Writing on Fire – Another Poem by Vittori Colonna

A drawing by Michelangelo around 1540 of his close friend Vittoria Colonna. Photo credit: Wikipedia


# 103

I’m afraid the knot in which for years
my soul has been bound up now rules: I write
from habit, not because I am on fire.
I’m afraid the knot is tightly tied,
and by myself: I’m proud
and therefore dull. I think
my days are useful
when in fact I waste them.
Come, then, flame of love:
sear me from within
again. Make me make my song
from silence and hoarse cries.
God listens only for my heart.
He cares nothing for my style.

Vittoria Colonna from Vittoria Colonna – Selections from the Rime Spirituali, trans: Jan Zwicky, The Porcupine Press, 2014

Oh, what I hope for! And what happens! Hoped I would post lots of poetry blogs during my 16 day residency in Tuscany! So happy that didn’t happen. Instead, discovered lots of my own poems. I say discovered because none of them had an expected outcome. All I did was face the terrifying blank page, literally, and the poems did the rest!

Now, here I am on a flight to Munich from Pisa, Italy, and I so pleased to write another blog on a poem of Vittoria Colonna (1492-1547). What a surprise Colonna has been for me especially here in Italy. Here, where she had a deep connection with Michelangelo. Was she the love of his life? Many believe so.

What a treasure, the slight book of ten bilingual poems of Colonna translated by the quietly-powerful Canadian poet, musician and philosopher Jan Zwicky. Zwicky calls her translations, versions that she hopes captures the essence of the poems if not their 16th Century style.

How spare yet complex the ten poems Zwicky translated into her versions. In a previous post I celebrated poem #56 from the Rime Spirituali. Its startling, challenging, declarations: Yet/ death is what makes space for love and in the fire of being, suffering/ is turned to light.

Poem # 103 is no less challenging. But I feel so known by the poem especially its writer’s despair over a certain kind of what I call dead-on-arrival writing! Her take on it:

I’m afraid the knot in which for years
my soul has been bound up now rules: I write
from habit, not because I am on fire.
I’m afraid the knot is tightly tied,
and by myself: I’m proud
and therefore dull.

How this line helps me meet myself: I write/ from habit, not because I am on fire. To know to ask? Where is that fire? And in that knowing be open to finding it!

 And her solution, its mystery:

Come, then, flame of love:
sear me from within
again.

And here is where something of Colonna’s poem connected with some words of Peggy Rosenthal from Image journal in 2005. Rosenthal a blogger, essayist and anthologist introduced me to the concept of poetry-as-prayer almost 15 years ago. And for that I am ever grateful. And grateful to discover in her most recent blog posted two days ago she is recovering from what seemed to be a sure death, failure of her kidneys, a few months ago. This was caused by complications from her leukemia she has lived with for 15 years.

Her recent blog titled, not surprisingly, As I Lay (Nearly) Dying has a similar title to the essay Dying into Life she wrote for Image. What a strange coincidence as I discovered this, sitting, now, in the Munich airport. Her essay profiled a poem of Yehuda Amichai, the great Israeli poet, and connected to her then recent diagnosis of leukemia. So many life giving words in that essay but these on the nature of poetry haunted me the most:

Facing the undeniable fact of our mortality, poetry says, yes, you are real but beyond you there is something else also real, which the human spirit naturally reaches for. We reach, however, not to grab—but rather to resonate with the holy mystery in which our mortality lives and moves and has its being.

Is this a reference to Colonna’s flame of love? I wonder. How to name whatever it is we reach for beyond our material reality. Then Rosenthal adds this:

Poetry play chords on time’s reeling cord, so that a single moment can seem to be held still while our soul sings to harmonies beyond itself. The paradox of a good poem is that it grounds me by flowering into infinite possibilities.

This line resonates so with me: so that a single moment can seem to be held still while our soul sings to harmonies beyond itself . Yes, I experience this both reading and writing poetry! So often a poem, as Canadian poet Susan Musgrave says, seems to know more than I do! And it is in that place of my unknowing I reach for something beyond me to give me the words. Is it Colonna’s flame of love or Rosenthal’s holy mystery. I don’t know. But I do know Colloana reminds me to call on that mystery beyond me to help bring my poems alive, prevent them from being dead on arrival!