Walking the lush, wooded trails near my home in northern Vermont, I have come to appreciate the beautiful, sometimes elegiac, liminal spaces between heaven and earth. I have grown to love that fuzzy line between what is and what I cannot know. As a teenager I thought I knew everything. How exhausting that was! Youth mostly believes in sheer will mixed with magic, at least mine did. Sometimes I yearn for that solidarity of mind and opinion, but mostly not. This week on my walks, while communing with raspberries and Queen Ann’s lace, mosquitoes and moths, I have been contemplating this saying: “The number of things unknown to Buddhas outnumber the grains of sand on the bank of the Ganges.”
Indeed, we have only a finite understanding of the ineffable world, and poetry seeks to remedy this human dilemma. This week our Vermont State Poet Laureate has reminded me of these eternal questions in his splendid and resplendent new collection of poems due out next year from the University of Pittsburgh Press. In his forthcoming collection of poems, In My Unknowing, Vermont’s own deNiord explores the nuances and paradoxes of unknowing.
The inviting, lyrical voice in these luminous and accomplished poems extends a hand to the reader to come on the philosophical/spiritual voyage of the via negativa. Indeed the ars poetica at work in this collection is a kind of via negativa. These searching poems seek to explore the white light of unknowing and knowing coexisting inside the room of a poem. For as soon as we think we have acquired knowledge, something in the natural world reminds us that all is flux, that to grow spiritually and otherwise is to unburden oneself into a quiet, questioning wisdom. For, as the poet Richard Wilbur once wrote: “Love calls us to the things of this world.”
The book’s first and title poem, In My Unknowing, recognizes that in order to begin to understand we must, as the Psalm 34.8 says, “ taste and see” what is good—understand it with our earthly senses first, in the physical way our bodies can “know”. Our senses are one force of understanding, but there is also a counterforce that exists in the world that seeks to not know because the prime mover of this world, whether one believes in God or not, is ultimately unknowable. Our greatest knowledge is to know that we do not know. Why is that?
These poems are deeply searching and smart, engaging with the immutable, and the epistemological insights that delve into these human conundrums of understanding. Further, this work reminds me of deNiord’s generation’s clarion call of “we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden” sung about in the song “Woodstock” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. In writing “Woodstock”, the great Joni Mitchell implored that we all must work toward making heaven on earth, an Eden, especially during tumultuous times, and let’s face it most of the times in America have been tumultuous and full of suffering, except for a privileged few: We are stardust/ We are golden/And we've got to get ourselves/ Back to the garden.
The work also brings to mind a Christian biblical text, 1 Corinthians 13:12: “When I was a child I talked like a child, thought like a child, reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I set aside childish ways. Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” This text signals to me that part of paradox of knowing/unknowing is also being known fully, having faith in things seen and unseen, converging to make knowing someday possible. What we can say about the unknown is that we do not know and that we can use the natural world to try and express what our unknowing might contain and reveal. This is the work at hand in deNiord’s brilliant poems filled with musical propulsion, quiet images, the deep searching of a philosopher and poet for spiritual food.
Here is the opening poem, one of my favorites:
IN MY UNKNOWING
Oh taste and see.
Psalm 34, 8
I was driving through the fields of Heaven when I realized I was still on Earth,
because Earth was all I had ever known of Heaven and no other place would do
for living forever. I had grown beyond belief from seeing that everything I felt
had sprung from lives I’d already lived, so that I could feel the way I did, which
was so much I had no idea where to begin. The crawling? The slithering? The
leaping? The flying? The dying? If you had been there with me in the passenger
seat and asked me about the newt or flea or pachyderm, I would have told you
everything I knew, which was a frightening amount, and not only that, but just
how much I loved them all—those Heavenly beings: the serpent, the lion, the
mosquito, the hawk, the antelope, the worm; and not only beings, but stones as
well. Each particular thing so mysterious in my unknowing, I knew I was living
forever. I knew the fields through which I was driving were the fields of Heaven in
which I was tasting and seeing, seeing and tasting.
AN INTERVIEW WITH CHARD deNIORD
Rilke said, "We must live the questions" which were your questions here in this book, this part of your life? What questions did this book answer for you in the writing of it? Or did it bring you more questions?
As with all my books, I feel I’m raising as many questions as I’m answering. I think most of my poems start as questions and then end with questions. But the dust there at the end of my poems is more often than not more vital than the cleanness of my answers. So, my poetry tends to be circular rather than linear in this respect. In my new book, which acknowledges the paradoxical source of my inspiration, I’m simply curious about the rewards of unknowing. About epistemological irony and just how what Czelaw Milosz called “immense particulars” serve as transcendent synecdoches for the unknowable “whole.” A few of my specific obsessive questions that have only come clear to me now after finishing the book, or I should say “abandoning” it, are: What can I know in my ignorance? How can an ant lead me to enlightenment? Just where does my x lie on earth? In what new ways can I continue to perform what William Blake called the most sublime act, namely, to set another before one’s self? How can I continue singing in “a dark time”? Yes, this new book left me with many more questions than I had before I started it, for which I feel grateful, overwhelmed, but also uncertain. How to write anew about the beauty of the world as it evanesces before my eyes? How to write about the oldest, irreducible subjects: those creatures like the tiger, the mountain gorilla, the rhino, the poison dart frog, and my neighbor in the face of the present administration’s insane denial over climate change, jingoism, and realpolitik? How simply to write in the increasingly dark shadow of impending eschaton? It takes not a little courage that mitigates against denial as heroic belief in humanity’s ultimate ability to save itself and the world. W.H. Auden wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen,” but he also wrote that poetry “survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper, flows on south / From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, / Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, / A way of happening, a mouth.” So as a poet, I feel must believe, even though it may seem unrealistic and even absurd, that poetry contains the salvific power of “a way of happening.”
What have you noticed and learned about yourself and your home state as result of being Poet Laureate? How has the role informed your work and world view and vice versa?
Well, this position has humbled me enormously as I’ve traveled around Vermont meeting and listening to my fellow poets throughout the state, from enormously talented students of all ages and my peers. I’ve had a wonderful time interviewing dozens of Vermont poets on Brattleboro Community Television, editing an anthology of Vermont poets with my predecessor, Syd Lea, titled Roads Taken, which contains the work of almost a hundred contemporary Vermont poets, giving readings around the state at schools, theaters, art venues, and literary festivals, writing a poetry column for my local newspaper The Valley News, inviting poets to the Brattleboro Literary Festival, organizing readings for emerging poets, serving as the essay editor for Plume Poetry Journal and just struggling to continue writing myself. A journalist at the Burlington newspaper, Seven Days, asked me a similar question recently since I’m in my last few months as poet laureate of Vermont, to which I responded:
When a state sets a high standard for its poets laureate, as Vermont has over the past 60 years with such laureates as Robert Frost, Galway Kinnell, Louise Gluck, Ellen Voigt, Grace Paley, Ruth Stone, and Syd Lea, it inspires its residents with language that complements its laws, traditions and customs with what Auden called "memorable speech." One can't read "Home Burial" by Robert Frost or "Headwaters" by Ellen Voigt or “The Avenue Bearing The Initial Of Christ Into The New World" by Galway Kinnell or "Mock Orange" by Louise Glück or "Speculation" by Ruth Stone or “House, Some Instructions” by Grace Paley or “My Wife’s Back” by Syd Lea and not be deeply moved and enlightened at the same time, even changed. A strong poet laureate succeeds in accomplishing both literary and political feats by deepening its citizenry's appreciation for others through poetry. Vermont's poets laureate have consistently done just this, while also memorializing the state’s heavenly landscape, its fierce sense of independence, and its paradoxical motto: "Freedom and unity." I can only hope that I, too, have added a line or two of memorable speech to Vermont’s rich poetic legacy.
And also, how can poetry save us now in this dark time? What can we as poets do?
As I’ve mentioned above, they can keep singing and in their singing demonstrate simultaneously just how “ways of happening” can occur, ways that lead to enlightened action. Such heroic action takes both imagination and compassion. Poetry is transformational language with the capacity to issue passports to its readers for entering transcendent realms of awareness where the mind broadens and affections deepen; where strange associations make striking new sense, where unlike things coalesce in figurative magic; where miniscule details turn into immense particulars; where “language means more and sounds better” (Charles Wright), where language finds form and verbal music. It’s no coincidence that the language in two of the most definitive American documents—The Declaration of Independence and “The Gettysburg Address”—flows with a verbal economy that express truths Thomas Jefferson called “self-evident.” Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Anna Akhmatova’s “Requiem,” Wallace Stevens’ “The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” Galway Kinnell’s “The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World”, Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue,” Nazim Hikmet’s “On Living,” Miklos Radnoti’s “Letter to My Wife,” Anonymous’ Gilgamesh, Adrienne Rich’s Atlas of A Difficult World, Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” Philip Levine’s “The Mercy,” Carolyn Forche’s “The Boatman”, Vijay Seshadri’s “Trailing Clouds of Glory”, David Tomas Martinez’s “The Only Mexican,” Natasha Trethewey’s “The Age of Reason”, Wislawa Szymborska, “Hunger Camp at Jasko,” Zbignew Herbert’s “Then Envoy of Mr. Cogito,” Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic,” and Mahmoud Darwish’s “In Jerusalem” merely begin a list of poems that could serve as a primer for a much longer list of nation-saving verses. Like democracy, poetry is an ongoing experiment that tests its readers ability to “get the meanings of poems” which convey “the main things” (Walt Whitman) in every new age. I feel one of the “main things” if not the main thing of this age is for people to see themselves in others. While this has always been true, it resounds more loudly now than ever as racism, nationalism, and fundamentalism recrudesce with viral vengeance. Poetry provides an essential literary vehicle for motivating people to remember what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of [their] nature. I wish I could penetrate the White House with poetry, but in lieu of that since willful deafness plagues that house, I must settle for speaking out, for treating poetry as more than just an art form, but as a verbal anodyne that is imbued with the power to heal an ailing nation with “a mouth” and “way of happening.”
Chard deNiord earned a BA in religious studies from Lynchburg College, a Masters of Divinity from Yale Divinity School, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. A cofounder of the New England College MFA program in poetry, he is the author of the poetry collections Asleep in the Fire (1990), Sharp Golden Thorn (2003), Night Mowing (2005), The Double Truth (2011), and At the Sleep Clinic (2020). His book Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs (2011) is a collection of interviews with American poets, including Robert Bly, Lucille Clifton, Jack Gilbert, Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin, and Ruth Stone. His second collection of interviews with poets is I Would Lie to You if I Could: Interviews with Ten American Poets (2018).
DeNiord has been a Poetry Fellow at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Allan Collins Scholar in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and his poems have been included in the anthologies Pushcart Prize XXII (1998), Best American Poetry (1999), Best of the Prose Poem (2000), American Religious Poems (2006), and American Poetry Now (2007).
A professor of English and creative writing at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, deNiord lives in Putney, Vermont. In 2015, he was named poet laureate of Vermont.
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