August 7, 2025 • 27 mins
In this collection of conversations, Ben Palpant, author of Letters From The Mountain, has compiled his intimate, one-on-one interviews with seventeen powerful poets of the 21st century. These conversations cover an entire range of life experience, including grief, hope, culture, the writing craft, family life, and the imagination. Each poet speaks with remarkable candor and joy. Taken together, these interviews are a powerful reminder that poetry remains an essential expression of what it means to be human.
Franz Kafka famously said that "a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." And the words and thoughts contained here aim to wake up much that has become silent in each of us. They contain wisdom that may inspire, instruct, and strengthen, confronting us with the reality that words matter, that poetry matters, and that we matter.
You can purchase a copy of An Axe for the Frozen Sea in the Rabbit Room Store.
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S1 (00:00):
The following is brought to you in partnership with Oasis Audio.
Welcome to Rabbit Room Press Presents, a podcast series of
great audiobooks, one chapter at a time. As Franz Kafka
(00:20):
once said, a book must be the axe for the
frozen sea within us, and we at Rabbit Room Press
believe that. So this book, this collection of interviews with
contemporary poets, aims to awaken what is grown silent within us.
We're proud of the good work Ben has done in
the writing of this book, and we hope you enjoy
it as much as we have.
S2 (00:45):
An axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben read for
you by the author. Preface. If you had told me
back when I was just a lad that I would
choose to spend much of my 40s in conversation with
poets and worse yet, writing poems myself. I would have
(01:07):
kicked you in the shins and run for the hills.
I don't think my boy sized brain could have conceived
of a worse insult. Then I met a living poet.
It happened this way. I was a senior in high school,
holding a paper plate in a potluck line next to
a stranger. Because my mother taught me to be polite.
I struck up a conversation. What do you do? I asked.
(01:30):
I'm a poet, he replied. I thought he was pulling
my leg, but his face said otherwise. No smirk, no
glint in his eye. I thought every last poet was dead,
pinned onto the pages of boring textbooks. But here was
a living one standing next to me, speaking to me
in my native tongue. I fled. Then, years later, I
(01:54):
faced a health crisis that radically impacted my cognition for
an extended period of time. Calamity tends to open our
hearts to poetry. During that season of my life, I
could not track an argument in prose, but I could
follow a line of poetry to where it disappeared in
the grass. It became important to my physical and mental
stability that I learned to stand still in my heart,
(02:16):
to wait patiently until my mind could pick up where
the next poetic line offered itself and follow it. In poetry,
I found unexpected comfort and strangely, clarity, at least a
kind of clarity, the kind that poetry offers in paradox
and metaphor. Poetry offered me insights that drew me deeper
(02:37):
into life, and in particular, my life with Christ. Poetry
drew me, as Aslan says in The Last Battle. Further
up and further, in all these years later, poetry has
come to play a significant part in my walk with God,
which is why I set out at the start of
2024 to meet as many poets as I could and
(02:58):
to spend an hour with each one. Not to pepper
them with questions, but to have a conversation that would
lead us both further up and further in. Someone will
query why interview poets? To which I answer that I
believe the best poets practice seeing what most of us
overlook or take for granted. They know how to honor
(03:19):
the particularities of human existence, thereby opening our eyes to
see ourselves, God, and all of his creation with greater
clarity and appreciation and appreciation that leads from praise to
greater praise. Poets draw us to attention. They help us
sit up and take note. Leading us to the heart
(03:39):
of things and beyond the heart of things. In other words,
I believe poets can help us become more human as
God intended. Poets, through the ordinary means of the written word,
can give us glimpses of the eternal. That's why I
wanted these interviews to be less about the questions and
answers and more about the human interaction. I wanted them
(04:02):
to read like two people trying to dig deeper into
what it means to be human. Two friends exploring why
poetry matters for all of life. I did not intend
to collect these conversations into a book, but it became
apparent rather early on that reading them next to each
other would be a reinforcing and fulfilling experience. Each interview
(04:23):
is interesting and fruitful, but together they strengthen and enrich
one another. The title for this book comes from my
conversation with Misha Willette, who mentioned Franz Kafka's famous line,
A book must be an axe for the frozen sea
within us. It stuck with me and so I have
decided to title the book what I hope it will
(04:44):
become an axe for the Frozen Sea. Starting with the
sea that threatens to freeze inside me from time to time.
Over the years, poetry has helped break up the sea
of ice in my heart, which makes poets, I suppose,
axe wielders. I don't mean to describe these poets as
people who have weaponized their words, though some of them
(05:05):
might embrace that description. I mean that they have chosen
the more difficult work of changing hearts. Heart change always
begins with the poet, of course, but out of change
of heart, the mouth speaks. You will quickly discover that
the poets in this book do not always agree. There
are convictions vary, as do their practices. One of the
(05:26):
interesting convictions they share, however, is that poetry is more
than mere self-expression in our day and age. That's a
helpful connecting thread running through the discourse. I think I
can say this with certainty as well, that they all
agree with Eliot's famous line about writing poetry. Every attempt
is a wholly new start and a different kind of failure.
(05:47):
And so each venture is a new beginning, a raid
on the inarticulate. I will be asked why I included
some poets and did not include others. How I wish
I could say that I picked these poets for particular reasons. Alas,
I can't. I started with four poets who lived within
driving distance. They in turn suggested other poets, and so
(06:09):
the project evolved organically. These poets by no means represent
an exhaustive list of anything. Some are more famous than others,
but fame is no indicator of quality, and only time
will tell which poets will have a lasting impact. At
the end of the day, the world is full of
worthy poets. Find them. Learn from them. Given a thousand
(06:32):
possible ways to structure this book, I opted to organize
these poets alphabetically. It allows them to speak to each
other and to us without any orchestration on my part.
I also have a get out of jail free card,
which I find entirely convenient. If anyone complains about the order,
the question asked by every undergraduate is poetry still relevant
(06:54):
is a worthy one. The answer these conversations give is
a resounding yes. But how is poetry relevant? Well, the
answer to that question is as varied as the poets themselves.
When I look over the broad landscape of society, I
see a reawakening of interest in and writing of poetry.
(07:15):
If I'm correct, we need the best poets, both the
living and the dead, to guide us into a deeper
relationship with God, with ourselves, and with the world. Li-young
Lee once said, people who read poetry have heard about
the burning bush. But when you write poetry, you sit
inside the burning bush. We need poets whose souls are
(07:38):
fully awake so that we might glimpse what they sense
throbbing at the heart of all things. As the story goes,
Saint Augustine, weary of writing one day, decided to get
some fresh air and walk the beach. He had not
walked far when he saw a boy dashing back and
forth from the ocean to a tiny hole in the sand.
Augustine called out, hey there, what are you doing? The
(08:01):
boy lifted a shell, which he had been using to
transport seawater and cried out, I'm going to fit the
entire sea into this tiny hole I've dug in the sand.
Augustine laughed out loud, spreading his arms wide. He said,
you attempt the impossible, my son. You will never fit
this magnificent sea into that little hole. The boy, apparently
(08:23):
familiar with the great theologian's efforts, called back. And you
will never fit the Holy Trinity inside your head. Well,
imagine that there were two boys instead of only one,
or a boy and a girl. Would their success rate improve? Hardly.
But it would be good sport to watch. I suppose
(08:43):
that's what these conversations amount to. In the end, it's
just two people trying to spoon the ocean into a
tiny hole for an hour or so, doing our darndest
not to spill a single drop along the way. If
you are a poet, this book is for you. May
it inspire, instruct, and strengthen you for the work God
(09:04):
has given you to do. If you are not a poet,
may it remind you that words matter, that poetry matters
and that you matter. Not in that particular order. Most
of all, may these conversations spur us on to call
out to God, who loves to answer so that he
will show us great and mighty things which we did
(09:26):
not know. Jeremiah chapter 33, verse three. Ben Palpana September 2024.
Chapter one. Scott Cairns. Scott Cairns lives in a modest house,
the house of his childhood. A house his father built.
(09:49):
It is as unpretentious and welcoming as those who call
it home. Standing together in the kitchen, gazing at Puget Sound,
I am struck by the spirit in this place. The
same spirit that infuses his poetry. An open handed generosity,
a down to earth gentleness, a wry, disarming humor. He
(10:10):
leads me downstairs into a sunroom lined with windows, and
gives me first dibs on where I want to sit.
I select the old love seat built out of bamboo.
He's drinking his coffee from a mug that says seven
days without a pun makes one week. Glancing around the room,
I notice the unremarkable furniture, the shelf lined with plants.
The children's box set of Beatrix Potter books. It all
(10:33):
strikes me as incredibly unassuming. The observation that comes to
mind could seem insulting, but I choose to make it anyway.
You don't seem to take yourself too seriously, I suggest. Well,
he says, I guess going to a lot of poetry
readings over the years, listening to other poets, I find
myself thinking, you don't have to be that severe dude.
(10:55):
He grins. So yes, I usually open my poems with
a joke, and then at some point, you know, I
get a little more serious and the irony falls away.
If you were raised in this home as I was,
irony was a requirement, and puns were also required. How
did Naomi Shihab Nye put it? Answer if you hear
the words under the words. That is very similar to
(11:17):
what I have said endlessly to my students, which is
pay attention to the words within the words. Maybe you
could help me understand what you mean by that, I say.
I've noticed, he says, that the poems I love most
are poems that I can keep reading and opening, because
during a given reading I will have seen a primary
sense of the word, but then see how the secondary
(11:39):
and tertiary senses also figure into it. This is mostly
why I started learning Greek, and why I'm trying to
learn a little Latin. It's because, as you must know,
the English language is the best language for poetry. It's
a museum for almost all the other languages. And so
the etymological hauntings within an English word of its Greek
or Latin roots may not be so overt, but they're
(12:02):
present if you're attentive to those ghosts. The poem keeps
opening for you. It's never the same poem with each reading.
I want to make poems like that, poems that keep opening.
We should be cognizant that writing poems isn't about saying
what you think you know. It's really about constructing a
scene of meaning, making a field into which a reader
(12:24):
can enter and make meaning with the poet. There really
ought to be some ambiguity implicated in every line, I think.
Does the ambiguity play into line breaks for you, I ask?
How do you make decisions on line endings? I am
almost always counting something. That's one technical element of lineation.
I also want my lines to register as a provisional
(12:47):
syntactical unit, which is then modified by subsequent lines. Often,
for instance, the word out here at the end of
the line appears to be a noun, but then it
turns out that it's an adjective modifying an actual noun
waiting in the next line. That provides a wonderful, dizzying
experience for the reader, who then is obliged to take
(13:07):
another look at what he just read. And his rereading
proves essential to the agency of what I like to
call the poetic operation of language, which is what we
like about our favorite poems, I say. He nods and
takes a drink from his mug. Poetry. He says, when
it's really poetry, occasions this sort of spinning vertiginous. I
(13:29):
like the word vertiginous operation of language. You can also
witness this in a rich prose text. Poetry, of course,
can happen in verse or prose. Even fiction, non-fiction and
drama can obtain some degree of this poetic operation of language,
this delicious, puzzling opening activity. A great novel like Fyodor
(13:50):
Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, a book I read every summer
does this. It keeps opening me on to something new.
He pauses and gazes out the window. I really do
feel that when I'm making a poem, it's not about
having a glimpse of something true and then trying to
transcribe it. It's more like trying to figure it out,
(14:12):
glimpsing it as I go, wrestling with the language, listening
to the music of the words, letting the music lead
me to the next words. And in in that way,
my compositional practice is also my meditation. He thinks for
a moment. I guess for the first half of my life,
I resisted the equation between poetry and prayer. Over the
(14:35):
past 20 years, however, I have approached my poems as
a kind of prayer. Perhaps my most efficacious prayer. It
sounds to me like your favorite poets force you to
calibrate to mystery, I say. But that's also partly why
you write. You're calibrating to the divine mystery. Well, yes,
because I'm my first audience. I want to get something
(14:58):
out of it, too. He laughs. You should know that
I really only have five ideas. I think they're pretty
good ideas. But to the extent that ideation occurs in
any of my poems ever, they're pretty much the same.
Five ideas retooled. If opening a little more onto a
fuller glimpse each time I work it over, one of
the hardest things for young readers to figure out is
(15:18):
that there really is no hidden code in the poem.
The reader's purpose is not to crack the code and
replace the poem with a paraphrase of the poem. No,
a genuine poem is actually a place you enter and experience,
a place in which you collaborate in meaning making. While
he takes another drink from his mug, I consider the
room around me quietly before beginning my thought. when I
(15:42):
drove up to your house today, I say, I thought
of your house as just a house. A very modest house,
he replies. But when you told me that your dad
built this house, my perspective shifted. In a way, I
walked through this house differently. It seems as though poems,
if we think of them as a place, should be
entered with a different kind of respect. I'm not just
(16:04):
entering an apartment that is produced in mass. I'm entering
a place that had a great deal of meaning long
before I entered it. Are a dwelling place, he suggests. Yes.
How do you enter a poem with that kind of respect? Well,
he says, I suppose when I start reading, I'm not
looking for any inspiration. Anything to take. I'm just ingesting
(16:27):
the page. You know, if it draws me back later,
if I keep going back to the poem again and again,
then something grows out of that thorough reading. It's the
poets like W.H. Auden, CP Cavafy that I come back to.
Do you know Cavafy? He was a Greek poet living
in Alexandria, Egypt, in the early 20th century. He's a
fantastic poet. I have certain other poets, Mark strand, Anthony Hecht. Anyway,
(16:53):
I spent a lot of time with them, you see.
They become sort of my primary audience. They write to me,
I write to them. Richard Howard was one of my
beloved mentors, one of the best read guys I've met.
I pour over the works of these people and hope
that some of it rubs off. I end up writing
to satisfy them more than to satisfy. I don't know.
The living, he continues. I want students to be less
(17:17):
concerned with what the author is saying, and more concerned
with what they can literally make with the poem on
the page. The entire literary history is really all about
a conversation that has been going on for centuries. To
be part of that conversation, first you have to read
to find out what that conversation is, and let the
utterances of other writers provoke your responses. The more you're
(17:39):
equipped by the prior discourse, the more likely you are
to make something interesting with it, something that might actually
contribute to the ongoing conversation. Let's talk about calibrating to mystery,
I say. During difficult times of life, do you find
yourself writing? More or less? It has probably varied over
the years, he replies. As an escape from the turmoil? Yes.
(18:02):
Sometimes just saying to heck with it, I'm going to
work on this poem is a great thing. Other times
things are going well and I still get the legal
pad out and start reading again. Most of my writing time,
you see, begins with reading time. I'll be poring over
a book and eventually I glimpse something new. My legal
pad and number two pencils are out and ready, so
I start responding to whatever glimpses I just had. I
(18:25):
start looking for more openings onto new glimpses in this
new work. So there's this linguistic dynamic at work that
continues to give, to push me, to open me. Do
you leave unfinished poems out and about? So they're always
calling to you, I ask. You saw my desk, he chuckles.
I think that would qualify as out and about. At
(18:47):
some point I'll move them to the laptop. You strike
me as a poet who isn't under some delusion that
he's arrived, I say. There's always something to pursue, to learn.
The older I get, he replies, the more I feel
I have to achieve, and the more I feel like
I'm not going to make it, that I'm going to
run out of time. He laughs. That's pretty much a guarantee.
(19:11):
Do you feel the weight that John Keats felt when
he had fears that he may cease to be, when
he beheld cloudy symbols, that he may never live to
trace their shadows? Do you feel that? I've always been
cognizant of death, but it's a little more present as
I age. Yes, but I think of Samuel Coleridge. He
was always trying to mine something. I've found his continual
(19:33):
reaching to be compelling. I never want to give in
to the notion that if something comes easily, I should
keep doing that thing. How have you wrestled with public praise,
I ask? How have you kept it from warping your work? Well,
I guess I avoided as much as possible, he says
before taking another sip. I've never been good at taking compliments.
(19:55):
Maybe it's just part of my deflecting humor. One of
the best ways to defend against poor effect upon one's
character is to know some genuinely brilliant people. It keeps
you humble. Of course, I also have friends who don't
read poetry at all. I don't think it's for everyone.
I think you need to have a taste for uncertainty,
which is a taste I think most people don't share.
(20:16):
Most people are profoundly burdened by practical matters. They may
feel that they have no room for uncertainty, but that
feeling keeps them from discovering, keeps them from a deep
species of joy. Uncertainty is a great gift. I think
uncertainty is a truer disposition than certainty. For instance, God
(20:38):
is not reducible to anything we can say about God.
God necessarily always exceeds what we might make of God.
So too, the truth necessarily always exceeds what we can
narrowly define. If we think we can enclose the truth
or enclose God, we're not talking about truth and we're
not talking about God. Could we take a moment to
(20:59):
talk about the next generation of writers? I ask, what
are some of the missteps you see young writers taking?
The only time I really get distressed about my students,
he replies, is when marketing and self-promotion starts taking up
too much of their attention and time. I think self-promotion
is a really bad idea for a couple of reasons,
the greatest of which is that you start thinking that
(21:21):
public attention is how you know your work is good.
Applause and acclaim are not how you know something has quality.
Witnessing all the self-promotion they're doing, I feel very sad.
I start to wonder if maybe I forgot to say
something to them when I had the chance. Something important.
Are you suggesting, I asked, that the market economy has
(21:42):
no overlap with poetry? No. Marketing has a place, but
the poets shouldn't be the one to do it. The
poet should have some really great friends who love to
share his work with other people, so he can focus
on the work. I add truly, yes. Just do the work.
I'm not saying you shouldn't send your work out for publication,
(22:03):
but I spend probably an hour a month thinking about
what I have on hand to send out and who
I should send it to. Then I send it off
and forget about it. I get back to work. That
seems to me a healthy ratio, but more than that,
I think that a daily Instagram post about your deep
thoughts doesn't seem like a good use of your deep thoughts.
(22:24):
I don't get angry about marketing, I don't get resentful.
And yes, I think writers really do get noticed that way,
but I just mostly feel sad for folks who get
swept up in it. You wrote a book called Idiot Psalms.
One of my personal favorites is Psalm two, a Psalm
of Isaac accompanied by baying hounds. Who is Isaac? There
(22:48):
actually was a Saint Isaac of Syria. He says he
was a seventh century monastic who was bishop for about
three hours before he fled to the desert. I first
came upon him while reading The Brothers Karamazov. One of
the characters is said to have read the ascetical homilies
of Saint Isaac the Syrian nearly every day. Understanding none
(23:09):
of it. So that's the actual Saint Isaac. When I
became Orthodox, I took the name Isaac. He is my name. Saint,
as we say. Now, when I take communion, they don't
call me Scott. They call me Isaac. So these poems
and others of mine are understood to be spoken by
a persona, Isaac the least. Would you read the poem?
(23:33):
I ask? Absolutely. O shaper of vari colored clay and cellulose.
O keeper of same O subtle tweaker agent of energies,
both appalling and unobserved. Do not allow your servants limbs
(23:53):
to stiffen or to ossify unduly. Do not compel your
servant to go brittle. Neither cramping at the heart nor
narrowing his affective sympathies. Neither of the flesh nor of
the alleged soul. Keep me sufficiently limber that I might
continue to enjoy my morning run among the lilies and
(24:16):
the rowdy waterfowl. That I might delight in this and
every evening's intercourse with the woman you have set beside me.
Make me to awaken daily with a willingness to roll
out readily, accompanied by grateful smirk, a giddy joy. The
idiot's undying expectation despite the evidence. Thank you, I say.
(24:42):
I love that final stanza so much that I wrote
it down in my journal several years ago so I
could look at it regularly. Well, I wrote what I
hoped for myself, you know. The evidence is not promising,
but there is a grace in supposing that despite how
unpromising the surrounding evidence, the circumstances of our political lives,
(25:04):
our civic lives, our individual progress towards holiness, there is
an inescapable, deep note of joy that I've been blessed
with and count on. What a gift, I reply. I
remember being a boy, he says, maybe 3 or 4
years old, and we were getting ready to visit my
grandmother's house, he says. I was ready early because I
(25:26):
didn't have much to do, and so I walked out
into a very crisp winter night and closed the door
behind me. I stood on the threshold, my little feet
on the doorstep. And as I looked up into the
starry sky, I had this exhilarating sense of joy. Of beauty.
I said out loud, I love life. You know, the
(25:50):
expression of an earnest young person. But that has stuck
with me. It was this huge blessing, this realization that
it's all okay now and ever. It was a moment
that set me up for resistance, against the despair that
would woo me later in life. Here's one of my
(26:11):
favorite poems by Scott Cairns titled imperative. The thing to
remember is how tentative all of this really is. You
could wake up dead, or the woman you love could
decide you're ugly. Maybe she'll finally give up trying to
ignore the way you floss your teeth when you watch television.
(26:33):
All I'm saying is that there are no sure things here.
I mean, you'll probably wake up alive, and she'll probably
keep putting off any actual decision about your looks. Could
be she'll be glad your teeth are so clean. The
morning could be full of all the love and kindness
you need. Just don't go thinking you deserve any of it.
S1 (27:00):
An axe for the Frozen Sea is published by Rabbit
Room Press. The audio book is published by Oasis Audio.
Copyright by Ben Palpana. 2024 Music by Chris Badeker.
The following is brought to you in partnership with Oasis Audio.
Welcome to Rabbit Room Press Presents, a podcast series of
great audiobooks, one chapter at a time. As Franz Kafka
(00:20):
once said, a book must be the axe for the
frozen sea within us, and we at Rabbit Room Press
believe that. So this book, this collection of interviews with
contemporary poets, aims to awaken what is grown silent within us.
We're proud of the good work Ben has done in
the writing of this book, and we hope you enjoy
it as much as we have.
S2 (00:45):
An axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben read for
you by the author. Preface. If you had told me
back when I was just a lad that I would
choose to spend much of my 40s in conversation with
poets and worse yet, writing poems myself. I would have
(01:07):
kicked you in the shins and run for the hills.
I don't think my boy sized brain could have conceived
of a worse insult. Then I met a living poet.
It happened this way. I was a senior in high school,
holding a paper plate in a potluck line next to
a stranger. Because my mother taught me to be polite.
I struck up a conversation. What do you do? I asked.
(01:30):
I'm a poet, he replied. I thought he was pulling
my leg, but his face said otherwise. No smirk, no
glint in his eye. I thought every last poet was dead,
pinned onto the pages of boring textbooks. But here was
a living one standing next to me, speaking to me
in my native tongue. I fled. Then, years later, I
(01:54):
faced a health crisis that radically impacted my cognition for
an extended period of time. Calamity tends to open our
hearts to poetry. During that season of my life, I
could not track an argument in prose, but I could
follow a line of poetry to where it disappeared in
the grass. It became important to my physical and mental
stability that I learned to stand still in my heart,
(02:16):
to wait patiently until my mind could pick up where
the next poetic line offered itself and follow it. In poetry,
I found unexpected comfort and strangely, clarity, at least a
kind of clarity, the kind that poetry offers in paradox
and metaphor. Poetry offered me insights that drew me deeper
(02:37):
into life, and in particular, my life with Christ. Poetry
drew me, as Aslan says in The Last Battle. Further
up and further, in all these years later, poetry has
come to play a significant part in my walk with God,
which is why I set out at the start of
2024 to meet as many poets as I could and
(02:58):
to spend an hour with each one. Not to pepper
them with questions, but to have a conversation that would
lead us both further up and further in. Someone will
query why interview poets? To which I answer that I
believe the best poets practice seeing what most of us
overlook or take for granted. They know how to honor
(03:19):
the particularities of human existence, thereby opening our eyes to
see ourselves, God, and all of his creation with greater
clarity and appreciation and appreciation that leads from praise to
greater praise. Poets draw us to attention. They help us
sit up and take note. Leading us to the heart
(03:39):
of things and beyond the heart of things. In other words,
I believe poets can help us become more human as
God intended. Poets, through the ordinary means of the written word,
can give us glimpses of the eternal. That's why I
wanted these interviews to be less about the questions and
answers and more about the human interaction. I wanted them
(04:02):
to read like two people trying to dig deeper into
what it means to be human. Two friends exploring why
poetry matters for all of life. I did not intend
to collect these conversations into a book, but it became
apparent rather early on that reading them next to each
other would be a reinforcing and fulfilling experience. Each interview
(04:23):
is interesting and fruitful, but together they strengthen and enrich
one another. The title for this book comes from my
conversation with Misha Willette, who mentioned Franz Kafka's famous line,
A book must be an axe for the frozen sea
within us. It stuck with me and so I have
decided to title the book what I hope it will
(04:44):
become an axe for the Frozen Sea. Starting with the
sea that threatens to freeze inside me from time to time.
Over the years, poetry has helped break up the sea
of ice in my heart, which makes poets, I suppose,
axe wielders. I don't mean to describe these poets as
people who have weaponized their words, though some of them
(05:05):
might embrace that description. I mean that they have chosen
the more difficult work of changing hearts. Heart change always
begins with the poet, of course, but out of change
of heart, the mouth speaks. You will quickly discover that
the poets in this book do not always agree. There
are convictions vary, as do their practices. One of the
(05:26):
interesting convictions they share, however, is that poetry is more
than mere self-expression in our day and age. That's a
helpful connecting thread running through the discourse. I think I
can say this with certainty as well, that they all
agree with Eliot's famous line about writing poetry. Every attempt
is a wholly new start and a different kind of failure.
(05:47):
And so each venture is a new beginning, a raid
on the inarticulate. I will be asked why I included
some poets and did not include others. How I wish
I could say that I picked these poets for particular reasons. Alas,
I can't. I started with four poets who lived within
driving distance. They in turn suggested other poets, and so
(06:09):
the project evolved organically. These poets by no means represent
an exhaustive list of anything. Some are more famous than others,
but fame is no indicator of quality, and only time
will tell which poets will have a lasting impact. At
the end of the day, the world is full of
worthy poets. Find them. Learn from them. Given a thousand
(06:32):
possible ways to structure this book, I opted to organize
these poets alphabetically. It allows them to speak to each
other and to us without any orchestration on my part.
I also have a get out of jail free card,
which I find entirely convenient. If anyone complains about the order,
the question asked by every undergraduate is poetry still relevant
(06:54):
is a worthy one. The answer these conversations give is
a resounding yes. But how is poetry relevant? Well, the
answer to that question is as varied as the poets themselves.
When I look over the broad landscape of society, I
see a reawakening of interest in and writing of poetry.
(07:15):
If I'm correct, we need the best poets, both the
living and the dead, to guide us into a deeper
relationship with God, with ourselves, and with the world. Li-young
Lee once said, people who read poetry have heard about
the burning bush. But when you write poetry, you sit
inside the burning bush. We need poets whose souls are
(07:38):
fully awake so that we might glimpse what they sense
throbbing at the heart of all things. As the story goes,
Saint Augustine, weary of writing one day, decided to get
some fresh air and walk the beach. He had not
walked far when he saw a boy dashing back and
forth from the ocean to a tiny hole in the sand.
Augustine called out, hey there, what are you doing? The
(08:01):
boy lifted a shell, which he had been using to
transport seawater and cried out, I'm going to fit the
entire sea into this tiny hole I've dug in the sand.
Augustine laughed out loud, spreading his arms wide. He said,
you attempt the impossible, my son. You will never fit
this magnificent sea into that little hole. The boy, apparently
(08:23):
familiar with the great theologian's efforts, called back. And you
will never fit the Holy Trinity inside your head. Well,
imagine that there were two boys instead of only one,
or a boy and a girl. Would their success rate improve? Hardly.
But it would be good sport to watch. I suppose
(08:43):
that's what these conversations amount to. In the end, it's
just two people trying to spoon the ocean into a
tiny hole for an hour or so, doing our darndest
not to spill a single drop along the way. If
you are a poet, this book is for you. May
it inspire, instruct, and strengthen you for the work God
(09:04):
has given you to do. If you are not a poet,
may it remind you that words matter, that poetry matters
and that you matter. Not in that particular order. Most
of all, may these conversations spur us on to call
out to God, who loves to answer so that he
will show us great and mighty things which we did
(09:26):
not know. Jeremiah chapter 33, verse three. Ben Palpana September 2024.
Chapter one. Scott Cairns. Scott Cairns lives in a modest house,
the house of his childhood. A house his father built.
(09:49):
It is as unpretentious and welcoming as those who call
it home. Standing together in the kitchen, gazing at Puget Sound,
I am struck by the spirit in this place. The
same spirit that infuses his poetry. An open handed generosity,
a down to earth gentleness, a wry, disarming humor. He
(10:10):
leads me downstairs into a sunroom lined with windows, and
gives me first dibs on where I want to sit.
I select the old love seat built out of bamboo.
He's drinking his coffee from a mug that says seven
days without a pun makes one week. Glancing around the room,
I notice the unremarkable furniture, the shelf lined with plants.
The children's box set of Beatrix Potter books. It all
(10:33):
strikes me as incredibly unassuming. The observation that comes to
mind could seem insulting, but I choose to make it anyway.
You don't seem to take yourself too seriously, I suggest. Well,
he says, I guess going to a lot of poetry
readings over the years, listening to other poets, I find
myself thinking, you don't have to be that severe dude.
(10:55):
He grins. So yes, I usually open my poems with
a joke, and then at some point, you know, I
get a little more serious and the irony falls away.
If you were raised in this home as I was,
irony was a requirement, and puns were also required. How
did Naomi Shihab Nye put it? Answer if you hear
the words under the words. That is very similar to
(11:17):
what I have said endlessly to my students, which is
pay attention to the words within the words. Maybe you
could help me understand what you mean by that, I say.
I've noticed, he says, that the poems I love most
are poems that I can keep reading and opening, because
during a given reading I will have seen a primary
sense of the word, but then see how the secondary
(11:39):
and tertiary senses also figure into it. This is mostly
why I started learning Greek, and why I'm trying to
learn a little Latin. It's because, as you must know,
the English language is the best language for poetry. It's
a museum for almost all the other languages. And so
the etymological hauntings within an English word of its Greek
or Latin roots may not be so overt, but they're
(12:02):
present if you're attentive to those ghosts. The poem keeps
opening for you. It's never the same poem with each reading.
I want to make poems like that, poems that keep opening.
We should be cognizant that writing poems isn't about saying
what you think you know. It's really about constructing a
scene of meaning, making a field into which a reader
(12:24):
can enter and make meaning with the poet. There really
ought to be some ambiguity implicated in every line, I think.
Does the ambiguity play into line breaks for you, I ask?
How do you make decisions on line endings? I am
almost always counting something. That's one technical element of lineation.
I also want my lines to register as a provisional
(12:47):
syntactical unit, which is then modified by subsequent lines. Often,
for instance, the word out here at the end of
the line appears to be a noun, but then it
turns out that it's an adjective modifying an actual noun
waiting in the next line. That provides a wonderful, dizzying
experience for the reader, who then is obliged to take
(13:07):
another look at what he just read. And his rereading
proves essential to the agency of what I like to
call the poetic operation of language, which is what we
like about our favorite poems, I say. He nods and
takes a drink from his mug. Poetry. He says, when
it's really poetry, occasions this sort of spinning vertiginous. I
(13:29):
like the word vertiginous operation of language. You can also
witness this in a rich prose text. Poetry, of course,
can happen in verse or prose. Even fiction, non-fiction and
drama can obtain some degree of this poetic operation of language,
this delicious, puzzling opening activity. A great novel like Fyodor
(13:50):
Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, a book I read every summer
does this. It keeps opening me on to something new.
He pauses and gazes out the window. I really do
feel that when I'm making a poem, it's not about
having a glimpse of something true and then trying to
transcribe it. It's more like trying to figure it out,
(14:12):
glimpsing it as I go, wrestling with the language, listening
to the music of the words, letting the music lead
me to the next words. And in in that way,
my compositional practice is also my meditation. He thinks for
a moment. I guess for the first half of my life,
I resisted the equation between poetry and prayer. Over the
(14:35):
past 20 years, however, I have approached my poems as
a kind of prayer. Perhaps my most efficacious prayer. It
sounds to me like your favorite poets force you to
calibrate to mystery, I say. But that's also partly why
you write. You're calibrating to the divine mystery. Well, yes,
because I'm my first audience. I want to get something
(14:58):
out of it, too. He laughs. You should know that
I really only have five ideas. I think they're pretty
good ideas. But to the extent that ideation occurs in
any of my poems ever, they're pretty much the same.
Five ideas retooled. If opening a little more onto a
fuller glimpse each time I work it over, one of
the hardest things for young readers to figure out is
(15:18):
that there really is no hidden code in the poem.
The reader's purpose is not to crack the code and
replace the poem with a paraphrase of the poem. No,
a genuine poem is actually a place you enter and experience,
a place in which you collaborate in meaning making. While
he takes another drink from his mug, I consider the
room around me quietly before beginning my thought. when I
(15:42):
drove up to your house today, I say, I thought
of your house as just a house. A very modest house,
he replies. But when you told me that your dad
built this house, my perspective shifted. In a way, I
walked through this house differently. It seems as though poems,
if we think of them as a place, should be
entered with a different kind of respect. I'm not just
(16:04):
entering an apartment that is produced in mass. I'm entering
a place that had a great deal of meaning long
before I entered it. Are a dwelling place, he suggests. Yes.
How do you enter a poem with that kind of respect? Well,
he says, I suppose when I start reading, I'm not
looking for any inspiration. Anything to take. I'm just ingesting
(16:27):
the page. You know, if it draws me back later,
if I keep going back to the poem again and again,
then something grows out of that thorough reading. It's the
poets like W.H. Auden, CP Cavafy that I come back to.
Do you know Cavafy? He was a Greek poet living
in Alexandria, Egypt, in the early 20th century. He's a
fantastic poet. I have certain other poets, Mark strand, Anthony Hecht. Anyway,
(16:53):
I spent a lot of time with them, you see.
They become sort of my primary audience. They write to me,
I write to them. Richard Howard was one of my
beloved mentors, one of the best read guys I've met.
I pour over the works of these people and hope
that some of it rubs off. I end up writing
to satisfy them more than to satisfy. I don't know.
The living, he continues. I want students to be less
(17:17):
concerned with what the author is saying, and more concerned
with what they can literally make with the poem on
the page. The entire literary history is really all about
a conversation that has been going on for centuries. To
be part of that conversation, first you have to read
to find out what that conversation is, and let the
utterances of other writers provoke your responses. The more you're
(17:39):
equipped by the prior discourse, the more likely you are
to make something interesting with it, something that might actually
contribute to the ongoing conversation. Let's talk about calibrating to mystery,
I say. During difficult times of life, do you find
yourself writing? More or less? It has probably varied over
the years, he replies. As an escape from the turmoil? Yes.
(18:02):
Sometimes just saying to heck with it, I'm going to
work on this poem is a great thing. Other times
things are going well and I still get the legal
pad out and start reading again. Most of my writing time,
you see, begins with reading time. I'll be poring over
a book and eventually I glimpse something new. My legal
pad and number two pencils are out and ready, so
I start responding to whatever glimpses I just had. I
(18:25):
start looking for more openings onto new glimpses in this
new work. So there's this linguistic dynamic at work that
continues to give, to push me, to open me. Do
you leave unfinished poems out and about? So they're always
calling to you, I ask. You saw my desk, he chuckles.
I think that would qualify as out and about. At
(18:47):
some point I'll move them to the laptop. You strike
me as a poet who isn't under some delusion that
he's arrived, I say. There's always something to pursue, to learn.
The older I get, he replies, the more I feel
I have to achieve, and the more I feel like
I'm not going to make it, that I'm going to
run out of time. He laughs. That's pretty much a guarantee.
(19:11):
Do you feel the weight that John Keats felt when
he had fears that he may cease to be, when
he beheld cloudy symbols, that he may never live to
trace their shadows? Do you feel that? I've always been
cognizant of death, but it's a little more present as
I age. Yes, but I think of Samuel Coleridge. He
was always trying to mine something. I've found his continual
(19:33):
reaching to be compelling. I never want to give in
to the notion that if something comes easily, I should
keep doing that thing. How have you wrestled with public praise,
I ask? How have you kept it from warping your work? Well,
I guess I avoided as much as possible, he says
before taking another sip. I've never been good at taking compliments.
(19:55):
Maybe it's just part of my deflecting humor. One of
the best ways to defend against poor effect upon one's
character is to know some genuinely brilliant people. It keeps
you humble. Of course, I also have friends who don't
read poetry at all. I don't think it's for everyone.
I think you need to have a taste for uncertainty,
which is a taste I think most people don't share.
(20:16):
Most people are profoundly burdened by practical matters. They may
feel that they have no room for uncertainty, but that
feeling keeps them from discovering, keeps them from a deep
species of joy. Uncertainty is a great gift. I think
uncertainty is a truer disposition than certainty. For instance, God
(20:38):
is not reducible to anything we can say about God.
God necessarily always exceeds what we might make of God.
So too, the truth necessarily always exceeds what we can
narrowly define. If we think we can enclose the truth
or enclose God, we're not talking about truth and we're
not talking about God. Could we take a moment to
(20:59):
talk about the next generation of writers? I ask, what
are some of the missteps you see young writers taking?
The only time I really get distressed about my students,
he replies, is when marketing and self-promotion starts taking up
too much of their attention and time. I think self-promotion
is a really bad idea for a couple of reasons,
the greatest of which is that you start thinking that
(21:21):
public attention is how you know your work is good.
Applause and acclaim are not how you know something has quality.
Witnessing all the self-promotion they're doing, I feel very sad.
I start to wonder if maybe I forgot to say
something to them when I had the chance. Something important.
Are you suggesting, I asked, that the market economy has
(21:42):
no overlap with poetry? No. Marketing has a place, but
the poets shouldn't be the one to do it. The
poet should have some really great friends who love to
share his work with other people, so he can focus
on the work. I add truly, yes. Just do the work.
I'm not saying you shouldn't send your work out for publication,
(22:03):
but I spend probably an hour a month thinking about
what I have on hand to send out and who
I should send it to. Then I send it off
and forget about it. I get back to work. That
seems to me a healthy ratio, but more than that,
I think that a daily Instagram post about your deep
thoughts doesn't seem like a good use of your deep thoughts.
(22:24):
I don't get angry about marketing, I don't get resentful.
And yes, I think writers really do get noticed that way,
but I just mostly feel sad for folks who get
swept up in it. You wrote a book called Idiot Psalms.
One of my personal favorites is Psalm two, a Psalm
of Isaac accompanied by baying hounds. Who is Isaac? There
(22:48):
actually was a Saint Isaac of Syria. He says he
was a seventh century monastic who was bishop for about
three hours before he fled to the desert. I first
came upon him while reading The Brothers Karamazov. One of
the characters is said to have read the ascetical homilies
of Saint Isaac the Syrian nearly every day. Understanding none
(23:09):
of it. So that's the actual Saint Isaac. When I
became Orthodox, I took the name Isaac. He is my name. Saint,
as we say. Now, when I take communion, they don't
call me Scott. They call me Isaac. So these poems
and others of mine are understood to be spoken by
a persona, Isaac the least. Would you read the poem?
(23:33):
I ask? Absolutely. O shaper of vari colored clay and cellulose.
O keeper of same O subtle tweaker agent of energies,
both appalling and unobserved. Do not allow your servants limbs
(23:53):
to stiffen or to ossify unduly. Do not compel your
servant to go brittle. Neither cramping at the heart nor
narrowing his affective sympathies. Neither of the flesh nor of
the alleged soul. Keep me sufficiently limber that I might
continue to enjoy my morning run among the lilies and
(24:16):
the rowdy waterfowl. That I might delight in this and
every evening's intercourse with the woman you have set beside me.
Make me to awaken daily with a willingness to roll
out readily, accompanied by grateful smirk, a giddy joy. The
idiot's undying expectation despite the evidence. Thank you, I say.
(24:42):
I love that final stanza so much that I wrote
it down in my journal several years ago so I
could look at it regularly. Well, I wrote what I
hoped for myself, you know. The evidence is not promising,
but there is a grace in supposing that despite how
unpromising the surrounding evidence, the circumstances of our political lives,
(25:04):
our civic lives, our individual progress towards holiness, there is
an inescapable, deep note of joy that I've been blessed
with and count on. What a gift, I reply. I
remember being a boy, he says, maybe 3 or 4
years old, and we were getting ready to visit my
grandmother's house, he says. I was ready early because I
(25:26):
didn't have much to do, and so I walked out
into a very crisp winter night and closed the door
behind me. I stood on the threshold, my little feet
on the doorstep. And as I looked up into the
starry sky, I had this exhilarating sense of joy. Of beauty.
I said out loud, I love life. You know, the
(25:50):
expression of an earnest young person. But that has stuck
with me. It was this huge blessing, this realization that
it's all okay now and ever. It was a moment
that set me up for resistance, against the despair that
would woo me later in life. Here's one of my
(26:11):
favorite poems by Scott Cairns titled imperative. The thing to
remember is how tentative all of this really is. You
could wake up dead, or the woman you love could
decide you're ugly. Maybe she'll finally give up trying to
ignore the way you floss your teeth when you watch television.
(26:33):
All I'm saying is that there are no sure things here.
I mean, you'll probably wake up alive, and she'll probably
keep putting off any actual decision about your looks. Could
be she'll be glad your teeth are so clean. The
morning could be full of all the love and kindness
you need. Just don't go thinking you deserve any of it.
S1 (27:00):
An axe for the Frozen Sea is published by Rabbit
Room Press. The audio book is published by Oasis Audio.
Copyright by Ben Palpana. 2024 Music by Chris Badeker.
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