God bless you for writing this ambitious poem! its incredible! parts like v were reminding me of pound and what i like in pound, the gravitas and courage. ive been coming back to read this again periodically the past few days and will probably return. there is spiritual depth in this poem and its edifying and inspiring. i thank you heartily!
Thank you Stephen. I appreciate that. Very encouraging. I do love the Pound of Cathay and the earlier Cantos, when he's writing with clarity and gravitas, as you say.
An interesting morning read! After a quick first pass, I just want to jot down some notes:
* The major mode of the New Testament (clipped narrative, earthy but hard to resolve anecdote) is apparent here.
* So are the modes of the modernists, Pound and Eliot, the montage of different styles and the academic source eclecticism. Your take is more contained, for obvious reasons--more Christian, more orthodox, and also just cleaner and more approachable.
* The choice of theme--asceticism--is ambitious. I think in our civilization the tradition of self-denial is especially odd, especially self-denial as mental exploration, rather than social utility. It's freaky.
* It's a reminder that the whole lyric tradition of listening to yourselves and playing with our minds is part of a much larger, usually religious tradition. And that it is not a very safe one. It might lead to madness, for instance.
* Secular takes on the theme--Bidart in Ellen West (anorexia), and Rilke (Duino Elegies, intense, elegant world-hatred) are few and far between. But those examples are very powerful and disturbing.
* This poem in contrast, by being embedded in a tradition of a particular long-ago historical figure, seems less threatening. And the emphasis is more on finding God than finding God by denying the world and the self. The negative theology (it's here because it's not here) is more Stevens than visceral.
These are just first impressions I wanted to capture. I'll do another read this wknd. Thank you putting this our there. Intriguing!
Thanks Matt. That's a generous analysis. I appreciate it. There is something uneasy about these early hermits, going all the way back to John the Baptist eating locusts and living off honey in the desert. The intense ascetism and zealotry is so foreign and uncanny. I don't know what else you'd call it but divinely inspired madness. But it seems to be a consequence of the kind of thing the Empire had become, which is what I'm exploring in this series, i.e. the change from the pagan to the Christian west.
I agree with about Rilke's power. The elegant world-hatred. What's that? I see a sense of fear and trembling, of awe at the world, but not necessarily hatred towards it.
Hatred is maybe not the word. Maybe intensely cultivated detachment that verges on the inhuman. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing! :) Poems can do many things, and making us feel detached is one of them.
There is a lot to consider here, and I don't know if I am reading it correctly, but I enjoyed the journey. You demonstrate great trust in your reader to follow the trail. Rome's power abuses as the framework contextualize the religious excesses. The italicized voice is the poet or transcriber contemplating the mystic. The other voice is the hermit but seems to have multiple personas. Some voices are more reliable than others. Some teeter on the brink of madness. But some lines from both hermit and transcriber are so beautiful (God is the God of fecundity / He splits open the desert / draws manna from the wound) I am tempted to read a holy zeal into the madness. I can't decide if I should be inspired to greater devotion or wary of a performative relationship with this God of the desert. Is the ambivalence the point?
Apologies for missing this comment Abigail. I thought of the italics as a sort of omniscient narrator, or transcriber, as you say. Your whole analysis is very perceptive.
There's this concept in Jewish mysticism called kenosis, or "an emptying." The sort of revelation that a monk like St. Anthony would've experienced, living in the desert for 20 years, seemed to me to be related to the idea of kenosis. A complete emptying of oneself, melting away. Into what? Into one's environment. Dissolving that boundary between oneself and nature. That's something like the theme of the poem. In such a religious experience, God is no different than Nature, and everything that happens in Nature, both good and evil, comes from God. This anyway was an important theological discussion at the time, and I felt it fit the poem, too. St. Anthony returns to the world at the end, and sees the persecution of the Christians, but no longer disturbed by it, sees in it something of the natural processes that were a part of his enlightenment.
You've given me plenty of material to "appropriate." After chopping this thing up, I should be able to get 70 or 80 poems out of it. I've already submitted Part III ("Hold perfectly still . . .") to the Dakota Review under the name Doug Van Buren (bio: "Formerly a chaplain with the Marines, Mr. Van Buren teaches Ethics and the Bible (two separate courses) at Mt. HolyOak Girls Academy in Ralston, Montana . . ."). Your poem could make Mr. Van Buren's career. By the way, your (Doug's) depiction of Jerome is spot-on. He always struck me as a rather unctuous "hermit," making a good living off posing for Old Masters. I also like that you've created a sort of hive of hermits, a kind of ascetics guild. Hermits, by definition, work alone, don't they? It's fun to see this most theatrical of hermits perform for his peers.
Thank you, Robert. The way the theology serves the poem instead of the other way around is well done. How did you choose the varying stanza and line lengths? Are they meant to symbolize the hermit's spiritual state? This conversational aspect of Substack is honing my reading skills. Truly grateful for this engagement with writers here.
God bless you for writing this ambitious poem! its incredible! parts like v were reminding me of pound and what i like in pound, the gravitas and courage. ive been coming back to read this again periodically the past few days and will probably return. there is spiritual depth in this poem and its edifying and inspiring. i thank you heartily!
Thank you Stephen. I appreciate that. Very encouraging. I do love the Pound of Cathay and the earlier Cantos, when he's writing with clarity and gravitas, as you say.
An interesting morning read! After a quick first pass, I just want to jot down some notes:
* The major mode of the New Testament (clipped narrative, earthy but hard to resolve anecdote) is apparent here.
* So are the modes of the modernists, Pound and Eliot, the montage of different styles and the academic source eclecticism. Your take is more contained, for obvious reasons--more Christian, more orthodox, and also just cleaner and more approachable.
* The choice of theme--asceticism--is ambitious. I think in our civilization the tradition of self-denial is especially odd, especially self-denial as mental exploration, rather than social utility. It's freaky.
* It's a reminder that the whole lyric tradition of listening to yourselves and playing with our minds is part of a much larger, usually religious tradition. And that it is not a very safe one. It might lead to madness, for instance.
* Secular takes on the theme--Bidart in Ellen West (anorexia), and Rilke (Duino Elegies, intense, elegant world-hatred) are few and far between. But those examples are very powerful and disturbing.
* This poem in contrast, by being embedded in a tradition of a particular long-ago historical figure, seems less threatening. And the emphasis is more on finding God than finding God by denying the world and the self. The negative theology (it's here because it's not here) is more Stevens than visceral.
These are just first impressions I wanted to capture. I'll do another read this wknd. Thank you putting this our there. Intriguing!
Thanks Matt. That's a generous analysis. I appreciate it. There is something uneasy about these early hermits, going all the way back to John the Baptist eating locusts and living off honey in the desert. The intense ascetism and zealotry is so foreign and uncanny. I don't know what else you'd call it but divinely inspired madness. But it seems to be a consequence of the kind of thing the Empire had become, which is what I'm exploring in this series, i.e. the change from the pagan to the Christian west.
I agree with about Rilke's power. The elegant world-hatred. What's that? I see a sense of fear and trembling, of awe at the world, but not necessarily hatred towards it.
Hatred is maybe not the word. Maybe intensely cultivated detachment that verges on the inhuman. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing! :) Poems can do many things, and making us feel detached is one of them.
Yeah, I see what you mean. He's detached himself in order to see the angels everywhere.
masterful.
Thank you samara
There is a lot to consider here, and I don't know if I am reading it correctly, but I enjoyed the journey. You demonstrate great trust in your reader to follow the trail. Rome's power abuses as the framework contextualize the religious excesses. The italicized voice is the poet or transcriber contemplating the mystic. The other voice is the hermit but seems to have multiple personas. Some voices are more reliable than others. Some teeter on the brink of madness. But some lines from both hermit and transcriber are so beautiful (God is the God of fecundity / He splits open the desert / draws manna from the wound) I am tempted to read a holy zeal into the madness. I can't decide if I should be inspired to greater devotion or wary of a performative relationship with this God of the desert. Is the ambivalence the point?
Apologies for missing this comment Abigail. I thought of the italics as a sort of omniscient narrator, or transcriber, as you say. Your whole analysis is very perceptive.
There's this concept in Jewish mysticism called kenosis, or "an emptying." The sort of revelation that a monk like St. Anthony would've experienced, living in the desert for 20 years, seemed to me to be related to the idea of kenosis. A complete emptying of oneself, melting away. Into what? Into one's environment. Dissolving that boundary between oneself and nature. That's something like the theme of the poem. In such a religious experience, God is no different than Nature, and everything that happens in Nature, both good and evil, comes from God. This anyway was an important theological discussion at the time, and I felt it fit the poem, too. St. Anthony returns to the world at the end, and sees the persecution of the Christians, but no longer disturbed by it, sees in it something of the natural processes that were a part of his enlightenment.
My belly is full, my mind awake.
I have chewed on the fat of memory.
I have drunk from the bowl of occurrence.
In the burnished air vultures ride higher
as I inhale, lower as my breath departs.
My heartbeat is as the mountains are.
I'm stealing that shit.
That's the best compliment. Especially because I've always wanted to write a Peter Whisenant poem.
You've given me plenty of material to "appropriate." After chopping this thing up, I should be able to get 70 or 80 poems out of it. I've already submitted Part III ("Hold perfectly still . . .") to the Dakota Review under the name Doug Van Buren (bio: "Formerly a chaplain with the Marines, Mr. Van Buren teaches Ethics and the Bible (two separate courses) at Mt. HolyOak Girls Academy in Ralston, Montana . . ."). Your poem could make Mr. Van Buren's career. By the way, your (Doug's) depiction of Jerome is spot-on. He always struck me as a rather unctuous "hermit," making a good living off posing for Old Masters. I also like that you've created a sort of hive of hermits, a kind of ascetics guild. Hermits, by definition, work alone, don't they? It's fun to see this most theatrical of hermits perform for his peers.
Thank you, Robert. The way the theology serves the poem instead of the other way around is well done. How did you choose the varying stanza and line lengths? Are they meant to symbolize the hermit's spiritual state? This conversational aspect of Substack is honing my reading skills. Truly grateful for this engagement with writers here.