Poetry of Inspiration
UUCCSM Service presentation
July 29, 2012
Rima Snyder, Diana Spears, Judith Martin-Straw and Edna Bonacich

 

Introduction

Since this month's congregational theme is creativity, it's a good time to explore the idea of creativity and inspiration and to look at some poems that address the topic. I have found in reading the words of artists and in thinking about the subject that some aspects of the creative process seem similar across all art forms, and that some are unique to the written word. I think all types of artistic expression can offer us a way to interact with the world in a new way, to connect with something extra-ordinary.

Art can show us the world in a fundamentally different way than the way in which we ordinarily perceive it. Looking at a painting by Cezanne, we can see his attempt to convey the substance of his subject, the depth beneath the superficial form. "Nature is  ...not on the surface," he said, "it is in the depths. Colors are an expression of these depths on the surface. They rise from the roots of the world". 

In preparing for this morning's presentation I rediscovered a book by the British author Jeannette Winterson, whom many of you will know as a wonderful novelist. This book is a collection of her reflections on art, poetry and literature titled "Art Objects; Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery". In the section called "A Veil of Words" that talks about the innovative Virginia Woolf novel "The Waves", Winterson tells us that art approaches the universal through working with the unique and the specific, which in the case of a writer means describing the exact detail of a thing or a situation in precisely the right words.

The exactness the poet seeks is ... the same inspiration of relationship that the painter seeks, that the architect seeks, that the musician seeks. It is a harmony of form, a close balanced series of weights and measures and proportions that agree with one another and that agree as a whole.

This description is a good portrayal of what makes a musical composition, the balance of tension and resolution, harmony and discord, sound and silence. The quotation at the top of today's order of service is from Wallace Steven's poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird":

I do not know which to prefer, the beauty of inflections or the beauty of innuendoes, the blackbird whistling or just after.

I love the simple elegance of the sentence, like a Zen riddle or a haiku verse. It evokes a quality of silence, a space created by the sound that came before. 

In Billy Collins' poem titled "Silence" he also tells us that there are different types and qualities to silence, that it is not just a uniform state, or an absence of sound.

Silence

 

There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.
The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.
The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.
The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.
And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night
like snow falling in the darkness of the house—
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.
               ~ Billy Collins

Jeannette Winterson tells us that "for a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include... When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold. When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken."

Winterson also believes that poetry and literature are essential for our survival and growth. She writes, "The healing power of art is not a rhetorical fantasy ... I know of no pain that art cannot assuage. For some, music, for some, pictures, for me, primarily, poetry, whether found in poems or in prose, cuts through noise and hurt, opens the wound to clean it, and then gradually teaches it to heal itself.

And in her autobiography, "Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal", she says "When people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

A single image from a poem can change the way you think about something forever. In Marie Howe's poem from her collection "The Kingdom of Ordinary Time”, which Edna will be reading from today, there's a poem called "The World" that ends with this sentence:

- and I've lived on this earth so long - 50 winters, 50 springs and
summers,
and all this time stars in the sky - in daylight

when I couldn't see them, at and night when, most nights, I didn't look.

 

The simple idea of the stars being above us, constantly moving in their proud and silent orbits during the day when we can't see them and so are unaware of their presence, has stayed with me as a powerful image since I read it. Sometimes now when I look up at the sky I think about the invisible stars and my life feels a little richer, a little less isolated from the motion of the universe.

In "Art Objects" Jeannette Winterson tells us that "the work of the artist is to see into the life of things; to discriminate between superficialities and realities; to know what is genuine and what is a make-believe. The artist through the disciplines of her work is one of the few people who does see things as they really are, stripped of associative value ... when the imaginative capacity is highly developed, it is made up of invention and discernment. Invention is the shaping spirit that re-forms fragments into new wholes, so that even what has been familiar can be seen fresh. Discernment is to know how to test the true and the false and to reveal objects, emotions, ideas in their own coherence. The artist is a translator; one who has learned how to pass into her own language the languages gathered from stones, from birds, from dreams, from the body, from the material world, from the invisible world, from sex, from death, from love. A different language is a different reality; what is the language, the world, of stones?

Responsive Reading

Stone
Charles Simic

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

 

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

 

(Duke Ellington - Gwendolyn Brooks, read by Diana Spears)

Duke Ellington

 

The man is forever.

Blue savoir-faire
We loved that. We loved
that dukehood. We loved royalty and riff
because we could not reach them for ourselves.

We loved. We love.

He built a fuzzy blanket all around us.
He fed us, in such Ways! He
could educate us toward fulfillment,
reduce our torrents, maim our hurricanes.

We listened to that music:
our caterpillars instantly
were butterflies. Our sorrows
sank, in sweet submission.

He provided philanthropy
of profound clouds, provided
shredded silver and red, provided
steel and feathers.
 
     We have him!
     The man is forever.
     We have forever
     his sass, his electric Commitment,
     his royalty, his Love.
      ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

(Because These Failures Are My Job - Alison Luterman, read by Judith Martin-Straw)  

 

             
Because These Failures Are My Job

This morning I failed to notice the pearl-gray moment
just before sunrise when everything lightens;
failed also to find bird song under the grinding of garbage trucks,
and later, walking through woods, to stop thinking, thinking,
for even five consecutive steps.  Then there was the failure to name
the exact shade of blue overhead, not sapphire, not azure, not delft,
to savor the soft squelch of pine needles underfoot.
Later I found the fork raised halfway to my mouth
while I was still chewing the last untasted bite,
and so it went, until finally, wading into sleep's thick undertow,
I felt myself drift from dream to dream,
forever failing to comprehend where I am falling from or to:
this blurred life with only moments caught
in attention's loose sieve-
tiny pearls fished out of oblivion's sea,
laid out here as offering or apology or thank you
          ~ Alison Luterman

 

Meditation

Slower and Slower
Mark Belletini

Let the difficulties of the week
take their sabbath now,
their brief and simple rest.
Let the worries of the week
lay their heft gently onto the dark earth
below this carpeted floor
which can bear them with greater ease
than any one of us can by ourselves.
Let the tangle of feelings,
the pull and push of these last seven days
sit still for a minute,
stop writhing in my heart,
and move no more than a Buddha
at rest under a tree.
Let there be stillness in my heart for a moment,
the balance point between breathing in
and breathing out, like the pause of a dancer
between movements in the music.
Let the breathing in this room be free and flowing.
Let pulses trance a slower rhythm in the wrist.
Let the coming silence be like hands
pulling back a curtain,
revealing the table set with the feast of life
which is present here and now
and has been the whole while,
present to those who give up living in either the past
or the future.

 

(Prayer, What the Living Do- Marie Howe, read by Edna Bonacich)

Prayer

Every day I want to speak with you. And every day something more important 
calls for my attention -- the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage

 

I need to buy for the trip.
Even now I can hardly sit here

among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside
already screeching and banging.

 

The mystics say you are as close as my own breath.
Why do I flee from you?

My days and nights pour through me like complaints
and become a story I forgot to tell.

 

Help me. Even as I write these words I am planning
to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.
          ~ Marie Howe

What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I've been thinking: This is what the living do.
And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk,
spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass.
We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss - we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living.
I remember you.
          ~ Marie Howe