I received your paper. It’s very interesting, and extremely well-written. I would say you cut right to the heart of my poetry, and it’s quite edifying to read the prose of someone so attuned to one’s own poetry.

On to your recent Emails: How does one know his purpose? Joseph Campbell answers this question by saying you should always follow your bliss, and if you do this with integrity, doors will naturally open for you in places where you have previously seen no doors. Are you familiar with Campbell?

All this begs the question, how do you know where your bliss lies? I answer that by saying one should become attuned to what it is in life that compels. What gives mental satisfaction or pleasure? This is the main clue. For myself poetry fits the above criteria. Campbell says everyone has something they were meant to do. The two tricks are discovering it, then following it. Most people double-clutch on one or the other.

Flying back from Sioux Falls, I struck up a conversation with a retired Ph.D. who had taught comparative language in Chicago. When he spoke, for example, of the Latin roots of Celtic words, he spoke as an inflamed evangelist. Clearly in his seventies, he possessed a youth’s passion for his bliss. This is what one needs to find in life (Rilke’s necessity) - something that makes one want to grab the lapels of a stranger and extol the necessity of understanding that which makes you passionate. People who have this fire in old age are surely the successes of life.

I’m quite honored that you would suggest I might fit into a mentor role. I will endeavor to find one pearl or two I can pass your way, while endeavoring not to impede the facility you possess for writing. One pearl would be: graduate at all costs!

Here are two interesting quotes I stumbled across this week, after I read your paper and Emails: The first comes from John Ruskin, a 19th century art critic, "But this poor miserable Me! Is this, then, all the book I have got to read about God in? Yes, truly so. No other book, nor fragment of book, than that, will you ever find . . . That flesh-bound volume is the only revelation that is, that was, or that can be. In that is the image of God painted; in that is the law of God written; in that is the promise of God revealed. Know thyself; for through thyself only canst thou know God. Through the glass, darkly. But except through the glass, in no wise." This appears to reflect yours and Rilke’s awareness of God that comes from the self; at any rate Ruskin pulls off capitalization and the italic.

The second quote is Judith Farr describing Emily: "What most interests Emily Dickinson is of interest to us all: the complex fate of human beings in this tragic yet beautiful world and the possible fortunes of the human spirit in the subsequent life." I find I have more intuitive affinity for the second of the two quotes.

Lastly you spoke of a nature running deeper than most people. Clearly you bear the albatross of introspection, and how you bear this will determine the grace, or lack of grace, of your life. It will either be a wonderful gift to you, or a penance. Since I spend so much time in planes, traveling has taken on metaphorical meaning for me, quite out of perspective. Yet it gives one the opportunity to observe numerous strangers. I’m always amazed to look around the cabin of a plane and see so many people simply sitting there doing nothing. For hours they will peer at the seat in front of them.

How do they do it? How can they not engage their minds? It would drive me to distraction, yet they appear to be quite content. And the metaphor? The majority of people have a similar approach to life itself. They are quite content to avoid a closer examination of life and death, and perhaps this is an attribute. But not an attribute granted everyone.

When I read your words concerning that you are left to share the vast majority of your thoughts with yourself, it reminded me of traveling strategies, and the grace that comes from recognizing one’s nature, or as James Hillman may have it - one’s own daemon -- then determining how to create grace from it.

In the end, I’m quite grateful for your questions and comments, since I’m usually not called on to apply a proper logic to these ideas, proper enough to commit them to prose. Thank you for your poignancy.

Best regards,

Ward

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Dear Andy,

Here’s what I say regarding you not being inspired to write to or from the muse: never a problem. No worries, mate. Some people talk of ‘writer’s block,’ but that only occurs to scribblers who force it. When one truly learns how ‘not to think,’ then the muse will find them with vast fluidity. How does one know what he’s supposed to be writing about if he’s trying to force it by thought? I often think about the writing frenzies experienced by Emily in the early 1860s, and Sylvia Plath the last year of her life. These were the results of lifetimes of devotion to being a conduit.

Besides the avoidance of thought, there is another way to jump start the process, or entice the muse to yourself . . . with a correct reverence. And that is to simply read the poetry of others. James Dickey works well for me. Someday I’ll be reading Andrew Port books to motivate myself.

To answer your questions at the end of your last Email: "You look to the afterlife. Why there more than here?"

I believe it’s the role of the poet to examine the human condition; and most poets eventually attune their antennae to the afterlife. Most questions concerning the human condition can be boiled down to ‘what are we doing here?’ Or, ‘is there a purpose to all this?’ Or, simply, "Why?" So priests or poets are supposed to answer these basic questions.

Although it’s not only the afterlife I’ve been studying. In the past couple of years I’ve been sensing the circularity of our souls’ natures. I’m coming around to the point of view that a soul has the ability to dive in and out of life, or as I refer to it on occasion in my poems, the teaming. Not everybody, and not on a schedule, but perhaps when a soul is ready to dive back into the teaming, it has that ability. Perhaps there is a voluntary reincarnation. Yet who can prove such things?

It always interests me that when I zero in on one of your questions, I come across examples in my week’s reading, or it arises as a poem. So here’s a couple of quotes for you on this circularity topic, both final lines of a poem. The first is from Rilke. See, this is the monster you have created, when Rilke is quoted back to you. It’s from ‘Das Lied Des Selbstmorders,’ or ‘The Suicide’s Song.’ He’s talking about an inability to join life’s feast:

It makes me ill, though others it feeds;
Do see that I must deny it!
For a thousand years from now at least
I’m keeping a diet.

The other is from Charlotte Mew (1869 - 1928):

And They live so long and They feel no pain,
I shall grow up, but never grow old,
I shall always, always be very cold,

I shall never come back again!

And then there’s the poem I’m working on today:

Algernon

In the end, down the cobbled street,
on an old, chestnut, tired horse,
your one hand gloved, one hand
naked and mottled, you knew
it must be said, though none
would know of it to the bone,
to the end of where their cells conspire,
none would turn this over
like a cobblestone above larvae,
and in the very end these vermin
are like your fingers under stone,
yet you thought to say . . .
you knew it must be said . . .
"as a god self-slain,
on his own strange altar,
Death lies dead."

Yet we go, in the end,
as a god sustained, and you
came to suspect it’s physics, physics,
not metaphysics, only we’re not
clever enough yet to perceive,
or create, strong enough instruments
to pierce all the way to the other side
of our souls or natures, to the bend,
all the way down to see enough
that Death lies dead, a knot,
because instead . . . our souls
circle on and on,
sometimes Algernon,
on and on, sometimes not.

Algernon Charles Swinburne, a 19th century English poet and critic, was saved from excessive drink by his friend Theodore Watts-Dunton. With "Poems and Ballads" (1866), Swinburne endured one of the most famous literary scandals of the Victorian period, as the public registered shock over this celebration of physical love. The lines above in quotes are from Swinburne’s poem "A Forsaken Garden."

 I liked your Rilke quote about some folks letting the riddles pile up, then dying like animals, without making sense of it. Indeed, we all have -- or perhaps have been assigned -- a certain chore to carve these poems out with bones.

And in this chore, I do not believe it is a muse that comes to us as a separate entity. This thing we call muse may simply be that part of our soul that can whisper these reverse prayers back to us. Do we not all have one foot in the grave? Only some of us may have an articulate foot?

And yes, I’m happily married, but I never think about being also married to a muse . . . for even from childhood I’ve sensed that this capacity comes from within me, is a part of me or my own soul. This is why I suggested the muse looks into your eyes, but is staring at the rear of your eyes. She is within you . . . there inside . . . ready to help you with your chore . . . if you can learn how to coax this part of your soul to whisper back to you. And you surely have.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Best regards,

Ward