the lost words
to open God’s mouth?
The converts sway in white silk,
their necks bent forward in yearning
like swans,
and I covet
what they think we’ve got.
(Bloch 2015, p. 59)
Here, wisdom arises out of bittersweet humor: on the one hand, there is something charming about the converts’ enthusiasm, at least from the perspective of the hungry poet and the other Jews who have been attending Yom Kippur services all their lives. On the other hand, Bloch is touched by these young converts with their “feathery beards” and “their necks bent forward in yearning / like swans.” What moves her is that spiritual yearning which has led them to convert, a hunger that she and the rest of the congregation seem to lack. Ironically, their desire, and their belief that their newly found faith will provide “the lost words / to open God’s mouth,” reawakens her desire, ironically leading her to “covet / what they think we’ve got.” But that desire in itself is never satisfied, and therein lies the dark wisdom of Bloch’s poem.
Returning to Eden
“Poetry requires a new Heaven and new Earth in every word” (Revell 2019, p. 14). This may sound like William Blake, but it is actually Donald Revell, writing on Thomas Traherne. Revell’s vision joins the ecstatic (and in some respects, antinomian) Christianity of the English Metaphysicals and Romantics with the close attention to the momentary urgencies of American life found in Thoreau and Whitman. Meditating on Easter through Traherne’s poetry, Revell declares that “All Easters are one and the same because, if they have any reality at all, they are the product not of dogma, culture, or festival habit, but rather of immediate experience. Resurrection has to happen” (Revell 2019, p. 10). Many modern and postmodern poets emphasize a poetics of immediate experience (one thinks of William Carlos Williams and Robert Creeley, two other important figures for Revell), but relatively few make of this a devotional poetry. As he explains, “Traherne teaches me how to write devotion by simply devoting poems to sense. We access sensation by grace of the lordly senses. If anything comes to mind, it comes through them and is therefore current. Resurrection is immediately available” (Revell 2019, p. 13).
A devotional poet practicing an updated version of Romantic natural supernaturalism, Revell, over his long career, has moved through a variety of styles, some simple and direct, some severe and opaque, but always sustaining and sustained by a single desire: to return to “Paradise: momentary but continuous; intermittent but eternal, at least so far” (Revell 2019, p. 5). A sequence titled “To the Lord Protector” (that is, Oliver Cromwell), from There Are Three, ends with
A few and easy
things, a few words
unearthed in season
revive the ruined
man on earth.
The effortless rainbow
deepens.
My author sang and was deep in her showing.
(Revell 1998, p. 22)
Redemption comes through “A few and easy/things”; the heavenly promise of the rainbow is “effortless.” This becomes even more true in Arcady, a book of poems in response to the sudden death of Revell’s sister, composed after months of creative silence: “I began to see poems: poems of mine, but hardly made” (Revell 2002, p. ix). Sight becomes crucial (Revell notes that looking at the paintings of Poussin was a great comfort to him). Thus the poet learns to console himself, as in “I See Almost”:
I think there must be
A place all summer
In the air and on
The whole horizon
Where it’s Heaven all the time
(Revell 2002, p. 34)
If Heaven is to be found in the natural world, then it makes sense that more recently, Revell would meditate upon the Creation. From “The Creation of the Stag,” in Drought-Adapted Vine:
Creation considered of starlight long before,
When God had not yet made the world. As of today,
God has not yet made the world. Countless colors,
Countless colors, all of them eyes and eyebeams
Just now in your mouth at the point of sleep,
Catch fire. They have considered of starlight.
I see the lark not yet lighted upon
The animal, the soul before mine. Love.
(Revell 2015, p. 27)
Creation is primal starlight, a visionary spectrum breaking into countless colors, powered by divine Love. Ezekiel 10:12: “And their whole body, and their backs, and their hands, and their wings, and the wheels, were full of eyes round about…” For Revell to see is to participate in an eternal act of Creation.
In the passage with which I began this essay, Max Weber memorializes the passing of a monumental art, claiming that only in more intimate modern art can we see “that something is pulsating that corresponds to the prophetic pneuma.” Neither intimate nor monumental, but perhaps taking on attributes of both, the kinds of poetry I have considered here still have something of that pulsating prophetic pneuma, even when it is called into doubt. That pneuma charges the mundane world, and the poem inscribes a longing for Eden. In this work, the sacred and the secular, the transcendental and the rational, belief and skepticism, enchantment and disenchantment, all constitute a volatile, creative dialectic. I close with lines from a new book by Peter O’Leary, Earth Is Best, in which his vision of the “soul-bright earth, cobwebbed with life” is expressed “in a poetry whose modes are theogony and mycology” (O’Leary 2019, p. xv). Mycology is the study of mushrooms, and O’Leary, another supernatural naturalist, gives us a volume consisting mainly of “Amanita Odes,” the Amanita being a species of mushroom, some poisonous, some edible, and some inducing a psychedelic state:
Though there is no Depth in which there are not hyphae or funguses.
Though the mushrooms inspire the senses, chiefly in their musking scent.
Though the fruit perplexes the vegetable order and the roots tenaciously decompose
all adversaries.
Though the boletes have their angels even the Latin of God’s taxonomy.
Though the warp and woof of agarics are worked by perpetual degrading energies.
Though morels are good for both the living and the dead.
Though there is a language of mushrooms.
Though there is a euphoria of foraging upon many mushrooms.
Though obsolete phrases are arguably a poetry of the resurrection.
Though mushrooms are an antique medicine.
Though mushrooms are musical in olfactory harmonies.
Though the right names of the mushroom abide in the earth. God make mycologers
better vocabularians.
(O’Leary 2019, pp. 60–61)
O’Leary, following Christopher Smart and Walt Whitman, chants a shamanic ode which sanctifies and re-magics our relationship to the earth, teaching anew “God’s taxonomy,” and making “better vocabularians” of us all.
NOTES
1 1.