October 13: "The Great American Poem," Driving Downpour, Marquette Art Awards

It rained pretty much all day.  A hard, driving downpour.  It was the kind of rain that makes you not want to get out of bed or brush your teeth or do anything productive.  Except maybe read a good book.  Something with a dog or star-crossed lovers.

I did not not do any of that.  (Read that sentence over a few times.  It makes sense.)  I played two church services.  Took my dog for a muddy walk then gave her a bath.  Went grocery shopping.  Attended the 2024 Marquette Art Awards.  Got a little drunk.

If I were a Stephen King character, I'd probably be on about page 50 and a zombie would crash through my living room window to eat my brains about now.  But I'm not a protagonist in a horror novel.  I'm a poet who had really busy Sunday.

Billy Collins isn't a character in a novel or a novelist, either . . . 

The Great American Poem

by: Billy Collins

If this were a novel,

it would begin with a character,
a man alone on a southbound train
or a young girl on a swing by a farmhouse.

And as the pages turned, you would be told
that it was morning or the dead of night,
and I, the narrator, would describe
for you the miscellaneous clouds over the farmhouse

and what the man was wearing on the train
right down to his red tartan scarf,
and the hat he tossed onto the rack above his head,
as well as the cows sliding past his window.

Eventually—one can only read so fast—
you would learn either that the train was bearing
the man back to the place of his birth
or that he was headed into the vast unknown,

and you might just tolerate all of this
as you waited patiently for shots to ring out
in a ravine where the man was hiding
or for a tall, raven-haired woman to appear in a doorway.

But this is a poem, not a novel,
and the only characters here are you and I,
alone in an imaginary room
which will disappear after a few more lines,

leaving us no time to point guns at one another
or toss all our clothes into a roaring fireplace.
I ask you: who needs the man on the train
and who cares what his black valise contains?

We have something better than all this turbulence
lurching toward some ruinous conclusion.
I mean the sound that we will hear
as soon as I stop writing and put down this pen.

I once heard someone compare it
to the sound of crickets in a field of wheat
or, more faintly, just the wind
over that field stirring things that we will never see.

I really enjoy being around creatives.  Dancers.  Educators.  Painters.  Jewelry makers.  Poets.  That's my scene.  As a poet, I can vouch for the fact that artists don't really get acknowledged or celebrated very much.  That's why I love attending the Marquette Art Awards.  It's a time to reward great people and organizations for just being really damn cool.

This year, a poet friend received the award for Writer of the Year.  I couldn't have been more thrilled for her.  Generally, poets don't receive a whole lot of recognition, unless your last name happens to be Collins or Angelou.  The last time the Nobel Prize in Literature was given to a poet was in 2020, when Louise Glück won.  Before that, you'd have to go back to 2011 (Tomas Tranströmer), and then to 1996 (Wislawa Szymborska).  Like I said, poets are the redheaded stepchildren on the literary world.

So this evening's ceremony was a really great ending to the weekend.  Saint Marty got to hang out with some of his best friends, drink, and eat cheese and crackers.  It was like being at a Diddy party without the sex, drugs, rape, or pedophilia.  

December 3: Appreciate His Stature, Louise Glück, "Doe After a Blizzard"

 Merton becomes obsessed with William Blake . . .

I remember with what indecision I went on into the spring, trying to settle the problem of a subject with finality. Yet the thing worked itself out quite suddenly: so suddenly that I do not remember what brought it about. One day I came running down out of the Carpenter Library, and passed along the wire fences by the tennis courts, in the sun, with my mind made up that there was only one possible man in the eighteenth century for me to work on: the one poet who had least to do with his age, and was most in opposition to everything it stood for. 

I had just had in my hands the small, neatly printed Nonesuch Press edition of the Poems of William Blake, and I now knew what my thesis would probably be. It would take in his poems and some aspect of his religious ideas. 

In the Columbia bookstore I bought the same edition of Blake, on credit. (I paid for it two years later.) It had a blue cover, and I suppose it is now hidden somewhere in our monastery library, the part to which nobody has access. And that is all right. I think the ordinary Trappist would be only dangerously bewildered by the “Prophetic Books,” and those who still might be able to profit by Blake, have a lot of other things to read that are still better. For my own part, I no longer need him. He has done his work for me: and he did it very thoroughly. I hope that I will see him in heaven. 

But oh, what a thing it was to live in contact with the genius and the holiness of William Blake that year, that summer, writing the thesis! I had some beginning of an appreciation of his greatness above the other men of his time in England: but from this distance, from the hill where I now stand, looking back I can really appreciate his stature. 

William Blake died an unknown prophet.  A poet who walked and spoke with angels every day.  On his deathbed, he sang songs and celebrated.  It was years after his death that his reputation grew and he came to be recognized as the poetic giant that he is regarded as today.  When Merton becomes fevered with Blake's work, Blake was still regarded with suspicion because of his radical religious beliefs.  To this day, William Blake is still misunderstood by some, misinterpreted by others.

Tonight, I led a workshop based on the poetry of Louise 

Glück. She is a poet whom I've admired for years, but I've never really understood her. Her poetry is dense, full of mysterious emotion. Even after spending a few weeks preparing for this evening, I'm still not sure I get her.

But I'm not sure getting Louise Glück is the point. One critic said this about her work: "We feel before we understand, and we understand very little." That pretty much sums it up for me. I sit here, feeling much, understanding little. Like William Blake's contemporaries. However, I can imagine Louise Glück consorting with angels, like Blake.

In that vein, Saint Marty has a poem he wrote this evening during his poetry workshop. At least he thinks it's a poem.

You be the judge . . .


Doe After a Blizzard

by: Martin Achatz

My son noticed her first, splayed, bloody, broken by a neighbor's fence.

A dead doe, shining in the sunlight that always comes after a blizzard,

sunlight so strong it hurts to step into it. Sunlight that shouts.

The doe was haloed in that light, and my son, only five, said,

Fix it, daddy, reduced me to an Easter Island carving, stone face

immutable in the presence of suffering. I wanted to tell my son

I can't or She's gone or She's with God or some other

emptiness recited in church every Sunday so often that it has lost

its ability to comfort. Instead, I picked my son up, carried him

closer to the doe, whispered in his ear Isn't she beautiful?

I watched his face change, confusion give way to something

seraphic. Yes, he said, nodding. Yes, she is. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.