How Not to Relaunch a Blog

Taking a page from my playbook of how not to launch a blog, I’m rebooting the Underground with some poetry.  It is well known that lots of folks write poetry, don’t read anyone else’s poetry, and then occasionally publish their poems to the web, in order that they might be ignored by a broader audience.  Publishing poetry to one’s blog is much like walking around one’s house completely naked when no one else is around; if your friends find out, they make think it odd, but since it really doesn’t affect them (given that they neither read your poems nor peek through your blinds), they regard it merely as a forgivable, perhaps even endearing quirk.  In keeping with this illustrious tradition then, I here publish two poems for you to disregard.  Afterward I want to comment a bit about what is going on in them; if there is one thing that galvanizes an audience more than collectively ignoring a poem, its collectively ignoring commentary on poetry.  My readership is soaring, I can feel it…

The Hippopotamus

It is as if in creating us God asked a question and in awakening us to contemplation He answered the question. –Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

Strange, at the end of pilgrimage

When friends have failed,

Wife given bad advice,

houses collapsed, sons entombed,

daughters dead, and sheep stolen;

to be offered, tendered

as some way of explanation

when the answer is a question

and I am given the task of being

Both: answer and question

You seem satisfied, which is good-

you know, I almost envy you,

Tragedy is not without benefits.

It may sound romantic in verse

to lie among the lotus

I of iron limbs and bronze tubed bones,

I assure you: it is a stinking mire

the river rushes, but my feet remain

stuck here – a pilgrimage in place.

That is, in time I move

occasionally called up

as something counter, spare, original, strange

by Him- whose beauty is past change.

Praise Him.

I do, I try at least

But my vocation disheartens

Perhaps I should take out an ad,

begin looking for my replacement.

Wanted: One to prove

the inscrutability of God.

Apply within.

2/11/09

If you can but defer your excitement to rush on to another poem and will bear with me a bit, I want to talk a bit about what I tried to do here.  If you’re one of those types that like to form your own opinions about these sort of things or frankly want to get as far away from the previous poem as possible, feel free to skip on down to the next section. (As an aside, it is fortunate in a way that this blog hasn’t really taken off yet.  The plan is eventually to get James Earl Jones to do voiceovers for the audio version of all these posts on a podcast.  If you were listening to that you would have to cover your ears and hum through this entire section to avoid the commentary.  And no one really wants to do that.)  Anyway, in case you missed it, this is told from the perspective of the behemoth (which seems decidedly hippopotamus-y to me) that God directs Job’s attention to at the end of the book (of Job- but hopefully you figured that out).  Also, if you must continue thinking about the narrator as a hippopotamus, think about him more like a hippo you might find in Narnia rather than a hungry, hungry one that spends all its time trying to eat tiny white plastic balls; it is a rational and moral being.  One more thing needs to be pointed out before continuing, the last few lines of the penultimate stanza are from a wonderful little poem by Hopkins called “Pied Beauty”, if they look out of place (you know by rhyming, being good lines of poetry, ect.) that’s why.

A couple things do need to be said, I think, about why this poem takes the form it does and why I felt it necessary to write it in this way (this will also help show what the next poem is trying for).  The poem is not explicitly Christian, in fact the narrator has an ambiguous, sometimes subversive stance towards the faith.  The key part is that he is wrong.  He cannot, of course, leave his vocation because it is (take the leap with me here) the human condition.  In Jesus Christ, God has declared His love and His decision to be for us.  Whether in the alienated boredom of the hippo or the anguish of Job, the declaration of the beloved state is in the end the proof of God’s inscrutability.  The narrator’s desire to know (anything, even the certainty of tragedy) is subverted by the necessity of his fundamental acceptance of the mystery- the declaration that God is Love in and through Christ.  Far from rejecting his office or finding a replacement, the hippo embodies and invites others into the mystery found in the Gospel, to the praise of God.  The previous sentence if taken out of context is of course silly in the extreme, but this is entirely appropriate to the colossal comedy of the Gospel.  Comedy (in the old Shakespearian sense that the story ends in marriage) is the most appropriate way of dramatizing the Gospel.  However, like many of Shakespeare’s later comedies (The Merchant of Venice, to take one example) a good deal of tragedy is mixed in- the Christian is not to be unrealistic or “pie-in-the-sky, we’ll all escape to Heaven by and by” about the tragedies that still are inflicted on the world on a daily basis, but they are not to despair.  “Take heart, for I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)

-Word tells me that I’ve now reached near a thousand words in this post, so I’ll defer my other poem to another, later post.  Try to contain your excitement in the interim.