Joy Ladin | May/Summer 2017

NOTES

Why is it so hard for American poets to write about God?

Creating language for human encounters with Divine presence is one of poetry’s most ancient and enduring functions, not because poets are necessarily religious, but because poets are human; and however it is conceived, and whether or not it is institutionalized, experiencing the Divine is part of being human. Even in American poetry, which has been dominated by secular skepticism since the early 20^th century, we find, as Allen Ginsberg argued, poets who persistently “thirst for the Absolute.” That thirst is dramatized in Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” the poem that marked the triumph of the modernizing movement in American poetry, which ends by contrasting self-imprisoning individual consciousness (“We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison”) with the Absolute voice of Sanskrit-speaking thunder: “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. // Shantih shantih shantih.”

American poets continue to “thirst for the Absolute” to the present day, but the voice of the thunder has grown ever harder to hear. In most American poems that represent the Divine, God is reduced to an empty concept, a toothless patriarchal caricature, a generalized wonder at nature, or, sometimes, a disappointed wish for something beyond us, something that is not us, something that could unlock the prison of individual consciousness.

I used to take it for granted that American poets couldn’t, and shouldn’t, represent God as a living presence. I attended poetry workshops from eighth grade through college, and then returned to them a decade later to complete an MFA. In every workshop, at every level, it was understood that although the occasional snarky, skeptical, or angry representation of God was acceptable, poems that portrayed God not as a human projection or convention but as existential fact, were considered, by definition, subliterary, “devotional verse” that might have a place in church newsletters but were unworthy of consideration by poetry workshops or literary magazines.

This assumption was so pervasive that it took me decades to wonder why American poets disdain subject matter that has inspired some of the greatest poetry in English, from Paradise Lost to the lyrics of John Donne, George Herbert, Emily Dickinson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. When I was invited by Boston University’s Scripture and the Arts program to give the final Amos Wilder lecture on poetry and religion, the question suddenly seemed unavoidable: Why is it so hard for American poets to follow our thirst for the Absolute to poems in which God is a living presence, alive and well, engaged with but unbounded by the human?

*

What we know today as American poetry grew out of the early 20^th century overthrow of “genteel lyricism,” a set of poetic conventions that codified cultural and aesthetic assumptions, which dominated American poetry at the end of the 19^th century. Genteel lyrics were homogenous in language and limited to subject matter and style that was elevated, idealized, untainted by the cacophony of voices, viewpoints, and experiences beyond their melliflous margins. Take for example the opening stanza of “The Flight of Youth” by Richard Henry Stoddard, one of the leaders of genteel literary culture:

There are gains for all our losses,
There are balms for all our pain:
But when youth, the dream, departs,
It takes something from our hearts,
And it never comes again.

Contemporary habits of reading and writing prompt us to attribute poetic assertions to a speaker, but there is no speaker in this poem. Rather, as is characteristic of genteel lyrics, the poem speaks in absolute, universal terms, claiming to represent all “our” world-weary maturity rather than one individual’s “losses” and “pain.” The language of the poem reflects this absolute perspective. The diction is abstract, generalized, stripped of words or images, idioms or specifics. There are ideas here, but no individuals to think, qualify, or contest them. There is time, but no events, no narrative, no history. There is generalized emotion, but none of the flux of individual feeling, or particularity of sensation.

Genteel lyrics like “The Flight of Youth” were prized by the American literary establishment of the late 19^th-century, and set the standard for ambitious young poets who grew up in that time, including Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and others who would rebel against genteel lyricism in the first two decades of the 20^th century, and pioneered the practices, such as use of colloquial and other nonliterary language, that have long been considered standard procedure for American poets.¹

As Allen Ginsberg pointed out, these modernizing practices reflected a new aesthetics, which Ginsberg dubbed “the aesthetics of relative truth.” Because the aesthetics of relative truth developed in reaction against genteel lyricism, it was profoundly shaped by the aesthetic assumptions it overthrew. Whereas genteel aesthetics promoted the depersonalized absolutism we saw in “The Flight of Youth,” the aesthetics of relative truth prompt us to “go in fear of abstractions,” as Pound once said, and prize instead the “relative truth” of individual perception and experience. As Ginsberg put it, the aesthetics of relative truth make the “behavior of the mind [the] model, subject, and measure of literary form and content,” fostering poems in which assertions are presented as products of the flux of individual consciousness. In poems based on the aesthetics of relative truth, no knowledge or perspective is absolute, save, perhaps, skepticism toward any discourse that claims to stand above or beyond the relativizing hubbub of humanity.

Thanks to the triumph of the aesthetics of relative truth, genteel lyricism rapidly receded into the mists of kitsch; by the mid-20^th century, American poets were completely free of its constraints. Poetry could be fashioned from any sort of language, from street obscenity to academic jargon. A line of poetry could be shorter than a single phoneme or sprawl, as in Ginsberg’s “Howl,” the length of a paragraph. Poetic content ranged from Williams’s haiku-like descriptions of a broken bottle to Sylvia Plath’s hair-raising intimacies to Pound’s world-historical theories; sense could be made, unmade, or utterly ignored; lines could sing like bel canto or clang like garbage cans.

But in embracing the liberating aesthetics of relative truth, American poets also embraced its assumptions about what poetry should and shouldn’t be, assumptions designed to ensure that whatever modernized American poets wrote, they would never write genteel lyrics. These assumptions have become the basis for mainstream poetry workshop pedagogy. For example, students are often encouraged to “Write what you know,” to focus on autobiographical anecdotes and idiosyncratic perceptions that mark poetic assertions as relative truths, reflecting individual experience and perspective, and avoid language that sounds literary, “poetic,” academic, philosophical or otherwise distant from personal voices and viewpoints.

If American poets bound ourselves to this over-simplified version of the aesthetics of relative truth, we would have had little to say and little language with which to say it. But from the first, high modernists and popular modernizers alike understood the aesthetics of relative truth not as confining each poem to a single personal voice or viewpoint expressed in colloquial language, but as means of opening American poetry to a variety of perspectives and forms of discourse, including, as Marianne Moore suggests in her famous manifesto, “Poetry,” those of “the immoveable critic… the base- / ball fan, the statistician” and “business documents and // schoolbooks.”

Modernized American poets don’t have to “go in fear” of these discourses, no matter how abstract their language or absolute their assertions, because, as Moore demonstrates, the aesthetics of relative truth enables poets to use them without endorsing their claims: to juxtapose and juggle them, nest them in quotations marks, attribute them to individuals such as “the statistician,” and otherwise call them into question. Such techniques enable poets to “relativize”—to present as relative truth—even the most absolute language, as long as they are willing to do what Robert Pinsky, in The Situation of Poetry, identified as the hallmark of modernized American poetry: to simultaneously “say, and not-say,” to frame all language, however absolute, in the skeptical terms of relative truth.

By simultaneously saying and not-saying, American poets can use the language of religious ritual and theology and even represent the human experience of the Divine without violating the aesthetics of relative truth. T.S. Eliot offers a virtuouso example in his deployment of traditional Christian language in the concluding section of “The Hollow Men”:

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

When uttered in church, “For Thine is the Kingdom” represents Absolute truth, recognition of a Divine “Kingdom” that transcends human experience. Here, though, “For Thine is the Kingdom” is italicized, equating it with the similarly italicized nursery rhyme that begins the section (“Here we go round the prickly pear / Prickly pear prickly pear”). In the next stanza, “For Thine is the Kingdom” is broken into bits that suggest the stuttering of an individual speaker struggling to complete this affirmation of faith. Such relativizing techniques ensure that we know that “For Thine is the Kingdom” is being not-said even as it is being said, that the absolute has been firmly demoted to relative truth.

But as Pinsky pointed out, the aesthetics of relative truth not only require American poets to not-say whatever they are saying; it also requires them to say whatever they are not-saying. Despite the battering “For Thine is the Kingdom” takes, the poem continues to say it, not with the bang it would have in the context of authority-confirming religious discourse, but as a whimper, a reminder that human existence can be seen as part of God’s “Kingdom.” Indeed, as Eliot, the modernist who most openly “thirsted for the Absolute,” no doubt knew, the italics and repetition that relativize “For Thine is the Kingdom” act like spotlights, ensuring that readers notice the affirmation of the Absolute to which it alludes.

Thus, though the aesthetics of relative truth obligate American poets to not-say any Absolute Truth they present, it’s wrong to read the modernization of American poetry as a rejection of the religious dimension of human experience. As I found in 1999, when Parnassus: Poetry in Review commissioned me to review recent American poetry collections in which God or religion were important elements, the thirst for the Absolute we see in “The Hollow Men” remained alive, if not well, throughout the twentieth century. Parnassus sent me a dozen or so collections reflecting a wide range of spiritual perspectives. In every one, I found the combination of saying and not-saying I now recognize as signifying the aesthetics of relative truth. But unlike “The Hollow Men,” in which a single phrase connoting God’s presence was so charged with meaning that it required a veritable arsenal of relativizing techniques to not-say it, in many of the collections I reviewed, poets seemed to be engaging in the theological equivalent of bear-baiting. In poem after poem, God was presented as a toothless caricature, a debunked convention hardly worth relativizing.

But though I didn’t notice any in the box Parnassus sent me, there are contemporary American poets who represent God as a living presence, as Louise Glück does in her Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, The Wild Iris (1992). The Wild Iris is a multivoiced theological exploration whose vision of the relationship between Divine and human is too complex to consider here. Instead, I want to examine how Glück, in one of several poems entitled “Vespers,” uses the aesthetics of relative truth to emphasize rather than undermine the sense of God’s presence.

Unlike the end of “The Hollow Men,” “Vespers” does not merely allude to faith; from the outset, “Vespers” makes it clear that the speaker herself experiences God’s presence:

Even as you appeared to Moses, because
I need you, you appear to me, not
often, however. (43)

Though “you” is lower-case, the reference to Moses makes it clear that the speaker is addressing the Judeo-Christian God, and equating her experiences of God’s “appearance” to those of Moses, who, the Biblical text tells us, “spoke to God face to face” (Exodus 33:11). The speaker experiences God as both absolute, transcending human time and space, and as her own relative truth, someone who “appears” occasionally, and is aware of her “need,” her situation, her feelings:

I live essentially
in darkness. You are perhaps training me to be
responsive to the slightest brightening.... This afternoon,
in the physical world to which you commonly
contribute your silence, I climbed
the small hill above the wild blueberries....
As you anticipated,
I did not look up.

Here, as for most of the poem, there seems to be no conflict between relative and Absolute truth, no effort or pressure to not say what the speaker says about God. There is nothing in the poem that marks the speaker as a persona, a fictional character whose “relative truth” is distinct from the author’s. As a result, the first-person address amplifies rather than qualifies the sense of God’s presence. The speaker addresses God in personal terms, commenting on God’s habits, reflecting not only on how she sees God but also on how God sees her (“As you anticipated, / I did not look up”), representing God as aware of the smallest movements of her spirit and body. Unlike the declaration “For Thine is the Kingdom,” these affirmations of God’s presence don’t need to be relativized to fit the aesthetics of relative truth; the content of the poem is the speaker’s description of the “behavior of [her] mind,” and her mind is experiencing God as simultaneously present to her and absolute.

“Vespers” suggests that the conflict between relative and Absolute Truth is not a built-in condition of modernity. This speaker’s mind is completely modern, psychologically sophisticated, reflective, and individuated; her experience of God is not described as a matter of faith or belief, mental breakdown or supernatural intervention, but as actual experience:

…As you anticipated,
I did not look up. So you came down to me:
at my feet, not the wax
leaves of the wild blueberry, but your fiery self, a whole
pasture of fire, and beyond the red sun neither falling nor rising—
I was not a child; I could take advantage of illusions.

As the speaker tells the story of God’s appearance to her, her language becomes more concrete, more rooted in specific, time- and space-bound experience. For a moment, that specificity—the implication that her perception of God’s “fiery self” was as clear and immediate as her perception of “the wax / leaves of the wild blueberry”—seems to irreversibly violate the aesthetics of relative truth: God is “at [her] feet,” the Absolute made visible via the relative, without any conflict between them.

But as the speaker relates her theophany, the conflict between relative and Absolute Truth re-emerges, and the final line resolves that conflict by reinscribing “Vespers” within the terms of the aesthetics of relative truth. By describing God’s “fiery self” as “a whole / pasture of fire,” the speaker depersonalizes God, transforming God from intimate interlocutor into incendiary real estate. Up to this point, the speaker has described God in relation to herself, but she locates the “pasture of fire” in relation to “the red sun,” presenting God as a distant, heavenly phenomenon, neither accessible to nor involved with humanity.

Since I didn’t identify with my body or my male persona, to me, God was always there, as real as I was, the only person I could talk to honestly, the only other person I knew who, like me, couldn’t be understood in terms of human categories like gender.

These descriptions emphasize the gulf between the relative and the absolute, between the human speaker and the vast blazing inhumanity of the God who, a few lines before, “anticipated” her inattention. But despite the gulf, the speaker is still describing God as a living presence. The final line, however, calls God’s presence into question, suggesting that the speaker’s experience of God may be nothing more than willful projection onto an inhuman, impersonal universe: “I was not a child; I could take advantage of illusions.”

This ending fulfills the imperatives of the aesthetics of relative truth by reframing the speaker’s report of God’s appearance as the “behavior of the mind,” reflecting not Absolute Truth but the speaker’s deliberate misinterpretation of a trick of the light of the sinking sun. But even if we retroactively read the speaker as “taking advantage of illusions” from the beginning, and thus not-saying what she says about God throughout the poem, this relativizing technique is too little and comes too late to erase the detailed, intimate description of God as a living presence that precedes it—a description that demonstrates that the poetics of modernized American poetry don’t depend on the incompatibility of relative and Absolute truth, that those poetics can be used to represent God as a living presence.

But what if modernized American poets—I am one—are not willing to abide by the terms of the aesthetics of relative truth by representing God’s presence as the “behavior of the mind” rather than Absolute truth? Do we censor ourselves, avoid writing or sharing poems that represent God’s presence so as not to betray our truth by not-saying what we are saying? Do we represent God’s presence only through persona poems, so that we can plausibly deny our investment in the experiences of the persona? Or do we allow the aesthetics of relative truth to shape our representations of God, writing about God only in terms we are willing to not-say, because they don’t reflect our own experience?

I have done all of those things. In my first book, I represented God in ways I was eager to not-say. One poem, “Translating Ecclesiastes,” presents God as an abstraction, a “vicious circle” spinning in “the opposite direction” of human experience; in another, “Shekihinah,” God is a disembodied, windblown fragrance, permeating but not affecting human history; in “The Old God at the Urinal,” God is an old man struggling to urinate in a public restroom. My second book is written in the voice of a persona, a fictional concentration camp survivor so clearly different from me that there is no reason to think that her experience of God might reflect my own.

But for the most part, I censored myself, rarely writing and never sharing poems representing God as a living presence. Censorship came naturally to me. I began censoring myself even before I learned to write, monitoring my behavior to make sure I avoided doing anything that might reveal that despite the fact that I was physically male and lived as a boy, my gender identity was female. Because I was terrified of revealing my transgender identity, my life was a constant exercise in simultaneously saying and not-saying the male identity that to me was little more than a persona. The life I lived as a male—the life my workshop teachers urged me to mine for memories, images, and experiences—was a lie, a performance from which I was so dissociated that it was hard to perceive or experience anything vividly, because perceptions and experiences came to me through a body that didn’t feel like mine. As a result, for me, common poetry workshop exercises in memory or description—the simplest forms of relative truth—were exercises in imagination: I would try to describe experiences as though I had actually been the boy who lived them, to imagine what I would have felt if I had been in my body, rather than hovering outside it.

I admire the Psalms, but I can’t adopt their aesthetic assumptions, because, as a modernized American poet, I experience a tension between relative and Absolute Truth.

My lack of a real self was not only a problem in poetry workshops; it made for a fairly miserable existence, marked by frequent bouts of suicidal depression. But dissociation had one definite advantage: it made it easy for me, as for it does for many transgender children, to experience God as a living presence. The point of many spiritual disciplines, like fasting, is to dissociate us from the noise of our bodies and the chattering vanities of our social identities so that we can more readily experience God’s presence. Since I didn’t identify with my body or my male persona, to me, God was always there, as real as I was, the only person I could talk to honestly, the only other person I knew who, like me, couldn’t be understood in terms of human categories like gender.

The poems about God that I published in my first two books don’t openly acknowledge my relationship with God, or the way that relationship was tangled up with my trans identity. Instead, they apply the aesthetics of relative truth to conventional ideas about God and gender in order to tacitly say, while not-saying, something of my actual feelings and experience. For example, “The Old God at the Urinal” presents God in physical, masculine terms that couldn’t be further from my experience of God as a disembodied, genderless presence: “What does he look like? Huge, I’m sure, / like the trunk of an old elephant.” By crudely exaggerating the conventional image of God as an old man, this poem places itself well within the usual theological range of modernized American poetry, mockingly locating the Absolute in the toilet of relative truth. But by pretending to simultaneously say and not-say things about God and gender in which I had no actual investment, I was using the aesthetics of relative truth as cover for representations much closer to what I felt and experienced, as when the speaker shifts from imagining God’s male body to imagining God’s dissociation from that body (“He can’t tell where he begins or ends”). By the end of the poem, I carry this mock-heresy even further, subjecting God to a rhetorical version of gender transition (“God has firm white breasts and a large womb. / God has no beard, only a fragrance.”

I knew what I was doing. Like many closeted artists, I was hiding in plain sight, using socially sanctioned means—the aesthetics of relative truth—to say while not-saying things about God and gender that I was afraid to write openly.

But writing in the closet was exhausting. Whenever I referred to God or gender, I had to translate what was true for me into misrepresentations that I could un-say in ways that would express my truths without actually revealing them—and do so in ways that produced vivid, resonant poetry. That’s why, though I wrote, read, and thought about poetry constantly from adolescence on, by my early forties, I had only two books to show for decades of effort. Once I began living as an openly transgender person, the creative floodgates opened: since 2007, I have published five collections of poetry and a memoir. But coming out of the closet as transgender didn’t make it any easier to use the aesthetics of relative truth to represent my experience of God. For that, I needed a different aesthetics, one that didn’t assume the incompatibility of relative and absolute truth.

As a practicing Jew, I had grown up with that kind of aesthetics: the Biblical Psalms, which assume that relative and Absolute Truth are not only compatible, but intertwined. Even the agonized speaker of Psalm 88, who cries out to God, “You have put me at the bottom of the Pit, in the darkest places, in the depths,” takes it for granted that God is there, responsible for his suffering and listening to his agony. In the psalms, all relative truth, however terrible, reflects and attests to the Absolute Truth of the living presence of God.

I admire the Psalms, but I can’t adopt their aesthetic assumptions, because, as a modernized American poet, I experience a tension between relative and Absolute truth. Like the speaker of “Vespers,” I sometimes find God coercive, indifferent to or bored by my concerns, my anxieties, the accidents of mind that are the “subject & measure,” the form and content, of my life. But unlike the speaker of “Vespers,” I never experience God’s presence as either “illusion” or my own willful, wishful interpretation of existence. God, for me, is an absolute though sometimes inconvenient truth, a living presence who shapes, suffuses, and transcends the relative truths of my life.

To be true to my experience of God, I needed to find a way to write that reflected both the compatibility of the relative and the absolute, and the tension and sometimes active conflict between them, as George Herbert does in his magnificent poem “The Collar,” written in the voice of an Anglican priest contemplating leaving the priesthood:

I struck the board, and cried, “No more;
             I will abroad!
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free, free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.
     Shall I be still in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
     Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn
  Before my tears did drown it.
   Is the year only lost to me?
     Have I no bays to crown it,
No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
         All wasted?
Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,
      And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage,
       Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
     And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
     Away! take heed;
     I will abroad.
Call in thy death’s-head there; tie up thy fears;
     He that forbears
     To suit and serve his need
     Deserves his load.”
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
     At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, Child!
     And I replied My Lord.

Like “The Hollow Men” and other modernized American poems, “The Collar” puts the conflict between relative and Absolute Truth center-stage. Until the last four lines, the speaker describes life as a choice between absolute and relative truth, between devoting himself to a “cold dispute / Of what is fit and not” or leaving that “cage” and embracing the freedom and richness of individual experience.

But though the speaker sees relative and Absolute Truth as utterly incompatible, in the last four lines of the poem, when the speaker hears God’s voice despite his “raving,” God’s voice doesn’t silence or erase the speaker’s relative truth. Moreover, contrary to the speaker’s fears, God neither commands, cages, nor compels: God “calls.” The speaker responds to this call not by surrendering the freedom of relative truth, but by exercising that freedom to consent to an intimate, though unequal, relationship with God: “And I replied My Lord. ”

As the end of “The Collar” shows, poems can both revel in the richness and tumult of relative truth, and represent God as a living, absolute presence. But though “The Collar”’s assumption that relative and absolute stand in dynamic, often difficult, relationship resonates with my experience of God, I can’t embrace Herbert’s 17^th-century poetics in my own poetry. Thanks to the modernizing poetic revolution and a century of innovation based on the aesthetics of relative truth, my lines and poetic life are free, enabling me to write poems in any form and style, and with any kind of language I choose. I have never wanted to leave behind the poetics that have grown out of the aesthetics of relative truth. Rather, I longed to free those poetics from the assumption that the only poetically viable relationship between relative and Absolute Truth is one in which the absolute is always, ultimately, subordinated to, if not vanquished by, relative truth.

In summer 2010, after writing two collections, Transmigration and Coming to Life, that centered on transgender identity and gender transition, I decided to risk writing poetry that was equally open about my experience of God. I had recently been diagnosed (misdiagnosed, it turned out) with a progressive, degenerative disease; walking, talking, and thinking were becoming increasingly difficult; it was time to say whatever I had to say without worrying about simultaneously not-saying it.

Between illness, divorce, and the social disruptions that so often accompany gender transition, I was isolated to a degree I hadn’t felt since childhood. As I had when I was a child, I spent a lot of time talking with God. But though God was a constant presence in my shut-in existence, I was still miserable, lonely, and afraid. Those were the terms of our relationship: God was there, witnessing but not alleviating my suffering, no more interested in my withering life than in the blossoming leaves and lives I glimpsed through my window.

That fraught relationship became the basis for Psalms, a diary-like sequence of direct addresses to the God who would neither respond to my pain nor leave me alone. As Glück does in “Vespers,” these poems use poetic techniques based on the aesthetics of relative truth to represent God as a living presence— on, heavily enjambed sentences broken into phrases whose meanings are modified by the phrases that follow, turning syntax into a series of “accidents of mind” in which readings seem to become misreadings as the sentence unfolds. But contrary to the aesthetics of relative truth, these poems don’t present fictional speakers. Their first-person pronouns refer to me, not to a persona whose utterances I am simultaneously saying and not saying.

During my decades of hiding my transgender identity, my relationship with God was the only one in which I was sure that when I said “I,” that pronoun would be understood as referring not to my male persona but to my truest self. This assumption—that when I speak to God, I speak as my true self—is the basis for all these poems. That’s why, despite the rage many of them express, my address to God is neither ironic nor sarcastic; however angry I feel, I assume that God is there, an absolute you who literally gives life and substance to the “I” of my relative truth. The results were poems that my lifelong dream of using modernized American poetics—tricky linebreaks, shifting syntax and semantics—to express the complicated truth of my experience of God as a living presence.

Like the speaker of “The Collar,” I found that “as I raved, and grew more fierce and wild,” in my psalms, the relationship with God they expressed began to change. I no longer addressed God as a helpless victim, but as an equal partner in the tender, abusive intimacy of those who can neither stop hurting nor loving one another. This unexpected shift revealed to me how limited my assumptions about the relationships between relative and Absolute Truth had been. The relationships I recognized in “The Collar,” and in modernized American poems such as “The Hollow Men” and “Vespers,” represented only a small sliver of the spectrum of possibilities. The relationship between relative and absolute, between human and Divine, could be as various and variable as any other human relationships; it could grow and change over time, be completely transfigured, as I found when my psalms shifted from blaming God for my existence to gratitude for the sense that God “is making me now.”

To declare in a poem that God is making me now, without irony or other relativizing techniques, clearly violates the terms of the aesthetics of relative truth. But I couldn’t have written these psalms without the aesthetics of relative truth, aesthetics that not only gave me the poetics I needed to write them but which taught me that I and my relative truth are constantly changing and growing, as is my relationship with the God who is making me now.

 

Joy Ladin is the David and Ruth Gottesman Professor of English at Stern College of Yeshiva University. She is the author of eight books of poetry, numerous essays, and a memoir.

 

Notes

1. John Tomsich’s A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age gives a detailed account of cultural and aesthetic values institutionalized by the genteel literary establishment. Frank Lentricchia’s seminal essay, “Modernist Lyric in the Culture of Capital” examines the influence of genteel lyricism on modernizing American poets.