Poetry and the Sacred: The Poetics of Joy as a Transformative Pathway Through the World
~ On My Mind with Bracha K. Sharp ~
~ Guest Post by Bracha K. Sharp ~
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about poetry in terms of the sacred, and the ways in which joy and gratitude can help to shape our experiences, both as poets and as readers.
What I mean by this is not necessarily some ambiguous foray into the metaphysical. Poetry and the sacred does not have to be limited to one pathway or another and its aim need not only be towards the euphoric.
Rather, I would like to look at poetry and the sacred in terms of a closeness with poetry, a bond with it, and to look at it, as if through an observing lens. In this way, we may start to define what such poetry might encompass—what it might be, what it might come to be to writers and readers, alike, and what purposes it might serve.
I think that there is a danger here, in terms of oversimplifying what the poetics of joy might mean. For such a small word, joy can encompass large emotions, can hold a bounty of meanings beyond its three simple letters. I’m guessing that many might be thinking of the jollity of limericks or nursery rhymes, rhyming poems, or even the poems of the Romantics when I talk about joy and gratitude.
Some may be thinking, too, of the sort of euphoric poetic experiences expanded upon in the poetry of the Romantics, which almost diminishes the very goal of the types of poems to which I’m referring.
Why would a sort of diminishment occur in poems which actively seek to talk about joy, gratitude, the holy, and encounters with the Divine (or however one would want to put it, for themselves)?
While I do think that the canon of poems handed down to us from the Romantics, for example, discusses, in depth, the transformative powers of the sacred, as well as encounters with the Divine and with overflowing joy, I am theorizing that it is not necessarily only the poetics of joy and gratitude which they were writing about, but the poetics of the euphoric, as well.
Joy, gratitude, euphoria—what does it matter, anyway? Aren’t they basically all the same thing? To my way of thinking, they are each stops along the pathway on which positivity is founded, but there are slight differences. However, euphoria and beyond seems to be the peak towards which the Romantics were oftentimes traveling. In many of their poems, it is not enough to stop at full-flung joy; they seem to redefine or reimagine what the scope of joy and gratitude might actually be, thus transforming it into the all-encompassing feeling of euphoria.
Keats is a good example of the idea of euphoric joy. Ironically, his work often exchanges the euphoria of the life force for the euphoria of escaping from the hardships of life. Such poems seem to interestingly take a turn into a bid for death, if not an outright longing. For Keats, joy is but one level of experiencing the natural world, but there is also a level beyond the euphoric, the ecstasy of leaving behind any pain—even if the world is still comprised of both joy and pain. There is a turning away from the chance of deep, powerful joy, because there is also the chance of deep, powerful pain. In this way, euphoria becomes, instead, a way to leave the world.
As Keats writes, “Bright star! Would I were steadfast as thou art…Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death.” Keats goes even one step further, expressing in “Ode to a Nightingale:” “Now more than ever seems it rich to die/To cease upon the midnight with no pain/While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad/In such an ecstasy!”
Fair enough—this is not a poet who lived long (he died at age twenty-five of tuberculosis and, most likely, sadly knew that he was going to die from it). The other Romantics, too, were often touched by grief, trauma, and sadness in their own lives. This likely heightened their desires to write about the natural world and their places in it, their encounters with the Divine or their search for it, and the ways in which pure, unadulterated joy can be a transformative experience.
Of course, writing about joy of any stripe can be an effective way for the poet to draw closer to the sacred and/or to gratitude. And often, poets and readers may want to connect with this emotion, in general. Thus, poetry which employs these types of emotions can be looked at as both a catharsis and a celebration. We need more of that in our world, certainly—although that’s not to say that writing about or from a place of heaviness and sadness is to be avoided, when necessary.
Rather, what I’d like to propose here, is that joyful poetry is not necessarily the same as light or non-meaningful verse. In fact, poems which contain seemingly lighter emotions of joy and gratitude may allow both the poet and reader to more effectively cope with difficult emotions. This can happen via the act of engaging with joy, the sacred, gratitude, and the Divine. In this way, the poet creates a semi-distance from the trauma that would otherwise be overwhelming. From this calmer, more focused and built-up state, poetry becomes a generative way of healing.
Let’s take the test case of Wordsworth. While many of his poems encompass the joys of being present and in the moment, particularly in terms of engaging with nature in one form or another, there is often a deeper, more melancholic undercurrent. Often these may be themes regarding the loss of childhood, the inescapable passage of time, and the desire to bring the exalted past into the joy and beauty of the present. Together, the best of the past and present collide, providing a safer foundation for the future.
For instance, in “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud,” we can see a bit of what I have been referring to above—that of the process of the poet and reader first choosing to engage with joy, the sacred, and the Divine. We start out from a semi-detached view, and then move onto something that delights the poet, and thereby his readers—the natural world at peace and in harmony.
“I wandered lonely as a cloud/That floats on high o'er vales and hills,/When all at once I saw a crowd,/A host, of golden daffodils…Continuous as the stars that shine/And twinkle on the milky way...” The keyword here is “continuous.” So even if the poet’s world is in disarray, nature, at least, holds a key regarding constancy, thereby enabling him to console and reorient himself. It is not exaggerating, perhaps, to say that when Wordsworth concludes his poem that “For oft, when on my couch I lie/In vacant or in pensive mood,/They flash upon that inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude,” he was using a coping mechanism to return his nervous system to a state of calm.
Imagining this peaceful scene allows Wordsworth and his readers to benefit from the imagistic powers of poetry. Interestingly, neuroscience today confirms the beneficial practice of using visualizations. By visualizing or creating positive memories of the past, one can influence the brain to strengthen old pathways or establish new ones. In effect, this is what Wordsworth was (perhaps unintentionally) doing.
The other day when I was at the park, two toddler siblings approached me as I was sitting on a bench next to the park’s free lending library. I watched as they hung from their elbows on the bottommost bookshelf. The little boy playfully chattered and shouted into the empty shelf and his little sister followed along. I laughed as they had fun with this now-empty echo chamber, enjoying their creativity and play, and their utter absorption in doing so. I began to recognize that it was a long time since an empty bookshelf had become anything to me other than a place that was awaiting the new storage of books and I marveled at their instant ability to turn it into something completely new and unrecognizable. For years, I had only affixed a certain meaning to that structure—bookshelves are for books, and that is pretty much that.
Afterwards, still enchanted by their play, I watched as the little boy plucked bits of dirt and leaves from the ground, his sister joining in, as if they didn’t have a care in the world, and as if they didn’t hear anything else outside of their own little sphere.
They didn’t—such careful attunement required only the plastic baggie that the boy held, stuffing little bits of what I thought were debris—and what he gleefully thought of as treasure—into the bag. Picking up a branch, he declared that it was the biggest stick he’d ever seen. Really, it was pretty small. But to someone of his size, I could see why this seemingly ordinary find was huge. Watching the world through their eyes, the everyday became filled with gratitude and joy. The diligence and attunement with which they studied the natural world became an encounter with the sanctity of life, the beauty of the Divine.
While they weren’t thinking these things, it was my ability to perceive what they, in their innocence were hitting on—the truth of the moment; of being present. Later on, they approached me, having seen me smile at them. For about half an hour, we were thus occupied—bookshelves, books, dirt, grass, cats, my water bottle and keys.
This experience especially reminded me of Mary Oliver and her poetry. I don’t think that one can easily talk about modern poetry that reflects upon gratitude, joy, and the sacred without mentioning Oliver as a master of her craft.
Almost like a tour guide, Oliver guides us both through the natural world and through the experiences of what might be called the more mundane world, treating us to a crash-course in how to best navigate its complexities. Acknowledging that there are often troubles and frustrations in daily life, she nevertheless persists in her vision of gratitude and awareness. Such attunement often leads to joy and fulfillment, and it is that which allows us to grasp the sacred. Sometimes this attunement flows in the direction of the Divine, other times it flows in the direction of the awesome responsibility that humans have towards the natural world and to themselves—both of which are often seen by Oliver to be the fulfilment of something sacred, in-and-of-themselves. It is not enough to solely exist in this world, she posits, but we must also fill it with our gratitude, by being attuned to both the smallest and the largest of happenings.
Just as the smallest things were so important to the children in my example above, Oliver’s recognition of even the seemingly smallest gifts in life looms large in the vocabulary of her belief system. As she says in her poem, “Everything:”
“I want to make poems that say right out, plainly,/what I mean, that don’t go looking for the/laces of elaboration, puffed sleeves. I want to/keep close and use often words like/heavy, heart, joy, soon, and to cherish/the question mark and her bold sister/the dash. I want to write with quiet hands. I/want to write while crossing the fields that are/fresh with daisies and everlasting and the/ordinary grass. I want to make poems while thinking of/the bread of heaven and the/cup of astonishment; let them be/songs in which nothing is neglected,/not a hope, not a promise. I want to make poems/that look into the earth and the heavens/and see the unseeable…”
To learn how to appreciate both the small and the large is to grow and to level up. To learn from them is also to learn how to interpersonally navigate life. Responsibility and stewardship towards nature and ourselves becomes possible, especially because of this cultivated awareness, this extra-sensory perception and attunement.
Joy can bring gratitude and vice versa. Not only that, but to level up—in other words, to gain a deeper, more meaningful understanding of what it is that we are appreciating and why—is to connect to the sanctity of these moments, the minute everyday occurrences which Oliver feels can help propel and steady us in our life’s missions. It is also the cultivation of such a practice which allows these moments—something as small as watching an ant and as big as looking up towards the cosmos and all it entails—to endure. Sometimes, the sacred surprises us and, more often than not, it seems to me that Oliver suggests we must strengthen our powers of attunement, by consistently and insistently scavenging for such occurrences.
And while it seems that this practice must have always added an extra layer of sanctity and joy to Oliver’s everyday life, it can also be said that it grounded her and even allowed her to cling to stability in an often very unstable world. To my mind, her poetry often acts not as an escape-route from everyday realities, but rather as an anchor which reflects its deepest truths. In the midst of chaos and even trauma, nature and life does go on.
While Keats may have seen escapism as a form of accessing the sacred in his poem which I referenced above, Wordsworth seems to have seen the sacred as a form of actively generating positive memories, overlaid on a sometimes harsh world. Oliver, though, straightforwardly engages the reader not in the future of Keats or in the evocatively remembered past of Wordsworth. Rather, she holds us in the present—and in the practice of perfecting one’s experiences in the world before going on to what lies beyond.
The late poet, Mark Strand, who was a contemporary of Mary Oliver’s, can be seen as a bridge between Oliver and Keats. Like Keats, Strand wishes to escape towards some greater joy and relief that lies beyond the here-and-now. However, like Oliver, he wishes to firmly plant himself in the gratitude of the present. Thus, Strand seeks to acknowledge a certain amount of gratitude for the everyday experiences that he encounters, while also tremendously grappling with how to hold onto such gifts.
This duality is perhaps what makes Strand’s poems align so well with today’s contemporary poetry which seeks to focus on the topics of gratitude and the sacred. This is because much of his work is about an awareness of engaging with gratitude and the desire to hold onto it. On the one hand, he is afraid that the experiences he has encountered with nature, humanity, and within himself are simply ephemeral. However, he is also determined to hold onto them. Through the act of writing poetry, Strand succeeds in his quest to capture what is transitory and turn it into remembered permanence.
What marks his poetry as Keatsian are Strand’s feelings about mortality, and that the writing of poetry is what creates a sense of immortality. While Keats uses poetry to escape to a higher, more elevated realm, Strand uses poetry to maintain his grasp of what he feels are only fleeting experiences. It is his ambivalence regarding the passage of time and yet the desire to keep the moments that he deems sacred, alive, that sets him apart from Keats’s more extreme measures.
These other ways of escape can be seen in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightengale” where he says: “… a drowsy numbness pains/My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,/Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains/…O for a beaker full of the warm South,/Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,/With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,/…That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,/…Away! away! for I will fly to thee,/Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,/But on the viewless wings of Poesy…” For Strand, though, his poetry marks his efforts to move through the world by his own force of will. By doing so, he can, as he states in one of his most famous poems, “…keep things whole.”
If we take a look at the poem “Keeping Things Whole” we can see that for Strand, poetry is as much about the process, as it is about the result. Strand feels that what he is able to express via the written word can lead him to a state of wholeness, which allows for the integration of both stability and gratitude. From there, even the sacred can play a role, but the poet, himself, must at least have a hand in it. As he writes, “In a field/I am the absence/of field./This is/always the case./Wherever I am/I am what is missing…We all have reasons/for moving./I move/to keep things whole.” Note how the poet is, at first, actually the absence of something until he, himself, has a hand in the creation of his own stability. Once he has achieved this, he can bridge the link between the ideals of Keats’s escapism towards euphoria, and the here-and-now-attunement of Mary Oliver.
Unlike Strand, Oliver does not necessarily feel a need to keep moving. Instead, it is her own intuition and practiced observations which allow for the experiences of attunement to come to her. She can allow the present to unfold by being still. Strand’s end-goal focuses more on his attempts to reach a state where all things are in alignment. While Oliver is able to tap into both external and internal sources of sanctity, Strand feels that he must create such a connection primarily from his own internal resources. By continuously walking and creating, Strand is, in effect, both participant and creator in investing his world with sanctity. This, in turn, leads to gratitude and a deep appreciation for each moment-by-moment experience. Only then can the sanctity of life surround him, and thus be interwoven into his poems.
What saves Oliver, both in this world and the next, is the knowledge of a life well-lived and loved, and thus one that has connected her to nature, the sacred, and G-D. What saves Strand is the hope of finding meaningful moments, many of which become sacred experiences. By transposing them into the written word, Strand hopes to retain his vision of that moment—both sacred and yet fleeting, at the same time. For him, though, unlike for Oliver, there is never a certainty that each of these sacred moments will last.
This makes for an interesting reading experience. In one sense, Strand moves his readers forward and, in another sense, he holds them back. Firstly, while he allows his readers to participate in his journey and in the building-up of his world, it only leads up to a certain point. There is some level of reserve in his work, placing him somewhat uncomfortably between Keats and Oliver. And secondly, while he does not choose full escapism on the one hand, nor full personal disclosure on the other, he is left to wrestle with how to harness such lasting experiences of gratitude. Strand cannot yet fully engage in the unlimited visions of gratitude, joy, and the Divine, which color Oliver’s world, nor in the calming overlay of a Wordsworthian world. Thus, we are left to enter his experiences, somewhat, through a side-door.
Another one of his poems, “The Garden,” is a good example of this. Almost as if we are looking at a portrait, as viewed from afar, Strand plays on the idea of an Edenic space held in time, but also one that cannot last. Although he is able to grasp the gratitude of a moment in time “before it disappears,” as he says in the poem, his sense of loneliness and separateness are still reflected here. “It shines in the garden,/in the white foliage of the chestnut tree,/in the brim of my father’s hat/as he walks on the gravel./In the garden suspended in time/my mother sits in a redwood chair:/light fills the sky,/the folds of her dress,/the roses tangled beside her…” Here, the images encompass both the tangibility of people and objects, the objects given center stage as much as his family members. And yet, although he is aware of this abundance, he is afraid that such beautiful experiences are only passing. He cannot make of his life a lasting garden, full of blooming flowers, nor can he hold onto it as a lasting gift. He must enjoy snatches of this opportunity from afar, which to him then make up a whole, if transient, experience.
I think it’s both nice and very important that many of today’s poets have continued to write thematically on the subjects of gratitude and joy and its connections to the sacred. In doing so, these contemporary poets seem to focus on very specific experiences in their lives, as compared to the more universal concerns of past poets. While many contemporary poets do focus on certain broader themes like nature, religion, and mortality, there is also the practice of focusing on more personalized concerns. This then becomes a focal point in the poem. The challenge then becomes how to write about these highly individualized experiences, without losing the substance of more universal themes.
From Marc Alan Di Martino’s poem about nature’s majesty and power and the sacred duty that we have to find both gratitude and hope through immersing ourselves in it and bearing witness* to Julie Weiss’s meditation on the power of what revivifies us in the form of finding gratitude in both the mundane and the transcendental, such poetry is alive and well. Poet Betsy Mars writes about the ephemerality of past experiences, but ones that become sacred and thus more highly elevated, through her ability to savor each part of an overall experience. And Eva Eliav’s poetry often centers both on what we may gain and lose in just a moment—but how, nevertheless, certain interpersonal relationships can become a sacred form of healing, even through times that test one’s endurance (Falling, a Leaf and Poems from “Corporeal”: A Collection in Progress). Finally, poet Anannya Uberoi also writes here about a moment in time, but one that becomes exalted all the more, as the seemingly ordinary becomes ever more sacred.
Anannya Uberoi – A Textbook Afternoon (Jaggery Lit)
Anannya Uberoi – Something grand about grandmother (West Trestle Review)
In the end, I feel that these are just a few examples of poets who have explored the poetics of the sacred, gratitude, and joy and who have done so in their own unique ways. Even so, I have encountered a lot of other poets who either grapple with and/or explore these same themes, from Dante to Dickinson, to Robert Frost and Billy Collins and so on. I truly believe that we can benefit from reading both past and more modern poets who have written and are writing in this vein. And oftentimes, it is these particular explorations and emotions which can form the basis of transformation, from trauma to joy, from grief to consolation, and from a singular story to the universal, the story of life.
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*Note: Please also refer to these poems on the ONE ART website for a few more examples of poets today who are, in their own ways, writing and reflecting upon the themes of hope, joy, love, gratitude, and the sacred:
Serving Coffee in the ICU by Madeleine French
Journal note by Paulette Laufer
Three Poems by Jessica Whipple
Waxing Gibbous by Daye Phillippo
Home-Cooked Meal by Vitalia Strait
Hungry for Nostalgia by Beth Dulin
Autumn by Laura Ann Reed
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Bracha K. Sharp was published in the American Poetry Review, the Birmingham Arts Journal, Sky Island Journal, ONE ART: a journal of poetry (where she was a nominee for ONE ART’s nominations for Orison Book's Best Spiritual Literature [formerly The Orison Anthology]), Wild Roof Journal, The Closed Eye Open, Rogue Agent, and the Thimble Literary Magazine, among others. She placed first in the national Hackney Literary Awards; the poem subsequently appeared in the Birmingham Arts Journal and she was a finalist in the New Millennium Writings Poetry Awards. She received a 2019 Moonbeam Children’s Book Awards Silver Medal for her debut picture book. As her writing notebooks seem to end up finding their way into different rooms, she is always finding both old pieces to revisit and new inspirations to work with. She is a current reader for the Baltimore Review. You can find out more about her writing by visiting: www.brachaksharp.com