Favorite Poem of Mine

This is one of my favorite poems, by William Stafford. My own attempts at a reflection follow.


Saint Matthew and All

Lorene--we thought she'd come home. But
it got late, and then days. Now
it has been years. Why shouldn't she,
if she wanted? I would: something comes
along, a sunny day, you start walking:
you meet a person who says, "Follow me,"
and things lead on.

Usually, it wouldn't happen, but sometimes
the neighbors notice your car is gone, the
patch of oil in the driveway, and it fades.
They forget.

In the Bible it happened--fishermen, Levites.
They just went away and kept going. Thomas,
away off in India, never came back.

But Lorene--it was a stranger maybe, and he
said, "Your life, I need it." And nobody else did.


The first time I read this poem, I re-read it and re-read it. I consumed these words. I thought I'd never encountered a poem like this before. It was so simple. The language so straightforward and unadorned. It almost wasn't a poem. There was something subversive about it, I thought. But of course, it is very lyrical, and there is a beautiful, if subtle, use of sound.

Nevertheless, the borderline subversive, mysterious, almost dangerous quality remains. Stafford is telling the story of a small community and one woman who isn't there any more. She's gone. We thought she'd come back, but there's only a faded patch of oil in the driveway. Who couldn't be a bit disturbed by the unexpected, by the disruption of order like that.

And at the same time, Stafford is so generous, without judgment. "Why shouldn't she, if she wanted. I would...."

But when he compares her leaving to the decision of the disciples of Jesus to follow him.... I started to feel for the first time the depth of how disruptive and disturbing this could be to a community, even how disturbing this was to those staid and rigid parts of me.

Finally those last lines, "It was a stranger maybe, and he said, 'Your life, I need it,' and nobody else did," have communicated more to me about the transcendent freedom of each life than any other words I have ever encountered. I feel sure that although Stafford might not know the implications of what he wrote, he knew that a life was freer and more glorious than any other witness can recognize. And when I read those lines, I knew that too, and I knew that Jesus knew that truth even better. I felt a little part of me come alive and say, 'Yes,' I too have a true life, beyond any "role," in any community, and this is the life that Jesus is asking for.

I'm still amazed that a few plain spoken lines about an absent, "unimportant" woman in a small town can bring that kind of transforming power, but I witness that they can. I think that is subversive, and I long for more of that dangerous power.

Spiritual Formation and Making Art

I've grown a lot more self-conscious about this blog and its place on the church web site, especially since the church's creative writers group is currently out of commission. A little tune from Sesame Street often comes into my head: "One of these blogs is not like the others....one of these blogs just doesn't belong..."

Ultimately, the blog may not belong on this site. But I have deeply appreciated how the church has taken some rather unconventional steps to embrace and encourage the arts, including creative writing. I know there are many beautiful reasons for this, including a core belief that God delights in the creativity and self-expression of his children. I also think the church believes that the making of art is another path, another spiritual discipline that God often uses in the formation of our souls.

I thought a lot about how creative writing can lead us a bit towards the Kingdom of God while I was preparing to teach in the Arts Camp this summer. I'd like to share some of those thoughts here.

Usually, I hate to articulate the purposes and usefulness of a thing. This is simply because of some badly formed areas in me that tend to be rather uninterested in things that are "good for me," or come with some other kind of claim. Also, I feel like I barely have a grasp on what spiritual formation means, and so trying to say anything meaningful on this topic just seems riduculously presumptive. Please read what I say with this in mind. Most of all, I believe we write or make any other art because we want to. I also believe we pray because we want to. And we love others for the same reason. But I might be wrong about all that. Anyway, like I said, this blog might not belong. But here are my fairly rough thoughts. They are all quite related, and may be restating one another again and again. Do you have anything to add (or subtract)?

1) Creative Writing (and other art making) puts us in touch with our Self. I have most learned this from the poet William Stafford, and I intend to write more about him later. But I think this is a major gift of art making. I am tending toward a belief that real art is only made by free selves. Not for any secondary purpose but to express a self. It is a place to acknowledge the fact of our existence as a self that God has chosen for his universe of existence.

2) It also puts us in touch with the moment, with the Now. That's where poetry and other art comes from. And this is also, I've been told, where God meets us.

3) As we make art, we become more attentive to the world God has made, to ourselves, to others, and hopefully, through all of this attentiveness, to the eternal God himself. I think we start with how we see the world and this moment around us. That is enough work to last me for the rest of my life, I believe.

4) Making art allows us to live in wonder. When we let ourselves be surprised, astonished, delighted or appalled by the real, I think perhaps we let ourselves get a little closer to listening to God. (maybe I'm wrong).

5) I have found that for all of the reasons I've listed above, and more, making art has drawn me into a deeper connection with other people. I can see more of the beauty of their stories and of their selves. Writing has become another way for me to attend to others, which is one small way to love.

6) Perhaps I could say that making art also makes me a little more discerning about what is true and what is beautiful and lovely.

I think there must be other ways that making art and creative writing in particular can be a gracious tool in our spiritual formation. Do you have anything to add?

I also suppose that there are some pitfalls, some sins and blindspots that art making could encourage. Maybe I'll think about that and do another blog.

Regardless, it would be a pleasure to hear from any other artists about what you have discovered about the intersection of art and spiritual formation.

---Jenny Jiang

A Gesture Toward Sanity

Here's a quote from today's Writer's Almanac, by poet Stephen Dunn. It surely resonated with me. What about you?

Dunn said:

I think one of my early motivations for writing was that other people's versions of experience didn't gel with my own. It was a gesture toward sanity to try to get the world right for myself.
I've since learned that if you get it right for yourself, it often has resonance for others."

Father's Day

Of all the gifts my dad has given me (a short list: straw forts with tunnels and hidden entrances, almost any pet I could name--excepting snakes, a college education, orthidontal work, and that vacation to see the wild Assateague ponies when I was 11), the best one is a love for poetry.

I remember snuggling beside him as he read from a thin and tattered volume of One Hundred and One Famous Poems, copyright 1958. Most of the poems were from the era of the Civil War and World War I. There were oval, tinotype-like portaits of each somber poet next to their poem. I was very little, and I had no idea what it meant to have a "rendevous with Death at some disputed barricade..." (Alan Seeger), but I reveled in the cadences, and in my father's own relishing of each word.

He is from one of the last generations who were forced to memorize poetry for school. I guess he never forgot the poems he memorized. Nor will I. One of them was "Thanatopsis" by William Cullen Bryant. In my memory, he recited the last stanza of this poem almost every night of my childhood. And so tonight I can hear his voice, with his slight lisp, savoring every syllable.


So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, soothed and sustained
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.


Perhaps a little dark, but that's my dad. And I love him. And I haven't thanked him nearly enough for the treasure he planted in my soul.

Surprise Endings

So, with our assignment this month to write a poem or story with an ironic twist or surprise ending, I've been doing a lot of thinking about endings, and I've been realizing just how important those last lines are. They often make or break a poem or story. A wonderful ending doesn't have to be purposefully clever and surprising. In fact, that device, if not used with a sort of gentle light touch, often can feel like a sort of cheap trick. But I'm inclined to believe that an ending that perfectly, and yes, even surprisingly, transforms a poem or a story into something that lifts me up out of the dim room of myself is one of life's most sublime pleasures.

More than once I have literally cried out with sheer joy upon reading a perfect ending. Kay Ryan's poem "Things Shouldn't Be So Hard," and a recent reading of Alice Munro's story "Friend of My Youth," both showered me with such uncontainable delight.

I'd like to point you to one of the most delightful and perfect and even surprising endings in modern poetry. The poem is "A Blessing" by James Wright. Read it now, and let me know your reaction.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16944

I don't know enough about writing to say for sure, but my best guess is that the way to write endings like this is to let them surprise you, the writer first. At least this is one way to guard against cheap tricks. Just start writing, as Flannery O'Connor, and Raymond Carver, and Alice Munro and many other masters claimed to do, and see where you end up. If you allow yourself to be surprised, the reader will be as well.

Whatcha Reading?

Writers are first readers. We are most trained by our reading. And most of us are pretty compulsive readers. I know when I read something that excites me, I am so moved, my emotions and love are almost overwhelming. And I want to share what I've experienced. And I want to be a part of it through my own writing.

So, what are you reading? Would you share? What's on your nightstand? What keeps you up late long after you should be asleep.

Right now I'm reading: Annie Dillard's A Pilgrim At Tinker Creek for the first time. C.S. Lewis' book of poetry (did you know he wrote poetry, at that it was published?!), and I'm rereading a collected book of some of Alice Munro's short stories, which are absolutely amazing to me.

I find the voices of Dillard and Munro both are strong and vibrant, full of a kind of clarified vision and love and grace that I long for in my own life. They deeply impact me and resonate with me. I am inspired in the purest and truest sense.

And when I read Lewis' poems, I feel as if I'm reading the most beautiful and honest words from a dear, dear, beloved uncle of mine (because I've read all his other stuff). He's an uncle I've heard expounding and telling stories at the Sunday dinner table for years, but in his poetry he is singing, and praying, and it's just a delight.


What about you? What's got you turning pages right now?

Thoughts from a mother to other mother artists (and fathers....and other nurturers)

My return to creative writing coincided (not coincidentally, I believe) with the beginning of my life as mother. Among other things, this means that all my creative work, like everyone else's I know, has to fit around my life. Of course, it's a struggle. A toddler doesn't understand the meaning of "A room of her own." Babies catch colds, they have sleepless nights, cranky days. They need. My family (and many others) need me, the physical me, a lot more than they need my writing. And yet, I believe I need to, I would even say I am called to write. I believe that it is an act of faith and gratitude and perhaps even service. And I believe that learning to live with the tension of these different needs and demands and desires, and learning to trust God with those things and with what I cannot do and with what I must do is one of the most important tasks in my writing.

Right around the time I started writing, I read a little essay by Alicia Ostriker called, "A Wild Surmise: Motherhood and Poetry." Ostriker had encountered feminists who argued a woman diminished her life and her value as an artist if she had children. In this essay, Ostriker makes a strong argument against this lie. I was very inspired by what she wrote, so I'd like to quote it here. I will comment though, that I think men, as well as women who don't have children, can also learn from what she's written, to the extent that she challenges us to look at the whole of life, the actual life we have--a life with family and work and bodies and relationships--as valid, important (and I would argue) even sacred subject matter for any writer.

The quote follows. I'd love to hear your comments. I know she will say things that irritate some people, so.... it would be fun to talk about our reactions.

"... For women as artists, the most obvious truth is that the decision to have children is irrevocable. Having made it you are stuck with it forever; existence is never the same afterward, when you have put yourself, as de Beauvoir correctly says, in the service of the species. You no longer belong to yourself. Your time, energy, body, spirit, and freedom are drained. You do not, however, lack what W. B. Yeats prayed for: an interesting life. In practical terms, you may ask yourself, 'How can I ever write when I am involved with this child?' This is a real and desperate question. But can you imagine Petrarch, Dante, Keats, bemoaning their lot---'God, I'm so involved with this woman, how can I write?'

"The advantage of motherhood for a woman artist is that it puts her in immediate and inescapable contract with the sources of life, death, beauty, growth, corruption. If she is a theoretician it teaches her things she could not learn otherwise; if she is a moralist it engages her in serious and useful work; if she is a romantic it constitutes an adventure which cannot be duplicated by any other, and which is guaranteed to supply her with experiences of utter joy and utter misery; if she is a classicist it will nicely illustrate the vanity of human wishes. If the woman artist has been trained to believe that the activities of motherhood are trivial, tangential to the main issues of life, irrelevant to the great themes of literature, she should untrain herself. The training is misogynist, it protects and perpetuates systems of thought and feeling which prefer violence and death to love and birth, and it is a lie.

"....The writer who is a mother should, I think, record everything she can...and remind herself that there is a subject of incalculably vast significance to humanity, about which virtually nothing is known because writers have not been mothers. 'We think back through our mothers, if we are women,' declares Woolf, but through whom can those who are themselves mothers, when they want to know what this endeavor in their lives means, do their thinking? We should all be looking at each other with a wild surmise, it seems to me, because we all need data, we need information, not only of the sort provided by doctors, psychologists, sociologists examining a phenomenon from the outside, but the sort provided by poets, novelists, artists, from within. As our knowledge begins to accumulate, we can imagine what it would signify to all women, and men, to live in a culture where child-birth and mothering occupied the kind of position that sex and romantic love have occupied in literature and art for the last five hundred years, or the kind of position that warfare has occupied since literature began."