American Poet Charles Simic
Oh, I Said
My subject is the soul
Difficult to talk about,
Since it is invisible,
Silent and often absent.
Even when it shows itself
In the eyes of a child
Or a dog without a home,
I'm at a loss for words.
Charles Simic (1938 – ) from THE LUNATIC, HarperCollins Publishers, 2015
Earlier this year at the Spring launch in Toronto of McClelland & Stewart’s poetry titles, one of the younger poets talked about the no no of using “soul” in a poem. How a mentor or teacher had given her that proscription. That set me thinking about all the fine poems on the “soul” by master poets including the much-lauded naturalized American poet Charles Simic, who has, among many honours, won the Pulitzer Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize.
There is no doubt the wrong use of soul in a poem can torpedo both poem and poet. Too easy to become a flabby cliche like I was devestated to the bottom of my s..l. But done well it can sing inside a poem. As it does in Simic small poem above. In such a deft way Simic deals with this abstraction by saying its difficult to talk about and then does. A wonderful poetic device.
Canadian Poet Lorna Crozier
Ironically another master poet whose poem on the soul comes to mind was at the M & S event in the Spring and from what I remember, no one mentioned or realized that Lorna Crozier, there for the launch of her book, The Wrong Cat, had a poem busting out with soul! Here it is:
AN EXTRAORDINARY FONDNESS FOR BEETLES
I like to think of my soul taking on the shape of a beetle, that is, the many shapes of what it means to be a beetle since there are over 360,000 species of its kind. There's the Japanese, silver and flat as a dime so it can slip under the thinnest detritus on the ground. And the clicking beetle. Like someone cool from the '50's snapping his fingers to Miles, it flips into the air without twitching a wing. As a beetle, the soul will do what I can't do now excrete wax to keep in moisture, turn its legs into stilts to raise itself above burning tar or sand, drum its belly on the ground so it's called the abdomen-talking beetle. Imagine the abdomen-talking soul! Lorna Crozier (1948 - ) from The Wrong Cat, McClelland & Stewart, 2015
What a textbook example of how to handle an abstraction and especially one as galaxy-sized as soul. Crozier turns that abstraction into something so real. She puts the ache in it to echo this great line from Stephen Dunn’s poem, Tenderness: Oh abstractions are just abstract/ until they have an ache in them. Indeed: Imagine the abdomen-talking soul.
American poet Walt Whitman, wrote a great erotic poem to his soul in his poem Song of Myself. Here is an excerpt from Section Five of that poem describing his body making love to his soul:
I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself
to you
And you must not be abased to the other.
One of my favorite metaphors for the soul comes from the late American poet Jack Gilbert:
from The Spirit and the Soul
It is not about the spirit. The spirit dances, comes and goes. But the soul is nailed to us like lentils and fatty bacon lodged under the ribs. What lasted is what the soul ate. The way a child knows the world by putting it part by part into his mouth. As I tried to gnaw my way in the Lord, working to put my heart against that heart. Lying in the wheat at night, Letting the rain after all the dry months have me.
Gilbert, Jack (1925 – 2012) from The Great Fires, Alfred A. Knoff, Inc., New York, Mary Oliver, the revered American poet, captures a now-you-see-it now you don't quality of what the soul might be so vividly in this poem:
From Maybe
Nobody knows what the soul is.
It comes and goes
like the wind over the water --
sometimes, for days,
you don't think of it.
Maybe, after the sermon,
after the multitude was fed,
one or two of them felt
the soul slip forth
like a tremor of pure sunlight
before exhaustion,
that wants to swallow everything,
gripped their bones and left them
miserable and sleepy,
as they are now, forgetting
how the wind tore at the sails
before he rose and talked to it --
tender and luminous and demanding
as he always was --
a thousand times more frightening
than the killer storm
Mary Oliver from The Soul Is Here For Its Own Joy, ed. Robert Bly, Harper Collins,
1995
Last words to American poet, Linda Gregg, once the wife of Jack Gilbert and also a life- long friend. Here are two poems of hers that make the soul as real as the ochre-coloured mug beside me on my desk:
Paul On The Road To Damascus The soul is an emblem so bright you close your eyes. As when the sun here comes up out of the sea and blazes on the white of a village called Lefkes. The soul is dark in its nature, but shines. A rooster crows. The tall grass stirs on the ruined ancient terraces. The shadow of a wafting crocheted curtain runs in a slant down the wall of a house as the Albanians paving the street below are banging pieces of marble against a metal wheelbarrow. Linda Gregg from All Of It Singing – New and Selected Poems, Graywolf Press,2008
God’s Places
Does the soul care about the mightiness
of this love? No. The soul is a place
and love must find its way there.
A fisherman on his boat swung a string
of fish around his head and threw it
across the water where it landed at my feet.
That was a place. One day I walked into
a village that was all ruins. It was noon.
Nobody was there, the roofs were gone,
the silence was heavy. A man came out,
gradually other people, but no one spoke.
Then somebody gave me a glass of water
with a lump of jam on a spoon in it.
It was a place, one of God’s places,
but love was not with me. I breathed
the way grape vines live and give in
to the whole dream of being and not being.
The soul must be experienced to be achieved.
If you love me as much as you say you
love me, stay. Let us make a place
of that ripeness the soul speaks about.
Linda Gregg (1942 – ) from All of it Singing – New and Selected Poems, Graywolf Press, 2008