August 8, 2025 • 21 mins
Discover the wisdom and wonder of poetry through candid conversations with some of the most powerful poets of the 21st century.
In this remarkable collection, Ben Palpant, author of Letters from The Mountain, invites readers into intimate, one-on-one interviews with seventeen acclaimed poets. These conversations explore:
• The human experience: Grief, hope, culture, and the imagination.
• The writing life: Insights into the craft of poetry and the challenges of creativity.
• Everyday joys and struggles: Reflections on family life, faith, and the power of words.
As Franz Kafka once said, "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." The thoughts and words in this collection aim to awaken what has grown silent within us, reminding us that poetry is an essential expression of what it means to be human.
This book offers wisdom to inspire, instruct, and strengthen readers--proving that words matter, poetry matters, and you matter.
You can purchase a copy of An Axe for the Frozen Sea in the Rabbit Room Store.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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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.
S2 (00:15):
An axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben Read. For
you by the author. Chapter two Robert Cording. Let me
put all my cards on the table here and just
admit up front that I chose to interview Robert Cording,
not primarily because he's a first rate Christian poet, which
(00:37):
he is, but because he entered the abyss called grief,
and his poetry testifies to the one whom he found
at the bottom God. The word testify is perhaps not
quite right. I mean to say that his poetry sings
of God. He is like a bird caught in a well,
a well that we sidestep as long as possible, but
(00:59):
which we all must fall down sooner or later. I
suppose another way to put it is that I chose
to interview courting because I want his company. When that
day arrives. I chose him because he would remind me
that nothing can separate us from the love of God,
not even grief. Courting opens his latest book of poems
(01:20):
with a quote from the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Against other things,
it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes
to death, we human beings all live in an unwalled city.
Courting is an unwalled city, and he knows it. That's
perhaps all I need to say by way of introduction,
(01:41):
but I'll say this too. He is no graveside haunt.
Instead of a pale, morose aspect, his is rosy and sunkissed.
Instead of getting strung out on the opium of despair,
courting his clear eyed and hopeful, he would be the
first to demystify his title as poet. To tell you
that he is just a regular guy who lost his
(02:01):
son like so many before him. He would be the
first to say that when it comes to his poetry,
he's just trying to say what he doesn't know how
to say right out of the gate. I confess my
intentions to courting. You should know that I have a
singular plan for you, I say. He laughs. My other
interviews touch here and there on grief, but none of
(02:22):
them stays on that subject very long. You strike me
as a man who's willing to sit in uncomfortable spaces.
Why don't you start by telling me about your son? Happily,
he says, well, let's see, we lost our son six
years ago in October. Daniel had terrible back problems. For
five years. The discs in his spine were disintegrating, so
(02:45):
he would have these spasms that put him on the
ground and he couldn't walk. He was young, late 20s
when it started and had been a very good athlete,
so they didn't want to fuse his back. Instead, they
decided to shave away the extrusions to deal with the
pain they'd prescribed him opioids. He definitely became addicted to them.
(03:06):
He knew it. The doctor knew it. But they didn't
stop prescribing them because it was the only way to
deal with the pain. He died of an accidental drug overdose.
The more important thing is not his death, but his life.
He graduated with a degree in philosophy and architecture, did
a summer program at Harvard in architectural design, and started
(03:27):
his own business refurbishing houses. His work was very physical.
I know I'm biased, but the thing that made Daniel
extraordinary was that he took the question why seriously? And
he never settled for easy answers. He was a thinker.
I say yes, and in a way, his death offered
no easy answers. You know, we don't know how to
(03:50):
make sense of death. We can't move past it or
get around it, so we have to embrace it. I
know it sounds strange to say it that way, but
I truly believe that if we don't embrace death in
the way that we should embrace joy As an inexplicable thing,
then we harm ourselves. We end up mourning eternally for
something that we can't have. Again, the only defense we
(04:12):
have against death. If you want to call it a defense,
I would call it an offense. Myself is love. Solomon
says that love is as strong as death. I believe
that remembrance is a way to love. That's why I
started writing about him, writing as an act of love
and an act of remembrance. It seems to me a
necessity to make Daniel a daily part of my life,
(04:35):
just as he was when he was alive. You're leaning
into love as much as possible, I say. Yes, he replies.
You can't sidestep anything when you do that, and you
have to accept what happens to you. You know, some
of us are tempted to control every circumstance so that
nothing bad ever happens to us, but that way of
living always collapses on itself. Those kinds of people are
(04:58):
always unhappy. We just don't have control over much in life.
We have control over our own actions, of course, but
not much more than that. We have to embrace those
things that are out of our control. Leaning into love
means doing more than accepting Daniels death, hard as that is.
It means holding the grief as closely as I can.
(05:21):
It means not protecting myself from grief, but making the
grief as intimate as possible. It allows me to hold
him close, even in death. We have to embrace the
loss in order to embrace our son most fully. I
was talking to a young person the other day who
said that she had worked her whole life to evade trouble.
(05:41):
I say to control her circumstances, but it always seemed
to find her. She said that she had entered a
very dark place, but affirmed that it was when God
took away her control, when he put her in the
very place she dreaded most. That's when he met her there.
All she had left was God. That seems to me
(06:03):
to illustrate what you're talking about. Oh, it does very much.
I'm reminded of John chapter 16, verse seven, where Jesus
tells his disciples that he must go away so that
they might be comforted. I'm not sure how to explain that,
except to say that maybe the Holy Spirit, the comforter,
gives us a presence inside the absence. When I embrace
(06:24):
Daniel's absence, I felt comforted. You bring up the Holy
Spirit's work in your life, I say. I'm wondering what
his role is for you as a poet. Do you
see the Holy Spirit as the equivalent of what the
ancients referred to as the muse? I do, he replies.
I think one of the things we've lost is the
invocations that the older writers used to make before they wrote.
(06:47):
The first time I went through the Spiritual Exercises of
Saint Ignatius, I worked with my friend father McDonald, who
said at the start that we would invoke the Holy
Spirit so that maybe something could happen here with just
the two of us. We needed some help. He laughs.
I really feel that way about my writing. Poetry is
always trying to see beyond what we can see. We
(07:10):
know that's impossible. And yet we can ask. Scripture says,
see through a glass darkly. We know more than we
can say. Every act of writing is also a failure
to say what we most want to say. But it
is an attempt. It's an attempt to describe what it
means to be alive in this world. The seminal experience
(07:31):
of my life is that I live in a world
that's good. But so many bad things happen in it,
and yet I've never lost the sense that the world
was good at its core. For me, everything begins with
Genesis chapter one. It seems to me that your poetry
has always pointed to the goodness of creation in some way.
I say yes, I would say that it's the touchstone
(07:54):
of all my writing. I was lucky enough to find
my obsession in college. It happened in a funny way.
My mother, who thought I was just in a dreary
mood because I wore so much dark clothing, wanted me
to be happier. She told me to sit down and
write a list of all the bad things in life
on one side of a paper, and then write all
the good things on the other side. So I did.
(08:14):
Being the person that I was, I began with a
bad things. This was in the late 60s with racism,
the Vietnam War, a seemingly endless list. But when I
got to about 30 or 40 items, I had this
incredible realization. If I can list all of these bad things,
why do I have this abiding sense that life is
still good? I really did feel that life was, in
(08:36):
the end, good. I've spent the rest of my life
writing about that sense of goodness at the core of things.
You're reminding me of my conversation with Paul Mariani, I say,
who said that? His hero, Gerard Manley Hopkins, just wanted
to write at God's dictation to hear the Holy Spirit
as clearly as possible, and for his poetry to reflect
(08:59):
clearly what he heard. That seems to me to be
where you find yourself. Yes, my favorite poet is George Herbert.
For Herbert and Hopkins and myself. The dilemma is that
maybe we love the language we use to describe God
more than we love God. This was the dilemma I
ran into when writing about my son as well. I
wanted in the Unwalled city to be more than a
(09:21):
book about grief. I wanted it to be artistic. I
wanted it to be beautiful. That sounds crass. Perhaps to
write something artistic about your son who died. But there
it is. I did want to write something that was crafted,
that was beautifully written. I wanted something more than diary
entries or spilling my heart on the page. As a result,
(09:42):
the book is highly structured. I think if I'm going
to move people in any significant way, I must move
them by the artistry and not just the sentiment. Andrew
Peterson says that the job of the Christian artist is
to adorn the dark. I reply, that's what you're doing
in this book. You're trying to adorn your son's life
(10:02):
and his memory in a way that doesn't feel gaudy
or artificial, but in a way that honors him best.
And it requires a grateful heart to do that, he adds.
Yes it does. But that's exactly what I felt cut
off from when Daniel died, he says. This was true
for two years. It was hard to be grateful. All
(10:24):
my life I have felt that gratefulness equals a kind
of contentment. I think that's true, but it was just
not within reach for a while. My wife and I
would take a walk every day, and I don't think
she looked up for six months. Finally, one day we
took a walk and I saw two hawks doing this
aerial display, a kind of mating ritual. And I said
to her, you have to look at this. It's unbelievable.
(10:47):
After that, the natural world helped us live again. William
Wordsworth felt this keenly. He's one of my favorites because
he felt like the natural world could help in more
ways than we know, including helping us be better people.
I believe that, too. Like Hopkins, I believe that every
moment of every day, the world shows us the grandeur
of God. This must have an effect on your choice
(11:12):
of poetic form. I say your work is eclectic in
its forms, but I'm wondering how you choose. You know,
a sonnet is a lovely way of artistically making a point,
but it might not be the most effective way to
express our deepest passions, whether rage or utter exaltation and joy.
I never actually think about the form initially, he says.
(11:34):
Whenever I've written a sonnet, it actually started out as
something else, until I realized that there was a sonnet
there that the poem was asking to become. For me,
writing about grief was a matter of bringing in voices,
prose voices, formal poetry, voices, raw poetry, voices that are uninhibited.
And my son's voice, too. I wanted my son to speak.
(11:56):
I think he has the best lines in the book.
Did you have poets that ministered to you in times
of grief? I ask? Yes. Herbert's poem The Bag begins
this way away. Despair, my gracious Lord, doth hear. Though
winds and waves assault my keel. He doth preserve it.
(12:20):
He doth steer. Even when the boat seems most to real.
Storms are the triumph of his art. Well, may he
close his eyes, but not his heart. Reading that poem,
I realized that yes, I too must not close my heart.
If Christ would not close his heart, then why should I?
(12:42):
No matter how difficult the grief, you must not close
your heart to close one's heart as a self-destructive act,
I say. Yes, he replies. Do you find that if
we are honest, sometimes we want to destroy ourselves in
times of grief, to close our eyes, even literally and permanently?
(13:03):
Maybe we want to put ourselves on some kind of
pyre rather than face naked grief. Indeed, he says. But
Christ did not close his eyes. No, he did not,
I reply. Your words remind me of when Christ appeared
to the disciples after he rose from the dead. Thomas
in particular was a man like me, a skeptic, a
(13:24):
man whose grief accentuated his skepticism. In my opinion, skepticism
was a way of shielding himself against pervasive loss. Christ
doesn't just say, look, here I am. Christ invites Thomas
to put his hand in Christ's side. It's a kind
of invitation to embrace death fully, to really come to
(13:44):
grips with what happened. I agree, he says. It's an
invitation to be fully human. To face death and as
a result, the incomprehensibility of resurrection. In Wordsworth's Peel Castle,
a poem about his brother who drowned at sea, he
says that the death of his brother humanized his soul.
(14:04):
I think that's really true. But only if we embrace
death as we ought to embrace it. The grief actually
makes us more human, more compassionate, more attentive to our
connections with each other. It seems to me, I reply,
that you can spot a kinship rather quickly with someone
who has suffered deeply. Yes, it's true, he says. As
(14:27):
a teacher, I was always very moved by students who
had suffered terrible things at an early age. I felt
a deep compassion. I'll tell you something about when Daniel died.
Whether it was a good parenting decision or not, I
told my other two sons that we were going to
go down to the funeral home to be with Daniel
after he died. I wanted them to see their brother
(14:47):
before the funeral home, doctored him up before they changed
him to be more fit for public viewing. So we went,
the three of us, and sat with Daniel for over
an hour. I told them we were going to stay
with Daniel's body until we had grown comfortable with death,
as comfortable as we can become. We wanted to honor
(15:08):
him by letting his death imprint itself on our bodies.
I made my sons touch their brother's face. Six years later,
they say that they are really grateful for that experience.
Your story reminds me of Nikos Kazantzakis. I say his autobiography,
Report to Greco, is really wonderful. I'll never forget one
(15:30):
moment in his childhood when war broke out and flooded
the streets. They bolted the door and sat against the wall,
listening through the night to the sound of bloodshed. In
the morning, when life began again, his father took him
into the streets to show little Nikos the dead. At
one point they came to three men who had been hanged.
His father made him touch and kiss their feet. The
(15:51):
difference between your story and this Kazantzakis story, at least
as it seems to me, is that his father was
saying to Nikos, this is reality. Get used to it.
But yours was an act of faith. The first person
who died in my life, he replies, was my great grandmother.
I was very afraid, sitting in church, knowing that she
(16:12):
was dead in the coffin at the front of the church.
When it was time, my mother marched me all the
way up to the front of the church and took
my hand and placed it on my great grandmother's cheek
and on her lips, and then on her forehead. My
mother told me that I would always have the touch
of her. It was a kind of gift, a kind
of embracing death rather than simply facing it. At one
(16:36):
point in the book, you quote Henry James, who said
that we work in the dark. Could you unpack that
for me, especially in terms of writing poetry? I've always
believed that we live in a world that is untranslatable, unexplainable,
but intelligible. That's the part everyone leaves out when they
talk about mystery. They talk about mystery as if it
(16:56):
will one day no longer be a mystery when we
have all of the facts. But there's no accounting for
most things. Actually, most sacred mysteries are beyond our grasp,
but that doesn't mean they're unapproachable or unintelligible. That's why
we can have the gifts of physics and mathematics. All
the disciplines we teach. But when we're writing poetry, we're
(17:17):
trying to approach mystery through intelligible things. As a poet,
you try to move as close to mystery as you
possibly can. Poetry allows us to do what rational arguments don't.
He says poetry is especially suited to this because it
uses images. Robert Frost says that poetry says one thing
in terms of another. In poetry, something can mean two
(17:39):
things at once. Sometimes, paradoxically, this is often how we
experience life, like suffering and joy. But poetry makes that
which seems beyond reason intelligible and rational. It helps to
make a kind of sense out of our experience. Ephesians
chapter two, verse ten says that we are God's poema.
(18:01):
I say, have you thought of that word in the
context of grief? The word literally means workmanship. He replies,
something made God has made us. God has made everything.
Just think of the planet we live on spinning as
it does at such a velocity through space. God made
it spin in such a way that we don't fly
off of it, and it remains just at the right
(18:23):
distance from the sun, so that we neither fry nor freeze.
The only explanation for this exactness is divine love. That's
where the word workmanship comes into play. When Moses climbed
the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments, the Israelites made
a golden calf. They made it because they were afraid.
But when God tells them to make the ark of
(18:44):
the covenant, they make it out of love. That's an
interesting distinction, I say. Well, he replies, I believe that
God wants us to make like he makes from an
overflow of love. Christians especially ought to make out of love.
You know, I never felt angry at the loss of
my son, because I don't believe God took my son's
(19:06):
life as a destructive act. God is always making. That's
what he does continually. Annually. And I believe that at
the heart of life is the choice to embrace God's work,
even at great personal cost. My work as a poet,
my relationships, my daily decisions depend upon embracing the God
who makes and will always make as an overflow of love.
(19:34):
Here's one of my favorite poems by Robert Cording titled larches.
The green gone to gold. Larches gilded. My view for
three weeks. But now these deciduous evergreens sluff off their needles.
That lie in a ring beneath the trees. Already I
(19:56):
miss their feathery tops. Tempering the wind of a pop
up storm, as if there was something like a calm
kindness at the heart of things. Now the dark comes early.
Pools under the larches. And keeps on rising. Until the
darkness of the trees seek each other. I wait for
the dark to rise up in me as if it's
(20:18):
my duty. I believe as much as I can that
the sorrow arriving each evening is the hard gift required
of me. I have stood here so many evenings. My
sorrow has become its own relief. So I wait for
the stab of love and its wound. Of remembering my
dead son. Who I must keep from becoming the ghost
(20:42):
of all. I do not remember. His death is a
different death, unlike the larches that do not need me
to bring back their life.
S1 (20:59):
An axe for the Frozen Sea is published by Rabbit
Room Press. The audiobook is published by Oasis Audio. Copyright
by Ben Pallant, 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.
S2 (00:15):
An axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben Read. For
you by the author. Chapter two Robert Cording. Let me
put all my cards on the table here and just
admit up front that I chose to interview Robert Cording,
not primarily because he's a first rate Christian poet, which
(00:37):
he is, but because he entered the abyss called grief,
and his poetry testifies to the one whom he found
at the bottom God. The word testify is perhaps not
quite right. I mean to say that his poetry sings
of God. He is like a bird caught in a well,
a well that we sidestep as long as possible, but
(00:59):
which we all must fall down sooner or later. I
suppose another way to put it is that I chose
to interview courting because I want his company. When that
day arrives. I chose him because he would remind me
that nothing can separate us from the love of God,
not even grief. Courting opens his latest book of poems
(01:20):
with a quote from the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Against other things,
it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes
to death, we human beings all live in an unwalled city.
Courting is an unwalled city, and he knows it. That's
perhaps all I need to say by way of introduction,
(01:41):
but I'll say this too. He is no graveside haunt.
Instead of a pale, morose aspect, his is rosy and sunkissed.
Instead of getting strung out on the opium of despair,
courting his clear eyed and hopeful, he would be the
first to demystify his title as poet. To tell you
that he is just a regular guy who lost his
(02:01):
son like so many before him. He would be the
first to say that when it comes to his poetry,
he's just trying to say what he doesn't know how
to say right out of the gate. I confess my
intentions to courting. You should know that I have a
singular plan for you, I say. He laughs. My other
interviews touch here and there on grief, but none of
(02:22):
them stays on that subject very long. You strike me
as a man who's willing to sit in uncomfortable spaces.
Why don't you start by telling me about your son? Happily,
he says, well, let's see, we lost our son six
years ago in October. Daniel had terrible back problems. For
five years. The discs in his spine were disintegrating, so
(02:45):
he would have these spasms that put him on the
ground and he couldn't walk. He was young, late 20s
when it started and had been a very good athlete,
so they didn't want to fuse his back. Instead, they
decided to shave away the extrusions to deal with the
pain they'd prescribed him opioids. He definitely became addicted to them.
(03:06):
He knew it. The doctor knew it. But they didn't
stop prescribing them because it was the only way to
deal with the pain. He died of an accidental drug overdose.
The more important thing is not his death, but his life.
He graduated with a degree in philosophy and architecture, did
a summer program at Harvard in architectural design, and started
(03:27):
his own business refurbishing houses. His work was very physical.
I know I'm biased, but the thing that made Daniel
extraordinary was that he took the question why seriously? And
he never settled for easy answers. He was a thinker.
I say yes, and in a way, his death offered
no easy answers. You know, we don't know how to
(03:50):
make sense of death. We can't move past it or
get around it, so we have to embrace it. I
know it sounds strange to say it that way, but
I truly believe that if we don't embrace death in
the way that we should embrace joy As an inexplicable thing,
then we harm ourselves. We end up mourning eternally for
something that we can't have. Again, the only defense we
(04:12):
have against death. If you want to call it a defense,
I would call it an offense. Myself is love. Solomon
says that love is as strong as death. I believe
that remembrance is a way to love. That's why I
started writing about him, writing as an act of love
and an act of remembrance. It seems to me a
necessity to make Daniel a daily part of my life,
(04:35):
just as he was when he was alive. You're leaning
into love as much as possible, I say. Yes, he replies.
You can't sidestep anything when you do that, and you
have to accept what happens to you. You know, some
of us are tempted to control every circumstance so that
nothing bad ever happens to us, but that way of
living always collapses on itself. Those kinds of people are
(04:58):
always unhappy. We just don't have control over much in life.
We have control over our own actions, of course, but
not much more than that. We have to embrace those
things that are out of our control. Leaning into love
means doing more than accepting Daniels death, hard as that is.
It means holding the grief as closely as I can.
(05:21):
It means not protecting myself from grief, but making the
grief as intimate as possible. It allows me to hold
him close, even in death. We have to embrace the
loss in order to embrace our son most fully. I
was talking to a young person the other day who
said that she had worked her whole life to evade trouble.
(05:41):
I say to control her circumstances, but it always seemed
to find her. She said that she had entered a
very dark place, but affirmed that it was when God
took away her control, when he put her in the
very place she dreaded most. That's when he met her there.
All she had left was God. That seems to me
(06:03):
to illustrate what you're talking about. Oh, it does very much.
I'm reminded of John chapter 16, verse seven, where Jesus
tells his disciples that he must go away so that
they might be comforted. I'm not sure how to explain that,
except to say that maybe the Holy Spirit, the comforter,
gives us a presence inside the absence. When I embrace
(06:24):
Daniel's absence, I felt comforted. You bring up the Holy
Spirit's work in your life, I say. I'm wondering what
his role is for you as a poet. Do you
see the Holy Spirit as the equivalent of what the
ancients referred to as the muse? I do, he replies.
I think one of the things we've lost is the
invocations that the older writers used to make before they wrote.
(06:47):
The first time I went through the Spiritual Exercises of
Saint Ignatius, I worked with my friend father McDonald, who
said at the start that we would invoke the Holy
Spirit so that maybe something could happen here with just
the two of us. We needed some help. He laughs.
I really feel that way about my writing. Poetry is
always trying to see beyond what we can see. We
(07:10):
know that's impossible. And yet we can ask. Scripture says,
see through a glass darkly. We know more than we
can say. Every act of writing is also a failure
to say what we most want to say. But it
is an attempt. It's an attempt to describe what it
means to be alive in this world. The seminal experience
(07:31):
of my life is that I live in a world
that's good. But so many bad things happen in it,
and yet I've never lost the sense that the world
was good at its core. For me, everything begins with
Genesis chapter one. It seems to me that your poetry
has always pointed to the goodness of creation in some way.
I say yes, I would say that it's the touchstone
(07:54):
of all my writing. I was lucky enough to find
my obsession in college. It happened in a funny way.
My mother, who thought I was just in a dreary
mood because I wore so much dark clothing, wanted me
to be happier. She told me to sit down and
write a list of all the bad things in life
on one side of a paper, and then write all
the good things on the other side. So I did.
(08:14):
Being the person that I was, I began with a
bad things. This was in the late 60s with racism,
the Vietnam War, a seemingly endless list. But when I
got to about 30 or 40 items, I had this
incredible realization. If I can list all of these bad things,
why do I have this abiding sense that life is
still good? I really did feel that life was, in
(08:36):
the end, good. I've spent the rest of my life
writing about that sense of goodness at the core of things.
You're reminding me of my conversation with Paul Mariani, I say,
who said that? His hero, Gerard Manley Hopkins, just wanted
to write at God's dictation to hear the Holy Spirit
as clearly as possible, and for his poetry to reflect
(08:59):
clearly what he heard. That seems to me to be
where you find yourself. Yes, my favorite poet is George Herbert.
For Herbert and Hopkins and myself. The dilemma is that
maybe we love the language we use to describe God
more than we love God. This was the dilemma I
ran into when writing about my son as well. I
wanted in the Unwalled city to be more than a
(09:21):
book about grief. I wanted it to be artistic. I
wanted it to be beautiful. That sounds crass. Perhaps to
write something artistic about your son who died. But there
it is. I did want to write something that was crafted,
that was beautifully written. I wanted something more than diary
entries or spilling my heart on the page. As a result,
(09:42):
the book is highly structured. I think if I'm going
to move people in any significant way, I must move
them by the artistry and not just the sentiment. Andrew
Peterson says that the job of the Christian artist is
to adorn the dark. I reply, that's what you're doing
in this book. You're trying to adorn your son's life
(10:02):
and his memory in a way that doesn't feel gaudy
or artificial, but in a way that honors him best.
And it requires a grateful heart to do that, he adds.
Yes it does. But that's exactly what I felt cut
off from when Daniel died, he says. This was true
for two years. It was hard to be grateful. All
(10:24):
my life I have felt that gratefulness equals a kind
of contentment. I think that's true, but it was just
not within reach for a while. My wife and I
would take a walk every day, and I don't think
she looked up for six months. Finally, one day we
took a walk and I saw two hawks doing this
aerial display, a kind of mating ritual. And I said
to her, you have to look at this. It's unbelievable.
(10:47):
After that, the natural world helped us live again. William
Wordsworth felt this keenly. He's one of my favorites because
he felt like the natural world could help in more
ways than we know, including helping us be better people.
I believe that, too. Like Hopkins, I believe that every
moment of every day, the world shows us the grandeur
of God. This must have an effect on your choice
(11:12):
of poetic form. I say your work is eclectic in
its forms, but I'm wondering how you choose. You know,
a sonnet is a lovely way of artistically making a point,
but it might not be the most effective way to
express our deepest passions, whether rage or utter exaltation and joy.
I never actually think about the form initially, he says.
(11:34):
Whenever I've written a sonnet, it actually started out as
something else, until I realized that there was a sonnet
there that the poem was asking to become. For me,
writing about grief was a matter of bringing in voices,
prose voices, formal poetry, voices, raw poetry, voices that are uninhibited.
And my son's voice, too. I wanted my son to speak.
(11:56):
I think he has the best lines in the book.
Did you have poets that ministered to you in times
of grief? I ask? Yes. Herbert's poem The Bag begins
this way away. Despair, my gracious Lord, doth hear. Though
winds and waves assault my keel. He doth preserve it.
(12:20):
He doth steer. Even when the boat seems most to real.
Storms are the triumph of his art. Well, may he
close his eyes, but not his heart. Reading that poem,
I realized that yes, I too must not close my heart.
If Christ would not close his heart, then why should I?
(12:42):
No matter how difficult the grief, you must not close
your heart to close one's heart as a self-destructive act,
I say. Yes, he replies. Do you find that if
we are honest, sometimes we want to destroy ourselves in
times of grief, to close our eyes, even literally and permanently?
(13:03):
Maybe we want to put ourselves on some kind of
pyre rather than face naked grief. Indeed, he says. But
Christ did not close his eyes. No, he did not,
I reply. Your words remind me of when Christ appeared
to the disciples after he rose from the dead. Thomas
in particular was a man like me, a skeptic, a
(13:24):
man whose grief accentuated his skepticism. In my opinion, skepticism
was a way of shielding himself against pervasive loss. Christ
doesn't just say, look, here I am. Christ invites Thomas
to put his hand in Christ's side. It's a kind
of invitation to embrace death fully, to really come to
(13:44):
grips with what happened. I agree, he says. It's an
invitation to be fully human. To face death and as
a result, the incomprehensibility of resurrection. In Wordsworth's Peel Castle,
a poem about his brother who drowned at sea, he
says that the death of his brother humanized his soul.
(14:04):
I think that's really true. But only if we embrace
death as we ought to embrace it. The grief actually
makes us more human, more compassionate, more attentive to our
connections with each other. It seems to me, I reply,
that you can spot a kinship rather quickly with someone
who has suffered deeply. Yes, it's true, he says. As
(14:27):
a teacher, I was always very moved by students who
had suffered terrible things at an early age. I felt
a deep compassion. I'll tell you something about when Daniel died.
Whether it was a good parenting decision or not, I
told my other two sons that we were going to
go down to the funeral home to be with Daniel
after he died. I wanted them to see their brother
(14:47):
before the funeral home, doctored him up before they changed
him to be more fit for public viewing. So we went,
the three of us, and sat with Daniel for over
an hour. I told them we were going to stay
with Daniel's body until we had grown comfortable with death,
as comfortable as we can become. We wanted to honor
(15:08):
him by letting his death imprint itself on our bodies.
I made my sons touch their brother's face. Six years later,
they say that they are really grateful for that experience.
Your story reminds me of Nikos Kazantzakis. I say his autobiography,
Report to Greco, is really wonderful. I'll never forget one
(15:30):
moment in his childhood when war broke out and flooded
the streets. They bolted the door and sat against the wall,
listening through the night to the sound of bloodshed. In
the morning, when life began again, his father took him
into the streets to show little Nikos the dead. At
one point they came to three men who had been hanged.
His father made him touch and kiss their feet. The
(15:51):
difference between your story and this Kazantzakis story, at least
as it seems to me, is that his father was
saying to Nikos, this is reality. Get used to it.
But yours was an act of faith. The first person
who died in my life, he replies, was my great grandmother.
I was very afraid, sitting in church, knowing that she
(16:12):
was dead in the coffin at the front of the church.
When it was time, my mother marched me all the
way up to the front of the church and took
my hand and placed it on my great grandmother's cheek
and on her lips, and then on her forehead. My
mother told me that I would always have the touch
of her. It was a kind of gift, a kind
of embracing death rather than simply facing it. At one
(16:36):
point in the book, you quote Henry James, who said
that we work in the dark. Could you unpack that
for me, especially in terms of writing poetry? I've always
believed that we live in a world that is untranslatable, unexplainable,
but intelligible. That's the part everyone leaves out when they
talk about mystery. They talk about mystery as if it
(16:56):
will one day no longer be a mystery when we
have all of the facts. But there's no accounting for
most things. Actually, most sacred mysteries are beyond our grasp,
but that doesn't mean they're unapproachable or unintelligible. That's why
we can have the gifts of physics and mathematics. All
the disciplines we teach. But when we're writing poetry, we're
(17:17):
trying to approach mystery through intelligible things. As a poet,
you try to move as close to mystery as you
possibly can. Poetry allows us to do what rational arguments don't.
He says poetry is especially suited to this because it
uses images. Robert Frost says that poetry says one thing
in terms of another. In poetry, something can mean two
(17:39):
things at once. Sometimes, paradoxically, this is often how we
experience life, like suffering and joy. But poetry makes that
which seems beyond reason intelligible and rational. It helps to
make a kind of sense out of our experience. Ephesians
chapter two, verse ten says that we are God's poema.
(18:01):
I say, have you thought of that word in the
context of grief? The word literally means workmanship. He replies,
something made God has made us. God has made everything.
Just think of the planet we live on spinning as
it does at such a velocity through space. God made
it spin in such a way that we don't fly
off of it, and it remains just at the right
(18:23):
distance from the sun, so that we neither fry nor freeze.
The only explanation for this exactness is divine love. That's
where the word workmanship comes into play. When Moses climbed
the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments, the Israelites made
a golden calf. They made it because they were afraid.
But when God tells them to make the ark of
(18:44):
the covenant, they make it out of love. That's an
interesting distinction, I say. Well, he replies, I believe that
God wants us to make like he makes from an
overflow of love. Christians especially ought to make out of love.
You know, I never felt angry at the loss of
my son, because I don't believe God took my son's
(19:06):
life as a destructive act. God is always making. That's
what he does continually. Annually. And I believe that at
the heart of life is the choice to embrace God's work,
even at great personal cost. My work as a poet,
my relationships, my daily decisions depend upon embracing the God
who makes and will always make as an overflow of love.
(19:34):
Here's one of my favorite poems by Robert Cording titled larches.
The green gone to gold. Larches gilded. My view for
three weeks. But now these deciduous evergreens sluff off their needles.
That lie in a ring beneath the trees. Already I
(19:56):
miss their feathery tops. Tempering the wind of a pop
up storm, as if there was something like a calm
kindness at the heart of things. Now the dark comes early.
Pools under the larches. And keeps on rising. Until the
darkness of the trees seek each other. I wait for
the dark to rise up in me as if it's
(20:18):
my duty. I believe as much as I can that
the sorrow arriving each evening is the hard gift required
of me. I have stood here so many evenings. My
sorrow has become its own relief. So I wait for
the stab of love and its wound. Of remembering my
dead son. Who I must keep from becoming the ghost
(20:42):
of all. I do not remember. His death is a
different death, unlike the larches that do not need me
to bring back their life.
S1 (20:59):
An axe for the Frozen Sea is published by Rabbit
Room Press. The audiobook is published by Oasis Audio. Copyright
by Ben Pallant, 2024. Music by Chris Badeker.
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