American writer Peggy Rosenthal. Photo: Courtesy of the author.
from Ars Poetica?
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
—Czeslaw Milosz from New and Collected Poems (1931-2001) Ecco, 2013
from Asphodel, That Greeny Flower
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
— William Carlos Williams from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume II, New Directions, 1988
from Making Peace
Peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except in the words of its making…
A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.
—Denise Levertov from The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov, New Directions, 2013
RICHARD’S LEAD-IN FOR PEGGY ROSENTHAL AND HER BLOG POST INTRODUCTION
Once again, I am so pleased to introduce another guest poetry blogger, Peggy Rosenthal, #11 in this series. Part One of her posts is below after my formal introduction. In Part Two she will feature the celebrated American poet Billy Collins. I have never featured Billy Collins in my blogs at Recovering Words so a big thanks to Peggy for introducing him to these pages.
I met Peggy Rosenthal back in the early 2000’s thanks to Image Journal’s marvelous week-long Glen Workshops held at that time in Santa Fe. For one of those years she was a featured speaker and put together the community worship gathering every evening. One that featured many wonderful poems including one she asked me to read at one of those gatherings: The Eve of Rosh Hashanah by the inimitable Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.
In a review in 2016 in the New York Times of a version of the collected poems of Amichai which did not include The Eve of Rosh Hashanah, the reviewer Rosie Schaap says:
“Every year, on the occasion of its title, I read the poem aloud. In Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell’s translation, it begins: The eve of Rosh Hashanah. At the house that’s being built,/a man makes a vow: not to do anything wrong in it,/only to love. — and ends: And whoever uses people as handles or as rungs of a ladder/will soon find himself hugging a stick of wood/and holding a severed hand and wiping his tears/with a potsherd.
I share it with my family and my friends, Jews and non-Jews, poetry lovers and those who have made their distaste for poetry known. I often share poems I love, but nothing ever gets a response as enthusiastic as “The Eve of Rosh Hashanah” does. It reminds us — because Amichai knew we sometimes need reminding — to treat one another with decency and care; to love, not to exploit. “
Knowing as I now know the generous nature of Peggy Rosenthal that choice of Amichai’s poem is not a surprise. I learned much from Peggy during the number of summers she was there at the Glen. It was through Peggy I discovered the celebrated Anglo American poet Denise Levertov had converted herself to the Roman Catholic Christian faith while writing her remarkable poem Mass to the Day of St, Thomas Didymous, especially Part VI, Agnus Dei. Also, through her, I first heard of the concept of poetry as prayer. And because of this, during the past fifteen years or more, I have led numerous poetry-as-prayer retreats in Canada and the US.
But perhaps most the most meaningful thing I learned from Peggy is echoed in the lines of the Denise Levertov poem she chose above:
Peace, like a poem,/is not there ahead of itself,/can’t be imagined before it is made,/can’t be known except in the words of its making…
In my translation of Peggy’s words as they landed in me I have kept this mantra close to heart: If you write a poem knowing the ending already you are likely not going to write a very strong poem. Or perhaps, closer to the truth of what Peggy meant: If you already know the end of your poem it is most likely you are not going to be surprised. And the great gift of a poem is most often its surprise for the writer and the reader.
As Peggy points out, clearly, below she is not a poet. Maybe so, but as an anthologist and lover of poetry her words belong in this series! I will be ever so grateful to Peggy, one of my most inspiring influences at the beginning of my journey with poetry. Now, here’s Peggy in her own words:
PEGGY’S INTRODUCTION TO PART ONE OF HER TWO BLOG POSTS – THE “LONGNESS” OF POETRY
It took me years to absorb the truths of these lines from the three epigraph poem excerpts that introduce this blog post. I want to recount how I got there.
But first, I need to clarify one thing: Because I’ve published some books about poetry, and write about poetry for Slant Books’ “Close Reading” blog, people often assume that I’m a poet. So let me say at the start: I am not a poet. I don’t write poetry; I write about poetry.
How, when, and why did my attraction to poetry begin and then develop? It began in my childhood, since my mother’s brother was the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Karl Shapiro. He sent my parents each new poetry volume of his, so they were around the house. I remember being struck by this statement of Uncle Karl’s: “Poetry isn’t a way of saying things — it’s a way of seeing things.” My desire to “see” drew me gradually into reading other poets: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Whitman’s “Song of Myself“; so by then I was definitely hooked on poetry. The final clincher was when a friend from graduate school asked me to co-edit an anthology of poems from around the world inspired by Bible passages.
Around the same time that Oxford University Press published this anthology, it also published an anthology of contemporary Christian poetry called Upholding Mystery, edited by David Impastato. David and I got in touch and decided to launch the ministry “Poetry Retreats.” For about five years beginning in 2000, we gave retreats around the country—on Praying with Poetry, The Spirituality of Poetry, and so on. We took as our model for praying with poems the medieval monks’ practice of meditative reading of Scripture called lectio divina (“divine reading”). Lectio divina had four steps, which we adapted for meditative readings of a poem:
(1) monastic lectio: Reading the Scripture passage aloud, in a purely receptive attitude, in the spirit of just letting it happen to you, like rain soaking into the ground.
—which we adapted as Meeting the Poem: This is your initial, intuitive encounter with the poem. Read the poem aloud, slowly, in the spirit of just letting it happen to you, like rain soaking into the ground.
(2) monastic meditatio: An analytical response, using the intellect to probe the Scripture passage. This step includes historical study, word study, reading commentaries.
—which we adapted as Getting to Know the Poem: This is your analytical engagement with the poem. Observe how the poet is using language, sound, rhythm, punctuation, line breaks, or play with images. Look up words in a dictionary if it helps, but don’t feel you need to “understand” every bit; the art of poems is that they can communicate powerfully even if phrases or whole sections don’t disclose their meaning intellectually. Your focus here is on the poet, not on yourself: what does the poet seem to be trying to do?
(3) monastic oratio: One of the meanings of oratio is “prayer.” Here, it is asking God how this Scripture passage might apply to you personally, how through it you can better know God and pursue good instead of evil.
—which we adapted as Praying with the Poem: This is your renewed intuitive engagement with the poem, nurtured by your analytical engagement. Here you let yourself respond personally to anything in the poem that moves you. If an image strikes you, let it dwell in your mind or visualize it. Or there may be a character within the poem, or the poem’s speaker, with whom you wish to imaginatively engage in dialogue. This is a way for you and the poem to enter each other’s imaginative space, in a sense “completing” the poem. You may be drawn to address the poet or God or yourself. Finally, you may find that you’re drawn to share the poem’s spiritual journey or to reject it.
(4) monastic contemplatio: The culmination, in quiet: sitting back without making the mind work any more; relaxing one’s whole being in the presence of this word of God.
—which we adapted as Absorbing, Reflecting: Here you just sit and experience whatever remains with you. Maybe it will be a particular image from the poem or a memory or desire that the poem has evoked in you. Maybe it will be a sense of prayer or other communication with God. You can re-read lines of the poem at this point if they’ve become meaningful to you; or you can re-read the whole poem; or you can just sit with your eyes closed.
Leading retreatants through this process had a profound effect on me: it opened me to poetry’s riches in an entirely new way. Reading a poem became an action not only of my mind but also of my soul. I found, with Czeslaw Milosz, that:
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
This discovery moved me to want to share it with readers as well as retreatants. So I wrote two small reflection guides: Praying the Gospels through Poetry: Lent to Easter, St Anthony Messenger Press, 2002 and (my response to 9/11) Praying through Poetry: Hope for Violent Times, St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2003.
September 11th further moved me to collect poems helpful for peace-making, so I edited two collections of poems: Imagine a World: Poetry for Peacemakers, Pax Christi, 2005 and Making Peace (poems by Denise Levertov) New Directions Bibelot, 2006. For I’d become convinced that, as Levertov writes:
Peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except in the words of its making.
and also that, in William Carlos Williams’s famous words:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Poetry has become an even more integral part of my life by my current practice of memorizing favorite poems — to have them with me, in me, during my daily exercise or while I’m knitting a not-too-complicated row. My internal stash of poems includes two by Robert Frost (“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “Come In“), George Herbert’s “The Pulley,” Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur” and “As Kingfisher’s Catch Fire“, Adam Zagajewski’s “The Greenhouse,” Billy Collins’s “Forgetfulness,” and a few poems in Spanish by Pablo Neruda.
All in all, I can say, with early twentieth century Russian poet Osip Mandelstam:
“What distinguishes poetry from automatic [everyday] speech is that it rouses us and shakes us awake in the middle of a word. Then the word turns out to be far longer than we thought.” For me, that “longness” is lasting my whole life.
Peggy Rosenthal, March 2023