Luke Hankins: Yehud
a Amichai writes in his poem “Relativity”:Someone told me he’s going down to Sinai
because
he wants to be alone with his God:
I warned him.
Indeed.
You ask what the human cost of entering “the mysterious place of devotion” is. In my experience, it is very high. And judging by what poets devoted to God throughout the ages have written, I think they would agree. But I don’t think anyone enters a devout life counting the cost—not even monastics and ascetics (which I certainly have never been). That’s because one can’t imagine or begin to comprehend the actual price until it’s already being exacted. Hopkins, in “Carrion Comfort,” writes:
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me?
The psalmist(s) of Psalm 42 write(s):
Deep calls to deep
in the roar of your waterfalls;
all your waves and breakers
have swept over me.
Some, from a perspective outside of religious or spiritual devotion, would undoubtedly say that the cost is high because the devout are fooling themselves, chasing after shadows and myths and confronting their own neuroses in the dark, working themselves into a frenzy seeking what was never there to begin with. This is certainly not a novel idea for anyone who has ever genuinely sought the divine. (E.g., see R. S. Thomas’ poem “Threshold.” Whom do you meet in the desert? Is it the Maker in whom you see all of your fears and all of your hopes embodied, or is it the Nothing in which you see only a reflection of yourown inexplicable being? And which is more terrifying?
But though the cost of entering this desert is undoubtedly high, you come away changed irrevocably—which may be worth having experienced that “dark night of the soul.” As Andrew Marvell writes:
Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown,
but vainly flapped its tinsel wing.
I grew up in an evangelical, conservative Christian environment, and I clung desperately to that faith for most of my life, through constant cycles of doubt and belief. Weak Devotions, and in particular the title poem, chronicles the doubt and belief that has always been interwoven in my life, and more recently the evolution away from traditional religious beliefs toward—what?—a deeper acknowledgment of mystery and uncertainty. This, for me, was a very traumatic transition, in which I felt thatmy framework for understanding life was torn away, leaving me floating in a void. This spiritual transition coincided with a year-long period of intense and unremitting anxiety, a psychological problem I’ve dealt with since early childhood that suddenly burst out of control, and a mercifully shorter period of depression—a depth I hope to never touch again with so much as my little toe.
I realize that to write poems about this subject risks alienating any readers who have no experience with a religious upbringing or—more to the point—with primal and deep-seated religious beliefs of their own. My hope in this respect is that something like what T. S. Eliot has said about George Herbert’s poetry might prove true of poetry like mine as well (not to in any way compare the quality of my poems with that of Herbert’s!):
"When I claim a place for Herbert among those poets whose work every lover of English poetry should read and every student of English poetry should study, irrespective of religious belief or unbelief, I am not thinking primarily of the exquisite craftsmanship, the extraordinary metrical virtuosity, or the verbal felicities, but of the content of the poems which make up The Temple. These poems form a record of spiritual struggle which should touch the feeling, and enlarge the understanding of those readers also who hold no religious belief and find themselves unmoved by religious emotion." [emphasis mine]
Finally, you ask whether a “weak devotion” is the closest we as humans may come to something holy. My response is that we as humans do not come to what is holy at all. In my (of course subjective) experience, I see the opposite as true: the holy comes to us, and we can never be ready for it. (The holy is always other—etymologically, the word implies that which is whole, complete, inviolate—unlike us.) Our weak devotion is a reaction more than it is an action. In the poem of mine you quote, I do write of entering into mystery, but that is in itself a response to a prompting from outside. Those who enter the desert do not do it of their own volition, but are driven there by the wind of the Spirit. If it were up to us, I think none of us would ever go. We don’t want the terror, the pain, the annihilation of the self. But it seems that the Holy sees fit to drive some to that point—not all, and perhaps not even many. Why this is, I couldn’t say. I happen to believe that the will behind this is beneficent, only because of having come through my small version of the experience. Had you asked me during the most trying periods, you would have been met with silence, or worse. But now, like Marvell, I do in my better moments believe despair to be magnanimous.
JB: Who are some other devotional poets you admire? I see a bit of Donne in your work, but I know you also have kept an eye out for contemporary devotional poets – some of whom I’m guessing will appear in your forthcoming anthology Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets.
LH: Yes, Donne, but even more so George Herbert, who is my hero. I admire the other “Metaphysical Poets” as well. The Old Testament prophets and psalmists have been deeply important for me, as well as The Book of Job and Ecclesiastes, and parts of the Gospels and the Epistles in the New Testament (though some of these are deeply troubling to me as well). I’ve more recently fallen in love with the medieval Persian mystic Rumi, and other Eastern texts like Tao te Ching. Gerard Manley Hopkins has always been a big influence, as you might guess. I’ve recently discovered, thanks to poet and translator Jennifer Grotz, the mid-20th century French poet Patrice de la Tour du Pin, who wrote a long sequence of psalms over his lifetime. Other dead poets whose work in the devotional mode is important to me include, in no particular order, William Cowper, Francis Thompson, Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Czeslaw Milosz, R. S. Thomas, Denise Levertov, Vassar Miller, Thomas Merton, E. E. Cummings, and Yehuda Amichai, among many others. Some of the living poets I admire include Leonard Cohen, Richard Wilbur, Andrew Hudgins, Scott Cairns, Franz Wright, Wendell Berry, Suzanne Underwood Rhodes, Maurice Manning, Morri Creech, Ilya Kaminsky, Philip Metres, Tarfia Faizullah, and Ashley Anna McHugh. But I couldn’t possibly make an exhaustive list. Look for the ones I’ve mentioned and many others in the anthology, which will include poets alive in 1950 and afterward.
JB: For such a serious book, I love when your strange humor arrives, such as in the poem “Portrait of Myself as a Barbarian.” The poem exists in “some barbarous century/ long before the invention/ of eyeglasses,” and the speaker makes his way through the world, laughing, even as the unseen wolves advance. I thought I was the only one with the private fantasy/fear of living in a time without corrective lenses, since my vision is horrible. The poem pleases me with its vulnerability and fortitude, and I wonder if it’s between those two things that humor sometimes appears. So: can we bring humor to the table when having our sit-downs with God?
LH: You mention humor in “our sit-downs with God,” and I immediately think of the character Tevye in the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” What a marvelous example of humor in conversation with the divine! Well, Tevye’s kind of humor requires a nonchalance and self-confidence that I don’t naturally possess. But there are so many kinds of humor, and perhaps the one I most appreciate in poetry arises from the kind of irony we see in Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop,or, more recently, Kay Ryan, in which a grave subject is spoken of in a relatively lighthearted way, which can paradoxically increase the emotional impact of the poem once the serious underpinnings of the humor are recognized. I hope to include more poems with this kind of humor in my next book, which is in progress under the title Ex Nihilo—a very serious, Latin title! Here’s one small example of the kind of humor I’m talking about in one of my newer poems, in its entirety:
On Judgment
In canine mythology,
Sisyphus is the most blessèd of all,
granted an eternal game of fetch.
The humor of a dog’s perspective on mythology, and on the myth of Sisyphus in particular, is obvious. But I hope that the poem also works on a deeper level, in which it comments on the way in which our perspective and our state of mind can make hell of heaven and heaven of hell—the way that what we now view as a curse we might one day learn to see as a blessing.
he wants to be alone with his God:
I warned him.
Indeed.
You ask what the human cost of entering “the mysterious place of devotion” is. In my experience, it is very high. And judging by what poets devoted to God throughout the ages have written, I think they would agree. But I don’t think anyone enters a devout life counting the cost—not even monastics and ascetics (which I certainly have never been). That’s because one can’t imagine or begin to comprehend the actual price until it’s already being exacted. Hopkins, in “Carrion Comfort,” writes:
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me?
The psalmist(s) of Psalm 42 write(s):
Deep calls to deep
in the roar of your waterfalls;
all your waves and breakers
have swept over me.
Some, from a perspective outside of religious or spiritual devotion, would undoubtedly say that the cost is high because the devout are fooling themselves, chasing after shadows and myths and confronting their own neuroses in the dark, working themselves into a frenzy seeking what was never there to begin with. This is certainly not a novel idea for anyone who has ever genuinely sought the divine. (E.g., see R. S. Thomas’ poem “Threshold.” Whom do you meet in the desert? Is it the Maker in whom you see all of your fears and all of your hopes embodied, or is it the Nothing in which you see only a reflection of yourown inexplicable being? And which is more terrifying?
But though the cost of entering this desert is undoubtedly high, you come away changed irrevocably—which may be worth having experienced that “dark night of the soul.” As Andrew Marvell writes:
Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown,
but vainly flapped its tinsel wing.
I grew up in an evangelical, conservative Christian environment, and I clung desperately to that faith for most of my life, through constant cycles of doubt and belief. Weak Devotions, and in particular the title poem, chronicles the doubt and belief that has always been interwoven in my life, and more recently the evolution away from traditional religious beliefs toward—what?—a deeper acknowledgment of mystery and uncertainty. This, for me, was a very traumatic transition, in which I felt thatmy framework for understanding life was torn away, leaving me floating in a void. This spiritual transition coincided with a year-long period of intense and unremitting anxiety, a psychological problem I’ve dealt with since early childhood that suddenly burst out of control, and a mercifully shorter period of depression—a depth I hope to never touch again with so much as my little toe.
I realize that to write poems about this subject risks alienating any readers who have no experience with a religious upbringing or—more to the point—with primal and deep-seated religious beliefs of their own. My hope in this respect is that something like what T. S. Eliot has said about George Herbert’s poetry might prove true of poetry like mine as well (not to in any way compare the quality of my poems with that of Herbert’s!):
"When I claim a place for Herbert among those poets whose work every lover of English poetry should read and every student of English poetry should study, irrespective of religious belief or unbelief, I am not thinking primarily of the exquisite craftsmanship, the extraordinary metrical virtuosity, or the verbal felicities, but of the content of the poems which make up The Temple. These poems form a record of spiritual struggle which should touch the feeling, and enlarge the understanding of those readers also who hold no religious belief and find themselves unmoved by religious emotion." [emphasis mine]
Finally, you ask whether a “weak devotion” is the closest we as humans may come to something holy. My response is that we as humans do not come to what is holy at all. In my (of course subjective) experience, I see the opposite as true: the holy comes to us, and we can never be ready for it. (The holy is always other—etymologically, the word implies that which is whole, complete, inviolate—unlike us.) Our weak devotion is a reaction more than it is an action. In the poem of mine you quote, I do write of entering into mystery, but that is in itself a response to a prompting from outside. Those who enter the desert do not do it of their own volition, but are driven there by the wind of the Spirit. If it were up to us, I think none of us would ever go. We don’t want the terror, the pain, the annihilation of the self. But it seems that the Holy sees fit to drive some to that point—not all, and perhaps not even many. Why this is, I couldn’t say. I happen to believe that the will behind this is beneficent, only because of having come through my small version of the experience. Had you asked me during the most trying periods, you would have been met with silence, or worse. But now, like Marvell, I do in my better moments believe despair to be magnanimous.
JB: Who are some other devotional poets you admire? I see a bit of Donne in your work, but I know you also have kept an eye out for contemporary devotional poets – some of whom I’m guessing will appear in your forthcoming anthology Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets.
LH: Yes, Donne, but even more so George Herbert, who is my hero. I admire the other “Metaphysical Poets” as well. The Old Testament prophets and psalmists have been deeply important for me, as well as The Book of Job and Ecclesiastes, and parts of the Gospels and the Epistles in the New Testament (though some of these are deeply troubling to me as well). I’ve more recently fallen in love with the medieval Persian mystic Rumi, and other Eastern texts like Tao te Ching. Gerard Manley Hopkins has always been a big influence, as you might guess. I’ve recently discovered, thanks to poet and translator Jennifer Grotz, the mid-20th century French poet Patrice de la Tour du Pin, who wrote a long sequence of psalms over his lifetime. Other dead poets whose work in the devotional mode is important to me include, in no particular order, William Cowper, Francis Thompson, Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, Czeslaw Milosz, R. S. Thomas, Denise Levertov, Vassar Miller, Thomas Merton, E. E. Cummings, and Yehuda Amichai, among many others. Some of the living poets I admire include Leonard Cohen, Richard Wilbur, Andrew Hudgins, Scott Cairns, Franz Wright, Wendell Berry, Suzanne Underwood Rhodes, Maurice Manning, Morri Creech, Ilya Kaminsky, Philip Metres, Tarfia Faizullah, and Ashley Anna McHugh. But I couldn’t possibly make an exhaustive list. Look for the ones I’ve mentioned and many others in the anthology, which will include poets alive in 1950 and afterward.
JB: For such a serious book, I love when your strange humor arrives, such as in the poem “Portrait of Myself as a Barbarian.” The poem exists in “some barbarous century/ long before the invention/ of eyeglasses,” and the speaker makes his way through the world, laughing, even as the unseen wolves advance. I thought I was the only one with the private fantasy/fear of living in a time without corrective lenses, since my vision is horrible. The poem pleases me with its vulnerability and fortitude, and I wonder if it’s between those two things that humor sometimes appears. So: can we bring humor to the table when having our sit-downs with God?
LH: You mention humor in “our sit-downs with God,” and I immediately think of the character Tevye in the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” What a marvelous example of humor in conversation with the divine! Well, Tevye’s kind of humor requires a nonchalance and self-confidence that I don’t naturally possess. But there are so many kinds of humor, and perhaps the one I most appreciate in poetry arises from the kind of irony we see in Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop,or, more recently, Kay Ryan, in which a grave subject is spoken of in a relatively lighthearted way, which can paradoxically increase the emotional impact of the poem once the serious underpinnings of the humor are recognized. I hope to include more poems with this kind of humor in my next book, which is in progress under the title Ex Nihilo—a very serious, Latin title! Here’s one small example of the kind of humor I’m talking about in one of my newer poems, in its entirety:
On Judgment
In canine mythology,
Sisyphus is the most blessèd of all,
granted an eternal game of fetch.
The humor of a dog’s perspective on mythology, and on the myth of Sisyphus in particular, is obvious. But I hope that the poem also works on a deeper level, in which it comments on the way in which our perspective and our state of mind can make hell of heaven and heaven of hell—the way that what we now view as a curse we might one day learn to see as a blessing.
JB: One of my favorite poems in the book is the villanelle “A Shape with Forty Wings,” which will appear in the next issue of the American Literary Review. I’m curious how long it took you to write this poem. I have tried many villanelles over the years, and I have never written a good one. Do you need to have strong repeating lines right away, or can those come later? (Your terrific repeating lines are: “Love is strange and calls me to stranger things” and “I’ve drawn my life—a shape with forty wings.”)
LH: As with most of my poems, I wrote the initial poem fairly quickly, then over a period of several years came back to it and revised it numerous times. In this case, the refrains came first. I think that it’s helpful to have a meter in mind if you decide to come up with refrain lines first, so that instead of pulling words out of thin air you at least have some sort of framework—a length of utterance, at least—to drop them into. Here, it’s pentameter, but there are no restrictions on which meter is required in a villanelle, though pentameter has historically been a favorite in English-language villanelles.
But there is no right or wrong way to compose a poem, whether free verse or “formal.” We all work on finding what works for us—and of course what worked for us once or a dozen times may not work for the next poem, and we may have to try new strategies. The important thing is to be willing to be flexible, and once you have something on the page, to be able to achieve a level of objectivity in assessing its success or lack thereof.
JB: I know you have spoken and written about this before, including on NPR, but I wonder if you’d be willing to discuss yet one more time the assault you suffered last summer. For readers who don’t know: you were assaulted by four people in July of 2011; the perpetrators called you “faggot” and made fun of the way you were dressed, and they did not attempt to steal your money or car. This was clearly a hate crime. The attack took place in Asheville, North Carolina, a city that prides itself on its liberal – and especially, pro-gay – values. You’ve written a poem (“The Way They Loved Each Other”) about the event, and one of the things I admire about it is that the speaker recognizes a love in the attackers, even if “tribal,” “primal.” But I also admire that you were able to write such a gracious poem so quickly after the event. People sometimes make fun of poetry that seems written as therapy, but what else can a poem like yours do but attempt to heal – both yourself and the world? Are people unfair when they mock the poem of therapy, or is there a difference between therapy and art?
LH: The difficulty with comparing art and therapy is on one level merely a semantic one: we have certain associations with the sterile and history-laden word “therapy” that we are—rightly, I suppose—loath to bring into a conversation about art. Art—indeed, beauty itself—is perennially therapeutic. We might prefer the terms restorative, or calming, or invigorating, or pleasure-inducing, or any number of terms that indicate the very real physiological and psychological effects of the aesthetic experience of objects, sounds, and ideas. But regardless of how we describe it, it’s true that we often change for the better through our aesthetic experiences. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this has been true for me—so much so that the word “therapy” is quite reductive.
Writing the poem about the assault I experienced was primarily an attempt on my part to understand those who had attacked me, and by doing so to understand what seemed to me an inexplicable event. You’re right that the assailants didn’t try to steal anything. They apparently had no motive other than to hurt someone they perceived as different from themselves. And that was the most difficult aspect of the event to deal with. It filled me with inexpressible sorrow and anxiety, not only for myself but also for them. The pain of the fractured bones in my face was intense, but my inability to comprehend why or how these people could have acted this way was by far the more traumatizing aspect. I was sad not only for my experience, but for the lives of the people who had chosen to do this to me. What must their lives be like for this to be how they spent their time? But by making something out of the confusion and pain, I felt that I was able to redeem the experience and instead of dwelling on how it had hurt me or how inexplicable others’ actions were, I attempted to come to an understanding of their actions as human, as not other but as familiar. Joseph Conrad has said something marvelous in his famous “Preface”:
"[The artist] speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts: to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."
Making art is essential to who we are as humans—we are artificers, makers, shapers. And through shaping words or paint or musical notes many of us sense that we are fully engaging with what it means to be human—and we are able to come to a fuller understanding of what it means for others to be human as well—a conviction of what Conrad calls our “solidarity.”
In the Christian tradition, humans are made “in the image of God,” and since God is the great Maker, we as reflections of the divine are also makers. For me this is one of the most beautiful and most essential Christian teachings. We make because we are made. We are made because God loves to make. We are the result of the pleasureful work of the divine. And we sense this most, perhaps, when we are ourselves engaged in the pleasureful work of making art.
Luke Hankins' first
book of poems, Weak Devotions, was released by Wipf & Stock Publishers in 2011. He is the editor of an anthology entitled Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, forthcoming from Wipf & Stock in 2012. A chapbook of his translations of French poems by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, I Was Afraid of Vowels...Their Paleness, was published by Q Avenue Press in 2011. He is Senior Editor at Asheville Poetry Review, and he writes about poetry and the arts at his blog, A Way of Happening: http://awayofhappening.blogspot.com.
LH: As with most of my poems, I wrote the initial poem fairly quickly, then over a period of several years came back to it and revised it numerous times. In this case, the refrains came first. I think that it’s helpful to have a meter in mind if you decide to come up with refrain lines first, so that instead of pulling words out of thin air you at least have some sort of framework—a length of utterance, at least—to drop them into. Here, it’s pentameter, but there are no restrictions on which meter is required in a villanelle, though pentameter has historically been a favorite in English-language villanelles.
But there is no right or wrong way to compose a poem, whether free verse or “formal.” We all work on finding what works for us—and of course what worked for us once or a dozen times may not work for the next poem, and we may have to try new strategies. The important thing is to be willing to be flexible, and once you have something on the page, to be able to achieve a level of objectivity in assessing its success or lack thereof.
JB: I know you have spoken and written about this before, including on NPR, but I wonder if you’d be willing to discuss yet one more time the assault you suffered last summer. For readers who don’t know: you were assaulted by four people in July of 2011; the perpetrators called you “faggot” and made fun of the way you were dressed, and they did not attempt to steal your money or car. This was clearly a hate crime. The attack took place in Asheville, North Carolina, a city that prides itself on its liberal – and especially, pro-gay – values. You’ve written a poem (“The Way They Loved Each Other”) about the event, and one of the things I admire about it is that the speaker recognizes a love in the attackers, even if “tribal,” “primal.” But I also admire that you were able to write such a gracious poem so quickly after the event. People sometimes make fun of poetry that seems written as therapy, but what else can a poem like yours do but attempt to heal – both yourself and the world? Are people unfair when they mock the poem of therapy, or is there a difference between therapy and art?
LH: The difficulty with comparing art and therapy is on one level merely a semantic one: we have certain associations with the sterile and history-laden word “therapy” that we are—rightly, I suppose—loath to bring into a conversation about art. Art—indeed, beauty itself—is perennially therapeutic. We might prefer the terms restorative, or calming, or invigorating, or pleasure-inducing, or any number of terms that indicate the very real physiological and psychological effects of the aesthetic experience of objects, sounds, and ideas. But regardless of how we describe it, it’s true that we often change for the better through our aesthetic experiences. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this has been true for me—so much so that the word “therapy” is quite reductive.
Writing the poem about the assault I experienced was primarily an attempt on my part to understand those who had attacked me, and by doing so to understand what seemed to me an inexplicable event. You’re right that the assailants didn’t try to steal anything. They apparently had no motive other than to hurt someone they perceived as different from themselves. And that was the most difficult aspect of the event to deal with. It filled me with inexpressible sorrow and anxiety, not only for myself but also for them. The pain of the fractured bones in my face was intense, but my inability to comprehend why or how these people could have acted this way was by far the more traumatizing aspect. I was sad not only for my experience, but for the lives of the people who had chosen to do this to me. What must their lives be like for this to be how they spent their time? But by making something out of the confusion and pain, I felt that I was able to redeem the experience and instead of dwelling on how it had hurt me or how inexplicable others’ actions were, I attempted to come to an understanding of their actions as human, as not other but as familiar. Joseph Conrad has said something marvelous in his famous “Preface”:
"[The artist] speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation—and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts: to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."
Making art is essential to who we are as humans—we are artificers, makers, shapers. And through shaping words or paint or musical notes many of us sense that we are fully engaging with what it means to be human—and we are able to come to a fuller understanding of what it means for others to be human as well—a conviction of what Conrad calls our “solidarity.”
In the Christian tradition, humans are made “in the image of God,” and since God is the great Maker, we as reflections of the divine are also makers. For me this is one of the most beautiful and most essential Christian teachings. We make because we are made. We are made because God loves to make. We are the result of the pleasureful work of the divine. And we sense this most, perhaps, when we are ourselves engaged in the pleasureful work of making art.
Luke Hankins' first
book of poems, Weak Devotions, was released by Wipf & Stock Publishers in 2011. He is the editor of an anthology entitled Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, forthcoming from Wipf & Stock in 2012. A chapbook of his translations of French poems by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, I Was Afraid of Vowels...Their Paleness, was published by Q Avenue Press in 2011. He is Senior Editor at Asheville Poetry Review, and he writes about poetry and the arts at his blog, A Way of Happening: http://awayofhappening.blogspot.com.
Wonderful and wise!
ReplyDeleteNice and inspirational one.
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