The last of the ephemeral stuff I’ll inflict on you is the Reverse Prayer idea. Prayer emanates from the beseecher, a request of the individual which flows out into divinity. Poems, I believe, are the reverse of this process; poems radiate inward to the individual from the exterior of the poet, little requests from the great outside. Poets are people who are a smidgen more attuned to these remarks from the exterior, but they still cannot interpret the concepts succinctly. The struggle of the poet is to translate a wordless language into a poem that will knock somebody, somewhere, off their feet. Possibly one could make a case for the divine not hearing the exact words of the beseecher either . . . but intuiting the soul. Again, in reverse, is it not the role of the poet to intuit the divine?

It took me awhile to arrive at this place; but after I had it fleshed out, I felt rather proud of it, even somewhat unique. Bonehead that I am; what in the past million years of human beings on earth has really changed in human nature? Surely not pride. A year later, I was startled to read in an essay on Emily by Richard Wilbur, "Sumptuous Destitution" that Emily called poems ‘bulletins from Immortality.’ Spooky, is it not? Or maybe it’s akin to Spielberg’s ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ as though there are poets, like pinpricks throughout the country, all building clay models of a mountain they’ve intuited. Eventually the poets -- like Eliot’s and Dickinson’s tombstones -- will arrive at kindred places. Forgive me, but I can’t resist saying at this juncture that I’d like the line ‘our souls are meant to mourn our mortal days . . . ’ engraved on my own.

When I was seven, and I clearly remember the incident, I was sitting in church one Sunday, listening to the sermon. The priest was speaking about immortality, and made the point that no one can possibly know for sure what awaits us after death. And hence, one needs faith to explain this world and the next. Being a bonehead even at seven, I wondered why no one had ever been able to figure it out. Maybe adults just gave up on it after a while. Why couldn’t it be done?

I decided that if someone thought about this subject all their life, if one studied the issue long enough, if one were properly dedicated, they could indeed solve this mystery the priest described. And why not I? Young Lancelot, there in the pew.

So forty years later, here I am, but I assure you that even I am not pompous enough to say I’ve got it solved. Far from it; because it cannot be solved. However, you asked me to explain why I became a poet, and this little story is the beginning of my particular affliction. For if one does not use theology -- faith in religion -- or philosophy -- faith in logic -- to apprehend the afterlife, then there is really only one other tool left to use. And that is poetry, which requires a faith in the poet’s ability to intuit.

Poets, priests, shamans . . . they are all doing the same carving with bones. They are all scratching away at the same question. All fielding or tossing the same whiffleball prayers. And there is really only one world-series question to aim at the human condition after all, and that is ‘why?’

Lastly, let’s see if I can pull this whole discussion away from the metaphysical, like I promised much earlier. Sometimes I fear this sounds like I should be out under a cardboard pyramid, lining up my crystals with a favorable planetary conjunction. In discussions of poetry one can easily pratfall into a New Age spiritualism, and I well understand the risks of sounding baffoonish on the subject.

However, if one subtracts religion - any form of religion - from the pursuit, and approaches it agnostically (and not atheistically, since that too requires a type of faith), there is still something beyond the human being to be intuited. Whether using one’s intuition, or one’s conscious study, or even one’s subconscious premonitions, this state beyond death is always sensed. Sensed. The only problem is the age-old one - you simply can’t prove it. You can’t uncover something tangible, like finding a butterfly wing on a trail deep within a forest then bringing it back for other people to see and gently touch.

Even though the ephemeral wing cannot be produced right now, I’ve always suspected that in the end our race will discover it’s actually physics, and not metaphysics. Today, we’re simply not yet sufficiently clever human beings to create strong enough microscopes or telescopes to pierce the other side of our natures . . . strong enough to detect the human soul.

I say it’s physics, and not metaphysics. And as poets, we are all some strange combination of scientists and priests.

Best regards,

Ward

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Dear Andy,

Thanks for your kind words. I got back from Oregon Friday night. I always get to do a lot of poetry on my lap top during those long flights, and perhaps 30,000 feet is the proper setting for some of my outlandish offerings.

To answer your question on ‘our souls are meant to mourn our mortal days:’ The line started out in a poem about Robert Penn Warren as a view in opposition to Warren. He always had an optimistic slant to his poetry, albeit a craggy optimistic slant. Still one could make an argument that all poets are optimistic - surely we all have, at least, a profound belief in posterity.

The poem heralded Warren for transcending modern day writers who dwelled more on pessimism:

sailing around the prophets who predict
our souls are meant to mourn our mortal days . . .
curling, sailing, displacing:
this is the stuff of proper spirit.

At first I double-clutched on the line, thinking it had a tad too much alliteration, but in the end intuitively went with it. It appeared to belong there.

Months later, the line continued to unsettle some sense that desires a completion. Whenever I re-read the poem, my eyes were drawn to that particular line, and gradually I came to understand this was one of those ‘inferred montages’ I claim exist independent of the original poems or concepts that give them birth.

Maybe, I thought, this is not pessimism at all. Maybe if one considered this in another concept, the line might come to represent something much more significant. This is one of those lines that haunts one, at the beginning for no apparent reason, but in the end bursts through, one hopes, into its intended purpose. The line eventually came rushing out, half a year later, in the midst of an Emily poem, indeed right at the punchline:

you hinted our souls are meant
to mourn our mortal days,
then at last you were called back,
you testified, with the inference you
were there at least once before,
and you’ve now completed the current circle.

 So, here’s what I think it means. I think it has something to do with Plato’s idea that all souls, before they are born, get to choose the exact parents who will enable them to fulfill their natures, or daemons. I can’t say I accept the idea, but it would certainly put many an unhappy childhood into perspective. Back to my line: perhaps life is meant to be a trial, for this is how art is born. Art comes from the abrasion between reality and the ideal. Art seeks to make sense of things; art yearns to discover the reason for this place we all inhabit.

One of the themes of my novel, "Divine Murder," is that of all the planets and beings that God created, he only created one place where the inhabitants felt pain and died. The reason for Earth, as he created it, was for human beings to create art - and to do so they had to first suffer.

My second novel, "Keenly Alive, Tony," takes up the theme that life is a consequential struggle. Simply, we all know life is a struggle (and who from the poorest to the wealthiest does not struggle and think their path is uniquely difficult?); yet we all, I also claim, think life is consequential. We feel strongly that there is something purposeful to life. Only, we all are hard pressed to describe the consequentiality. It either comes out as religion, or art, or passions, or despair. But few of us can succinctly describe it.

So back to ‘our souls are meant to mourn our mortal days.’ Perhaps this is the whole point. When we’re incarnate, we’re meant to struggle and mourn and try to make some sense of things. Perhaps this is how we earn our spirituality. Or perhaps this is the grace of human beings.

In the end, the line speaks to me of some type of continuity, or circularity of existence. I think Emily intuited this when she says her business is circumference, and on her tombstone she says she was ‘called back,’ inferring that she had once started from a conscious spiritual plane. I think T.S. Eliot describes something similar on his tomb, "in the beginning is my end, in the end is my beginning."

"Our souls are meant to mourn our mortal days." Prior to corporal life, and after corporal life, our souls might soar; yet here, we are in the midst of it, and perhaps are meant to pound away at the art of breathing well.

I have no proof, of course, of any of this, and only describe it as a point I have intuited from writing poetry for thirty-odd years. Unluckily this is all about feelings, and not a shred of scientific evidence. But perhaps that is why human beings need poetry.

Here’s a new poem I’m fleshing out:

Sylvia Pounding on the Point

I gallop on the point, though it never moves,
my hands pummel down the words,
my feet tango and staccato out the thoughts,
my flesh rolls over the forms that are
these reverse prayers . . . does it matter
where they originate, once they appear
so vibrant?

The point, the point, it requires hammering,
a blacksmith’s thundering diligence,
the billows, the coals, all inflamed
while the dust of history whirls
like fleas or no-see-um prayers . . .
and psalms flipflop everywhere.

I can never keep my hands on the point,
I suspect no one can . . . one can touch it,
genuflect to it, kiss it like the blarney stone,
but no one can keep hanging on . . .
and those who have tried have all died,
some in kitchens, some in oceans.

So I go on, this lusting for the point,
and sometimes, briefly, between
the hammering, on the upstroke’s
pinnacle, the point will whisper back,
a kiss or caress back, that it really
shouldn’t matter where the receptor
minds originate either . . .
it is the process that must be
perpetuated.

Encyclopedia Americana: POINT, that which has no part, but merely position. There are various definitions, all to a degree unsatisfactory and defective because of the elemental nature of the term.

Best regards,

Ward