The language of redemption: the Catholic poets Adam Zagajewski, Marie Ponsot & Lawrence Joseph.

Wallace Stevens, one of the great modernist poets of the last century, wrote that "after one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is the essence which takes its place as life's redemption." Yet, modernism--the period of literary innovation during which T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce wrote--never succeeded in creating a poetry entirely without a belief in God. Ultimately, more than art was needed in the twentieth century's ongoing search for redemption.

In one tradition, poets continued to pursue an alternative to the either/or of God and poetry, searching for a synthesis between theology's "account" of the divine and poetry's own human, yet God-like, "making." Right up to the present, they have sought out a contemporary language to speak about expressions of immanence and transcendence, the quotidian and the ineffable, without ever once using those terms; their subjects--common or arcane--are drawn from a world that is constantly unfolding, believing in the possibility of redemption rather than loss. They are, in a word, Catholic, and while they are not necessarily writing about religion, their poetry is shot through with the elements and activities of a "cosmos"--in its literal sense of "order"--that contains the possibility of a world with and a world without end.

As a tradition this kind of poetry is not new. The ancients--Hesiod, Homer, Virgil--struggled with it on their own cosmic terms. Dante's Divine Comedy is the poetic paradigm in the Christian world. Among poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Gerard Manley Hopkins, David Jones, and Robert Lowell, just to name a few, have tried to make sense of the order of the world that passes and the order that remains. While Catholic poets maintain a likeness in their search for what one contemporary Catholic poet, Czeslaw Milosz, calls "the resistance of tiny kernels of good,...revealed gradually," they are defined too by the different social and political worlds that have shaped them. As a result, Catholic poetry continues to abide beneath the ebb and flood of other trends because of its inherent desire to embrace rather than dispel the tension between order and difference.

There have been two strains of thought recently on what constitutes what I am calling here Catholic poetry, over and above a poet's assertion that, as a matter of faith, he or she is a Catholic. Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy paved the way in the 1950s and 1960s for a critical vocabulary that would merge a theological worldview with an aesthetic vision. O'Connor is best known for her assertion that the Catholic writer is "incarnational," which is to say revealing mysteries "by describing truthfully what he sees from where he is." Poet and literary biographer Paul Mariani insists that, while O'Connor's notion of the "incarnational" and Walker Percy's belief in the "'touch of God' in our literature seem ambiguous, imprecise, and misunderstood..., it is a dimension of language that seems necessary for any fuller sense of the mystery and multidimensionality of human experience." Arguing that this dimension of poetry has been occluded at times but never lost, Mariani identifies not a strictly Catholic position but a "sacramental language" at work in poets such as Dante, Hopkins, John Berryman, and Richard Wilbur. It is "a language that pays homage to the splendid grittiness of the physical," he writes, "as well as to the splendor and consolation of the spiritual.... Evidence of God's immanent presence ought to be capable of breaking in on us each day, the way air and light and sound do, if we only know what to look and listen for." To look and listen are the first tasks of any poet, and these tactile duties require poets using a "sacramental language" to be engaged first as social beings.

The late poet and critic Denise Levertov, an Englishwoman who emigrated to the United States and found inspiration in William Carlos Williams's own gritty "No ideas but in things," spent the last decade of her life writing about and appreciating poetry of spiritual longing, poetry that, "while it does not attempt to ignore or deny the ocean of crisis in which we swim, is itself 'on pilgrimage'...in search of significance underneath and beyond the succession of temporal events." A self-professed city-dweller, which is to say grounded in the concrete, Levertov, as a reader of poetry, found herself drawn to poems that expressed "a universal dimension that speaks to the inner life. Such poems communicate not just the appearance of phenomena but the presence of spirit within those phenomena." Levertov points to the other side of the Catholic, or incarnational, imagination driving the writer and poet: knowing what to look and listen for must admit the presence of a divine, ineffable spirit. For this reason the poet's looking and listening must be done not just on the level of the social but of the contemplative as well. In other words, the poet must know the internal as well as the external landscapes of experience.

There is a third element to poetry, though, that is Catholic. It is the language and voice of the prophetic. Born out of an acute understanding of the past and a desire to peer fearlessly into the future, the prophetic is different from the social and the contemplative in its insistent call to change. While he or she will require at times the public volume of the social, at times the private reflectiveness of the contemplative, the prophetic poet always asks and demands an answer for the question, "What is to be done?" We see this in the non-Catholic yet still prophetic poetry of writers like Adrienne Rich and Yusef Komunyakaa, with their common projects of equality in gender and race, and their desire to speak for the voiceless. We saw it most recently this winter with Sam Hamill's "Poets against the War" project, a secular effort to rescue poetry from the patriotic for the prophetic. What the Catholic poet adds to the prophetic voice is his or her necessary kinship to the social and the contemplative poets; while there is difference among these three, there remains the larger similarity of belief in a redemptive order.

With these dynamics in mind I want to discuss three Catholic poets who embody, respectively, a voice for the social, the contemplative, and the prophetic: the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, and the American poets Marie Ponsot and Lawrence Joseph. I want to re-introduce them, not so much as a critic but as a reader of poetry who believes that Catholic poets remain essential and artistically alive.

Adam Zagajewski (za-ga-YEV-ski) is often described as a poet who believes in the civility of a democratic society. Though he is rarely identified as Catholic, his autobiographical essay "Two Cities" is prefaced by anecdotes from a Catholic boyhood, with everything from a sense of homelessness (due to the fact that his family left the beautiful city of Lvov, Ukraine, when Zagajewski was four months old for the industrial town of Gliwice, Poland), to a humorous assessment of the nihilism of altar boys. Recently, his prose work, Another Beauty, documents a turn from the childlike sense of the church-as-world to the world-as-church. "[T]hat boy who discovered that you can make up your own prayers, you don't always need a prayerbook, would also come to understand with time that a church isn't the only place where you may find divinity." In this turn, what may be construed superficially as a celebration of freedom from constraint is rather Zagajewski's embrace of social solidarity, a foundational element of the Catholic imagination.

In Zagajewski's recent collection of poetry, Without End: New and Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), one finds a contemporary poet on a pilgrimage through the cities of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Zagajewski's early poems from 1970-75 are similar to his countryman Czeslaw Milosz's epigrammatic work from the same period; they are shorter, philosophical nuggets with titles such as "Truth," "Philosophers," and "Immortality," ideals caught in the reality of a politically repressive world. However, his later collections, Tremor (1985), Canvas (1991), and Mysticism for Beginners (1997), were written while communism crumbled and poets began to move about. They shake off the historical influence of the expatriate (but not the Catholic) Milosz and develop their own vision of what a contemporary civil society might look like, how it might arise in a post-totalitarian society, how it might even endure.

Zagajewski's template is always one in which two dimensions exist side by side, as he writes in the poem "Lava," as if

   Heraclitus and Parmenides are both right... one serene, the other insane;
   God is and God dies; night returns to us in the evening, and the dawn is
   hoary with dew.

What we learn from Zagajewski's poetry is the dynamic of harmony and struggle, beauty and pain, with which the bulk of the poems in Without End are infused. Poems written in the 1970s and 1980s contrast the literal industrial town with the metaphoric eternal city; poems from the late 1990s resonate with a political as well as spiritual freedom as Zagajewski adjusts to his recent home cities of Houston and Paris. This is the classic dynamic between the city and the soul. As in Plato and Augustine, the harmony in which the city exists as the mirror of the soul is, for Zagajewski, the ideal. Yet, for a writer at work on the cusp of two centuries, the struggle remains a painful "not yet." Often Zagajewski's poems will end with a sense of not so much the ambiguity between what is done and what is yet to be done, as the simple reality that, in spite of ambiguity, we endure, as in the final stanza of "Stary Sacz":

   The innkeeper's daughter was so thin that she kept bricks in her backpack
   to outwit the wind when she crossed the viaduct above the train tracks. The
   wind never got her, but other elements weren't idle, especially Nothingness
   and her rich suitor, Mr. Time.

The truth about reality for Zagajewski is that both city and soul are, as he says in "Opus Posthumous," places of "golden aura" and "gray doubt."

Marie Ponsot is an interesting social as well as poetic counterpart to Zagajewski. She too, off and on during her eighty-one years, has lived in two cities--New York and Paris--while documenting travels to many others on her own pilgrimage. Her most recent collection, Springing: New and Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf), spans the more than sixty years she has been writing poetry, during which she has never wavered from a project of revealing a sacredness beneath events, actions, and observations, which, as a matter of course, arise in her daily life. Every Ponsot poem uncovers what Levertov calls the spirit within--a tendency toward the contemplative in the midst of an active public life.

Ponsot's first collection, True Minds, was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Books in 1956, one year after Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsburg's Howl--which is telling. The poems in True Minds are formal and reminiscent of John Donne, yet they are intensely modernist in the ways in which they subtly invoke the French symbolists, back to the poetry of Baudelaire. Indeed, it is Baudelaire's notion of correspondances that Ponsot translates into her own modernism: "In certain, almost supernatural, spiritual states," Baudelaire believed, "the profundity of life can be revealed in all its fullness in any particular thing at which one is looking, however banal. This glimpse of the ordinary becomes the symbol of that profundity."

Ponsot really began her career more as an experimental poet than a religious poet. She then waited twenty-five years before publishing, in a steady order, Admit Impediment (1981), The Green Dark (1988), and The Bird Catcher (1998). In each of these books she continues her formal and aesthetic innovations. Some poems are overtly experimental in form, others settle into the narrative sway of lyrical blank verse. But there is always the omnipresent voice telling of its search for "something / smaller and more human than belief, / some reason to read these thick omens / as good and those outlands as relief." This is the crucial characteristic of Ponsot's work. Hers has been the task of inventing a language of contemplation. During the past four decades of American poetry, so-called confessional poetry put the self on public display, while devotional poetry, with its hackneyed piety, stunted the self. Ponsot's poetry constantly engaged in turning to the creative act as the contemplative act. As she writes playfully in the recent poem "Entranced": "In verse & reverse / word and worm / both turn." In other words, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh. That's the tension Ponsot's poetry articulates; language and poetry are like an incarnate God, at once both divine and touchable.

At the same time, Ponsot resists being unnecessarily obscure. For her, nothing familiar will resist being the subject of a poem. Cities, towns, gardens, children, churches, saints, letters--all points on the map of our common world. Her subjects parallel Zagajewski's Augustinian view of the city and the soul. The parallel is a crucial one, and any reader of Zagajewski's poetry will find a deep affinity with Ponsot's. Ponsot differs from Zagajewski, however, in longing not for the tension between the real and the eternal city that Zagajewski mines as a metaphor, but for the restless heart to find its place of rest. Her eternal city would ultimately be the still point of the soul alone with God. She never begins alone, and she is always admitting to someone else, "I know I owe you everything--Kafka, Mary Butts, The Idea of the Holy, / the way to wear scarves, / to welcome brutal losses." Yet, more often than not, these apostrophes evoke a tone of leave-taking; the contemplative ultimately seeks solitude and the peace that a raindrop in "Crude Cabin: At the Brink of Quiet," suggests "as it turns / into silence that turns / into sound that, spent, / turns into silence again."

In the way that Zagajewski may be considered the chronicler of histories in a civil society, Ponsot is the revealer of mysteries that remain tucked away among the quotidian. It is Augustine's "things of this world that love calls us to" that Ponsot celebrates; for Ponsot the things of the world have the power in their simplicity to transform, to be sacramental. And she has always known that the sacramental never denies the social. During the 1950s, she worked at the Catholic Worker; she has translated the radio plays of Paul Claudel; she was poetry editor of this magazine; and she has raised seven children. Ponsot simply seems to have made the choice--either by temperament or calling--to err on the side of the contemplative and whatever transformation that may bring.

In early September of last year, I went down to the West Village to meet with poet Lawrence Joseph. Joseph is a professor of law at Saint John's University, a native of Detroit, a grandchild of Lebanese and Syrian immigrants, a resident of Manhattan since 1981, and an Eastern Catholic of the Maronite rite. He lives a block from what was the World Trade Center, near a neighborhood known in the early part of the twentieth century as "Little Syria." I had come with questions about his poetry and identity as a Catholic. Our conversation quickly turned toward a perceived change in the voice and role of poetry, especially as we talked literally in the shadow of September 11, and six months away from a new war. What does it mean now to put the qualifier Catholic before poetry?

"I think we need to start talking about how narration has changed," Joseph said, "how the ways people describe and talk about the world have changed. Our society is so increasingly complex and diverse that collectively experienced events have to change our language because they change us. Yet that change still comes about in poetry through the larger motifs of history and the self. Catholic poets have always understood this."

If any voice can manage the challenge of the language and narrative yet to come, it may be Lawrence Joseph's. Joseph is the author of three acclaimed books of poems, Shouting at No One (Pittsburgh, 1983), Curriculum Vitae (Pittsburgh, 1988), and Before Our Eyes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), and also a book of prose, Lawyerland (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), which has been praised for its formal innovation. Joseph has made his way in the world as a professional in the manner of Williams Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. Poetry has always been for him not a livelihood but a compelling insistence to write. For that reason he has never lost the sort of idealism and pragmatism that both drives a language and gets it heard.

Joseph's poems are the kind that run through your mind on a sleepless night. As they have with Zagajewski's poetry, critics have used the words "social," "authentic," and "real" to describe Joseph. Unlike Zagajewski, however, Joseph reminds me of the prophets Amos and Jeremiah. The language of Joseph's poetry is, at a fundamental level, committed to the prophetic, insisting on the importance of poetry to instigate action. Yet within the poetry there is a constant awareness of the poem as a medium in which action is tentative at best. Joseph writes as though on the verge of both resistance and sage-like resolve. His poetry has a certain off-centeredness that is slightly ironic. The voices of the poems suggest a restless, radical outsider, one who has no time for those who, even for good reasons, decide that the social or political struggle is futile. Establishing a profession as a lawyer, living his life first in his native Detroit and later in New York, Joseph weighs the discernible desire to speak out, as if each time he writes he is making, in the old Jesuit way, a particular examination of conscience for what's next: "nothing exists except through the senses / (amid poisons from Bayonne blown / over the harbor)."

Like Zagajewski and Ponsot, Joseph accepts his Catholic identity without apology. He sees in it what William Carlos Williams, in In The American Grain, considered Catholicism's best quality: a sense of touch that defies the abstraction of the Puritan. It is, as he writes, "East and west, converged expression, / analytical instincts, erupted harmonies." Writing from within the historical moment, Joseph insists on poetry's constant embrace of the both/and: both as the necessary voice within a society, and as the hard, refracted language of the self. One must "look," then speak--but one must speak, Joseph insists. "It's there. Except to plead you begin / again, as soon as possible." And that urgency is at the heart of what I mean by prophetic.

A number of poems in Joseph's most recent book, Before Our Eyes, contain references to the first Gulf War, and are eerily prescient in our contemporary climate because of their unflinching capacity to present what demands a public, moral hearing. His poem "Some Sort of Chronicler I Am" admits freely to his "mixing / emotional perceptions and digressions"; the poet knows that the reader would rather he change the subject when the talk turns to political and moral responsibility, "(I know how to change the subject)," then continues to hammer away at the evidence of a distorted, if not disintegrating, society that has lost its commitment to a collective good. His new poems have the same qualities, and yet seem to embark (with some of that sage-like resolve) on the new task of writing a narrative of our present, shifting, social condition, such as in "A Style, A Groove, A Fate":

   The sky blue, almost burst. Leaves burnished

   yellow. Nearing Liberty, Liberty and Church Streets. So it happened

   in early November, which is to say a story took place.

Which is to say the story of Catholic poets today has to be read with attention to more than the surface markers of institutional or professional identities. An imagination that is Catholic shapes the work of those poets who are compelled to speak individually within the social sphere, drawn to listen contemplatively in the midst of being creatively active, and prepared to bear witness in an appropriate time. I have attempted here to reveal within Catholic poetry what Denise Levertov has called "some affinities of content," because it is ultimately the reader's own desire to seek out a poet and journey with him or her on the basis of possible affinities that creates a belief in and understanding of, as Lawrence Joseph suggests, a view of history and the self. That is also how the story continues.