Wrenn:
Seventeenth-century religious poets like
Herbert, Traherne, Vaughn, and Donne—with their clear-eyed rendering of
psycho-spiritual realms as well as their naturalness of tone—are my
poetic heroes, and I increasingly see my poems as devotional lyrics
aspiring to embody those ideals. The earth, as a disappointing theater
in which greed and
decay perform, is utterly ordinary to them, at times dangerous, and
they seek out a transcendent being to console them. A little like
Vaughn’s Holy-Land despondency in “The Search,” I also
desired
To see the Temple, but was shown
A little dust, and for the Town
A heap of ashes, where some said
A small bright sparkle was a bed… (14-17)
God, for lack of a better word, can be awfully elusive; and the
impermanence of conditioned things, whether numinous relics or lawn
rubbish, is a universal law. Just as one glimpses love, it turns into
indifference or anger, which I find inexorably seeks transformation
back into love by a Beloved, by some bearded Master. I’m afraid the cycle of depravity
and redemption never exhausts itself. I'm afraid I'm tired.
My own devotion, though, is not exclusively Judeo-Christian, and
extends outward (inward?) toward a largely unknown Other, a force that
is difficult for me to name, whose body is made of intense emotion and
harsh music. He—“it” feels absolutely male to me—is a frightening deity
or father or religious taskmaster, invisible in space-time but
"visible" inside me. Intuition, what Gertrude Stein might have called
"secret with a bestow a bestow reed, a reed to be a reed to be, in a
reed to be." Hypomania, chakras synchronizing and faltering, the
mind-body process fluttering at breakneck speed and producing its own
sort of "heat" that feels figural, powerful, limitless. Both of us
awkwardly attempt to establish loving contact with one another, but it
is largely in vain, because our inchoate connection soon becomes frayed
by intimations of aggression, sex, and humiliation. It is the sort of
failed communion that generates poetry but not peace.