Hi friends,
It’s our monthly-ish poetry analysis time! Today I’d like to write about God’s Places, a gift of a poem by the great Linda Gregg - one of my favourite poets. (I’ve written about her before.)
There is a numinous quality to Linda Gregg’s poems, including those more oblique in their religiosity than this one. The poet Tony Hoagland once wrote that Gregg’s poetry, in its spirituality, seems to elide the usual severe biblical archetypes as well as the alternative drive for mystic transcendence. Instead, she hearkens back to a different, ancient approach to gnosticism: that of Greece, where she spent years living - in which, as Hoagland writes, ‘grief, eros, and ecstasy are indissoluble’.
‘Does the soul care about the mightiness / of this love?’ the poem begins. (A cold open, as they say in TV… Ah Gregg, always a master at stating the thesis in the first, vigorous inhale.) I forget where I read it, but someone recently described the three-count acoustics of dactylic meter as a waltz. And that’s what this opening line is: brash, imperfectly flowing, framed in 3/4 time yet stepping on toes. Does the soul care about (rum pum pum, rum pum pum). But then a pause. ‘The’ adds a beat, disrupts the waltz, before ‘mightiness of this love’ restarts the waltz with gusto. ‘The soul is a place / and love must find its way there’: the poem answers itself here, transitioning to a looser, prose-like tempo.
I’d hesitate to categorise any of Gregg’s work as ‘love poems,’ even when they are about love, because there is such a deep core of universalism emanating from them that the stuff of small human interaction holds gnostic weight—equally precise and staggeringly grand. To Gregg, love means: to love a person, to love the world, to love God, all shades of the same grand questions. A spoonful of jam in water; the mightiness of love: both examples of immanence rather than transcendence. And indeed, the word immanence is derived from the Latin - to dwell in, to remain. Gregg’s poems - for all their religiosity and grandeur - dwell firmly on earth, alive to small moments that hold weight, candid about the fact of experiencing mystery.
Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet that one must ‘live the questions,’ and I tend to think of poems as embodiments of that nearly-spiritual purpose. A good poem is not a retrospective retelling. It’s a living, breathing, real-time experiment in detangling the depth of a feeling or experience: the process is the thing itself. In that vein, God’s Places is a heck of a question.
Small stuff:
DeafBlind Communities May Be Creating a New Language of Touch: Protactile began as a movement for autonomy and a system of tactile communication. Now, some linguists argue, it is becoming a language of its own. A fascinating long-read by Andrew Leland for the New Yorker. ‘Oscar Chacon, who works part time in Edwards’s lab, told me that it annoys him when hearing-sighted people, upon learning about Protactile, say they find it “inspiring.” “We’re human beings,” he said, “using language the way humans use language.’
This made me LOL and agree wholeheartedly (freelancers unite!)
Antjie Krog and the role of the poet in SA’s social and political life, in the Sunday Times.
Who has seen the new season of Derry Girls?? Impeccable, I tell you. Sister Michael supremacy 4evr.
Dreamers in Broad Daylight: Ten Conversations, by the ever-magnificent Leslie Jamison. If you read one thing this week, let it be this.
That’s all for today! Catch you next time,
Maddy