Notes on "Praying" (p. 37)

This poem--which is very important to me--seems to hold an important key into poetry as a spiritual practice on/at/in the tension between the physical and the spiritual (the earthly and the divine). Here, and perhaps this is too simple a definition, Oliver is telling us a similar thing to that which T. S. Eliot says: Only through time time is conquered. In a much less violent manner, Oliver is saying, through the earth we attain towards what is beyond the earth. If indeed this is what she is saying, than there are some additional important principles that she gives us:

A. The moment in the earth, the situation in which or about which we would like to engage the divine through "reflection" (poetry) on doesn't have to be anything that is particularly "special." "It doesn't have to be the blue iris." This point is not really novel--poets have long (though more nowadays than in Homer's days) been in the practice of engaging ordinary or lowly objects--but it is well put and worth being reminded of.

B. The poet's work is not about the poet's skill, particularly, not about the poet's skill in relation to other poet's. "It's not a contest." Rather it is a humble task and, can be, should be, should at least have some internal aspect of being, a simple task. This point is perhaps difficult to accept, on reading Oliver's textbooks on poetry, where the poet must be elaborately skilled. The hard work, I would like to think, is what achieves simplicity. This is so, but in addition, it is also so that even a highly skilled simplicity is not necessary for the work that Oliver is describing. Even we can write these kinds of prayer-poems because praying is different from being a well-selling poet. "Don't try to make them elaborate." Perhaps she is not talking about poetry after all--but only about praying. Is poetry not about striving, then?

C. "Patch a few words together." I'm not sure how this ties in, but it seems to affirm my preference for shorter poems. It seems also to emphasize that the point, as it is not the poet, is also not the poem either. We this is importantly in the few following lines that tell us what it is about.

D. The poem is a doorway. Poetry and prayer are for facilitating something ("attention" or "awareness" if I'm correct) that allows spirit(uality) to happen.

E. Importatly, as this process is not about the poet or pray-er, it allows the voice of someone else. The poem's task is to create silence preciely for that someone else to "speak." As gratitude is mentioned in this same line and as my mystical leanings prompt me to associate silence with God's presence, I can only think that this "other voice" is the "voice" of God. This may be God speaking to us or it may be God speaking for us.

The lines "just pay attention and patch a few words together" have become my poetics, at least in theory if not in practice. In practice, my poetics consist of "put down whatever words come." Perhaps I would benefit from "paying attention" more.

If living in the "tension" between God and Earth is a valuable spiritual practice, it is only accomplished by us doing our simple grateful work with the langauge and earthly material we have and then by God to taking up for us and with us in the silence (that, perhaps, we create). The work of praying and writing poems is the work of creating silence, creating spiritual space. The work of "paying attention" results in the creation of space in which "another voice" may speak. God speaking in the space we create--which is, perhaps, really us discovering the space and hearing God already speaking--partially resolves the tension between God and Earth for its duration and, if we believe the mystics who taught us lectio divina, it changes us some too. God's "voice," which, as it speaks in silence does not itself make a sound, exists between God's "body" and God's "mind." (Oliver's use of "mind" doesn't fit that well with apophatic langauge unless it ironically means that which is beyond the order of the mental.") It involves breath which is physical, coming from physical organs, and which is also, in its root and in its metaphorical connection to the contents of the "mind," spirit.