My Poems, Part 2
It was 1978, and I was thirty-four years old, when I sat before a typewriter to compose my first poem as an adult, and the product was “A Daughter of Sarah Is My Beloved”:
A daughter of Sarah is my beloved,
A priestess in Abraham’s house.
Her knee is bent to the Lord;
She dwells within the circle of his law.
For virtue she is clean as the rain,
As the streams that descend the high slopes.
Her smile is as sunlight on meadows,
Her speech a sparrow’s flight for gentleness.
Her counsel is heard in the congregation;
To the ears of the wise she speaks wisdom.
She gives bread to those who have not asked;
The afflicted receive comfort at her hand.
Her love she has not withheld from me;
She has given me all delights.
Sons and daughters she has given me;
Our generations will fill the heavens.
Our covenant will stand forever;
Beyond death I shall know her embrace.
Though the earth melt at his coming,
I shall never be parted from her.
At the back of the mind, as I began to write, was the thought that I wanted to work out of my own deepest being (Romanticism just keeps on keepin’ on, doesn’t it?), which had undergone twenty years of shaping by the experiences of being prepared to become and then being a Latter-day Saint, under the covenants and benefiting (I would like to think) from the sanctifying companionship of the Holy Ghost. I would not force Restorationist imagery or ideas into the poem, but neither would I reject them as they presented themselves. I knew that a non – Latter-day Saint reader would not recognize the source of some of the imagery, and therefore its full meaning, or would respond to the idea of eternal marriage as would a Latter-day Saint of the kind that I had become, but I was content to let the poem find its audience among those who had eyes to see and ears to hear, for I would write as well as I could only by dipping as deeply as I could into my own being. I was familiar with Orson F. Whitney’s, Merrill Bradshaw’s, and Clinton F. Larson’s thoughts on that subject of writing as a Latter-day Saint, and particularly of Larson’s thoughts about capturing the “feeling” of the Spirit in verbal analog, and I hoped that something of that sort might happen with my poem. I thought that some sort of form was necessary, having learned much about the nature of poetry and possibilities for discovering meaning from the more formalist craftsmen since my adolescent encounter with Rimbaud and Breton, and having taken to heart Marden J. Clark’s thoughts about “liberating form” (in Liberating Form: Mormon Essays on Religion and Literature, Aspen Books, 1992). I did not, however, want to attempt to work within a rigid metrical or rhyming scheme, because I had learned by experience that my imagination did not function that way and that such schemes blocked rather than liberated my own creative flow. I would have given, would still give, much for facility with meter and rhyme, but that gift was not mine, and I would do better by being content to work with the more modest lyric gift that had been given me. I turned, therefore, to the parallelism of the Bible and the Doctrine and Covenants and portions of the Book of Mormon. I had absorbed those rhythms (though I had much still to learn from the yet-to-be-published The Art of Biblical Poetry, by Robert Alter, published by Basic Books, Inc., 1985) about how they worked and about their potential for discovering meaning. I knew that Ezra Pound had called Hebraic verse as represented in the KJV as “turgid” (the citation is somewhere in my forty-year-old index cards), but I supposed that he had never experienced the ministrations of the Spirit, which in my experience are so naturally captured verbally by the rhythms of Hebraic parallelism. Moreover, I had taken to heart Pound’s and others’ advice about working under the tutelage of a poetic mentor within the “tradition,” and it seemed to me that my essential tradition as a Restorationist writer was the scriptures, for the scriptures were the most important texts to my life, and I had begun to see that the scriptures did what they did fundamentally as art, and therefore I could do no better and could do far worse than to turn to them for my first instruction in being a literary artist (third, actually, for I had received my first from Rimbaud and Breton, and my second from English and American Modernists). In addition, however, I had been captivated—maybe “ravished” is not too strong a word—by the lucidity and luminescence and the emotional compression of much of Kenneth Rexroth’s and Gary Snyder’s work, from which I present here Rexroth’s “I Pass Your Home in a Slow Vermilion Dawn” and Snyder’s “Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout” (both of which were anthologized in Modern Poetry of Western America, co-edited by Clinton F. Larson, which was published by BYU Press in 1975, while I was in graduate school).
I PASS YOUR HOME IN A SLOW VERMILLION DAWN
I pass your home in a slow vermilion dawn,
The blinds are drawn, and the windows are open.
The soft breeze from the lake
Is like your breath upon my cheek.
All day long I walk in the intermittent rainfall.
I pick a vermilion tulip in the deserted park,
Bright raindrops cling to its petals.
At five o’clock it is a lonely color in the city.
I pass your home in a rainy evening,
I can see you faintly, moving between lighted walls.
Late at night I sit before a white sheet of paper,
Until a fallen vermilion petal quivers before me.
MID-AUGUST AT SOURDOUGH MOUNTAIN LOOKOUT
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
As to method of composition, I simply started with the first line, “A daughter of Sarah is my beloved,” the pressure of which had impelled me to the typewriter (and I was thinking of it first as a love poem to my wife), and let further words and images gravitate toward it.
“Wedding Songs” came later (though a bit of the imagery had been with me since 1967) and was first published in Sunstone in 1986. Here is one stanza of five (and not the most explicitly erotic):
We lay down among flowers,
The grass sweet and wet,
Your dress wet.
Horses came near under blue sky,
Treading down the sweet grass,
And your dress was yellow among the flowers.
I had discovered along the way that erotic imagery offered itself freely to my imagination, and it was appearing in almost every poem that I wrote during that period (all of which have been included in First Light, First Water, Waking Lion Press, 2014, and reprinted in Glyphs, Waking Lion Press, 2015). It was, in fact, quite irrepressible. It was already in “A Daughter of Sarah” (“Her love she has not withheld from me; / She has given me all delights”), and some of it even sneaked through Correlation into the Ensign (in “My Beloved Shall Be Mine Beyond Death”: “In the fields of a new earth I shall embrace her; / In the gardens of a new Eden she will receive me”); but I was so fearful of making it as explicit as it is in “Wedding Songs” that I submitted it to Dennis Clark at Sunstone under a pseudonym and had it mailed from San Jose, California, by a friend, under his address. That looks rather silly in hindsight, but I was employed in the Church Curriculum Department at the time, and the Gospel Doctrine teacher in our ward, the son of a very popular and very “orthodox” LDS author, had told us in class not even to read The Song of Solomon, because it was “pure pornography.”( He exhibited some consternation when I pointed out to him that Joseph Smith and the Lord had evidently read it because it was quoted several times in the Doctrine and Covenants, but he retreated only so far as to advise me that “we need to be very careful with it.”)
Indeed, I have found it impossible, and I don’t try, to escape eroticism in some form as I draw from my own depths, and I have come to see it as being at the very heart of the theology of the restored gospel—at the very heart of existence, for that matter. Creation begins in the union of an Eternal Man and an Eternal woman (a statement that fixes me ideologically—I cannot see existence as being anything other than essentially and thoroughly heterosexual), and a like union is offered in eternity to the children who spring from them, and the doctrines of the literal resurrection and of the fullness of joy that can be experienced only in the inseparable connection of spirit and element…. well, it is obvious to me where that points. I first saw this two weeks after my baptism when at church I picked up a stray copy of the Doctrine and Covenants, which before then had not really dawned on my consciousness, and I was, providentially, I presume, led to section 132, where my eyes fell on verse 26. My sixteen-year-old spirit and element thrilled at the implications of that. I looked up at the Young Men’s president, who was standing near me, and said, “I’ve just been reading here about eternal marriage. This is important!” He smiled indulgently and said, “Yes, that is important.” Indeed it is, and it is important to the kinds of poetry I have written.
I have found that “Wedding Songs” is actually the best liked of my poems; it is the one that people mention when they make the connection with my name: “Oh! You wrote ‘Wedding Songs’! I love that!”
I have finally pushed the explicitly erotic as far as I want to in Glyphs, in the group of verses titled “More Wedding Songs”:
MORE WEDDING SONGS
Who is she that looketh forth at the morning, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners?—Song of Solomon 6:10
i
Flute songs float up from your hair
A tulip is one eye and a daffodil the other
Clouds of butterflies are the skin of your belly
Meadows of fresh grass are your thighs
Honey bees make a hive of your bowels
A rising sun in clear sky tips each of your fingers
A galaxy revolves in black space on each of your palms
White-water rivers cascade from beneath your toenails
Armies with bright banners gallop across a plain beyond the gateway of your sex.
ii
I fall into you as into a dream of a house
The front doors open outward wide
I tumble through
To roll into an ocean of flowers vermillion
iii
My hands grasp your ribcage
Stars are your nipples
iv
Your ribcage holds the sun
Light streams between my fingers
v
In the orchard
Swollen fruit
Wet grass tangled
Sunlight refracted in raindrops
Shining in the veins
vi
My hands cupped about your breasts
|A thumb over each nipple
Your eyes open to meet mine
Those verses were inspired not only by The Song of Solomon, but also by André Breton’s “L’union libre” (“Free Union”), from which these lines, translated by Mary Ann Caws and Patricia Terry, are drawn:
My love her throat of a golden valley
Rendez-vous in the torrent’s very bed
Her breasts of night
My love her breasts of molehills beneath the sea
Crucibles of rubies
Spectre of the dew-sparkled rose
My love whose belly unfurls the fan of every day
Its giant claws
Whose back is a bird’s vertical flight
Whose back is quicksilver
From Breton and others of the Surrealists, I have learned another way to explore eros, exemplified by this from my Division by Zero, which I anticipate will be published by Waking Lion Press shortly after this blog installment (written in first draft in November 2015) is posted:
SYMPHONY OF INSURRECTION
You unlock yourself
And swing back the door between your ribs and your navel
To allow the golden wire coils of a symphony of insurrection
To spill forth across both sides of the bed onto the floor
Through the door into the kitchen to liquefy
It is water two inches deep
I attempt to squeegee it together
To hold it against a wall away from the stove
Where a large kettle of broth is coming to a boil
Light reflected from the coils flashing on the walls and ceiling
For an instant we are a full-grown cherry tree heavy with fruit bursting from the ground
I help you collect the coils in handfuls and stuff them back into the darkness
And you push me inside and close the door and lock it
How I got to that and why I think that kind of thing has a place in the Restorationist tradition is the subject of the next installment.
Thoughts?
You’re right, I think, about the essential sexuality of the gospel (as Mormons understand it). Catholics may have had to make do with allegories of Christ as the bride of the Church and the (sometimes not so) veiled sensuality of mystics; we have a more direct avenue toward sensuality, if we ever can grow up enough to embrace rather than sniggering over it. (Come to think of it, maybe Mormonism’s direct embrace of sensuality and sexuality is part of why we don’t have a mystic tradition?) Although I still don’t really “get” the comparison of a lover to sun, moon, and (especially) “an army with banners.”
Reading your poems, I’m reminded of the factor of voice, which (in a relatively untechnical way) I’ve come to see as more organically occupying spaces that my earlier literary training had assigned to rhetorical awareness of audience. My first step toward that came on AML-List, actually, as I interacted with people like Eric Samuelsen who insisted that he was not thinking about audience as he did his writing, but much of whose work is so clearly spoken from within a community to other members of that community. Hence “voice,” which is simultaneously other-directed and personal.
Voice also incorporates an awareness of form (how you want to sound, who you want to sound like), which is where your writing comes in. A genre theorist might say that having decided to write a psalm-form love poem, you then incorporated what you knew about the structure of that kind of poem and wrote something conforming to those rules. But it seems to me that most creative moments are rather more organic than that, based in study but even more in having developed an “ear” for a particular literary form, and then listening to our own production and correcting it as needed to create the produce we desire.
I also think that most of us–perhaps all of us–have many different voices, which we employ to different ends in order to speak to and as members of different communities. (I almost wrote “with different audiences in mind,” but then remembered what I had said above about audiences versus communities and corrected myself.) Your other poems quoted here are in a different voice than “A Daughter of Sarah Is My Beloved.” I daresay there were particular desires at work in that poem that work different in your other poems (and perhaps leave you feeling that there is no need to write other poems in that voice, as you have now said in it what you wanted to say?).
Back when I was writing No Going Back, several times I wound up including fragments of priesthood blessings, and on one occasion parts of patriarchal blessing. Writing those sections was one of the most interesting writing experiences I have ever had: surprisingly similar to channeling myself as I try to do for actual priesthood blessings, even while I was highly aware that it was not actually the same thing. Another instance of acting as “voice.”
Good insights, Jonathan. And thank you for treating my stuff so respectfully.