photo credit: Coral Gomez

To all of those out there who have been sending me comments: I'm sorry, I just found them! I don't like ignoring people and it's still better simply to email. The address is somewhere in the site if you want to find it.

That's not what I want to write about today, though. A friend has written to ask why I chose to self-publish my anthology of poetry (Hierophany: Poems of the Sacred). The truth is that many people had been asking me for a collection, and I was having no luck with the small independent publishers here in Canada. It's discouraging to send your work out consistently and have it come back with "Lovely work. Unfortunately it's not right for our company right now" letters. I understand that this is part of the writing process, and I am not really as peevish as I sound to myself as I type, but...well, part of me is a little peevish!

I think it's not entirely because I am dubious about what else I will need to do to turn "pro", so to speak. Poetry continues to be a passion, and I continue to read other poets widely as well as occasionally getting up the gumption to submit to things. However, I am gradually recognizing a few things about getting published: one, the field is capricious. It's often just a bit of a crapshoot: who receives your poem, who reads it, who shortlists it, who just doesn't like your style or the way you put words together. Another reason is that I am rather cheerful by nature: I don't write a lot of I'm-depressed-woe-is-me poetry. Yet it strikes me that at least some of the post-modernist ethos is to revel in the dismal (or perhaps, as one of the Baha'i prayers puts it, to "dwell on the unpleasant things of life".) I am usually not a "dweller". Yes, I like the contemplative life, and yes, I tend towards the serious, but no, I am not a dweller.

My poems tend, however, to be a little "spiritual", and I think that doesn't go over well in 2010. I don't mean this in a self-help-guru-I-have-all-the-answers kind of way. I'm not (self-helpish), I don't (guru), and I don't want to pretend to know more than I do. But I do tend to want to lean towards the spiritual. I wonder if I should explain that a little?

There are some classic, and in some cases, quite popular writers (Rumi, Mary Avison, Lorna Crozier, Mary Oliver, Rilke) whose voices are spiritual. They may not be commenting directly on the spirit (although sometimes they do) but they imbue the words with the transcendent nature of longing, which to me is a spiritual condition. Exploring God, or whatever you might wish to call the Creator or the Universe or the Magic-that-makes-us-alive, is an essential component of their relationship with the world. It's beyond time-and-space. It's soul work. I love it; I love reading a poem by Rumi or Oliver and discovering that even back then, even now, there is someone who speaks my language and who has left letters to the world about spirit, in poetic form. This is also intimately connected to beauty, both in the Big Letter Beauty sense and in the small, macrocosmic, delight-in-the-beauty-of-the-world beauty. The poetic ability, it seems to me, is to take the time and place you find yourself surrounded by and make it, through your words, a time and place anyone can enter with you through the magic of your words, descriptive, narrative, and honest.

So if I am to write, I want to write from the spirit. And in this day and age, it's really hard to do well. Sometimes I hit it, and some of the poems in my own collection are ones which I feel leave a glimpse of the unblemished spirit within me, the part which has been untouched by all the mistakes I've made. For this is the thing: it's the human condition, it seems, to make mistakes and have regrets (or at least something like) but to dwell on those is also to deny the beauty of the power of redemption. And trust me, redemption is not a popular word in modern-day poetry, really, although there are a few authors who write themselves into that sacred space through beauty. That's the poet I'd like to be, and gradually, through patience, prayer, and some perseverance, she's emerging. I hear her voice whispering within, sometimes softly, and I want to recognize her and allow her to speak.

Annie Dillard did this in prose, of course, with that amazing work, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, whom I've just re-read, kindled spirit throughout Women Who Run With the Wolves...and Barbara Kingsolver consistently does it, works through words and the deep longing of the world to create beauty. Their works are redemptions, and they are not alone. And their poetry is lovely, too...but, there's something hesitant, perhaps, when we try to understand the numinous. I find that I have to wait for it, and sometimes it just flows into me like heat. Something kindled. Crozier said this; I listened to her at the Ottawa Writers' Festival a few years ago and she reminded us of the gift of immanence. Yes.

This is also kind of why I blog, too: not just to send letters to my parents (although that too) but to leave an exploration out there, something for both friends and strangers to ruminate about and perhaps share right back. So I published myself because I got impatient! And when you hope that what you have said can kindle something for someone else, find that resonance, then you want the words out there. If poets are given a gift (even minor poets like me!) then it's best to share it, and sometimes you just have to get it out there whether the literary powers-that-be think it's worthwhile or not. One acquaintance reminded me that there is value in following your passion.

So here's someone who said all of this better:

Word Fog

Words, even if they come from
the soul, hide the soul, as fog

rising off the sea covers the sea,
the coast, the fish, the pearls.

It's noble work to build coherent
philosophical discourses, but

they block out the sun of truth.
See God's qualities as an ocean,

this world as foam on the purity
of that. Brush away and look

through the alphabet to essence,
as you do the hair covering your

beloved's eyes. Here's the mystery:
this intricate, astonishing world

is proof of God's presence even as
it covers the beauty. One flake

from the wall of a gold mine does
not give much idea what it's like

when the sun shines in and turns
the air and the workers golden.

Rumi

A couple of years ago, I wrote an elegy for Joan Doran. Today, I write one for her husband, Bob, who died today. I cannot say that I knew this couple well; we were related through marriage. They were my sister's parents-in-law. From time to time I visited them, over the years, and have met all of the brothers (there are six) and most of their families; I guess you could say that they are extended families. There are ties that western kinship systems don't really have words for; maybe that's a reflection of our low expectations regarding connectedness. What do you call your sister's mother and father-in-law? They are my nephews' and niece's grandparents, my grand-nieces great-grandparents, and were loved by more than just their blood relations. I loved Bob and Joan Doran, not in a terrible, grieving way, but in a we-are-connected way. I loved Joan for her grace and charm and kindness; I loved Bob for his exacting and meticulous appreciation of the best things in life. I loved them because they upheld, sometimes in an unconscious way, the principles of truth and beauty.

Their grandchildren are my nephews and niece. I visited in their home, I cooked them some meals in the days when Joan was becoming more frail, and I liked listening to their stories, especially Bob's stories of the war, which he could repeat as though the 1940s and the war in Europe had happened yesterday. Bob was a veteran, one of the few remaining in the world who had helped to fight the scourge of the Nazi era. I was proud of him.

I remember accompanying him, my sister and her husband, and some of their family, to the War Museum in Ottawa. We wandered through those grand hallways and, as someone who has taught a generation of students about that war, in history classrooms, it was like walking through a diorama of the Grade Eleven textbook. The sections on World Wars One and Two brought to visual memory the names and places I had required hundreds of students to memorize: the Battle of the Somme, Vimy Ridge, the Phony War, the Battle for the Atlantic. The words of Winston Churchill are not the only ones immortalized there; everywhere there are comments from soldiers about their experiences. One of the most visceral exhibits re-creates a World War trench, complete with facsimiles of dying soldiers lying face down in muddy bogs. It is eerily lit and a testament to a time now almost a century old. I have posted one photo of the many I took on that occasion, including my sister with her dearly-loved father-in-law.

Today a fine man passed on. Bob Doran raised a family after surviving World War Two from a cold ship in the North Atlantic. He came home to Ottawa and married Joan. If I recall his story correctly, he saw her step from a streetcar and admired the turn of her ankle. It's a good beginning, I suppose, for a family of six strapping sons. They worked hard, the two of them, to build a family with high values and morals. Their sons inherited their determination, their world view, their high expectations. They also inherited a little proclivity for rabble rousing...ah, there are some stories. But those are not mine to tell!

They inherited the arts. Bob Doran was a meticulous painter, and he could build anything. The sheen of perfection was on all his work, from beautifully carved and painted Canada geese to exquisitely-rendered oil paintings. He also loved music: most of the sons are musicians of a professional calibre, and that gene appears to have continued into the next generation, as well. His grandsons Tim and Mitch are both excellent music-makers, born with a natural and sometimes almost uncanny talent. They owe some of this legacy to their grandfather, to whom they must say goodbye today.

If I were to write an elegy for Bob Doran, picturing him, as I do, joining his beloved Joan in a world beyond pain and cancer and Alzheimers, and surrounded by the most extraordinary beauties of a heaven he believed in, it would be this one. Joan has been in my prayers each day since her passing; today, Bob joins her in an homage to a couple of ordinary people who, in their own steadfast and formidable way, were extraordinary. God go with you, Bob, and take our love to Joan.

Luthier

for Bob Doran

There's a craft to life.
There's perfection in its building,
in the strokes across fine grains
of fallen trees,
in the plucking of a string.

When you hold something you've made
in your arms:
a son,
a grandchild,
a picture,
a piece of wood carved
as preciously as any of these,

when you touch the divine
in His own creation,
offer prayers and blessings,
when you believe that right is right
and live it with all your might,

then the just reward,
the right outcome
is not fairy tales or pipe dreams,
angels and minstrels at some
imaginary pearly gates:

it's to find yourself
surrounded. There's a wife
in her beauty,
opening her arms in welcome;
there's incantatory music
all around you,
tall steeples of gold and gems,
Irish roads riding you to
this new country,
this beauteous whirligig of eternity.

Here you are, Grandpa Doran,
there you are waving
from a ship sailing
not through angry, war-worn
waters but through
seas made of music.
Here you are, Grandpa,
holding hands with Grandma
from that island beyond the sun
where joy waves like wings
and you create the music.

You are the luthier, Grandpa.
If prayers were wings,
we would be flying alongside,
exultant in the salt spray
of light, this new life,
yours to play in pride,
and ours to dream, and ride.