrayed in endless clots,
Have mustered up the tedious and loud,But I defy them, in their vast display,
To touch me, in my body or my head.
Gathering up my will, to them I say
That I shall live, though their whole world fall dead.
I have come to see this rebellion as “the defense of the soul.” “Defense” might conjure the image of a bleak fortress, but not in this case. The soul—that whole union of spirit and body that is the core of human personhood—is best defended by what most enlivens it. These activities are those physical joys with spiritual roots: devouring wild berries, hot from the sun perhaps, or wrestling with one’s brothers, or rolling one’s lover, or properly tuning a fine guitar, or walking a pilgrimage, or smelling old books, or hearing a good joke, or being in warm rain without a jacket, or stomping acorns in the dirt in promising locations for future oaks. Each of these joys is a weapon in the battle to remain a person and to grow in the ways of the Kingdom of Heaven (another way, perhaps, of saying “the Real”).
A formidable weapon in this defense is the sheer pleasure of rich language. But like many others, this pleasure is becoming remote to us. Where in the past poetry was woven into the fabric of human affairs, that fabric is quickly fraying. Poetry, from the nursery rhyme to the homily of one’s funeral, once filled and punctuated the average person’s life, often when they weren’t really thinking about it at all. Its presence brought real benefits, elevating the mind, connecting people across generations and national borders, expanding the imagination, and resisting the coarsening effects of industrial culture.
But what has happened? People speak more flatly than they used to speak. The words are being sterilized and sapped of vigor, and we along with them. A good analogy may be made to walking. Walking was once quite central to our culture. In daily life, its benefits—physical health, connection to the community, intimacy with the elements and seasons—could be taken wholly for granted. But today, the simplicity of walking should not at all be taken for granted—it is optional for most and outdated for many. This is a loss of course, but as it is all loss of things that most of us do not particularly value, no one does anything about it. No one feels like they can.
***
Of all the arts, poetry is most completely out of step with the spirit of our age. Because of this, it has become particularly valuable to anyone wishing to cheerfully resist that spirit. Poetry is the consummate art of the word, resisting the cults of image; is an art that can be absolutely free, thwarting corporate commodification; is a technology of remembrance in a time that considers forgetting the past a virtue; and is a fundamentally embodied art of attention that tends to the local, the spiritual, to wisdom, and to empathy, against, well, the opposites of all those. Ultimately, poetry helps us become and remain human. It helps us to connect to centuries and continents other than our own, to struggle with the rougher bits of empathy, to more thoroughly feel the fullness of being alive. Right now, what’s more rebellious than all that?
My new book of poetry, The Locust Years (out last May from the excellent Wiseblood Books), is, I hope, a “burning spear” in the service of this general defense. Its creation was a long process, and one born out of a time of considerable hopelessness and desolation in my personal life, as our family struggled, down to its very foundations, with a serious health condition one of our children experienced. The result was about a decade of being “eaten,” as we watched every aspect of life, work, family, childhood, and memory itself be bitten, gobbled, devoured by the shadow of this thing. While we now are experiencing a time of remarkable joy and wholeness, when I look at pictures of those priceless years—the most precious years in the glow of childhood—I see in my face and that of my wife and children the confusion, grief, and helplessness that attends these sorts of things. Consolations were real and present throughout, but the baseline state was desolation.
There was nothing to do but survive it together. While we did this, Raymond Carver’s phrase “A Small, Good Thing” (the title of a story of his, one which you must read) came to my wife and me often. In the story, the small, good thing at first seems like it is eating (cinnamon rolls, specifically, after the senseless death of a child), but later, when you think about Carver’s story, you realize that the small, good thing is not being alone.
I found, during this time, strange solace in the words of others, a solace which began to spread to my own words. Perhaps because childhood was all mixed up in my grief and confusion, the cadences of childhood haunted me: Mother Goose and Shel Silverstein, A.A. Milne and Robert Louis Stevenson, and Carroll and Frost and Dickinson, and above all, William Blake. I saw, for the first time, an almost inexpressible wisdom hidden in these works, whose “sing-song” rhymes held in them all the fragility and power of childhood.
Who Has Been a Friend?
Who has been a friend?
—The wind.
It sighed when I have sighed.
It swept the fallen leaves,
And taught me how to breathe.
It died when I have died.***
Who knew my desire?
—The fire.
It burned when I have burned.
It loved the incense wood.
Its cinders all glowed good.
It learned what I have learned.***
Who taught me of my Father?
—The water.
It rained when I have rained.
We became wild streams.
We laughed about our dreams.
It gained what I have gained.***
Who has had a wound?
—The ground.
It broke when I have bled.
And in its painful need
It brought forth much rich seed.
It fed whom I have fed.
There was a strange solidity in the words that I found in the writing of this book. Lines would come to me, unbidden and whole, as if I had remembered them after waking from a dream. “I have visited the country on the other side of grief …” or “Because I thought that hope was not for me / I missed it in the gutters of the street / and in the dyings of the compost heap…” Later, they would be carefully crafted into sonnets and couplets and little octets, but at first they were found, not made. At least that’s how it felt.
In this, I was experiencing some of the consolation that poetry can be in difficulty, and experiencing what felt like a true and good rebellion against my personal despair, which I felt deliciously mimicked that of the world around me, whose desolations and destructions were (and are) the “garden where the locust played.” Like Tom O’Bedlam’s “burning spear” and his “horse of air,” the imagination is a powerful weapon and a means of agency and freedom. One can strike a hearty blow with such a weapon, one can ride hard and freely, and one can wander, like Tom O’Bedlam, from the claustrophobic sterility of madness into the healing wilderness.
I have found great joy in reclaiming for myself, foot by foot and measure by measure, the small good thing that poetry can be for the soul that needs solace and defense. Perhaps I will not be alone in this. There have been such centuries as ours before, in which good things have felt at an ebb.
Like King Canute, we do not command the tides. But we can still choose to go down to the sea. My hope is that the small, good thing of poetry, whose writing, reading, and keeping is a strong and fiery defense of what is best in us, will be reclaimed broadly and joyfully by our generation of thinkers, writers, teachers, preachers, architects, parents, activists, and, well, all, for our shared pleasure, enrichment, and the stewardship of the mighty treasures of our faith and language.