Poets on poetry

 

Recently, I had the pleasure of discussing poetry, faith, and his new chapbook with Matthew J. Andrews in an online interview for Agape Review. Not only is Matthew the Associate Poetry Editor of Solum Press, he has the unusual-for-a-poet job of Private Investigator.

I hope you'll check out Matthew's and my discussion, and since family concerns have kept me from posting here lately, I also hope you'll use the Search box to find other subjects of interest.

May your New Year be blessed with peace, joy, and poetry!

(c) 2021, Mary Sayler

How Haiku Helps

 

Reading and writing haiku, senryu, and other mini-poems help us to see more detail and say more in fewer words. Why should this matter to poets and writers?

 

Brevity

 

Many of the poems posted on the Internet go on and on, like a first draft that was never read aloud, reconsidered, or revised. With just a little more wait-time allowed after writing and just a little more listening time allowed to evaluate the sound echoes, rhythm, and musicality, each poem can go from “okay” to “good” or “good” to “well-done.”

 

Haiku, senryu, and other mini-poems remind us to be brief.

 

Clarity

 

Lengthy poems often have overlapping pictures with no clear focus. This can happen by mixing metaphors, but also because the poem has no clear direction. That’s fine in a first draft, but after letting a poem sit for a while before coming back to revise, poets are more apt to see what they and the poem are trying to say.

 

Haiku, senryu, and other mini-poems call on the clarity of a well-taken photograph or an artist’s quick sketch.

 

Beauty

 

Haiku, senryu, and other mini-poems frequently rely on a beautiful sight or insight (preferably both!)

 

This awareness of a fleeting thought, moment, or scene causes us to welcome the unexpected, be alert for the exquisite, be attentive to the profound, and be appreciative of our environment.

 

Other Features

 

Haiku, senryu, and other mini-poems are so transportable! They encourage us to keep a notebook handy.

 

These little forms help us to break free of rhymes that quickly close down thought, originality, and natural-sounding language. Also, by focusing on rhyming words, we might overlook other poetic factors, waiting to reveal themselves.

 

When we give ourselves and our poems over to the traditional 5/7/5 syllables in the three lines of haiku or senryu, we begin to think in form. If we prefer 2/4/2 or 3/4/3 or other syllabic count, that works too. Regardless, we’ll eventually be apt to count out those syllables on our fingers, activating kinetic memory, exercising creativity, and becoming more aware of the poetic moments in our lives.

 

 

©2021, Mary Sayler, poet-writer

 

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Let's Talk Poetry

April begins National Poetry Month – the perfect time to discuss questions we might have about poetry reading and/or writing. 

Consider these questions, for example, then respond in the Comments section below:

 

• What do I hope to gain from the poems I read?
• What do I most want my poems to give to my readers?
• Why does poetry even matter to me?
• Do formal poems or conversational ones appeal to me the most?
• Which poetry technique do I like best: fresh comparisons, musicality, exquisitely expressed phrases, unexpected insights, or _______?
• What types or forms of poetry do I especially like?

 

If you want to expand your poetry-writing options, A Poet’s Guide to Writing Poetry: in Free Verse and Traditional Forms will surely help!

 

National Poetry Month also brings a good time talk about our concerns as poets. For example:

 

• How do I find poetry publishing markets?
• Is it a good idea to self-publish a poetry book?
• How do I know for sure if I’m even a poet?

 

If you scroll through the posts on this blog or type a key word into the Search box, you might find previous discussions that relate to where you are now. Regardless, post your responses to the above questions and/or other poetry questions you’d like to ask in the Comments box below. And have a happy NaPoMo! 

 

©2021, Mary Harwell Sayler, poet, A Gathering of Poems

 

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Wendell Berry: Poet, Farmer, Philosopher

[Note: This article originally appeared in the Poets Who Make Us Better column on Interlitq.]

Growing up in the home of a Christian poet who loves nature and small towns, my son knew I’d be eager to hear the poet who had been invited to speak at our local university. Located in DeLand, Florida, Stetson University often had (and still does) such interesting guest speakers as former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, anthropologist Jane Goodall, and theologian and social activist Desmond Tutu. And so, during a time when my son was completing undergraduate studies, Wendell Berry came to visit. By then Berry had written “Mad Farmer” and other manifestos of which I was unfamiliar, being interested primarily in his poetry.

After hearing this down-to-earth yet sophisticated Kentucky poet-philosopher speak and purchasing my signed copy of his Collected Poems, I began reading this paperback collection of his first eight books, starting with The Broken Ground.

Elegy

I.
“All day our eyes could find no resting place.
Over a flood of snow sight came back
Empty to the mind. The sun
In a shutter of clouds, light
Staggered down the fall of snow.
All circling surfaces of earth were white.
No shape or shadow moved the flight

Of winter birds. Snow held the earth its silence.”

The poem continues for five sections, the latter of which ends:

“The shape of the wind is a tree
Bending, spilling its birds.
From the cloud to the stone.
The rain stands tall,
Columned into his darkness.
The church hill heals our father in.
Our remembering moves from a difference place.”

The next book in the collection, Findings, includes “Three Elegiac Poems,” the second of which offers these lines:

“At the house the light is still waiting.
An old man I’ve loved all my life is dying
in his bed there. He is going
slowly down from himself.
In final obedience to his life, he follows
his body out of our knowing.
Only his hands, quiet on the sheet, keep
a painful resemblance to what they no longer are.”

By the book Openings, the poetic voice speaks with an uncommon clarity and sensitivity as shown in the poem, “My Great- Grandfather’s Slaves,” which concludes:

“I see them go in the bonds of my blood
through all the time of their bodies.

I have seen that freedom cannot be taken
from one man and given to another,
and cannot be taken and kept.

I know that freedom can only be given,
and is the gift to the giver
from the one who receives.

I am owned by the blood of all of them
who ever were owned by my blood.
We cannot be free of each other.”

What profound insight Berry brings as we ponder who owns whom! How many of us with an Anglo-Saxon heritage, for example, realize the need to be free of the enslavement we have – the  inherited guilt of ancestral ownership of other persons? How many of us long for pardon from those whom we have harmed in any way, whether individuals or collected cultures of the one human race we all share?

At this writing, racial tensions have flamed up around the world, and social change continues to be a need and strong priority. But while we look for a more perfect peace found in clarity, wisdom, pardon, and divine inspiration, these lines from Berry’s long poem “Windows” might ease the wait.

“Peace. Let men, who cannot be brothers
to themselves, be brothers
to mullein and daisies
that have learned to live on the earth.
Let them understand the pride
of sycamores and thrushes
that receive the light gladly, and do not
think to illuminate themselves.”

This idea of being siblings to ourselves may well enable us to be better citizens and siblings to one another. 

In the next book included in Collected Poems, Berry addresses Farming: A Hand Book with poems such as “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer.”

“I am done with apologies. If contrariness is my
inheritance and destiny, so be it. If it is my mission
to go in exits and come out at entrances, so be it.
I have planted by the stars in defiance of the experts,
and tilled somewhat by incantation and by singing,
and reaped, as I knew, by luck and Heaven’s favor,
in spite of the best advice. If I have been caught
so often laughing at funerals, that was because
I knew the dead were already slipping away,
preparing a comeback….”

This sense of life and death, people and place coupled as one entity comes together in the book The Country of Marriage. The first of seven parts in the poem by that name begins:

“I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.”

Part 7. goes on:

“I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,
containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.
I give you the life I have let live for love of you….”

The love of his wife of many years widens the poet’s embrace of the land, nature, people in particular, community, and peoples in general. However, this vision of a land at peace – an earth in love with life and the lives of every living thing – is not sentimentalized in Berry’s poems and other works as shown by these lines in the poem “The Clearing” from the book of that name.

2.

“Vision must have severity
at its edge:

against neglect,
bushes grown over the pastures,
vines riding down
the fences, the cistern broken;

against the false vision
of the farm dismembered,
sold in pieces on the condition
of the buyer’s ignorance,
a disorderly town
of ‘houses in the country’
inhabited by strangers;

against indifference, the tracks
of the bulldozer running
to gullies;

            against weariness,
the dread of too much to do,
the wish to make desire
easy, the thought of rest.”

In A Part, the book dedicated to his mother, Berry offers “A Warning to My Readers.”

“Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.”

I would be more inclined, though, to call it wisdom and perhaps the inversion of pride – not arrogance but delight in the timeless cycles of life and death as shown in this oddly named poem “Desolation” from the book The Wheel.

“A gracious Spirit sings as it comes
and goes. It moves forever
among things. Earth and flesh, passing
into each other, sing together.”

Although I have other books by Wendell Berry – and he has far more published than I have shelf space – his Collected Poems give us a sweeping view of his insights and his farsightedness. As an author, essayist, naturalist, and “mad farmer,” who challenges us to expand our thinking, the perspectives of this poet might make our views better too.

 

by Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2020

 

Poet-writer Mary Sayler maintains the Poetry Editor blog and provides resources for other poets and writers on her website. Her recent books include A Gathering of Poems and Talking to the Wren: Haiku, Short Verse, and One Long Poem published by Cyberwit.net.

 

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The Poet’s Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke

The following post originally appeared on the “Poets Who Make Us Better” column for Interlitq (The International Literary Quarterly.)

In the introduction to The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, the former U.S. Poet Laureate and prize-winning poet Robert Haas summarizes the central theme of Rilke’s poetry as “…the abandonment of ordinary life for the sake of a spiritual quest.” Our interest in this quest, shared by other poets and prophets, draws us to Rilke’s work as a standard for improving our poetry and seeing our lives embraced by both mystery and clarity.

The very first poem in the collection, entitled by its first line, gives a glimpse of that quest:

I am, O Anxious One. Don’t you hear my voice
urging forth with all my earthly feelings?
They yearn so high that they have sprouted wings
and whitely fly in circles around your face.
My soul, dressed in silence, rises up
and stands alone before you: can’t you see?
Don’t you know that my prayer is growing ripe
upon your vision, as upon a tree?

That poem originated in Rilke’s renowned The Book of Hours, but to get an overview of his life’s work, I chose the Vintage Books edition of poems edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell, who selected poems from Rilke’s books written between 1905 and 1926.

This does not, of course, include the must-have Letters to a Young Poet since that book consists, not of poetry, but of the correspondence between 27-year-old Rilke and 19-year-old Franz Kappus, who asked for a critique of his poems but received a 5-year-long discussion on poetry and the life of a literary artist.

For example, in the first letter of the book Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke wrote, “Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression; they exist where a word has never intruded.”

Rilke’s adventures into a life-expressed continue throughout ten letters to Kappus with everyday conversations but also brilliant observations such as this timeless insight from Letter 8:

 “It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing.”

Also in Letter 8, the poet-mentor challenged the novice with these words:

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien.”

The startling statement that “sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien” gives an excellent example of how Rilke’s words call us to read his work again and again.

Regarding the questions the poet likely intended to be rhetorical, the answer just might be fear – the common lack of courage to face life head-on, regardless of its pleasantries or lack thereof, and a frequent factor in our tendency to pull back or shy away from living life to its fullest.

Not only do Rilke’s letters enlarge our ability to embrace our own existence and expand our view of life and poetry, they let us know where he was coming from in the poems he wrote.

For instance, the poem “Lament” from The Book of Pictures, expresses Rilke’s openness to the sadness that well might be a prerequisite for joy.

I think that the star
glittering above me
has been dead for a million years.
I think there were tears
in the car I heard pass
and something terrible was said.

Then these lines conclude the poem:

I would like to step out of my heart
and go walking beneath the enormous sky.
I would like to pray.
And surely of all the stars that perished
long ago,
one still exists.
I think that I know
which one it is –
which one, at the end of its beam in the sky,
stands like a white city….

Perhaps my background and interests cause those lines to bring to mind the long-ago shining star over Bethlehem and the bright new Jerusalem yet to come. However, another poem selected from The Book of Pictures shows Rilke’s skill in observing and comparing what’s right before us in these opening lines of “Evening.”

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient tress.

An observer of all aspects of nature – whether plant, animal, human, or Divine – Rilke clearly sees the predicament of “The Panther” in New Poems:

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

A less poetic voice might have said something like, “The panther only sees the bars of his cage, and after staring at them for ages, he no longer believes there’s anything ‘out there,” but bars.” So Rilke is not satisfied merely to notice something; he must enter it.

Also in the section of New Poems, we find one of Rilke’s best-known pieces, the “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” which ends with the often quoted statement, “You must change your life.” However, my favorite from New Poems is “The Flamingo,” which portrays a flock of the exotic birds in this exquisite word-picture:

“…They rise above the green
grass and lightly sway on their long pink stems,
side by side, like enormous feathery blossoms….”

Having returned to my almost-native Florida after several years in Virginia, I can easily envision the flamingos here looking like the blousy pink peonies that bloomed alongside my sister’ Virginia farmhouse, but I never thought about that until Rilke made the connection – the fresh comparison and delightful depiction that, hopefully, challenges us to spend enough time with our own poems for them to come fully into bloom.

Highly adept at letting poems unfold, Rilke even managed to let life unfurl in death! For example, his book Requiem includes the poem “Requiem For A Friend,” which begins:

“I have my dead, and I have let them go,
and was amazed to see them so contented,
so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful,
so unlike their reputation….”

This inclination to turn a concept or assumption onto its head and shake out its pockets is a high mark in Rilke’s poetry and prose. For instance, in his book The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, his poem on the well-known biblical figure, “The Prodigal Son,” gives this unique account:

He “…didn’t even want to have the dogs with him, it was because they too loved him; because in their eyes he could see observation and sympathy, expectation, concern; because in their presence too he couldn’t do anything without giving pleasure or pain.”

Instead of the degenerate young man typically portrayed, Rilke saw the prodigal as the younger son surrounded by so much love, he had to get away to keep himself from suffocating.

In the “First Elegy” of the Duino Elegies, Rilke gives us another fresh perspective:

“…the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in
our interpreted world.”

In the “Second Elegy” of that same book, Rilke asks:

“Does the infinite space
we dissolve into, taste of us then. Do the angels really
reabsorb only the radiance that streamed out from themselves….”

And in The Sonnets of Orpheus, the first poem to Orpheus describes him as a “tall tree in the ear,” then says, “you built a temple deep inside their hearing.” Conversely, the poem “At once the winged energy of delight” astonishingly states, “For the god wants to know himself in you.”

Apparently, Rilke also wants us to know ourselves in our poems – and vice versa. Returning to The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, which some call a semi-autobiographical novel, the master poet offers us this counsel in his poetic prose “For The Sake of a Single Poem”:

“…Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) – they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained….”

The sage advice goes on, “And it is not enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”

Rilke frequently presents the flip side of what’s obvious,  taken for granted, and/or unexplored beyond a shallow surface or assumption, enticing us to open ourselves more fully to a well-lived life, and perhaps, in the process, finding ourselves becoming better people, better poets.

...

©2020 Poet-writer-reviewer Mary Harwell Sayler began writing poems in childhood but, as an adult, wrote almost everything except poetry! Eventually, she placed three dozen books in all genres including books of poems and how-to’s on poetry and writing. She continues to provide resources for poets and writers on her website.

Prufrock and T.S. Eliot

As I began the column “Poets Who Make Us Better” for Interlitq (The International Poetry Quarterly) T.S. Eliot  came to mind – not because his poetry led us out of the wistfulness of romanticism into the  honesty of modernism (which it did), but because, in the United States, my high school English teacher forced our small class to read the “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” 

Although Eliot wrote the poem from the perspective of an old-fashioned, socially-inept, aging man, the poet himself was a college student, not much older than the baffled teens who studied his work. At the time, of course, I had no idea what the poem meant, especially since it began with a quote from Dante’s Inferno! Nevertheless, the opening lines in English invited me into a new experience, and, immediately, Eliot’s skillful use of figurative language startled me into something I’d never thought about before: Poetry can be brilliant!

Lines from the first verse give a glint of that poetic brilliance:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table.

Remember: I said “poetic brilliance,” which has little, if anything, to do with poetic prettiness.

Regardless, if you have ever had the nauseating experience of being “etherized,” you may recall the fog accompanying that older form of anesthesia, which, thank God, is no longer in use, except among residents of countries who can’t afford the newer, pricier ways of getting a patient ready for the surgery that inevitably follows.

So, from the start, Eliot invites us to accompany him before gesturing with a hand-sweep across the sky to show a hazy grey evening that contributes to the dismal mood. The “half-deserted streets” and “cheap hotels” add to the gloominess before the poem jolts our sensibilities with a precise, concise, and, yes, brilliant simile that depicts a city scene:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Insightful phrasing like that does not come from one’s imagination, but from the outer sight of what’s actually present. This highly observant “nowness” is where Eliot had a turn at altering the course of  poetic flow in literary history.

Before he began to write for publication, reams of poems had been written to “my lady, my love.” Or, poets had painted idyllic landscapes flowering with nostalgia, or they addressed abstract matters having little to do with everyday lives. But like an interesting (albeit shy) tour guide, Prufrock invited us to accompany him on a journey.

Once the speaker of the poem reached his destination, Prufrock began paying close attention to a particular movement that caught his eye:

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

Frankly, I would like to walk around, talking of Michelangelo and maybe Dante too, but Prufrock is clearly not in the mood. Instead, his glance shifts, drifting toward another movement that catches his attention:

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes.

Oh, to be that observant and write such amazing metaphors! And yet, Prufrock himself evokes pity.  He goes on to speak of the time needed for people to do whatever they will in life, while recognizing that he himself wastes a lot of time by being mired in uncertainty:

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

As he turns in on himself (which high school students are also apt to do!) Prufrock reveals his self-doubts – from thinning hair to, ironically, being unable to express himself and, therefore, being misunderstood and likely to misunderstand others. But, instead of saying, “I feel so insignificant,” he shows that by saying:

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

Prufrock’s indictment against himself most likely felt true for Eliot too, and perhaps even urged him toward his poetic greatness. But, as this poem unfolds, Prufrock continues to observe people while trying to figure out where he (and maybe Eliot) might fit in. Eventually this led to the troubling question:

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

At first, the question seems rather egotistical, but, in light of Prufrock’s insecurities, that assessment dims. For, in the decades following the high school student I was and college student Eliot was, I’m convinced the question “Do I dare?” occasionally haunts those of us who want to make a discernible difference in the world.

Do I dare to set things right? Do I dare try to make life better for someone or something somewhere? Do we dare to pray, to hope, to take a chance on the unknown? Eliot did.

Caught between his uncertainties and his calling, between his life in America and in Europe, and between two world wars, the poet dared to expand his poetic sight by exploring the inner self, the impact of social confinement, the quality of time, the literary edges of poetry, and the spiritual struggles we all face – and embrace or deny.

The chances Eliot dared to take earned him a Nobel Prize in literature as well as the honor of being a pioneer in the modern movement of poetry and, ultimately, of having an appreciated place in the classroom of my high school, which I now appreciate too.

by Mary Harwell Sayler

originally published in “Poets Who Make Us Better” column on Interlitq

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Christian mystic and poet: Caryll Houselander

Are you ready for 2019 to end? As 2020 begins, let’s make poetry a priority for the coming year. Let’s get a 20-20 vision of the legacy we want to leave as poets, and let’s seek to see more clearly and deeply into every subject to which we’re drawn.

An example of this abilty to see well can be found in the work of the Christian mystic and poet, Caryll Houselander, whom I wrote about in the following article which initially appeared in my “Poets Who Make Us Better” column for The International Literary Quarterly (Interlitq.)

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The road to mysticism is sometimes paved with ruins and wreckage as Caryll Houselander (1901-1954) colorfully illustrated in her life. She liked to drink. She liked to curse. And she fell in love with a Russian spy, who broke her heart by marrying someone else.

As the Blitz killed 40,000 people in and around London where she lived during World War II, Caryll drowned out the noise and her own explosive fears while writing her first book The War is Passion. These lines from the book give us an idea of the changes happening within her as bombs dropped and sirens blared, and she came to realize this calming thought:

“There are people who do not find it necessary to use words or ideas for meditation. We know we can hear a song, sung in a language of which we know not one word, but of the rhythm, the melody of it finds an answer in our heart, it echoes from our own soul. We can understand it without being able to translate a word of it into our own speech. For some, prayer is like that.”

In 1944, Caryll wrote The Reed of God, an inspired collection of devotionals about Mary, the Mother of Jesus. She wrote poetry, too, but called the poems her “rhythms,” which I’d be more apt to call “perceptive.” Take, for example, her opening lines of this longer poem:

The Old Woman

The old woman, who nods by the Altar,
Is plain and ill shapen
and her clothes musty.
She thinks her life useless.
She has scrubbed many floors,
And always she did it, mostly
for God’s glory;
but never with the vision
that makes the work easy.

The empathy Caryll felt with other people grew so strong, it didn’t even matter if they were alive! She physically felt the pain of others, saw the face of Christ in everyone, and experienced a peculiar closeness with people who had died.

Eventually Caryll acquired the reputation of being a spiritual writer or modern-day mystic, and yet I knew none of this when I bought her slender volume, A Child in Winter – a post-humus collection of short devotionals from her various books. I just wanted something with a Christmas theme to read during Advent. So it’s not really Caryll’s poetry or “rhythms” that first spoke to me but rather her insights into spiritual matters that make us better people and give us cause to pause and consider such words as these:

“Christ has lived each of our lives” from her book, The Risen Christ.

“The Law of Growth is rest,” from The Passion of the Infant Christ.

“Truth would be a very small and petty thing if it would fit into our minds,” The Reed of God.

The little book I bought for Advent includes other lines and passages from The Reed of God, many of which seem significant not only to seekers of the spiritual but to poets, writers, and other artists. For example:

“Those who seek are more aware than any others. They observe every face; they look deep into every personality;  they hear every modulation in the voice. They hear music and words and the sounds of machinery, laughter, and tears with new hearing, attentive ears. They hear and see and taste life in a new way, with a finer consciousness, more analytically, because they are searching, because truth and only truth can ease their thirst; and with incomparably more delight, because, in this seeking, searching, and finding are one thing; everywhere and in everyone they find what they seek.”

For most of us, this awareness of people and the world seems especially keen during the Christmas season as we focus more fully on one another and on the Christ Child, Who awaits our love. Caryll Houselander understood this vital relationship, which she expressed for us in The Reed of God:

“Most people know the sheer wonder that goes with falling in love, how not only does everything in heaven and earth become new, but the lover becomes new as well. It is…like the sap rising in the tree, putting forth new green shoots of life. The capacity for joy is doubled, the awareness of beauty sharpened, the power to do and enjoy creative work increased immeasurably. The heart is enlarged; there is more sympathy, more warmth in it than ever before.

“This being in love increases a person’s life, makes them potent with new life, a life-giver; from it comes all the poetry, music, and art in the world. Human beings, made in the image of God, must also make the image of God’s own love. We make songs and tunes and drawings and poems; children’s stories, fairy stories; jewels, dances, and all else that tells the story of our love long after our heart is dust.

“Christ on earth was a man in love. His love gave life to all loves. He was Love itself. He infused life with all the grace of its outward and inward joyfulness, with all its poetry and song, with all the gaiety and laughter….”

Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2019

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Wanderings of an Ordinary Pilgrim

In Wanderings of an Ordinary Pilgrim by Tim Bete, who kindly sent me a copy to review, a collection of accessible poems takes us on a tour of the seeker’s life in Christ. As is common with many of us, the life-themes fall into one of four sections:

Departures such as “After the Fall” and “Where is My Heart?”

Journeys with “Wheels Down” and a “Bus Trip to Pope Francis”

Sojourns into “The Church” and the “Divine Office of the Shovel”

Returns of feeling “Orphaned” or looking “Over My Shoulder”

In the “Preface,” the poet says, “When I read poetry, I often wonder what inspired the poet to use a certain metaphor or phrase. At the end of this book, I’ve included notes that provide a few thoughts on some of the poems.”

The back matter also contains a few thoughts “About the Author,” who happens to be Poetry Editor for the Catholic Poetry Room on the Integrated Catholic Life website and, therefore, undoubtedly reads poems on all levels of spiritual and/or literary quality. In addition, the poet belongs to the Secular Order of Discalced Carmelites, a family of men and women around the world who focus on “being” and, like Mary, pondering or contemplating thoughts of Jesus.

For instance, in “The Word”:

I read the Word

and the Word in my soul

called back – an echo

reverberating;

a heart beating;

and I knew the Word lived.

Besides the faith illustrated in these poems, readers will likely connect with the doubts and honesty expressed, for example, in this last quatrain of “The Overseer”:

Such an amiable God,

who willing watches the mundane

parts of my life – parts that sometimes

don’t interest even me.

Unexpected humor also arises, for example, in “Lost Things,” which opens with these words:

St. Anthony of Lisbon,

patron saint of lost things,

did not answer the prayer

to find my lost youth.

In case you’re not familiar with St. Anthony, who was born in Lisbon, Portugal, the poet included an explanation for “Lost Things” in the “Notes” section at the back of the book. Or, if you’re like me and had heard of St. Anthony as the patron of lost things but didn’t know why, the poet tells us:

“He has this title because a novice who left his community took with him St. Anthony’s Psalter (Book of Psalms). Anthony prayed for the return of the book and eventually the novice rejoined the Franciscan Order, bringing with him Anthony’s book.”

As one who often prays head-on, I’m drawn to this way of praying small for what’s little and lost to be returned and letting God bring largely more than anything asked or imagined.

Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2019, poet-writer, reviewer

Click to order Wanderings of an Ordinary Pilgrim, paperback edition.

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