The Shape of Waking Up

and its relationship to poetic form

Beginning with a Creator changes a writer’s relationship with her materials, including but not limited to everything.

Funny aside, when beginning with a Creator, one’s encounter with the cosmos and the particulars thereof sets up a possible encounter with the Creator—as may be inferred from Saint Paul’s language in his epistle to the Ephesians: the Creator being “over all, through all, and in all” (4:6), the one who “fills everything in every way” (1:23), filling, yes, “the whole kit and caboodle” (4:10 and obviously, my paraphrase).

Not that every or any encounter with Creator will be recognized as such. Normally, what is experienced in such encounters is, first, creational awe or fear or feeling overwhelmed. More often than not we simply blow right by such encounters, numb to them because they are, in fact, constituent of our daily comings and goings on planet Earth. But were we to slow down and pay closer attention to where we are (“consider the lilies”)—attention being a tell of love for Creator and all that is loved by Creator—our daily encounters with the Creator might become more immediately felt and known than realized upon reflection.

But whether we come by this knowing of Creator immediately or upon reflection, it doesn’t really matter. Saint John quotes Jesus as having said that this quality of knowing is what’s meant by the biblical term “eternal life” (John 17:3). So either way, it’s a very cool thing and the reason Creator commissioned Jesus in the first place (John 3:16).

Granted, you may not buy into all of this specifically Christian stuff. I mention it because it’s how I came to welcome the worldview of a Creator whose word called the cosmos into being (John 1:1-3) and sustains its integrity over time (Hebrews 1:3), and who is Immanuel, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23) and for us, and who is making and will, one day, make every broken thing new (Revelation 21:1-5).

Needless to say, my believing all of this has changed my relationship with my materials, from the paper I use, to the language I’ve inherited, to the reasons I write.

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These days, the poems I aspire to write incorporate what I found in the wonderful little book, The Necessary Poetics of Atheism (essays and poems by Martín Espada, Lauren Marie Schmidt, and J. D. Schraffenberger).

In its foreword, philosopher Andrew Sneddon calls for making poems that begin with “a way of speaking of the world and of what matters in it that eschews the religiously weighted vocabulary (and concerns, and metaphors, and habits, and so on) and that instead retrains [a] the ear to attend to our fragility and temporality and [b] the tongue to speak of truths, both hard and beautiful, instead of vain hopes and empty fears.” Why do I love this? Because it is the common ground we all occupy, before any religious or philosophical interpretation.

As well, it’s analogous to the worldview I wake up with every morning: this is all there is, and I need to pee. By the time I sit down to read and write—say, between 5:30 and 6:00—and as I nurture first coffee, the glorious peace of the hour (that’s often hung with a garland of birdsong) tips me toward gratitude or praise or an awareness of being upheld, surrounded by more than condo walls and the world beyond our windows.

True, I have a daily process than includes reading and journaling through the gospels. But some (if not many) mornings my felt experience of that ritual is just that, ritual, and I come to it not because I’m animated by lively faith but simply because it’s what I’ve been doing for years—along with making first coffee and taking my blood pressure pill. So it’s not the ritual that sparks my morning by morning “conversion” to theism. It is, rather, a grace that feels more analogous to stepping daily from a glorious, thickly canopied forest, with its diverse critters and stunning erratics, into a broad, lake-side meadow with a view of the bright sky above, a different set of birds, and the horizon beyond.

This has become the rhetorical shape I’m after in my new poems: a movement, be it subtle or sudden, from delighting in “the world and what matters in it”—with language focused on the “hard and beautiful” and free of religious jargon—to intuiting the “something more" which may very well lead to language having a spiritual or overtly religious character. The aim is to make poems that assume the shape of my morning progress toward full consciousness, from bleary-eyed, happy-to-be-here numbness to renewed faith and the seeing that accompanies it.

One might argue that this is the rhetorical shape of a sonnet, with its turn about two-thirds in. Or that of a meditative poem. For me, it’s simply the shape of waking up.