"NEITHER FIRM NOR INFIRM": REFLECTIONS ON POETRY AND CONTEMPLATION IN THE WRITINGS OF WILLIAM STAFFORD


The poet lives on the cutting edge of society. For some, she or he is a freak, or perhaps someone who has an unreal perspective on life. For others, the poet may fulfill the role of prophet. No matter what the reader's outlook, the poet may see more clearly what is invisible or hidden, namely God. Why? One author says:
A poet does not, of course, spend all his hours composing metaphysical lyrics on the nature of God, yet implicit in his poetry, in everything he writes, is his Weltanshauung - his ontological values, his attitude toward God.

What is this attitude toward God? It is one of healthy scepticism. "The poet of our time feels lost, as if he had wiped the cultural slate clean of all past supernatural beliefs and decided to start anew." Everything is questioned and nothing affirmed. The modern poet, and maybe anyone who has ever been a poet, cannot answer difficult existential questions or solve his problems by coming to rest in God. It just is not that simple. Glicksburg observes:

The best "religious" poets are those, who, without benefit of dogma and without abandoning their faith, grapple with the tumultuous life of their age. Every poet who does this honestly, regardless of his views on theological issues, is to be considered "religious."


For this essay, I will follow Dr. Glicksburg's thesis - it is only through honesty, not dogma, that one comes to grips with God.

The poet's purpose is to live life with a question mark. Basho, the seventeenth century Japanese haiku poet, writes succinctly:

Such fragrances
from where,
which tree?

Basho captures in this simple haiku the poet's quest. The eternal question mark should punctuate each poem. The search is not through dogma, but

Regardless of the religious outlook a writer embraces - Buddhism, Protestantism, Judaism, Catholicism - he cannot, as a poet, sacrifice his creative autonomy to a set of orthodox doctrines. He must fight to discover his own truths, his own reality.


The individual must ascertain what are the important questions. Jean Valentine, the poet, when interviewed by Michael Klein said:

I feel that all poetry is prayer, it's just as simple as that. Who else would we be talking to? I think the intensity in a poem may be because it's so prayerful - it's intense in the way that a song is, but in a way that prose isn't, and doesn't attempt to be. Plays sometimes are, though - like Beckett's plays, they're all prayers to me. They're just very moving prayers spoken by people walking across a stage. In his case, not very much walking across the stage.


Because all poetry is prayer does not mean that it is pious. Pious poetry is usually bad art, and bad art is not good poetry. Madeleine L'Engle captures this idea well when she writes:

Christian art? Art is art; painting is painting; music is music; a story is a story. If it's bad art, it's bad religion, no matter how pious the subject. If it's good art -and there the questions start coming, questions which it would be simpler to evade.


As she says later in the book "...to paint a picture or to write a story or to compose a song is an incarnational activity. The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver." In a sense an artist gives birth to God. Yet as we will see Scripture warns us even to be careful of this statement. The author of Ecclesiastes informs us that we must even destroy our idea of God. For God must be allowed to be God. As one author writes:

We have reduced the size of the divine by describing God in terms of only certain dimensions of experience, those that are controlling, active, independent. God acts on the world but receives nothing from it, and is wholly self-sufficient. Therefore, process theology has its own list of inadequate names for God: Unchanging and Passionless, Controlling Power, Status Quo, Male.


Yet poets have grappled with the problem of God for centuries. How do we name the "Unnamable"? Anne Sexton, the poet, was such an explorer, a person searching for ways to name God.

In her quest Anne Sexton explored numerous images of God - The Island, Dearest Dealer, Laughter of the Morning - and seemed on the verge of seeing that no one name could contain God. The God-images found in her poetry, many of them challenging and unorthodox, are a reminder that tradition is not an unchanging legacy from the past, but a resource to be adapted to new circumstance and problems.


God cannot be boxed into a neatly packaged definition. God is free. We do not have a clear picture of whom God is. Sometimes we feel abandoned by all, even God. Martin Marty captures this mood:
'Absence, Absence':a poet hears the cry. Winterly frost comes in the void left when love dies or a lover grows distant. Let a new love come into life or let the enduring one come close gain, and summer can return to the heart. So it is in human affairs. The absence can also come, however, to a waste space left when the divine is distant, the sacred is remote, when God is silent. The wind of furious winter for awhile blows without, and then grows silent as spring comes. The fury and the bleakness within the soul can remain, no matter what the season or the weather.


A poet must continue, but how? Glicksburg says:

Since he (the poet) is neither a theological propagandist nor a priest, the poet instinctively rebels against any force which would exploit him for ends not inherent in his calling. His function is not to convert but to reveal. Ingrained doubt as to the existence of God is today an inescapable condition of religious faith.


Here poet becomes prophet. As we have said before, the poet lives on the cutting edge, often with a Hidden God, a God who remains unrevealed.
How does one speak of such a Being? Again it is Glicksburg who writes:
If the God the poet celebrates is a hidden God, then the poet can only resort to the language of paradox to suggest His being, and even so the divine essence is transformed into the humanly perceived.


Even this paradox is a prayer. For "God cannot be imprisoned within theological walls." Yet what kind of poetry is poetry written, seemingly, outside of theology? They are poems written when one feels utterly forsaken. Ralph J. Mills, Jr. describes poetry this way:

Contemplation is the word I would select to cover the general experience underlying this religious poetry. ....Language is, for a poet of experience, at best a mere approximation of the felt presence of that Otherness. The art of the contemplative poet is predicated on the belief in a universal order external to himself, in a relationship between the material and spiritual realm.


Poetry flows from our most intense emotions. But as we know "exactness of language alone cannot produce poetry." For the poet, the search is often the vocation. Frequently words fail, yet as one authority has written:

The poet...is under the necessity of casting about for appropriate means of symbolizing that which does not lend itself to embodiment in words. The best he can do...is to depend on analogy, indirection, suggestiveness, paradox, ambiguity, and symbolism.


The actual writing of poetry becomes the poet's prayer. It is a writing that frequently seems to skirt God and all issues about God. "The modern poet cannot solve his problem by coming to rest in God." No, the poet must sink teeth into the world, and embrace it in its total brokenness. As one expert writes:

The poetry of our time must therefore reflect this crisis:the anxiety, the search, the metaphysical despair, the nihilism, also the counterpointing cry of affirmation and the triumphant discovery of faith.


Contemplation in this article will mean an attitude of seeking complete union with God, a passionate search practiced through a variety of prayer forms, although contemplative prayer also may occur, according to some authorities, without a particular form through a continuing intent of willingness for God in all of life. This definition of contemplation as an attitude of seeking is drawn from a number of sources making it appear quite universal.

Sam Hamill in a recent book has written "the poet's calling insists upon a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer is called a 'younger poet' until the age of forty." This lifelong apprenticeship is part of the search for meaning in life. Hamill uses monastic terms to discuss what the poet does:
The poet, like one who has taken vows, is "in training" all the time. In blessed moments, the poet inspires (inhales) theanemos , the breath of the muses, and becomes "inspired," but without discipline, the Mind refuses to speak. If frogs had wings, they could fly.

Alone in cloisters, the mind is perfectly at rest, looking neither in upon itself nor out upon the world. The poet breathes.

In the hands of a poet, a book is holy writ. It is a text. But the book does not contain the poem. The poem is in the self.


Hamill's use of the monastic imagery seems fitting. The poet needs inspiration but if the poet is without self-discipline nothing will happen. The quiet of interior solitude is needed for the word to become the poem. This monastic imagery must be considered symbolic. For in the end, Hamill states "Poetry is not a religion." Why is this so? "It is not precious. It is not sanctimonious. Nor is it fragile." Religion for Hamill is equated with organized religion and layered by his own poor experiences with "church." Yet religion doesn't have to have those characteristics. I believe that the late contemporary poet, William Stafford was a poet who used the writing of poetry as a form of contemplative prayer in searching for the Hidden God. Yet I am sure he would have denied this fact if he had been asked, since for him, the search was more important than to remain orthodox within his particular beliefs. For from his belief flowed his writing, but also one might say that from his writing flows his belief. Both writing and belief seem to shape each other.

William Stafford lived latter part of his life in the Pacific Northwest, residing during his final years in Oregon where he taught poetry. In 1990, the author of this article attended the WPA (Washington Poet's Association) meeting in Tumwater, Washington. He knew that several outstanding poets had been invited and so he decided to go to the meeting. On arrival the author found myself the only person there for he had arrived over an hour early. As he got out of my car, a 65 to 70 year old man came up to him and asked, "Is this where the WPA is meeting?" He answered in the affirmative, and older man said, "I'm Bill Stafford, the key note speaker." And so for an hour they chatted and talked about poetry and when Stafford found out that the author of this dissertation was a priest and monk they talked cabbages and kings.

From our conversation, the author of this article can say that Stafford was a down-to-earth poet who considered what he did a gift. He was a searcher who was on the way, but had not arrived. In one article he said that he was a "mixed Un-itarian." When asked in this interview: "How prominent are Christian values in your poetry?" He answered:

There are not many labels on the value statements in my poetry; but my assumption is that such values are homogenized all through the lines: we acquire our values in so many little ways throughout our lives that we may become unaware of them; but a reader in my opinion could feel in the presence of such values, if alerted to search for them.


When asked later how aware he was that Christian values provide a substructure for his poetry, he answered:

While writing, I am seldom aware of substructures . . . . But if I try to respond to the spirit of the question I would say that, on reflection, I would find such values lavishly present. And behind the explicit statements there are no doubt prevalent residues and assumptions - substructuring - from the whole wealth of Scripture-reading, church-going, and society-listening parts of my life.


Stafford was mistrustful of poetry that attempts to preach or indoctrinate. As he put it so aptly:

...poetry is based on something other than just the shoveling in of content: poetry is an experience, a venturing into new encounters, an exercise in thoughts, feelings, dreams, impulses of living human beings.


He goes on to explain of what true religious experience consists:


Every religious experience I recall that impressed me greatly has been in the presence of influences that combined several senses - not merely verbal experience, in a church, has provided a full religious experience.

The most impressive such experience I recall was on the banks of the Cimarron River in western Kansas one mild summer evening, when sky, air, birdcalls, and the setting sun combined to expand the universe for me and to give me the feeling of being sustained, cherished, included somehow in a great, reverent story.


When asked if he had a firm belief about the nature of God, he answered:


My sense of the nature of God is neither firm nor infirm; it is just there:I can't perceive the degree of such sensing others have, so I can't tell whether they would think my feeling firm or infirm. Whatever it is I have - I do have something that served me unfailingly - it is not something I can impose on others in the one direction, nor retreat from in the other. My belief is just something like where north is to a compass: I can sway; I can be confused. But north is still there.


Stafford showed what he believed or how he believed in a wonderful poem entitled "Sleeping Toward Heaven."


I wish that I had been one of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,
their cave was so quiet and their bed so dim century
forgotten till their return. Think of our time -
bells and honks, a schedule even for how to relax
for success. But when they woke up, their work had all
been finished - had transformed the whole world.

While they slept, faith flowered, an outside dream,
and surrounded them in their cave. All they had to do
was to sleep toward Heaven and open their eyes
like dolls. Up there on the ceiling was all they needed.


Yet there is also uncertainty; God is Hidden from the poet. In "The Saint of Thought" he writes:

One moment each noon, faced
where the sun is, turn
from the events to the church in the stone.
The shade under your hand
welcomes you. Let the lamp
in your forehead explode.

In the long dive of your life
past the sun, these are important,
these meetings. Repeat:
"Rescue me, Day. Hills,
hold the light." Lift your hand.
Let the dark out.


This is contemplation. It is a prayer voiced when one feels a divine presence, yet is unsure of that presence. When Stafford and this author talked casually in Tumwater, he expressed interest in monastic traditions. He told me how hard he found inspiration at times, yet how often it all came together in an instant, that moment of inspiration that often remains a lifetime with us.

I believe he wrote out of a contemplative stance that is based on the search for the Hidden God, a pilgrimage model through life. Although he had problems with formal religion, he continued his pursuit of theDeus Absconditus throughout his live. Poetry was for him a means of praying, or at least keeping open the channels of communication with God, and often it was a spiritual activity similar to mystic inspiration or contemplative prayer. Bill spent his life in this pursuit. As the poet Grace Schulman once commented to me "When I write, I pray. And when I pray, I write." Bill would have agreed with this statement.