Reed, Alex

This is a revised version of a talk given in February 2020 on a Retreat at Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey, which included an exploration of poetry and contemplative writing.

The American poet and Zen practitioner Jane Hirshfield has described poetry as a ‘potential path of awareness’.¹ In this article I’ll discuss some of my own experiences of reading and writing poetry and reflect on why this has become important in my life. In doing so, I also hope to highlight some of the ways in which poetry has become relevant to my Buddhist practice.

But first, I want to issue a disclaimer: although I’ve written poetry and practiced Zen for several years, I don’t lay claim to expertise in either. Perhaps it is a feature of both activities that one always feels like a novice? So what I’m about to share are just a few observations and reflections from my own limited viewpoint.

I’ve always enjoyed writing. When I first started, this was mostly academic articles relating to my work in mental health services. After a while I began to feel this academic style was a bit dry, that it lacked emotional resonance. Working in psychiatry was a privileged situation in that people would often share their private fears, hopes and dreams with me, sometimes speaking of things they’d never said out loud before. I wanted to find a more personal way of writing about this intimate work, a form of expression which had a greater sense of being, as Jane Hirshfield has said of poetry, “dipped in the mind of openness and connection”.2

Also during this period my late wife Jan was becoming increasingly disabled by multiple sclerosis. The experience of living with the uncertainties and losses that accompany long-term illness can be confusing, difficult to navigate from day-to-day, and hard to talk about for fear of amplifying pain by over-focusing on problems. It was during this time, about fifteen or twenty years ago, that I started writing poetry.

As with Zen practice, it is difficult for me to explain precisely what it was about poetry that felt important. I imagine that many readers have at some time been asked by a curious friend, “Why do you meditate?”. And often, this is followed by a related question, “Does meditation help you?” Now there are several answers we might give to these very reasonable questions. But while I find that the answers I hear myself giving are more-or-less accurate, none of them seem to adequately convey exactly how it is.

When Jan died, a close relative would often ask if my Buddhist practice, “brought me comfort?” It was difficult to say, but generally, I’d simply answer ‘yes’ so as not to appear obtuse. But this simple question opened up other questions that I found myself reflecting on: Does a practice in which we try to face the actuality of life bring comfort in the midst of grief?

Well, yes – in a strange way – but perhaps not in that way my kindly relative meant. And was it even ‘comfort’ for my ‘bewildered self’ that I was seeking? Yes and no. More than any other experience I have encountered (possibly apart from witnessing the birth of my two children), grief revealed to me very directly the essential mystery of life. Practice provided a way of being inside this mystery without (completely) drowning; paying attention to our lives by sitting in meditation seems to me to have a clarifying effect; and this clarification seems to reveal what is to be done, and just as importantly, what it might be wiser not to do.

And returning to poetry, when I first started writing there may have been a basic therapeutic benefit in externalising my inner thoughts and feelings by putting them down on paper. But it’s difficult to honestly say whether writing about loss made me feel ‘better’ or ‘worse’. I think Cynthia Fuller put it well when she wrote that poetry can ‘make us feel better’, even when it doesn’t allow us to, pretend that we’re ‘all right’.³

As with sitting in meditation, poetry may help us to view our lives a little more clearly and deeply, and this act of intimate witnessing seems somehow to be sustaining or even affirming. Jane Hirshfield writes,

“We turn towards poems in times of loss or despair, toward their writing or their reading, because even poems that face darkness carry the beauty of original seeing. A good poem is possibility’s presence made visible.”⁴

Or as the American poet Galway Kinnell has said, “the secret title of every good poem might be ‘Tenderness”’.5

One of the things that intrigued me (and continues to do so) was that I found I was often surprised by what I’d written. It wasn’t simply a matter of expressing what I already knew was going on, inside me and around me. Through writing, I discovered new things about what I thought and felt. And occasionally, on a very good day, it seemed possible to say something about very familiar, day-to-day experience in a way that felt both new and more ‘true’ than might be easily said in conversation.

The poet Linda France writes: “Perhaps the most important teaching of a poem, as a time-based art form, is impermanence – both in the writing of it and the reading. It’s a time to stop time briefly and say, ‘this is what this is like’, to investigate experience and translate it into words – to create a simulacrum of that experience, not the experience itself; in Buddhist terms, a finger pointing at the moon.”⁶

So perhaps both poetry and practice provide a sense of clarification, of seeing that ‘this is what it’s like’ in a particular moment.

I’ve also found that writing poetry, at least in the early stage, before all of the seemingly endless revision and shaping needs to be done, as with meditation, requires finding a way of somehow ‘getting myself out of the way’ so that my mind is more still and receptive to words, images and connections that seem both unusual and true.

This stilling of the mind relates to what John Keats described as negative capability, in a famous letter to his two brothers written in 1817.⁷ Keats said of a mutual acquaintance that he was, “a man who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he has made up his Mind about everything … he will never come at a truth as long as he lives; because he is always trying at it”. Keats remarked that negative capability, by contrast, requires us to be, “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason – You have to get into that state of mind.”

Following the advice of more experienced poets, I’ve recently experimented with getting up very early to write. This is a time when my mind is still relatively uncluttered by the business of the day and seems to be floating in some liminal place between dreaming and wakefulness, in which, as Basil Bunting has said, “We know neither where we are nor why.”⁸

Again, this is similar to the experience of early morning meditation, when the mind seems cleaner and more still.

Another aspect of writing poetry that makes the activity compelling for me is to do with a sense of vulnerability and risk. With some poems I’ve written I’ve felt, ‘I can’t say that – it’s too near the grain’, or ‘what would people think of me if they were to read this?’

Here’s an example:

Woken by your cough

More in spite than in hope

of sleep, I skulk to the spare room,

leaving you to the restless

rhythm of your breaths.

Too tired to search for sheets,

my bare shoulders itch

against the mattress

of this makeshift bed.

Thoughts of where we’ve ended up,

and of dragging ourselves through

those bleary tomorrows –

I wish it was different.

I wish you were not ill.

It dawns – flame licking dry wood –

I live in a state of rage.

I haven’t chosen to include this poem because I think it’s particularly good, but rather as an example in which I found I’d written something that felt ‘true’ but hard to admit to myself, never mind to others. What was expressed in the poem went against the conventional stereotype of ‘selfless’ caring. I had a sense that if I was going to say something about the experience of being a carer that went beyond cliché, I needed to be willing to risk saying those things that aren’t usually spoken of but might be familiar to others who have been in a similar situation – many carers will have experienced those frequent nights of broken sleep. I also took some reassurance from novelist Jonathon Franzen’s remark that to create good work the writer always risks shaming themselves.⁹

And is this not also so with practice? That to go ‘deeper’, we must take risks in facing those aspects of ourselves we would prefer to keep hidden away? That arriving at “a condition of complete simplicity”, as T.S. Eliot wrote, costs “not less than everything”.¹⁰

There are many different kinds of poems, of course, although most tend to be fairly brief, using a concentrated use of words to ‘capture’ experience. A poem therefore requires a slower, more attentive or meditative reading (as with Dharma writings), and many poems can seem cryptic or puzzling on first reading. But it’s also poetry’s capacity to express something familiar in a concentrated and unusual way, to ‘tell the truth but tell it slant’ which makes it precious, and this may be why many of us turn to poems in times of extremity – when we fall in love, for instance, or in moments of crisis or loss. We live in a death-denying culture where it can be difficult to speak about the complexities of grief in an open and straightforward way. Poetry can speak to us in a powerful way about our intimate and difficult to express experiences.

The arranging of words in unusual ways, and the often-fragmented form and mood of contemporary poetry can be off-putting for many. But this strangeness or oddity can also convey our experience in a more authentic way than is achieved through more conventional modes of expression.

A more oblique, apparently less ‘logical’ way of writing is also characteristic of some Buddhist texts, of course. This seems particularly true in the work of Great Master Dōgen, whose writings have particularly significance for our tradition. Now, I am no Dōgen scholar, and a deeper appreciation of his work requires a lifetime’s study, but I find that when read in the way that one might approach a poem – slowly, with a less analytic, more meditative mind, his rather convoluted, paradoxical statements convey a sense of what non-dualistic perception or ‘original seeing’ may be like:

“Flowing is like spring. Spring with all its numerous aspects is called flowing. When spring flows there is nothing outside of spring. Study this in detail. Spring invariably flows through spring. Although flowing is not spring, flowing occurs throughout spring. Thus, flowing is completed at just this moment of spring. Examine this fully, coming and going.”11

Through the medium of language, Dōgen points to a way of experiencing life which is prior to, or beyond language and fixed conceptions of time.

With both poetry and Zen, I find that I’ve become committed to practices that are, in a sense, fundamentally mysterious to me. This is perhaps the very reason why both feel necessary and enlivening.

Notes

1. Jane Hirshfield, Felt in its Fullness: An Interview. Tricycle Magazine, https://tricycle.org/trikedaily/felt-its-fullness.

2. Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. (New York: Harper, 1998), p.209.

3. Cynthia Fuller, Preface, in Julia Darling & Cynthia Fuller (eds.) The Poetry Cure. (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2005), p.9.

4. Jane Hirshfield, The world has not yet become ash. Interview with Jai Hamid Bashir, 2020 (http://columbiajournal.org/interview-jane-hirshfield)

Galway Kinnell, cited in Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, p.211.

6. Linda France, (Glasgow: Playspace, 2012), p.4.

7. John Keats, Letter to his brothers, 21 December 1817.

8. Basil Bunting, (Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2009 edition), p. 40.

9. Jonathon Franzen, Introduction to The Best American Essays 2016. New York: Harcourt.

10. T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets. (London: Faber, 2001 edition)

11. Great Master Dōgen. Moon in a Dewdrop, (New York: North Point Press, 1985), 80.

 

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