Richard Jackson | September 2013

NOTES

I. PRETEXTS

“There is no literature that does not, from its very first word, ask for forgiveness,” writes Jacques Derrida.¹ What literature, what poetry, asks forgiveness for is its inability to say what is unsayable. Charles Wright captures this in a recent poem from Sestets:

The world’s an untranslatable language
                                                                Without words or parts of speech.
It’s the language of objects
Our tongues can’t master,
                                But which we are the ardent subjects of.

If tree is tree in English,
                                                And albero in Italian,
That’s as close as we can come
To divinity, the language that circles the earth
                                                And which we’ll never speak.²

In the Hebrew tradition, what is unspeakable is the name for God, the name for the mysterious forces that are beyond us. It is also the name of the world around us whose objects, according to Psalm 19 (NRSV), have

        ……no speech, nor are there words;
         their voice is not heard;
yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
         and their words to the end of the world.

This sense of the mystery of the world that speaks a kind of language of silence, that itself has a language we do not understand, forms part of the mystery of what is called the Logos in the prologue of John’s Gospel, and more figuratively what the German Romantic critic, Schelling, called a sense of a “boundless expansion” as opposed to the kind of “egotistical contraction” one finds, say, in so much self-oriented contemporary poetry.³ The unsayable is the “mystery of the sacred”⁴ as Derrida calls it, a secret we hold within us but do not understand. It is as if we internalize the world outside in order to project our version of it, always coming up short against the original. It is an endless process, and yet, as Blake reminds us, “All deities reside in the human breast,”⁵ an idea that can be interpreted as we shall see, in numerous ways. What we see is what Slavoj Žižek describes as the space that Hopper’s characters look at through various windows, a space that is always beyond the canvas. What they see is what Jack Gilbert describes in “Winter Happiness in Greece”—

The world is beyond us even as we own it.
It is a hugeness in which we climb toward.

 

A place only the wind knows, the kingdom
Of the moon which breathes a thousand years
At a time. Our soul and the body hold each other
Tenderly in their arms like Charles Lamb
And his sister walking again to the madhouse.⁶

Despite the fact that the world, the cosmos, now seems like a madhouse with few consolations, few means for understanding “where we are going,” there is yet a faith here, that just as scientific discoveries have been confirmed long after first being proposed, our faith that “understanding” will be rewarded will undergo a similar time lag. The hope seems to contradict the evidence, of course, but for the poet to say the unsayable is to engage in a paradoxical enterprise where, as the poet Carl Phillips says in a discussion of the Psalms, “there is less an impulse to reconcile contradiction than to plumb and sound contradiction’s depths.”⁷ This sounds remarkably close to Keats’s idea of negative capability—“the ability to live in uncertainty and doubt without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.”⁸ Or Whitman’s delight in self contradiction in Song of Myself. Or Blake’s “Without Contraries is no Progression.”⁹

However, the kind of ambiguity and uncertainty that comes with contradiction, with a sense that there are things beyond us, poses a problem. Phillips, for instance, goes on to say that such a poetry “refreshingly deepens and enlarges the beliefs and sensibilities of the very society it—inevitably, necessarily—also threatens.” Without some sense of the beyond, Ashbery argues in “Um,” we become aimless and simply declare the world plural, “unintelligible, / past, beyond belief” so that we must change course:

Put another way, God is singular,
Strong in feeling, wise in the ways of others.
His flesh is singular, like water.
His feeling anchored in a deep pool.
Get Him back.
He’s on an eagle trip.¹⁰

So the question becomes how to get back a sense of whatever force is beyond us. To get that force back, to return to a sense of mystery, the poet, as Tomaž Šalamun says in an interview, must become “a hunter, not an expresser. You express what you already have. The inexpressible is like the beast in the woods that the hunter always knows only by its tracks.”¹¹ Kafka, too, in his diaries, talks about the writer as a “hunter” whose hunt is also an “assault on the last earthly limit.”¹² The writer, for Kafka, searches for the perfect language where the secrets, the unsayable and unknowable, would be clearly known. As tradition has it, this attempt is what Nimrod was punished for, the result being a babel of languages filled with enormous gaps in understanding and communication. If he had succeeded, he would have become a god himself with an attendant loss of desire to hunt, that is, a loss of his humanity. For Šalamun, the poet today understands the impossibility of the task he is nevertheless drawn to: “Basically, what I am drawn to is—with a word or phrase—to catch the sacred seed of everything, what is at the center of the fruit, and open it up. The poem goes for the inexpressible, a kind of hidden God’s space.”¹³ What Šalamun is getting at is an argument against the kind of poetry that says such and such is important because it happened to the author, or because it crossed his or her mind; a poetry that roots itself so deeply in the personal material world that it never reaches beyond it. Giorgio Agamben, the Italian philosopher, writes that “a work of art or poetry that does not contain within it a critical exigency is destined for oblivion.”¹⁴ Poetry, for me, is that struggle against oblivion, a search for something beyond the moment, a sense of a larger mystery that can never finally be known, a search that defines us as human. Even the atheist Žižek worries that in today’s literature, “the gap that separates the sacred space of sublime beauty from the excremental space of trash (leftover) is gradually narrowing.”¹⁵ Whatever is beyond the horizon may not be a theistic God in white robes, some presence circling us like a satellite: it may be a parallel universe, it may be a kind of Jungian soup we return to, it may be pure energy that our matter is converted to. But the point is, as Charles Wright says in “Yellow Wings,” there is “always a whitish light / edging the earth’s offerings, some impermanent light / The soul is pulled toward, and longs for, deep in its cave, / Little canary.”¹⁶ We are always in the position of Rilke on the cliffs at Duino shouting “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels’ / Orders,” as he faces a terrifying sense of abandonment. In the end he realizes that the “Void” can become a source of “rapture and solace and help.”¹⁷

This sort of contradiction and ambiguity, of course, leads just as often to doubt. C.K. Williams, in Wait, addresses the problem in several poems. In “Assumptions,” he posits a number of critiques of any “entity” that is “vast, omnipotent but immaterial,” what constitutes for him an “unfaltering faulty logic.”¹⁸ But at the same time the issue does not go away. In fact in “Halo” he admits, in talking about the Jesuit theologian Teilhard de Chardin, that “All the yearnings, prayers pleas, entreaties, / Of humans for something beyond—he meant god, of course, / Christ—towards which he believed the universe was evolving,” were “very seductive for people like me, / who had no god, no Christ, but thought they might like to.” A few lines later he goes on to say, “I still do, sometimes, wish I could believe,” but ends the poem with a vision of a “puncture in the heavens” that is both blind and numb, an “angel-less halo… pouring through / without meaning or reason.” In “Brain” he imagines an organ with “corridors, corners, strange, narrow caverns, dead ends” but in exploring it, exploring the self, wonders “if the conclusion I’d long ago come to that there can be nothing / that might reasonably be postulated as the soul apart from the body and mind was entirely valid.” From that he wonders if the task would then be to “salvage” what he’d lost, to find consolation in a vision of other souls in a kind of Jungian lake. However, the poem never answers the hypothesis, and ends on a vision of darkness “seeping down.” Williams’s worries reveal just how important and defining such issues are to human nature, and so, to poetry.

Even a believer like Czeslaw Milosz questions his belief in what might be beyond us by redefining the very terms of belief. In his poem “On Angels,” he takes a nontraditional view of angels in an attempt to define the supernatural or celestial, the unsayable. For him they seem to retain some sort of hope in a larger view of ourselves, but a hope in the beyond that is experienced in sight, smell, and sound, a voice “girdled” with “lightening.”

On Angels

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe in you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.

The voice—no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightening.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:

day draw near
another one
do what you can.¹⁹

 

Ironically, he begins by questioning their existence, but at the same time wonders what they might be messengers of, and ends up with a sense that they tell us to “draw near” them and each other. Their “unearthly tongue” is something that can only be understood in dream, in the subconscious, or preconscious. There is no warning, no threat, no commandment to be obeyed, only that one should “do what you can.” What Milosz is getting at here is a sense of a voice, here perhaps a voice of conscience, which is beyond our everyday selves. Neither Williams nor Milosz finds fully satisfactory answers, but the importance is in the search itself. As Šalamun says in his interview, “the very fact that we can’t describe it now, searching as we are with various metaphors and similes, shows us what a powerful thing it is, what attraction it has.”²⁰

II. TEXTS

Trying to understand the mystery of what may be beyond us leads to extraordinary uses of language. For example, another Psalm, attempting to explain how the world might react to the presence of this sort of mystery, describes how

The sea looked and fled;
         Jordan turned back.
The mountains skipped like rams,
         The hills like rams. (114)

 

The surrealism is heightened by the doublings, a common syntactic strategy in the Psalms. Most of the Psalms use very ordinary objects to get at the sense of what is beyond, as in #114 where the Psalmist sings, “You stretch out the heavens like a tent,” or in the numerous mentions of trees, seeds, water, mountains, stars, shade, and the like, images that tell us as much about daily life in an arid land as the search for something beyond its aridity. For the Psalmist, daily life itself becomes a major component of the mystery of the cosmos.

Pattiann Rogers notes in a book of contemporary poets on the Psalms that she used Psalm #1 as the starting point for her poem “The Tree Has Captured My Soul,”²¹ dedicated to the mystery of Vincent van Gogh’s art. The relevant verses from the Psalm describe how good people are “like trees / planted by streams of water,” which yield fruit and do not wither. Her idea, she says, is that we can become like those flourishing trees by studying and praising the physical world. This appreciation of the world is for her a spiritual act, something she sees epitomized in van Gogh. “When they found him mad in the field / on his knees, gripping the hard wooden trunk / of his own living soul,” she begins, quickly picking up on the tree-soul analogy, explaining that “it could never be said / How it happened.” The possibilities she explores are crucial in that they describe the main ways in which one transcends the world, in which the physical and the spiritual, the known and the mysterious, interact. She wonders whether:

1) the “soul of the tree” penetrated his body ( traditional pantheistic view),

2) or that the “soul itself became the pure white tree,” (a medieval meditative view),

3) or that the soul was caught in the “wind” among the branches (a metaphoric view),

4) or whether he saw his soul spread out on the canvas, the work of art itself (a view of art itself as transcendent),

5) or whether the body itself became a substitute for the soul (a basic naturalistic view),

6) or he went directly beyond the tree to see “the veins of his soul rising and branching / towards light” (a religiously ecstatic view)

7) or if his soul became part of the movement of the wind (a more spiritualized naturalistic view),

8) or if he saw the “Shimmering perception” of the tree “lift his body, light as a soul, / On the tips of its branches forever towards heaven” (a more traditional religious view).

In the end, all that is known for sure is that “he came fully awake… / his arms around his body / as if rooted to the earth” but also seeing “the illuminating wind of his soul for the first time.” What is crucial here is that what actually transpired is a mystery, and that it was in some fashion an illumination that led to his great art. While originating in the Biblical Psalm, the poem moves outward, expanding, as Schelling suggested, to a larger concern, and in doing so actually increases the sense of mystery.

Thomas Lux, in “God Particles,” describes a sense of the divine in terms of current atomic theory: “God explodes, supernovas, and down the whole planet / a tender rain of Him falls / on every cow, ladle, leaf, human, ax handle, swing set.”²² For Lux, the divine is not some overreaching sky but “each God particle is different” and so related to each individual, internalized as an aspect of the self: “Every human, every creature, tomato on earth / is absorbing God!” He then goes on to ask why God has exploded—not, to be sure, as a suicide bomber that would destroy us all, and not the victim of such an attack. Not guilt for Christ’s death, either. But simply for a very human reason, for Lux’s god is the sense of the love and human interaction that is potential in each of us:

        He wanted each of us,

 

And all the things we touch
And are touched by,
To have a tiny piece of Him,
Though we are unqualified
For even the crumb of a crumb.

 

There’s a humility in Lux that has biblical origins, of course, but it is just as much about our smallness in the cosmos of our age, and how we hope to participate in something beyond our own spheres. A similar sense informs Jean Valentine’s “Trust Me,”²³ but here the emphasis is on the act of writing itself as a connection to the divine. “Why did I write last night,” she begins, and then to the more existential question, “Who am I? / who want so much to move / like a fish through water, / through life.” The water image is then developed so that she begins to realize she must “go by the river which is frozen under the snow,” that is, to plumb the depths of movement under a static surface. The way one must live is the way one must write, to be receptive to those hidden depths that seem always out of sight and reach. In the end, one must have the faith that Valentine’s feminine God “fills us as a woman fills a pitcher.” While for Lux the sense of the divine is met as it strikes each person differently, for Valentine each individual is responsible for being receptive to the divine, be that poetic inspiration or spiritual knowledge, as a way to answer the question “Who am I?”

Sharon Olds has an even more earthly view of the divine. In “Sex Without Love,” she wonders how anyone can “make love / without love.” For her they are like ice skaters on the cold bodies of one another. But as she thinks more about the situation she begins to question this view, playing off of Psalm #23 (“He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters”):

                        How do they come to the

 

come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, heat
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? I guess they are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false messiah, love the
priest instead of the Messiah.²⁴

Curiously, the name of God here is both an object of the phrase “come to the” (with the pun on “come”) and an interjection on the part of the speaker. For Olds, the divine is love, sexual love included if not primary. On the one hand the true believers worship only love itself, the act, not their partners; on the other hand they realize that the others, like their physical condition and accoutrements, are only signs and not the “truth, which is / the single body alone in the universe / against its own best time.” In other words, the true religious lovers are trying to connect with whatever it is beyond them, a world that will “appear infinite and holy,” as Blake says, “by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.”²⁵

Linda Gregg, on the other hand, describes love in more metaphysical terms as the essence of the mystery of what seems so often to evade us. In “God’s Places,” she begins with a separation of the self from the soul and the soul from love:

Does the soul care about the mightiness

 

of this love. No. The soul is a place
and love must find its way there.

She then goes on to describe several places, a shoreline, a ruined village—both being “God’s places” but without “love.” She lived in those places, she says, “the way grape vines live” without emotional engagement in the world around her. Indeed, she might well have been absent from those places. What makes a place of God, a place where something greater than the self can be felt, is the presence of the beloved:

The soul must be experienced to be achieved.

 

If you love me as much as you say you
Love me, stay. Let us make a place
Of that ripeness the soul speaks about.²⁶

The idea here pivots on the word “achieved,” which echoes “believed” but is more active: the speaker does not wait passively but reaches out to the other. Place becomes not a physical location but a state of mind, a state of emotional fulfillment. What she works at through the poem is a way to move from detached and passive experience, to active engaged experience, a ripening of the soul, of love.

What Rogers, Lux, Olds, and Gregg are doing is describing a movement from the earthly to the divine or transcendent. Given the facts of the world, they seem to ask, what is behind it all. But what if we reverse the question as Robert Hass does in “Privilege of Being”?²⁷ While his figures are making love, they are watched by Angels who think of the lovemaking first in comic terms: “it must look to them like featherless birds / splashing in the spring puddle of a bed.” So involved are the lovers with each other that “the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically.” The result is that “all of creation is offended by this distress” so that it reflects back on the lovers who “especially cannot bear it, / it fills them with unspeakable sadness.” But this in turn leads to a kind of distancing of the lovers, the one telling the other that he cannot “cure” her “loneliness.” Towards the end, as they are out for a run, he finds a kind of resignation, a relationship like that of couples “reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes.” Ironically, this is overheard by the angels, who now, despite the fact that their despair has created a disturbance in the cosmos that affects the lovers, now become “immense, illiterate, consoling angels.” It is not simply that the individual seeks for something beyond the self that is never fully attainable, the world beyond seeks for a humanity that it can never attain. It is in the huge space between these, as Gregg would call it, that poetry begins.

A number of other poets have written about the unsayable as a sense of divinity, as Rilke in his Book of Images and poems on Biblical characters where he adopts their various points of view. Some poems are prayers, as are a number of poems by Robert Penn Warren, Carl Dennis, Donald Revell, and Alicia Ostriker. There is Mark Strand’s long poem, “Poem After the Seven Last Words” of Christ. Mark Jarman’s Unholy Sonnets,²⁸ playing off the title of Donne’s “Holy Sonnets,” and following Jarman’s own distinctive Questions for Ecclesiastes, projects a self engaged in an ultimate quest to understand what cannot be understood, the ultimate otherness of a creator who should be a part of us. Facing the possibility of an absent God, the book argues that prayer, as a kind of answer, that is, as presupposing an answer, is a dialogue, poetically a dialectic structure, and so a form of hope. For example, the opening poem, “The Word ‘Answer,’” comprised of four sonnet stanzas, begins with a predominance of occasional, slant, and even harsh consonant rhymes, but as the poem progresses, as prayer is more and more its own answer, the lines too begin to echo in fuller and tighter rhymes. The effect is of a crescendo, a broadening of perspective, a song of praise that yet understands that prayer is “Acknowledgement, out of the freezing air, / As dangerous as it is beautiful.” The language of prayer is always failing, and needs to be revised. It is always in process, because it is always human as Anne Sexton suggests in The Awful Rowing Towards God.

III. SUBTEXTS

Engagement. Activity. Process. As we have seen, hunting for the unsayable is not necessarily a traditional religious enterprise, even when it uses religious images, and may not be religious at all. What is important is the process of hunting itself. Franz Wright, having written a number of theological poems, finds this process to be an essential undertaking. In “The Door,” he compares entering a cellar to opening a book that is “twice as big as you are,” but he asks, “toward—what” would we be descending:

maybe you have no idea

yet, but you know something is down there, and a
light you need to find,

before you can even begin to search.²⁹

The light: our intuition that there is indeed something down there, something in the darkness, something beyond our understanding that we must first intuit. Otherwise, the search becomes hopeless. The light may be a form of inspiration, or a means to search, a kind of natural knowledge of the beyond that some would suggest we possess from the womb. But what he is suggesting, ultimately, is that one must be disposed to find something if one is to find some version of it, or even to begin the search itself.

For Jack Gilbert in “Moreover,”³⁰ the search is an attempt to recapture what has been lost in our relationship to time:

We are given trees so we can know

 

What God looks like. And rivers
So we might understand him.

But at the same time, the world we are given is a “difficult garden” that is “indifferent” to us, and worse, “what we are given is taken away,” though “we manage to keep it secretly.” With the secret, that mystery

We lose everything, but make harvest
Of the consequences it was to us. Memory
Builds this kingdom from the fragments
And approximation. We are gleaners who fill
The barn for the winter that comes on.

The winter, the potential blankness at the end of one’s life, or beyond one’s present moment, beyond one’s physical existence, is something the self resists if it wants to live beyond itself, and leave some sort of mark upon existence. And yet the possibility that there is only that blankness beyond the humdrum of the moment is something haunting. W.S. Merwin, in “Ring,”³¹ looks in a fully secular way at this sense of the possibility of emptiness: situated as we are on “this earth which for all we know / is the only place in the vault of darkness,” a place of “whispered voices” and absences, we are drawn to discover if there is anything beyond. So, “we look for what we have lost / one moment touching the earth and the next //straying far out past the orbits and webs.” In the end, we “go on // without being able to tell” whether we make any connections to the cosmos, the past, the dead, anything beyond us.

What is remarkable, as Yehuda Amichai shows, is how compelling that blankness is:

Of Three or Four In a Room

 

Of three or four in a room
There is always one who stands beside the window.
He must see the evil among thorns
and the fires on the hill.
And how people who went out of their houses whole
are given back in the evening like small change.

Of three or four in a room
there is always one who stands beside the window,
his dark hair above his thoughts.
Behind him, words.
And in front of him, voices wandering without a knapsack,
Hearts without provisions, prophecies without water,
large stones that have been returned
and stay sealed, like letters that have no
address, and no one to receive them.³²

Against the chatter of the everyday, the passing conversations of the others, the one person, the poet, worries about whatever might be beyond the room. The mysteries that are “sealed” have “no address,” no one to receive or decipher them. These are the wandering voices we saw in Charles Wright and Milosz, the angels of Hass, Olds’s pure lovers.

The fact of someone’s death is often a catalyst for thinking of what transcends us. Carol Frost’s recent Honeycomb deals with her mother’s Alzheimer’s, a disease that acts to cut the patient off from the world. In the end, Frost suggests that, Eliot-like, our ends are beginnings, or that the disease itself seems to provide some sort of contact with another world. Watching some man-of-wars, she says

Clouds made wandering shadows:

 

Sea and Grass mingled::
There is no hell after all
But a lull before it began over::
Flesh lying alone: then mating, a little spray of soul:
And the grace of waves, of stars, and remotest isles.

The double colons here suggest a series of parallels, as in logic relationship problems—the lost world of the patient, the world beneath the sea, the “wandering shadows” of clouds each seem to exist beside our own world.³³ What seems to be suggested is the sort of parallel world contemporary physics announces.

Another type of consciousness of a parallel world is precipitated when one meditates on a work of art, or another age, as James Wright does in “Jerome in Solitude,”³⁴ which takes its title from one of the earlier translators of the Bible. The focus of Wright’s poem is not on dogma or the events Jerome described in his translation of the Bible (“Christ retching in pain”). Because of that he moves from an extreme religious response (“beat / My breast with a stone”) to a state where he is motionless, frozen, because “I did not dare to.” What is it that has transfixed him? It is not Jerome, not the dogma, not the seemingly absent lion that is in most pictures, but only the lizard: “I looked close. / The deep place in the lizard’s eye / Looked back into me.” It is not some sense of the divine, not some belief system, or the holiness of the saint, but the other, animal world that exists beside and beyond us, that is the source of his vision.

As a source of transcendent thinking, the natural world itself can take many shapes. Charles Simic playfully suggests that he will investigate “what those weeds / By the stone wall are fretting about.” Already we are in an anthropomorphized world as he continues to speculate what they don’t “care” for. For Simic, the world we see is, like Wordsworth’s, half created and half perceived, a fanciful world that tells us as much about ourselves as the world. In this case the world seems to go on by itself except for the trees—

They bend their branches ever so slightly

 

In deference to something
About to make its entrance
Of which we know nothing,
Spellbound as we are by the deepening quiet.³⁵

The search leads to the unknown, a sense of a world that has its own logic that informs us in a way we never really understand. All we can do is read the signs of the “deepening quiet” that will only get deeper and deeper.

Gerald Stern, in his long poem “The Preacher” uses the character from Ecclesiastes, the doubter who considers that “all is vanity” (more accurately translated as “fog,” “futility,” or “emptiness”) to explore what he perceives as a “hole in the universe.” What Stern does is fill the perceived holes with things—the images in the poem from moles, geese, squirrels, and grubs to trees, history, music, and friends—the very sort of stuff that has filled his poems since his first book. “My figures / always start with the literal and the spreading / is like blood spreading,” he says. The result is that the holes are filled, and the poet himself touches and fills the spaces Rilke found terrifying:

                                         there has to
always be something there, a phrase, an idea, a
person even, or a mood or a kind of
shadow, different poets do it differently.³⁶

He goes on to quickly relate the holes and how we fill them to Alice in Wonderland, gardening, and Charles Mingus’s music. In this poem, where loss, foggy perception, and futility constantly threaten the speaker, the poet finds a way to establish the mystery of things as something immediately in front of him yet always, as he noted, “spreading out” so that in the end the distant universe is always linked to the self, a kind of Whitmanesque gesture.

Wallace Stevens solves the problem of detachment and separation that Simic and Stern, and so many other poets like Rilke and Hass describe, by merging with the distant and cosmic through a third party. “The Idea of Order at Key West”³⁷ can serve as a kind of summary for what we have been exploring. The poem opens with a sense of another figure who seems to have some connection to whatever is beyond the physical world:

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

While she seems to give the sea its definition by her words, nevertheless she is distinguished from its “inhuman” sound, at least in the observer’s mind, for “It was she and not the sea we heard.” The sea is merely the “place” (in a physical and metaphysical sense) where she sings. But the sound of the sea is something that seems to make no sense without her presence, while her presence creates in itself a deepening mystery as she seems to create a kind of world of her own that can somehow be experienced:

                            But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped…

                 …when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

In essence, she becomes the poet, merges in a sense with the speaker, with the world she has created which is the world of the poem and the world, now transformed, of the speaker. She becomes an emblem of

The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

The secret, the continually “ghostlier demarcations,” as Derrida says, is “secret even from the holder of the secret.”³⁸ Giorgio Agamben writes that “it is possible, in fact, that the way in which we are able to be ignorant is precisely what defines the rank of what we are able to know and that the articulation of a zone of nonknowledge is the condition—and at the same time the touchstone—of all our knowledge.”³⁹ Of course this is not a rational approach to uncovering the mysteries that inform our lives, but it is a poetic one. In fact, we might posit here, at the end, an essential poetics of mystery. It results in a poetry always aware of what it cannot do, but because it remains ignorant of that too, it keeps hunting, searching, uncovering the hints and fragments we call vision. In that sense, perhaps any poetics of mystery is itself a fable, a poem, part of the series of chambers Keats saw the poet’s imagination traveling through, and that poetry, any art really, is a balancing act between here and there, now and then, the physical and the ephemeral or spiritual, sight and vision.

Jack Gilbert, in “A Walk Blossoming,”⁴⁰ suggests that “the spirit opens as life closes down,” and that we try, as we are more conscious of death, to “frame the size of whatever God is.” But God is not, for him, some entity ready to judge us in any afterlife, but rather “the importance / of what we contain meanwhile.” If there is any paradise for him it is in this life, in the way we appreciate the world around us, in the way we take care of it. Behind that belief is a sense that whatever he is doing—walking around Bologna, remembering Pittsburgh, appreciating the glare of Greek sun, thinking of an old lover—there is always a sense that behind his perceptions there is something more, and behind that yet something else, endlessly, some connection to the cosmos we work towards that helps us understand the discrete particulars we observe. What we observe is not abstract but based on our senses:

The spirit can know the Lord as a flavor
Rather than a power. The soul is ambitious
For what is invisible. Hungers for a sacrament
That is both spirit and flesh. And neither.

For Gilbert, we are not body and not air, neither the wood nor the fire, but rather a kind of music that needs to be played by all that is around us in order to become “one with this world,” as he says in “Music is in the Piano Only When it is Played.”⁴¹ We refuse the ordinary sense of heaven to understand the heavenly in our own lives. In his “Ninth Elegy,” Rilke says in a famous passage that the poet’s job is to not simply mention things that are observed, but to say them “as the things themselves / never dreamt so intensely to be.”⁴² As Emily Dickinson expressed it in “The World Is Not Conclusion,”⁴³ it is not any dogma, which is of the present and which she satirizes as “hallelujahs from the pulpit,” that intrigues and calls us, but a sense of the unknown. It is mystery that propels us to the next poem, and there is never any final answer, for, as she writes, “narcotics cannot still the truth that nibbles at the soul.”                                

An earlier version of this essay was presented as a lecture at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Richard Jackson is the author of ten books of poems, most recently Eric Hoffer Award winning Resonance (Ashland Poetry Press, 2010), two books of translations, two books of criticism, and two anthologies of Slovene poetry. Out of Place will appear in 2014. Translated into fifteen languages, he is the winner of AWP’s George Garrett Award, Fulbright, Guggenheim, NEA, and NEH Fellowships, a Witter-Bynner Fellowship, and five Pushcart appearances. He won the Order of Freedom Award from the President of Slovenia for Literary and Humanitarian Work in the Balkans. Jackson teaches at UT-Chattanooga and Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Notes

1. Jacques Derrida, Literature in Secret, tr. D. Willis (U of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 157 (Published with The Gift of Death).
2. “The Ghost of Walter Benjamin Walks at Midnight,” Charles Wright, Sestets (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2009), p. 41.
3. See the discussion in Slavoj Žižek’s The Fragile Absolute (Verso, 2000), 103 ff.
4. Derrida, The Gift of Death, p. 3.
5. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford University Press, 1975), xx (Plate 11).
6. Jack Gilbert, The Dance Most of All (Knopf:2009), p. 16.
7. Poets on the Psalms, ed. Lynn Domina (Trinity U Press, 2008), p. 8.
8. Selected Poems and Letters: John Keats, ed. Bush (Houghton Mifflin, 1959), p. 261 (21, ?27 December 1817).
9. Blake, xvi (Plate 3).
10. John Ashbery, Planisphere (Ecco, 2009), p. 125.
11. Poetry Miscellany, 20, 1990, p. 7.
12. Cited in Giorgio Agamben, Nudities (Stanford U Press, 2011), p. 34.
13. Poetry Miscellany, p. 7.
14. Agamben, Nudities, p. 6.
15. Slavoi Žižek, The Fragile Absolute (Verso, 2009), p. 17.
16. “Yellow Wings,” Sestets, p. 35.
17. R.M. Rilke, The Poetry of Rilke, tr. Snow (North Point, 2009), 283 ff.
18. C.K. Williams, Wait (Farrar Strauss, 2010), p. 54.
19. Czelaw Milosz, New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001 (Ecco Press, 2001), p. 275.
20. Poetry Miscellany, p. 7.
21. Pattiann Rogers, in Poets on the Psalms, pp. 72-73.
22. Thomas Lux, God Particles (Houghton Mifflin, 2008), p. 27.
23. Jean Valentine, Door In The Mountain: New and Collected Poems:1965-2003 (Wesleyan, 2004), p. 180.
24. Sharon Olds, Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002 (Knopf, 2004), p. 24.
25. Blake, xxii (Plate 14).
26. Linda Gregg, All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf, 2008), p. 92.
27. Robert Hass, The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems (Ecco: 2010), p. 187.
28. Mark Jarman, Unholy Sonnets (Storyline Press, 2002), p. 67.
29. Franz Wright, Earlier Poems (Knopf, 2007), p. 154.
30. Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven (Knopf, 2005), p. 65.
31. W.S. Merwin, The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon, 2008), p. 50.
32. Yehuda Amichai, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (tr. Bloch & Mitchell (U. of California Press, 1996), p. 12.
33. Carol Frost, Honeycomb, (Triquarterly Books, 2010), p. 45.
34. James Wright, This Journey (Vintage, 1982), p. 72.
35. Charles Simic, Master of Disguises (Houghton Mifflin, 2010), p. 47.
36. Gerald Stern, The Preacher: A Poem (Quarter Note Chapbooks, 2007), p. 11.
37. Wallace Stevens (Faber and Faber, 2008), p. 21.
38. Derrida, Literature in Secret, p. 129.
39. Agamben, Nudities, p. 113.
40. Gilbert, Refusing Heaven, p. 67.
41. Refusing Heaven, p. 58.
42. Rilke, p. 335.
43. Emily Dickinson, Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Franklin (Triliteral, 2005).