August 25, 2025 • 25 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.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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 (00:16):
An axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben Pallant. Read
for you by the author. Chapter eight Paul Mariani. When
I started interviewing poets of Faith in January 2024, I
asked a publisher for suggestions. He immediately mentioned Paul Mariani,
(00:38):
calling him an elder statesman of contemporary poetry that engages faith.
That's not the kind of praise I hear very often,
so it gave me pause. I had read Mariani before,
but his significance had been unknown to me. I asked
the publisher if he would elaborate. This is what the
publisher wrote. Well, in the late 1980s, Paul had already
established himself as a leading poet and biographer of poets.
(01:02):
But he took a risk by starting to write and
publish poems that directly engaged with his Catholic faith. You
have to understand that this was still in a time
when the major gatekeepers of the culture were militantly anti-religious.
He demonstrated that you could be a major literary figure
in the midst of the mainstream public square, and be
a person of faith at a time when many Christians
preferred to huddle in a subculture. This helped me realize
(01:25):
that Paul Mariani has been doing the hard spade work
necessary for cultural cultivation long before I started writing. Truth
be told, I have been the beneficiary of his work
for many years now. Thinking through his life's work, it
was difficult for me to choose whether to ask him
about his own poetry or to discuss his formidable efforts
at writing about other poets. I decided to split the difference.
(01:48):
You seem to have twin engines that propel your work,
a love for poetic expression and a love for poets,
I say. When were those seeds planted? Well, when it
comes to writing poetry, he replies, I wrote my first
poem in the spring of 1957. I was training to
join the Marianist teaching order, living in community, sleeping in
(02:11):
a large dorm each night, along with about 40 other
novices attending morning mass, said in Latin back then, and
being fed by a small group of German nuns who
lived across the way. One day, another order of local
nuns posted a poetry contest for a religious poem about
Lent or Easter. I asked Brother Clyde if he could
help me write a sonnet on the Passion of Christ.
(02:32):
He couldn't, he said, but he directed me to a
battered book of poems that contained definitions in the back
about poetic forms. I sat down and studied the forms,
figured out the intertwining of the rhymed lines and the
nature of the five iambs. Over the next several days
I hammered out three quatrains and titled it forgive me.
Here it is. I help to beat and scourge your back.
(02:55):
A crimson red. And place a crown of prickly thorns
upon your regal head. Your sacred name and character I
mock and ridicule. Oh, Lord, each time I flee your
love I prove myself a fool. I hurt and helped
to make you fall along the doula's way. And scorn
your mother and the others as they watch and pray.
I strip your garment from your limbs and from your
(03:18):
whiplashed skin. Yes, all of this I do to you
when I commit a sin. I helped drive the ugly
nails into your feet and wrists and mock your kingly
deity with slanderous, waving fists. Each time I sin against thee, Lord,
I help to break your heart. Lord, help me hate
my sins and ever more from them depart. I'm glad
(03:40):
you still have the poem, I say. Did you win?
The good nuns awarded me with a $10 first place prize.
I spent that money on a beautiful rosary for my mother.
Tell me about your mother. Both my parents dropped out
of high school on the Upper East Side when each
turn 16, thanks to the Great Depression. My father delivered
carloads of food by truck and horse drawn wagon. My
(04:01):
mother lost her father in France, where he was mustard
gassed on the northern front when she was nine. My
mother was a week shy of her 17th birthday when
she had me. How many siblings did you have? I
am the oldest of seven siblings. I know my mother
did the best she could, taking care of the seven
of us while working nights at the publishing houses down
in Garden City, and drinking to medicate herself against my
(04:24):
father's outbursts of rage. Sad to say, but there it is.
Once he wanted to pull me out of school at
16 to work full time in his gas station. But
my mother, who knew I had unusual learning skills, said
that would only happen over her dead body. Thank God
for mothers like that. Amen, I say. You obviously never
entered the priesthood. Pretty soon after I wrote that poem,
(04:47):
I decided that I wanted to get married and have
a family of my own. At Manhattan College in the Bronx,
I took as much religion, literature, philosophy, Latin, Greek and
history as I could. My father wanted me to pursue
a respectable course of study, like engineering or law, to
make sure I made a decent living. But I kept
returning to English and decided at the last minute to
(05:09):
major in that. So you discovered the poets at Manhattan?
It was only in my last semester at Manhattan, in
the spring of 62, that I discovered my first great love,
the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Here was a Catholic
poet who radically redirected poetry and who had a profound
impact on me and many other poets. I think I
(05:29):
have always been influenced by the sacramental nature of beauty,
and how it can manifest itself in the stress and
music of language. While he published virtually nothing in his
44 years of life, he kept writing. It took his
close friend Robert Bridges, 30 years after Hopkins death, to
finally publish Hopkins's poems in a slim volume. There's so
much to love and admire in Hopkins's work. You've written
(05:52):
about Hopkins extensively. I've published two books on Hopkins, the
first being my heavily reworked dissertation under the guidance of
the great Dante scholar and poet Allen Mandelbaum, which Cornell
University brought out in early 1970, and then 38 years
later in 2008. Gerard Manley Hopkins, A life, published by
(06:13):
Viking Penguin. Do you have a favorite Hopkins poem, I ask?
Although I admire them all, he says, my favorite is
the wind over the sonnet. Hopkins wrote in late May
of 1877 as he prepared for his ordination to the priesthood.
He dedicated this Petrarchan sonnet to his hero, Christ our Lord.
You'll notice how the first eight lines all rhyme on
(06:35):
the word king, for with a strong stress king wing
swing thing, and four with unaccented syllables writing, striding, gliding, hiding.
It sounds like the lift and fall of the wind.
Over's wings as it flies into the winds of the
hills of northern Wales. Here's the poem. I caught this morning.
(06:56):
Morning's minion. Kingdom of daylight's. Dolphin dapple. Dawn drawn falcon
in his riding of the rolling level underneath him steady
air and striding high there how he rung upon the
rein of a wimping wing in his ecstasy. Then off, off,
forth on swing. As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on
(07:19):
a bow bend the hurl and gliding rebuffed the big wind.
My heart in hiding stirred for a bird. The achieve
of the mastery of the thing. Then in the final
six lines we watch as the wind over buckles and
drops to the ground. It is Christ and the incarnation,
Christ as he falls and sacrifices himself for us. It's
(07:42):
a sacrifice far lovelier and more dangerous than anything before.
The way a plow with sheer plod cuts through the
dirt and turns up thousands of speckled quartz pieces, previously
hidden but now shining for us to see. Or the
way those blue bleak embers in the fire grate break
through the iron grating. And as they fall, gall themselves.
(08:02):
Think of the vinegar gall pushed up to the crucified
Christ's lips as he was dying. And gash gold, vermilion.
His blood turned to the gold of our ransom. Here's
the rest of the poem. Brute beauty and valour and act. Oh,
air pride! Plume! Here, buckle. And the fire that breaks
(08:23):
from thee. Then a billion times told lovelier, more dangerous,
O my chevalier, no wonder of it. Sheer plod makes
plough down silly and shine. And blue bleak embers are
my dear fall gall themselves. And gash gold, vermilion. In
(08:46):
the mystery of it all, you wrote that Hopkins pleaded
with God for the peace that came with writing, not
for himself or the New York Times. He hoped from
now on to sweat out his writing at God's dictation.
Do you share that hope? How do we prevent the
allure to write for something other than merely the humble
dictation of the Spirit's work in us? I ask. I
(09:08):
do share that hope, he replies. Since I believe that
the gift of writing poetry has been a blessing from God,
it is that grace to which I return whenever I
undertake to write a poem. The Holy Spirit as muse.
What did Hopkins say? Jesus Christ is the only true
literary critic. I'm grateful for all the rest. But that
focus remains the true North. What is the hardest hurdle
(09:31):
you've had to overcome as a writer? Here was the
issue for me, he replies. Not just to write, but
to write what I wanted to write about. As a
college professor, I soon learned to take the axiom publish
or perish Seriously. But I also felt a responsibility and
a deep drawing to write about the underlying sacramental tensions
in the daily mysteries we encounter. Hopkins understood this. Flannery
(09:56):
O'Connor understood it. So did Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, John Berryman,
Hart Crane, and Wallace Stevens. Hopkins struggled mightily with insecurities
about his poetic work, I say. It seems to me
that those feelings are common among poets. Have you felt
that inadequacy, too? Especially given the weightiness of a sacramental vision? Yes,
(10:17):
he replies. Linda Khong recently wrote in mockingbird magazine I
didn't know how to pay tribute to such a great God,
or to register the complicated and contradictory experiences of being
a Christian with my measly words, my dull words. I
didn't know how to offer a new voice in a
new century. I was intimidated. I understand her sense of
(10:38):
trying to sing in the shadow of one's predecessors, but
you must venture out and try to write what you
believe you were meant to write, and you look for
those poets who seem to speak to you directly and
learn what each of those poets can teach you. Inscape. Beauty.
Daring the American idiom. You get knocked down the dark
angel somewhere in the rafters laughing at you. Then you
(10:59):
get up and you go forward again, and you do
what you can, and somehow the light breaks through again.
Thank God, it seems to me that your later poetry
is addressed more and more to friends, those still living
and those who live in your memory. Is poetry a
way for you to hold on to memories as you age,
to keep those you love alive in your heart? That's
(11:20):
beautifully phrased. Yes, more and more of my later poems
are addressed to friends and family, the pole stars of
my life to thank them. And of course, there's my
immediate family, my dear wife Eileen, a game changer. Ever
since that evening I met her at a college gathering
me from Manhattan College. She from Saint John's University in
a bar in Mineola, New York, back in December 1959.
(11:44):
And then my three sons and our grandkids and their
jokes at their grandfather's expense. I can't think of any
greater blessing than breaking bread with them at family gatherings. Truly,
they have made all the difference to my life. There
are also poems for my mother and father, poems both
sad and happy, and of course, my six younger siblings.
(12:04):
You refer to your time as poetry editor at America magazine,
as a time when you saw a great deal of
poetry that lacked spiritual dimension. You saw poems that were
strong on religious sensibility, and the verse forms were strong,
but the poetry was lacking. Can you elaborate on what
you mean? Is the problem a shallow spiritual life, culture wide?
Is it because we have become unmoored from the scriptures?
(12:26):
How do we write poems that are more than simply
religious poems that lift us into another spiritual dimension? Good question, Ben,
and a difficult one as well. Many religious poets seem
to think that if they just fill the lines with
quotations or hints of quotations from the Bible, then that
will suffice. It will not. Nor will the poem that
(12:46):
uses poetic formulae a sonnet, a cinquain, a triolet, a sestina,
heroic couplets, the ballad form, and so on result in
a satisfactory poem touching on the spiritual dimension. Certainly not
a Catholic poem. As Emily Dickinson said, it's only when
the hair on your head seems to respond that you
are in the presence of the real poem. Personally, I
(13:08):
read poetry every day, but only rarely do I feel
I am in the presence of a poem that truly matters.
So much depends upon the calibre of the person writing
the poem, doesn't it, I ask? Here's one thing for sure,
he says. The poet herself or himself must enter. The
poem must be somehow there in the poem, spending his
or her blood as the words flow out and on.
(13:30):
And this, my friend, cannot be faked. The perceptive reader
will spot it, and the interchange will end. Now, this
is true of all real poetry. but the poet who
seriously invokes the scriptures has an added obligation to meet
the words found there and create a music that will
serve as a worthy diadem for that diamond, and that
will come at a cost, a struggle in the mystery
(13:53):
of it all. You describe Scott Cairns as one of
those poets who offers grasshopper transcendency the momentary lift or epiphany,
in which the spiritual dimension is for a moment glimpsed
before it disappears. What is that evasive thing you're talking about?
William Carlos Williams wrote a magnificent epic poem, Paterson. There's
(14:14):
a passage where the poet walks across the park on
Garret Mountain and notices the grasshoppers leaping into the air,
their wings catching the sunlight for a moment so that
they seem transformed, and then quickly settling back into the
high grass. I have taken that to mean that momentary lift,
that epiphany in which something is for a moment glimpsed
before it disappears. It can be the shimmering silence, that
(14:36):
radiant white space, A momentary lifting of the spirit. Something
akin to the silences between and among and in and
through those sounds transformed into musical cadences. The thing that
returns us again and again to the mystery of the
well wrought poem. Your comments remind me of Paul's words
in his first letter to the Corinthians when he writes,
(14:59):
for now we see in a mirror dimly, but then
face to face. Now I know in part, then I
shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
I say, yes, that's exactly it. He replies, the best
poems give us a peek into something. Most of us,
if we are attentive enough the way the poet must be,
grasp now, only momentarily. It's a blessing, a gift, a grace.
(15:23):
The poet offers something the poet catches in the shadow
of the sun, a gift from the good Lord, for
which the only real response would be a profound thank you.
You're talking about a glimpse of light or hope or redemption? Yes.
I'm not speaking here of the poets of darkness, of
whom there are plenty. Thank you. I've been there, taught them,
(15:45):
tried to understand them in a sense, to even out
the field. But they are a little help to me,
especially as I grow older. My journey here is coming
to a close, whether I like it or not. So
what can I do but acknowledge the darkness and search.
Search for the light. My Catholic faith is essential in
this search. It helps me to accept grace and give
that grace back to others in whatever ways I can.
(16:07):
It helps me listen to others acknowledging their pain, rejoicing
in their joy, accepting love, and giving that love back
in the written word. You've been doing that for a
long time, I say. It's been 70 years since my
first poem, followed by biographies, memoirs, critical essays, reflections, and
more poems. But each time I write, I must face
(16:28):
the blank page. And then I begin with a line,
and then another. And perhaps the next day another and
another in the end. Surprising myself, if not my creator.
That's a wonderful answer, Paul. I think it has become
a full time job to hang on to hope, especially
as we age. I'm thankful for your example in that regard.
When it's all said and done, what do you hope
(16:50):
you have accomplished in your life? What are several things
you believe your life has testified to? When I look
back on my youth growing up on New York's East
51st Street back in the 1940s, he says, I find
myself lucky, first of all, to be alive. Those were
tough years. I nearly lost my feet when I was
three and tried to take a bath in the kitchen
sink early one morning, just after my father had left
(17:12):
for work, and the hot water scalded both my feet badly.
If it hadn't been for a new wonder drug called penicillin,
the only option would have been to amputate both my
feet at the ankles. And then there was the time
when I was six, returning alone in the late December, dark,
after going by myself to see Walt Disney's Song of
the South. A teenager named Harry and his gang cornered
me and poured kerosene around my feet. They'd been burning
(17:35):
Christmas trees, tossed out into the streets and then let
matches and taunted me. I cried and shouted, but no
one would help me, not even a gentleman slouching around
the gang and minding his own business. My mother came
running up the street, shouting, my little brother in tow
and my sister in the baby carriage. My father took
care of that the next morning when he confronted Harry's family,
(17:56):
knocked Harry's older brother just home from jail across the
room and told Harry's father, sitting there silently to make
sure Harry stayed away from me. You've survived a great deal,
I say. I suppose that's true, but I'm not alone,
he replies. Like most people, I'm a survivor. I have
no hearing in my right ear, a condition I was
born with, and so I've had to work hard to
(18:18):
make sure I hear what someone says to me. And
teaching classes and seminars for over half a century has
often been a challenge. But you go into the class,
welcome all of your students. Joke if you can, and
listen carefully to what they say. The benefit of that
is that I'm a good listener and I listen attentively
to what someone says. I'm also a Catholic Christian, so
(18:39):
there was always this sense of hope that the good
Lord would be there for me, and I would try
to bear witness to that. Which is why I chose
the name Christopher. Christ bearer for my confirmation name. Years later,
in 1975, I served as a rector at a retreat
and was in the makeshift room where we kept the
tabernacle with the Eucharist. I could hear Christ prompting me.
(19:00):
Go ahead, Paul. Ask for what's in your heart now.
I answered that I was fully satisfied with the work
my team had done in witnessing, and that was sufficient.
But again, the prompting. Go ahead and ask. And I said, well, Lord,
if it's your will, help me to be a poet
dedicated to you, lifting you up in 10,000 ways. We
(19:22):
find in what we call the ordinary. And within a
year I had somehow managed to complete an entire book
of poems, my first called Timing Devices, Poems that would
leave an impact. If you look at the list of
books I've published over the past half century spiritual memoirs, essays,
critical texts, those six biographies and a thousand pages of
my own poetry. It does amount to a bounty. Thanks
(19:44):
to the good Lord and the patience and support of
my dear wife of 60 years, Eileen. Truly a blessing
for me. You described Eileen as a game changer. Tell
me more about her. When I look across the table
at her, I realize that none of what I've done
would have been possible without her. I don't know, but
it seems we men often take for granted what our
(20:06):
women do to keep the home together and functioning. The
daily chores of shopping and preparing meals, raising a family,
and then being there for the next generation as well. Truly,
as I meditate on this, I see in those meals,
in that breaking of the bread, an incredible abundance of
love and grace. Of course, she's been there in all
the good times and the bad times, even to tell
(20:27):
the truth, when I wasn't there for her. for many years.
She typed out all my writings, my dissertation drafts of
essays and poems, and she has read everything I've written
over a lifetime. She has always made astute insights into
what I've written. She's a wonderful poem herself, I say. Okay.
Final question. How would you finish the following? Dear poet? Well,
(20:53):
I would probably speak to all the poets with whom
I've journeyed over the past 60 years. There's Father Hopkins,
of course, and there's my beloved Dante and Bill Williams,
with his search for the American idiom and the brilliance
of Stevens and Crane and those early years, especially Lowell,
as he knitted the warp and woof of Hopkins and
John Milton into his Quaker graveyard in Nantucket, and then
(21:16):
later the brutal honesty of Skunk Hour as his majestic
vision collapsed, only to have to be rebuilt as he
could in spite of his mental travails. Then add my
dear Miss Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, Marie Howe,
Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Robert Hayden and Wilfred Owen,
(21:39):
and William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney, both of whom
I taught in seminars. That's amazing, I reply. Well, there's
a long list of poets for whom I'm grateful, he says.
Bob pack, Phil Levine, Eddie Hirsch, Garrett Hongo, Scott Cairns,
and my dear friend Martin Espada. I shouldn't forget to
mention the greats Geoffrey Chaucer, Shakespeare, Virgil, Homer, Sappho. You
(22:03):
can see where this is going. Well, I say thank you.
Thank you all for a rich and Bountiful life filled
with poetry. Here's one of my favorite poems by Paul
Mariani titled elegy for Emily. Once more the leaves are falling.
(22:24):
Summer's gone like some evicted tenant and the light we
loved keeps fading with each day. The sun clicks left
a little more each evening, and the bright notes of
jays and finches that flocked last week about our feeders
have left for warmer climes. And so it goes, as
it has forever. And as the light grows shorter, those
crickets that kept time with the katydids have packed up
(22:47):
their strings and violas and departed. And now my dear
sister lies sleeping in her bed 3000 miles away, the
morphine flowing through her as her family and the nurse
attend her needs, while the hours and weeks drone on
and on. Our lone warrior has grown silent now, tucked
tight in her cocoon and still come dawn. Her big
(23:09):
brown baby eyes seem fixed on me again, her oldest brother.
As I keep peering through the crib bars there in
our dingy fifth floor walkup on East 51st. The clop
of horses and the L melding into prayer. The war
is finally over now, and daddy's home again. And peace,
(23:29):
the papers say, is flowing everywhere. But your wide eyes
keep staring into mine. As if to ask. Brother, can
you tell me why we're here? Questions I couldn't answer then.
And dear sister cannot answer now. But here we are
for the time we've been allotted, and questions to which
(23:50):
ask what might have been. If. If only what? I
climb back now, 60 years and more, and once again
catch you staring into a void I cannot see. That
winter night, I staggered back into the kitchen, having begged
our mother to shut off the engine. Weak as she was,
and come inside in silence and defeat our father for
(24:11):
once speechless. And you there in the doorway, your eyes
announcing it was over. Now that one day you'd move
away from here. Which in time was what you did. It.
And now, after all these years, as you lie sleeping
in your bed, you're moving on to another place only
you can know. The cancer having won which took Mom
(24:33):
and Dad. And if that wasn't quite enough, our youngest
sister to each day now, sweet Emily, I pray you
find the light and peace you longed for. Your feathers
unfolding now our eyes fixed fast on you as you
begin your final flight.
S1 (24:54):
An axe for the Frozen Sea is published by Rabbit
Room Press. The audiobook is published by Oasis Audio. Copyright
by Ben Pallant, 2024. 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 (00:16):
An axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben Pallant. Read
for you by the author. Chapter eight Paul Mariani. When
I started interviewing poets of Faith in January 2024, I
asked a publisher for suggestions. He immediately mentioned Paul Mariani,
(00:38):
calling him an elder statesman of contemporary poetry that engages faith.
That's not the kind of praise I hear very often,
so it gave me pause. I had read Mariani before,
but his significance had been unknown to me. I asked
the publisher if he would elaborate. This is what the
publisher wrote. Well, in the late 1980s, Paul had already
established himself as a leading poet and biographer of poets.
(01:02):
But he took a risk by starting to write and
publish poems that directly engaged with his Catholic faith. You
have to understand that this was still in a time
when the major gatekeepers of the culture were militantly anti-religious.
He demonstrated that you could be a major literary figure
in the midst of the mainstream public square, and be
a person of faith at a time when many Christians
preferred to huddle in a subculture. This helped me realize
(01:25):
that Paul Mariani has been doing the hard spade work
necessary for cultural cultivation long before I started writing. Truth
be told, I have been the beneficiary of his work
for many years now. Thinking through his life's work, it
was difficult for me to choose whether to ask him
about his own poetry or to discuss his formidable efforts
at writing about other poets. I decided to split the difference.
(01:48):
You seem to have twin engines that propel your work,
a love for poetic expression and a love for poets,
I say. When were those seeds planted? Well, when it
comes to writing poetry, he replies, I wrote my first
poem in the spring of 1957. I was training to
join the Marianist teaching order, living in community, sleeping in
(02:11):
a large dorm each night, along with about 40 other
novices attending morning mass, said in Latin back then, and
being fed by a small group of German nuns who
lived across the way. One day, another order of local
nuns posted a poetry contest for a religious poem about
Lent or Easter. I asked Brother Clyde if he could
help me write a sonnet on the Passion of Christ.
(02:32):
He couldn't, he said, but he directed me to a
battered book of poems that contained definitions in the back
about poetic forms. I sat down and studied the forms,
figured out the intertwining of the rhymed lines and the
nature of the five iambs. Over the next several days
I hammered out three quatrains and titled it forgive me.
Here it is. I help to beat and scourge your back.
(02:55):
A crimson red. And place a crown of prickly thorns
upon your regal head. Your sacred name and character I
mock and ridicule. Oh, Lord, each time I flee your
love I prove myself a fool. I hurt and helped
to make you fall along the doula's way. And scorn
your mother and the others as they watch and pray.
I strip your garment from your limbs and from your
(03:18):
whiplashed skin. Yes, all of this I do to you
when I commit a sin. I helped drive the ugly
nails into your feet and wrists and mock your kingly
deity with slanderous, waving fists. Each time I sin against thee, Lord,
I help to break your heart. Lord, help me hate
my sins and ever more from them depart. I'm glad
(03:40):
you still have the poem, I say. Did you win?
The good nuns awarded me with a $10 first place prize.
I spent that money on a beautiful rosary for my mother.
Tell me about your mother. Both my parents dropped out
of high school on the Upper East Side when each
turn 16, thanks to the Great Depression. My father delivered
carloads of food by truck and horse drawn wagon. My
(04:01):
mother lost her father in France, where he was mustard
gassed on the northern front when she was nine. My
mother was a week shy of her 17th birthday when
she had me. How many siblings did you have? I
am the oldest of seven siblings. I know my mother
did the best she could, taking care of the seven
of us while working nights at the publishing houses down
in Garden City, and drinking to medicate herself against my
(04:24):
father's outbursts of rage. Sad to say, but there it is.
Once he wanted to pull me out of school at
16 to work full time in his gas station. But
my mother, who knew I had unusual learning skills, said
that would only happen over her dead body. Thank God
for mothers like that. Amen, I say. You obviously never
entered the priesthood. Pretty soon after I wrote that poem,
(04:47):
I decided that I wanted to get married and have
a family of my own. At Manhattan College in the Bronx,
I took as much religion, literature, philosophy, Latin, Greek and
history as I could. My father wanted me to pursue
a respectable course of study, like engineering or law, to
make sure I made a decent living. But I kept
returning to English and decided at the last minute to
(05:09):
major in that. So you discovered the poets at Manhattan?
It was only in my last semester at Manhattan, in
the spring of 62, that I discovered my first great love,
the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Here was a Catholic
poet who radically redirected poetry and who had a profound
impact on me and many other poets. I think I
(05:29):
have always been influenced by the sacramental nature of beauty,
and how it can manifest itself in the stress and
music of language. While he published virtually nothing in his
44 years of life, he kept writing. It took his
close friend Robert Bridges, 30 years after Hopkins death, to
finally publish Hopkins's poems in a slim volume. There's so
much to love and admire in Hopkins's work. You've written
(05:52):
about Hopkins extensively. I've published two books on Hopkins, the
first being my heavily reworked dissertation under the guidance of
the great Dante scholar and poet Allen Mandelbaum, which Cornell
University brought out in early 1970, and then 38 years
later in 2008. Gerard Manley Hopkins, A life, published by
(06:13):
Viking Penguin. Do you have a favorite Hopkins poem, I ask?
Although I admire them all, he says, my favorite is
the wind over the sonnet. Hopkins wrote in late May
of 1877 as he prepared for his ordination to the priesthood.
He dedicated this Petrarchan sonnet to his hero, Christ our Lord.
You'll notice how the first eight lines all rhyme on
(06:35):
the word king, for with a strong stress king wing
swing thing, and four with unaccented syllables writing, striding, gliding, hiding.
It sounds like the lift and fall of the wind.
Over's wings as it flies into the winds of the
hills of northern Wales. Here's the poem. I caught this morning.
(06:56):
Morning's minion. Kingdom of daylight's. Dolphin dapple. Dawn drawn falcon
in his riding of the rolling level underneath him steady
air and striding high there how he rung upon the
rein of a wimping wing in his ecstasy. Then off, off,
forth on swing. As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on
(07:19):
a bow bend the hurl and gliding rebuffed the big wind.
My heart in hiding stirred for a bird. The achieve
of the mastery of the thing. Then in the final
six lines we watch as the wind over buckles and
drops to the ground. It is Christ and the incarnation,
Christ as he falls and sacrifices himself for us. It's
(07:42):
a sacrifice far lovelier and more dangerous than anything before.
The way a plow with sheer plod cuts through the
dirt and turns up thousands of speckled quartz pieces, previously
hidden but now shining for us to see. Or the
way those blue bleak embers in the fire grate break
through the iron grating. And as they fall, gall themselves.
(08:02):
Think of the vinegar gall pushed up to the crucified
Christ's lips as he was dying. And gash gold, vermilion.
His blood turned to the gold of our ransom. Here's
the rest of the poem. Brute beauty and valour and act. Oh,
air pride! Plume! Here, buckle. And the fire that breaks
(08:23):
from thee. Then a billion times told lovelier, more dangerous,
O my chevalier, no wonder of it. Sheer plod makes
plough down silly and shine. And blue bleak embers are
my dear fall gall themselves. And gash gold, vermilion. In
(08:46):
the mystery of it all, you wrote that Hopkins pleaded
with God for the peace that came with writing, not
for himself or the New York Times. He hoped from
now on to sweat out his writing at God's dictation.
Do you share that hope? How do we prevent the
allure to write for something other than merely the humble
dictation of the Spirit's work in us? I ask. I
(09:08):
do share that hope, he replies. Since I believe that
the gift of writing poetry has been a blessing from God,
it is that grace to which I return whenever I
undertake to write a poem. The Holy Spirit as muse.
What did Hopkins say? Jesus Christ is the only true
literary critic. I'm grateful for all the rest. But that
focus remains the true North. What is the hardest hurdle
(09:31):
you've had to overcome as a writer? Here was the
issue for me, he replies. Not just to write, but
to write what I wanted to write about. As a
college professor, I soon learned to take the axiom publish
or perish Seriously. But I also felt a responsibility and
a deep drawing to write about the underlying sacramental tensions
in the daily mysteries we encounter. Hopkins understood this. Flannery
(09:56):
O'Connor understood it. So did Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, John Berryman,
Hart Crane, and Wallace Stevens. Hopkins struggled mightily with insecurities
about his poetic work, I say. It seems to me
that those feelings are common among poets. Have you felt
that inadequacy, too? Especially given the weightiness of a sacramental vision? Yes,
(10:17):
he replies. Linda Khong recently wrote in mockingbird magazine I
didn't know how to pay tribute to such a great God,
or to register the complicated and contradictory experiences of being
a Christian with my measly words, my dull words. I
didn't know how to offer a new voice in a
new century. I was intimidated. I understand her sense of
(10:38):
trying to sing in the shadow of one's predecessors, but
you must venture out and try to write what you
believe you were meant to write, and you look for
those poets who seem to speak to you directly and
learn what each of those poets can teach you. Inscape. Beauty.
Daring the American idiom. You get knocked down the dark
angel somewhere in the rafters laughing at you. Then you
(10:59):
get up and you go forward again, and you do
what you can, and somehow the light breaks through again.
Thank God, it seems to me that your later poetry
is addressed more and more to friends, those still living
and those who live in your memory. Is poetry a
way for you to hold on to memories as you age,
to keep those you love alive in your heart? That's
(11:20):
beautifully phrased. Yes, more and more of my later poems
are addressed to friends and family, the pole stars of
my life to thank them. And of course, there's my
immediate family, my dear wife Eileen, a game changer. Ever
since that evening I met her at a college gathering
me from Manhattan College. She from Saint John's University in
a bar in Mineola, New York, back in December 1959.
(11:44):
And then my three sons and our grandkids and their
jokes at their grandfather's expense. I can't think of any
greater blessing than breaking bread with them at family gatherings. Truly,
they have made all the difference to my life. There
are also poems for my mother and father, poems both
sad and happy, and of course, my six younger siblings.
(12:04):
You refer to your time as poetry editor at America magazine,
as a time when you saw a great deal of
poetry that lacked spiritual dimension. You saw poems that were
strong on religious sensibility, and the verse forms were strong,
but the poetry was lacking. Can you elaborate on what
you mean? Is the problem a shallow spiritual life, culture wide?
Is it because we have become unmoored from the scriptures?
(12:26):
How do we write poems that are more than simply
religious poems that lift us into another spiritual dimension? Good question, Ben,
and a difficult one as well. Many religious poets seem
to think that if they just fill the lines with
quotations or hints of quotations from the Bible, then that
will suffice. It will not. Nor will the poem that
(12:46):
uses poetic formulae a sonnet, a cinquain, a triolet, a sestina,
heroic couplets, the ballad form, and so on result in
a satisfactory poem touching on the spiritual dimension. Certainly not
a Catholic poem. As Emily Dickinson said, it's only when
the hair on your head seems to respond that you
are in the presence of the real poem. Personally, I
(13:08):
read poetry every day, but only rarely do I feel
I am in the presence of a poem that truly matters.
So much depends upon the calibre of the person writing
the poem, doesn't it, I ask? Here's one thing for sure,
he says. The poet herself or himself must enter. The
poem must be somehow there in the poem, spending his
or her blood as the words flow out and on.
(13:30):
And this, my friend, cannot be faked. The perceptive reader
will spot it, and the interchange will end. Now, this
is true of all real poetry. but the poet who
seriously invokes the scriptures has an added obligation to meet
the words found there and create a music that will
serve as a worthy diadem for that diamond, and that
will come at a cost, a struggle in the mystery
(13:53):
of it all. You describe Scott Cairns as one of
those poets who offers grasshopper transcendency the momentary lift or epiphany,
in which the spiritual dimension is for a moment glimpsed
before it disappears. What is that evasive thing you're talking about?
William Carlos Williams wrote a magnificent epic poem, Paterson. There's
(14:14):
a passage where the poet walks across the park on
Garret Mountain and notices the grasshoppers leaping into the air,
their wings catching the sunlight for a moment so that
they seem transformed, and then quickly settling back into the
high grass. I have taken that to mean that momentary lift,
that epiphany in which something is for a moment glimpsed
before it disappears. It can be the shimmering silence, that
(14:36):
radiant white space, A momentary lifting of the spirit. Something
akin to the silences between and among and in and
through those sounds transformed into musical cadences. The thing that
returns us again and again to the mystery of the
well wrought poem. Your comments remind me of Paul's words
in his first letter to the Corinthians when he writes,
(14:59):
for now we see in a mirror dimly, but then
face to face. Now I know in part, then I
shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
I say, yes, that's exactly it. He replies, the best
poems give us a peek into something. Most of us,
if we are attentive enough the way the poet must be,
grasp now, only momentarily. It's a blessing, a gift, a grace.
(15:23):
The poet offers something the poet catches in the shadow
of the sun, a gift from the good Lord, for
which the only real response would be a profound thank you.
You're talking about a glimpse of light or hope or redemption? Yes.
I'm not speaking here of the poets of darkness, of
whom there are plenty. Thank you. I've been there, taught them,
(15:45):
tried to understand them in a sense, to even out
the field. But they are a little help to me,
especially as I grow older. My journey here is coming
to a close, whether I like it or not. So
what can I do but acknowledge the darkness and search.
Search for the light. My Catholic faith is essential in
this search. It helps me to accept grace and give
that grace back to others in whatever ways I can.
(16:07):
It helps me listen to others acknowledging their pain, rejoicing
in their joy, accepting love, and giving that love back
in the written word. You've been doing that for a
long time, I say. It's been 70 years since my
first poem, followed by biographies, memoirs, critical essays, reflections, and
more poems. But each time I write, I must face
(16:28):
the blank page. And then I begin with a line,
and then another. And perhaps the next day another and
another in the end. Surprising myself, if not my creator.
That's a wonderful answer, Paul. I think it has become
a full time job to hang on to hope, especially
as we age. I'm thankful for your example in that regard.
When it's all said and done, what do you hope
(16:50):
you have accomplished in your life? What are several things
you believe your life has testified to? When I look
back on my youth growing up on New York's East
51st Street back in the 1940s, he says, I find
myself lucky, first of all, to be alive. Those were
tough years. I nearly lost my feet when I was
three and tried to take a bath in the kitchen
sink early one morning, just after my father had left
(17:12):
for work, and the hot water scalded both my feet badly.
If it hadn't been for a new wonder drug called penicillin,
the only option would have been to amputate both my
feet at the ankles. And then there was the time
when I was six, returning alone in the late December, dark,
after going by myself to see Walt Disney's Song of
the South. A teenager named Harry and his gang cornered
me and poured kerosene around my feet. They'd been burning
(17:35):
Christmas trees, tossed out into the streets and then let
matches and taunted me. I cried and shouted, but no
one would help me, not even a gentleman slouching around
the gang and minding his own business. My mother came
running up the street, shouting, my little brother in tow
and my sister in the baby carriage. My father took
care of that the next morning when he confronted Harry's family,
(17:56):
knocked Harry's older brother just home from jail across the
room and told Harry's father, sitting there silently to make
sure Harry stayed away from me. You've survived a great deal,
I say. I suppose that's true, but I'm not alone,
he replies. Like most people, I'm a survivor. I have
no hearing in my right ear, a condition I was
born with, and so I've had to work hard to
(18:18):
make sure I hear what someone says to me. And
teaching classes and seminars for over half a century has
often been a challenge. But you go into the class,
welcome all of your students. Joke if you can, and
listen carefully to what they say. The benefit of that
is that I'm a good listener and I listen attentively
to what someone says. I'm also a Catholic Christian, so
(18:39):
there was always this sense of hope that the good
Lord would be there for me, and I would try
to bear witness to that. Which is why I chose
the name Christopher. Christ bearer for my confirmation name. Years later,
in 1975, I served as a rector at a retreat
and was in the makeshift room where we kept the
tabernacle with the Eucharist. I could hear Christ prompting me.
(19:00):
Go ahead, Paul. Ask for what's in your heart now.
I answered that I was fully satisfied with the work
my team had done in witnessing, and that was sufficient.
But again, the prompting. Go ahead and ask. And I said, well, Lord,
if it's your will, help me to be a poet
dedicated to you, lifting you up in 10,000 ways. We
(19:22):
find in what we call the ordinary. And within a
year I had somehow managed to complete an entire book
of poems, my first called Timing Devices, Poems that would
leave an impact. If you look at the list of
books I've published over the past half century spiritual memoirs, essays,
critical texts, those six biographies and a thousand pages of
my own poetry. It does amount to a bounty. Thanks
(19:44):
to the good Lord and the patience and support of
my dear wife of 60 years, Eileen. Truly a blessing
for me. You described Eileen as a game changer. Tell
me more about her. When I look across the table
at her, I realize that none of what I've done
would have been possible without her. I don't know, but
it seems we men often take for granted what our
(20:06):
women do to keep the home together and functioning. The
daily chores of shopping and preparing meals, raising a family,
and then being there for the next generation as well. Truly,
as I meditate on this, I see in those meals,
in that breaking of the bread, an incredible abundance of
love and grace. Of course, she's been there in all
the good times and the bad times, even to tell
(20:27):
the truth, when I wasn't there for her. for many years.
She typed out all my writings, my dissertation drafts of
essays and poems, and she has read everything I've written
over a lifetime. She has always made astute insights into
what I've written. She's a wonderful poem herself, I say. Okay.
Final question. How would you finish the following? Dear poet? Well,
(20:53):
I would probably speak to all the poets with whom
I've journeyed over the past 60 years. There's Father Hopkins,
of course, and there's my beloved Dante and Bill Williams,
with his search for the American idiom and the brilliance
of Stevens and Crane and those early years, especially Lowell,
as he knitted the warp and woof of Hopkins and
John Milton into his Quaker graveyard in Nantucket, and then
(21:16):
later the brutal honesty of Skunk Hour as his majestic
vision collapsed, only to have to be rebuilt as he
could in spite of his mental travails. Then add my
dear Miss Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, Marie Howe,
Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Robert Hayden and Wilfred Owen,
(21:39):
and William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney, both of whom
I taught in seminars. That's amazing, I reply. Well, there's
a long list of poets for whom I'm grateful, he says.
Bob pack, Phil Levine, Eddie Hirsch, Garrett Hongo, Scott Cairns,
and my dear friend Martin Espada. I shouldn't forget to
mention the greats Geoffrey Chaucer, Shakespeare, Virgil, Homer, Sappho. You
(22:03):
can see where this is going. Well, I say thank you.
Thank you all for a rich and Bountiful life filled
with poetry. Here's one of my favorite poems by Paul
Mariani titled elegy for Emily. Once more the leaves are falling.
(22:24):
Summer's gone like some evicted tenant and the light we
loved keeps fading with each day. The sun clicks left
a little more each evening, and the bright notes of
jays and finches that flocked last week about our feeders
have left for warmer climes. And so it goes, as
it has forever. And as the light grows shorter, those
crickets that kept time with the katydids have packed up
(22:47):
their strings and violas and departed. And now my dear
sister lies sleeping in her bed 3000 miles away, the
morphine flowing through her as her family and the nurse
attend her needs, while the hours and weeks drone on
and on. Our lone warrior has grown silent now, tucked
tight in her cocoon and still come dawn. Her big
(23:09):
brown baby eyes seem fixed on me again, her oldest brother.
As I keep peering through the crib bars there in
our dingy fifth floor walkup on East 51st. The clop
of horses and the L melding into prayer. The war
is finally over now, and daddy's home again. And peace,
(23:29):
the papers say, is flowing everywhere. But your wide eyes
keep staring into mine. As if to ask. Brother, can
you tell me why we're here? Questions I couldn't answer then.
And dear sister cannot answer now. But here we are
for the time we've been allotted, and questions to which
(23:50):
ask what might have been. If. If only what? I
climb back now, 60 years and more, and once again
catch you staring into a void I cannot see. That
winter night, I staggered back into the kitchen, having begged
our mother to shut off the engine. Weak as she was,
and come inside in silence and defeat our father for
(24:11):
once speechless. And you there in the doorway, your eyes
announcing it was over. Now that one day you'd move
away from here. Which in time was what you did. It.
And now, after all these years, as you lie sleeping
in your bed, you're moving on to another place only
you can know. The cancer having won which took Mom
(24:33):
and Dad. And if that wasn't quite enough, our youngest
sister to each day now, sweet Emily, I pray you
find the light and peace you longed for. Your feathers
unfolding now our eyes fixed fast on you as you
begin your final flight.
S1 (24:54):
An axe for the Frozen Sea is published by Rabbit
Room Press. The audiobook is published by Oasis Audio. Copyright
by Ben Pallant, 2024. By Chris Badeker.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Are You A Charlotte?
In 1997, actress Kristin Davis’ life was forever changed when she took on the role of Charlotte York in Sex and the City. As we watched Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte navigate relationships in NYC, the show helped push once unacceptable conversation topics out of the shadows and altered the narrative around women and sex. We all saw ourselves in them as they searched for fulfillment in life, sex and friendships. Now, Kristin Davis wants to connect with you, the fans, and share untold stories and all the behind the scenes. Together, with Kristin and special guests, what will begin with Sex and the City will evolve into talks about themes that are still so relevant today. "Are you a Charlotte?" is much more than just rewatching this beloved show, it brings the past and the present together as we talk with heart, humor and of course some optimism.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.