On poetry
'What is prose,' asked Gertrude Stein. 'And if you know what prose is, what is poetry?' I remember laughing at that, because the question's so simple, so complex, so unanswerable.
When Eliot was asked what he meant by 'Three white leopards sat under a juniper tree', he said 'Three white leopards sat under a juniper tree'. The poems themselves are the statement, the best statement, but one can try.
Poetry deals with the elusive – like music. A philosopher, aware that my poetry dealt with the metaphysical, suggested I write an article on 'Poetry and Metaphysics'. Difficult, for poetry works through the image-making faculty, not logic. The imagination provides virtual experiences, like and unlike actuality, which are , in the Zen phrase, 'fingers pointing to the moon'.
Again, Eliot said the meaning of a poem is like the piece of meat a burglar gives the dog when he wants to break into the house – a profound joke. The aspiration is to move the reader, make her creative, make her re-examine her own experience of the complicated, often painful but sublime themes of love, death and God.
In the quest for the ultimate consciousness and for my unknown self, which are, I believe, linked, writing and reading poetry are means of knowing myself and glimpsing the unknown. Poets such as Wordsworth, Eliot, and many others have been great masters. My own poetry's a matter of listening. I can make up poems, but such come from the wrong consciousness. I wait for the poems to choose me, and I try to kiss them 'as they fly'. I then of course bring all the skill I have onto the draft I've found, but I often feel I'm a co-operator with a consciousness that wants to use me.
In a 'secular society', or perhaps an emerging post-secular society, one has to be very sly with readers and oblique in dealing with religious themes – apart from the need to avoid clichés and the conventional wisdom. Theology is still for me the queen of the sciences, but one has to be one's own theologian, and create a new theology every day, if one can. The forever unknowable isn't going to be caught, and we're nowhere near approaching what he is, even though he's our closest Friend.
Yet I'm orthodox, though far from pious. I don't believe God is pious – I find the notion absurd – but anyway honesty is endemic to poetry. I'm not an ascetic, and I don't believe in being one. I'm here to live imperfectly and be a witness to my living.
There are as many ways to God and conceptions of God as there are people, but the ungraspable God is himself multiform. I interpret the 'Trinity' thus. I too am a father and a son – and also a husband, a widower, and many other 'persons', and in my relation to my son I'm a different person than to my daughter. In every poem I take on a different persona.
Autobiography is unattainable, for every report selects and arranges and thus changes the connotations. I believe in 'poetic truth', the nearest we can get, in spite of all the other ways to truth, and some of my poems would hint at all I've left out and distorted.
(543 words)
QUAKER MEETING
We sit here in the sauna of silence
wearing clothes, but souls naked
in the irradiance.
Occasionally we cast a scoop
of cool thought on the furnace
inflaming our skin.
It's opus a hundred and eleven:
written in silence
for the pianos of heaven and the future.
LISTENING
The wind's listening, and the rain on Whirlaw,
and the valley's long shadows in the evening.
A late blackbird breaks in on the quiet
of moss and lichen, and I know I'm here.
The trees know I'm here, and someone else
knows I'm here, listening, as I'm listening.
It seems like myself, only older, stranger,
knowing I'm not really the little boy I am.
THREE PRAYERS FOR CHILDREN
1
Dear Nobody, I know
you write better plays
than Shakespeare,
you're cleverer than Einstein,
more musical than Bach,
Beethoven and Mozart,
wiser than the wisest psychiatrist,
funnier than Charlie
or the Marx brothers,
and you've seen everything:
nothing can shock you.
But do you exist?
Funny, whenever I wonder that,
it's as if
I didn't exist myself!
2
Our Father, which aren't in heaven,
when it's very quiet
I feel you're there,
and when I'm crying,
I can sometimes feel
you coming to comfort me,
and when I'm happy
it's as if you're laughing,
but then I don't know
if it's you or I
who's being there,
laughing, and comforting me.
3
Dear Darkness, it's so hard
to believe in you
because I can't see you.
It's so easy to believe in
trees and stars,
and dogs and cats,
because I can stroke them,
tickle their ears,
and listen to them mewing.
You don't bite, mew, bark,
but am I tickling you
when I'm tickling them?
Herbert Lomas
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