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Rod Jellema
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A Book of Poems in Search of a Title
Preface to Incarnality: The Collected Poems
The present custom is to publish poetry collections as “Selected and New”
or “New and Selected” poems. This book does indeed select older poems and
contain new ones. It is called “Collected” poems because I have gathered into
it from earlier books only those poems that I now know were on their way to
forming this one unified book. Its fifty new poems, a kind of rounding off but in
no way a “conclusion,” helped me to explore and see and then extend the book’s
wholeness.
The many poems from my earlier books that I have kept out of this collection
were often stepping stones toward it but finally not part of it. I like that my
“collected” is unusually slender.
What kept needling me while making poems after forty was a growing insistence from somewhere
within them that these poems must refuse to rocket-thrust the experience of soul and spirit
heavenward into the mists and gasses, beyond sight, into pure unstained light, away from the
good heft of the physical.
Making poems is my way of clarifying and seeing. As a teacher I needed that. I have been watching
how our culture has trivialized the mysterious image of light, so much so that its ubiquitous glare
blinds us to our need for some positive darkness. In the same way, I mistrust the tendency,
gaining favor presently in our culture, to regard physical objects, things, bodies, as inferior stuff
that we must transcend. To struggle as we aspire toward spiritual enlightenment is to put aside
the other possibility: that the spiritual takes the initiative, comes down to us, dwells in our time and
history and flesh. In many mythologies as well as in Christian belief, the eternal Divine descends,
assumes human form, and thereby sanctifies time and the physical. This is a clear choice: whether
to appropriate and enjoy and conserve the world or to flee it.
More and more, my work has come to be celebratory. Good fertile darkness and lively physicality
are often the subjects celebrated. If this seems unusual, I hope it is so for the unusual moments
of discovery, the jolts of surprise. Darkness, after all, is not only ignorance, fear, and evil; it is the
mystery in which we dream and imagine and create; it is, science tells us, 85% of the stuff of the
universe. And the physical is not just “carnality” -- wickedly alluring fleshpots or sensual distractions
from white light and pure spirit; the physical is the astonishing home in which spirit lives.
I like the effect of reversing now and then the values of light and dark . I also like the effect of
celebrating human bodies, graceful motion, nature, and I am fascinated by the ways in which
literary writers and other artists can incarnate their perceptions and their vision into the physical
stuff of print, paint, and music. So I see this book as a kind of carnival, a festival of the sort that
James Thomson defined in 1744 as one in which “the glad Circle. . . yield their Souls to festive
mirth.”
I’d like my carnival to have the zest and color and blaring of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras or the old
Carnival of Venice. Let it hum its praise for the surprise of God-made-flesh that endows all humans,
and mix that with its celebration of standing ribs of roast beef served with burgundy wine.
Hallelujah for carne. Let hot carnival lights shoot in vain for stars far off into the embracing, cool
darkness.
But unlike that rush of carnival days before Lent (indulgence before the ritual of abstinence), this is
a lasting carnival, for all time, giving thanks for the astonishing realization that spirit, “the breath of
God,” is in residence here and now. But there is also this: the need for the soul’s lamentations
from a corner of the beribboned tent, noting what is absent, noting the sad confusions and
misunderstandings among us about things carnal and things incarnate.
I have to use a rare, seldom used word for what I see and miss and celebrate: Incarnality. It
gradually became the title of this book. The few theologians who use the term mean something
profoundly philosophical; I mean it to suggest all the hungry, thirsty, leaping excitement of carnival-
time, but this time as a year-around and forever celebration of the temporal, physical, finite,
material world. That world is created as an expression of and a container for the timeless and
spiritual . Just as the infinite is within us humans -- reflected as idea, vision, thought, imagination --
so it is embodied by the physical world, giving us glimpses of the wonder and life-force that are
enfleshed in it..
That’s what Incarnality is about. It’s about seeking and traveling until you get to a strange place
called home and discover you belong there. Necessarily, of course, it also tries to catch the feel of
a world in which that way seems missing and is sometimes longed for. But I like absence, the very
presence of absence. Likewise, in an age which honors bigness, I have been catching splinters,
threads, narrow light rays, flashes – moments of awareness of forces that we see only partially.
In an age of glitter and glare, I try to sense the healthy need for the mystery of darkness. In an
age that creates, for its pleasure or distraction, the unreal heavens of sentimental pop songs and
TV, and the cloying honey of sympathy cards, and the childish cartoon heavens afloat in puffy
clouds, I try to see in the here-and-now pieces and fragments of a very physical Eden. It wants
rebuilding.
The book is not an argument in the service of a thesis. It strings together moments of experience
or awareness that took shape as poems in the process of my making them. Willa Cather’s phrase
is right: “touch and pass on.” I hope they are a lively reminder that making poems is simply an
alternate way of seeing. Take a look and pass on.
Rod Jellema
Washington, D.C.
July 27, 2010
Preface to Incarnality: The Collected Poems
The present custom is to publish poetry collections as “Selected and New”
or “New and Selected” poems. This book does indeed select older poems and
contain new ones. It is called “Collected” poems because I have gathered into
it from earlier books only those poems that I now know were on their way to
forming this one unified book. Its fifty new poems, a kind of rounding off but in
no way a “conclusion,” helped me to explore and see and then extend the book’s
wholeness.
The many poems from my earlier books that I have kept out of this collection
were often stepping stones toward it but finally not part of it. I like that my
“collected” is unusually slender.
What kept needling me while making poems after forty was a growing insistence from somewhere
within them that these poems must refuse to rocket-thrust the experience of soul and spirit
heavenward into the mists and gasses, beyond sight, into pure unstained light, away from the
good heft of the physical.
Making poems is my way of clarifying and seeing. As a teacher I needed that. I have been watching
how our culture has trivialized the mysterious image of light, so much so that its ubiquitous glare
blinds us to our need for some positive darkness. In the same way, I mistrust the tendency,
gaining favor presently in our culture, to regard physical objects, things, bodies, as inferior stuff
that we must transcend. To struggle as we aspire toward spiritual enlightenment is to put aside
the other possibility: that the spiritual takes the initiative, comes down to us, dwells in our time and
history and flesh. In many mythologies as well as in Christian belief, the eternal Divine descends,
assumes human form, and thereby sanctifies time and the physical. This is a clear choice: whether
to appropriate and enjoy and conserve the world or to flee it.
More and more, my work has come to be celebratory. Good fertile darkness and lively physicality
are often the subjects celebrated. If this seems unusual, I hope it is so for the unusual moments
of discovery, the jolts of surprise. Darkness, after all, is not only ignorance, fear, and evil; it is the
mystery in which we dream and imagine and create; it is, science tells us, 85% of the stuff of the
universe. And the physical is not just “carnality” -- wickedly alluring fleshpots or sensual distractions
from white light and pure spirit; the physical is the astonishing home in which spirit lives.
I like the effect of reversing now and then the values of light and dark . I also like the effect of
celebrating human bodies, graceful motion, nature, and I am fascinated by the ways in which
literary writers and other artists can incarnate their perceptions and their vision into the physical
stuff of print, paint, and music. So I see this book as a kind of carnival, a festival of the sort that
James Thomson defined in 1744 as one in which “the glad Circle. . . yield their Souls to festive
mirth.”
I’d like my carnival to have the zest and color and blaring of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras or the old
Carnival of Venice. Let it hum its praise for the surprise of God-made-flesh that endows all humans,
and mix that with its celebration of standing ribs of roast beef served with burgundy wine.
Hallelujah for carne. Let hot carnival lights shoot in vain for stars far off into the embracing, cool
darkness.
But unlike that rush of carnival days before Lent (indulgence before the ritual of abstinence), this is
a lasting carnival, for all time, giving thanks for the astonishing realization that spirit, “the breath of
God,” is in residence here and now. But there is also this: the need for the soul’s lamentations
from a corner of the beribboned tent, noting what is absent, noting the sad confusions and
misunderstandings among us about things carnal and things incarnate.
I have to use a rare, seldom used word for what I see and miss and celebrate: Incarnality. It
gradually became the title of this book. The few theologians who use the term mean something
profoundly philosophical; I mean it to suggest all the hungry, thirsty, leaping excitement of carnival-
time, but this time as a year-around and forever celebration of the temporal, physical, finite,
material world. That world is created as an expression of and a container for the timeless and
spiritual . Just as the infinite is within us humans -- reflected as idea, vision, thought, imagination --
so it is embodied by the physical world, giving us glimpses of the wonder and life-force that are
enfleshed in it..
That’s what Incarnality is about. It’s about seeking and traveling until you get to a strange place
called home and discover you belong there. Necessarily, of course, it also tries to catch the feel of
a world in which that way seems missing and is sometimes longed for. But I like absence, the very
presence of absence. Likewise, in an age which honors bigness, I have been catching splinters,
threads, narrow light rays, flashes – moments of awareness of forces that we see only partially.
In an age of glitter and glare, I try to sense the healthy need for the mystery of darkness. In an
age that creates, for its pleasure or distraction, the unreal heavens of sentimental pop songs and
TV, and the cloying honey of sympathy cards, and the childish cartoon heavens afloat in puffy
clouds, I try to see in the here-and-now pieces and fragments of a very physical Eden. It wants
rebuilding.
The book is not an argument in the service of a thesis. It strings together moments of experience
or awareness that took shape as poems in the process of my making them. Willa Cather’s phrase
is right: “touch and pass on.” I hope they are a lively reminder that making poems is simply an
alternate way of seeing. Take a look and pass on.
Rod Jellema
Washington, D.C.
July 27, 2010
