No matter what the poem is about – the color change of trees, the quiet grave, the verve of café voices, or a bomb explosion at a busy intersection – and no matter your state of mind when writing – ecstatic in inspiration or perhaps some aggravated in revision – the act of collecting up the elements necessary to form a poem is very much like prayer.
I’m not talking about the sometimes easier part of the poetic process that is the reading of a completed work by ourselves or others, though that can be very difficult. I’m talking about putting the ship together before the long voyage that tests not only the sea-worthiness of the craft, but the sailor, too. The pooling of experience from practiced awareness.
Awareness is the key, just as is the case with heart-rooted prayer. To birth a poem about a thing or a place or an event is to re-animate it in language as interpreted through our senses, into the jumble of our abstract minds, and out on to paper or a screen or spoken. The more aware we manage to be in our limited humanness, the more true might re-create that thing we want others to live that we’ve sent out into the world.
This awareness becomes a constant sort of prayer in time. An acknowledgment of being things of and in the world – seen and unseen, understood or not – that we invite bravely into our senses, commune with for a time, morph with our spirit of language, and send back to the often harsh world.
What’s more prayerful and prayer-like than this? To experience the world, examine it in its mysterious detail while giving in to the wonder of it all, being curious enough to write down how our equally mysteriously working minds digest our surroundings in some manageable way, then say: Here it is. This is how I see it all.
I believe any omniscient being out there would recognize such striding effort as prayer, indeed.
I’m not talking about the sometimes easier part of the poetic process that is the reading of a completed work by ourselves or others, though that can be very difficult. I’m talking about putting the ship together before the long voyage that tests not only the sea-worthiness of the craft, but the sailor, too. The pooling of experience from practiced awareness.
Awareness is the key, just as is the case with heart-rooted prayer. To birth a poem about a thing or a place or an event is to re-animate it in language as interpreted through our senses, into the jumble of our abstract minds, and out on to paper or a screen or spoken. The more aware we manage to be in our limited humanness, the more true might re-create that thing we want others to live that we’ve sent out into the world.
This awareness becomes a constant sort of prayer in time. An acknowledgment of being things of and in the world – seen and unseen, understood or not – that we invite bravely into our senses, commune with for a time, morph with our spirit of language, and send back to the often harsh world.
What’s more prayerful and prayer-like than this? To experience the world, examine it in its mysterious detail while giving in to the wonder of it all, being curious enough to write down how our equally mysteriously working minds digest our surroundings in some manageable way, then say: Here it is. This is how I see it all.
I believe any omniscient being out there would recognize such striding effort as prayer, indeed.