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Rod Jellema
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On Double Vision: A Prefatory Note
Introduction to A Slender Grace
Most of us leave school believing that poems are intimidating and distant, addressed
to the few. So poets would seem to have some special fire that sets them apart and
leaves everyone else behind. It’s not so. Their difference from everyone else is that,
encountering things or people or experiences, they take a second look. And then
their poems invite others to share that second look.
It may take poets a long time and some hard work to focus that second look and
then correlate it with the first glance, the mere appearance. Like painters, they may
link the second look to history or ideas, to associations or images that didn’t occur to
you as you hastened on your way. But they see the same stuff that you see, and in
the same way, 99 percent of the time. Don’t be put off by the poets’ 1 percent. They
take time to catch a kind of double vision of this or that thing, this or that moment of
awareness — simply because it’s fascinating. Each poem that survives its own
process of being made beckons you back for a few minutes to have another look. If
it looks unlike what you’re accustomed to — that’s the point. You don’t have to
analyze it; just let it do its work. And its work is to make experience in some fresh
and direct way rather than to exult over it or chat about it or explain it. If you force
a poem into talking your kind of talk, it loses everything in the translation.
In Ireland they speak of “thin places,” where only the mists divide this world from
the Other. When I’m writing to catch that second look, clarifying gradually what it
becomes as I try to make it, the backdrop against which I see the world around us
is Eden, the lost Eden, almost invisible and always fragmented and splintered, but
enough of a presence so that I can sometimes draw on it, play it into the process of
what I make. I want to edge up to such slender moments when I can, and then give
them heft and substance, ground them — ground them at the very least in the way
we ground electricity.
On second look, even the long-accepted symbols of our culture can change. It is not
entirely strange to the wisdom of our time to reverse now and then the values of
light and dark. I have worked this perspective in several poems. Recalling the tens
of thousands of people blinded by the flash at Hiroshima, we should recall for
contrast Moses at Sinai approaching “the thick darkness . . . where God was.”
This making of poems is really not such a goofy or precious or starry-eyed thing to
do. Humans try to create because they’re human, because they are made in the
image of their Creator. We all recognize some creative longings and stirrings in
ourselves: that fading Polaroid snapshot of the old Latin teacher, or the postcard you
wrote from Viet Nam don’t quite do or say what you want them to. There are auras
of implication you didn’t explore. You see such implications sometimes in the
swaying of an ice-covered branch, in a mysterious movement of words and their
sounds through certain phrases, in a strange awareness that can move us when we
remember a lost schoolmate or hear breaking waves in the distance.
For the cosmic minute or two of our history, cut out of millions of years, we’re living
in the eighth day of creation. The world is still being created, but now it’s our job.
We all create (or sometimes destroy) with our lives, but some go on creating in
more special ways — trying to finish the job, Van Gogh would say — by imaging
forth what’s beneath and behind our lives.
* * *
The poems in this book come out of the workings of such double vision. But because
my second looks involve the Judeo-Christian belief in a lost Paradise, and in seeing
that lost world as the impetus for rebuilding this one, it might be assumed that this
book is a collection of religious poems. Well, any potential reader thumbing through
these pages can notice that there are many poems which seem not “religious” at all.
That’s as it should be. The Christian faith is the lump of yeast stirred into the dough
that makes the whole loaf, the book of poems, what it is. I don’t want to dish out
dollops of raw yeast, and you shouldn’t want to receive them. Let’s let the yeast
permeate the loaf.
So these poems individually are not spiritual message-bearers. They are poems,
seeing double. It is inevitable that my belief in a beautiful world which is broken and
divinely redeemed, though I am not preaching about it, should be yeasting and
working throughout. It is simply my way of seeing.
The poems in this book that hold religious themes — being not at home in the
present world, seeing how narrowly we almost miss God’s grace, feeling awe for the
dark, exploring God’s incarnation in Christ as the archetypal figure for seeing
ourselves and physical things as well as the arts as lesser embodiments of the
spiritual — are obviously “religious.” But I want to insist, in the name of human
creativeness, that these thematic guidelines weigh less than the little reflections of
my interest in — and I dare say of God’s interest in — a lovesick lonely young man
watching the spinning clothes of strangers in a laundromat, or the underrated glory
of green beans, or my sense of the world while snorkeling in the Red Sea, or even
some foolishness about a national poets’ strike. The world out there, certainly on
second look, shimmers with ripe implications and little metaphysical nudges. This
thin book hopes to vanquish prosaic realism now and then by mingling the real and
the supernatural, by making them sometimes indivisible. Its smallest poem will even
reach back to ancient Greece to flash you an altered perspective in which precision
binoculars destroy a vision of Aphrodite surfing toward shore, thereby depriving you
of a moment of the miraculous — divinity at play in the ordinary.
The life of the mind must, I think, draw sustenance from a mix of the ethereal and
the earthy, the carnal and the eternal, moved by flashes and echoes of Eden’s
physicality. I mean these poems to stand firm against the popular New Age
“spiritualist” flights away from the physical world and time and history. They share
some responsibility for the world that others would flee. I want them to speak
quietly of survival. And I mean them to be sometimes celebratory, and always
offering the reader the pleasure of seeing double.
* * *
After seventy-seven years of mistakes and insights, heavy griefs and high joys, and
a lot in between, I find myself celebrating time itself, and words that spark, and the
very “thisness” of persons and things, and paintings and music, because all these
are enfleshments of spirit, little incarnations, the timeless dimension touching
mortality. Soul, wrote Yeats, must “clap its hands and sing, and louder sing/For
every tatter in its mortal dress.” Even in tatters, this world is exactly the stuff that
got redeemed by the mystery of the big capital-I Incarnation, when Creator and
creature were reconciled by a gift that humankind did nothing to earn.
I like taking the risk of a balloon-bobbing carnival-like celebration of the physical
that’s denoted by the word carnality, regretting only the cheap overtones the word
has acquired. But I am also much moved by the word incarnation, both as it pivots
in Christian theology and as it extends into the idea that forms created by
imagination are incarnate bodies, embodiments of the human soul. My regret is that
the extension, so powerfully revealing, has so little currency among us. So I merged
the two words into one: incarnality.
For the few hours of this book, you’ll want to try fusing incarnation and carnality,
religious awe and lusty gratitude, by way of a made-up word. I hope it will help you
to enjoy one man’s double vision of what surrounds us.
Rod Jellema
Washington, DC
January 6, 2004
Introduction to A Slender Grace
Most of us leave school believing that poems are intimidating and distant, addressed
to the few. So poets would seem to have some special fire that sets them apart and
leaves everyone else behind. It’s not so. Their difference from everyone else is that,
encountering things or people or experiences, they take a second look. And then
their poems invite others to share that second look.
It may take poets a long time and some hard work to focus that second look and
then correlate it with the first glance, the mere appearance. Like painters, they may
link the second look to history or ideas, to associations or images that didn’t occur to
you as you hastened on your way. But they see the same stuff that you see, and in
the same way, 99 percent of the time. Don’t be put off by the poets’ 1 percent. They
take time to catch a kind of double vision of this or that thing, this or that moment of
awareness — simply because it’s fascinating. Each poem that survives its own
process of being made beckons you back for a few minutes to have another look. If
it looks unlike what you’re accustomed to — that’s the point. You don’t have to
analyze it; just let it do its work. And its work is to make experience in some fresh
and direct way rather than to exult over it or chat about it or explain it. If you force
a poem into talking your kind of talk, it loses everything in the translation.
In Ireland they speak of “thin places,” where only the mists divide this world from
the Other. When I’m writing to catch that second look, clarifying gradually what it
becomes as I try to make it, the backdrop against which I see the world around us
is Eden, the lost Eden, almost invisible and always fragmented and splintered, but
enough of a presence so that I can sometimes draw on it, play it into the process of
what I make. I want to edge up to such slender moments when I can, and then give
them heft and substance, ground them — ground them at the very least in the way
we ground electricity.
On second look, even the long-accepted symbols of our culture can change. It is not
entirely strange to the wisdom of our time to reverse now and then the values of
light and dark. I have worked this perspective in several poems. Recalling the tens
of thousands of people blinded by the flash at Hiroshima, we should recall for
contrast Moses at Sinai approaching “the thick darkness . . . where God was.”
This making of poems is really not such a goofy or precious or starry-eyed thing to
do. Humans try to create because they’re human, because they are made in the
image of their Creator. We all recognize some creative longings and stirrings in
ourselves: that fading Polaroid snapshot of the old Latin teacher, or the postcard you
wrote from Viet Nam don’t quite do or say what you want them to. There are auras
of implication you didn’t explore. You see such implications sometimes in the
swaying of an ice-covered branch, in a mysterious movement of words and their
sounds through certain phrases, in a strange awareness that can move us when we
remember a lost schoolmate or hear breaking waves in the distance.
For the cosmic minute or two of our history, cut out of millions of years, we’re living
in the eighth day of creation. The world is still being created, but now it’s our job.
We all create (or sometimes destroy) with our lives, but some go on creating in
more special ways — trying to finish the job, Van Gogh would say — by imaging
forth what’s beneath and behind our lives.
* * *
The poems in this book come out of the workings of such double vision. But because
my second looks involve the Judeo-Christian belief in a lost Paradise, and in seeing
that lost world as the impetus for rebuilding this one, it might be assumed that this
book is a collection of religious poems. Well, any potential reader thumbing through
these pages can notice that there are many poems which seem not “religious” at all.
That’s as it should be. The Christian faith is the lump of yeast stirred into the dough
that makes the whole loaf, the book of poems, what it is. I don’t want to dish out
dollops of raw yeast, and you shouldn’t want to receive them. Let’s let the yeast
permeate the loaf.
So these poems individually are not spiritual message-bearers. They are poems,
seeing double. It is inevitable that my belief in a beautiful world which is broken and
divinely redeemed, though I am not preaching about it, should be yeasting and
working throughout. It is simply my way of seeing.
The poems in this book that hold religious themes — being not at home in the
present world, seeing how narrowly we almost miss God’s grace, feeling awe for the
dark, exploring God’s incarnation in Christ as the archetypal figure for seeing
ourselves and physical things as well as the arts as lesser embodiments of the
spiritual — are obviously “religious.” But I want to insist, in the name of human
creativeness, that these thematic guidelines weigh less than the little reflections of
my interest in — and I dare say of God’s interest in — a lovesick lonely young man
watching the spinning clothes of strangers in a laundromat, or the underrated glory
of green beans, or my sense of the world while snorkeling in the Red Sea, or even
some foolishness about a national poets’ strike. The world out there, certainly on
second look, shimmers with ripe implications and little metaphysical nudges. This
thin book hopes to vanquish prosaic realism now and then by mingling the real and
the supernatural, by making them sometimes indivisible. Its smallest poem will even
reach back to ancient Greece to flash you an altered perspective in which precision
binoculars destroy a vision of Aphrodite surfing toward shore, thereby depriving you
of a moment of the miraculous — divinity at play in the ordinary.
The life of the mind must, I think, draw sustenance from a mix of the ethereal and
the earthy, the carnal and the eternal, moved by flashes and echoes of Eden’s
physicality. I mean these poems to stand firm against the popular New Age
“spiritualist” flights away from the physical world and time and history. They share
some responsibility for the world that others would flee. I want them to speak
quietly of survival. And I mean them to be sometimes celebratory, and always
offering the reader the pleasure of seeing double.
* * *
After seventy-seven years of mistakes and insights, heavy griefs and high joys, and
a lot in between, I find myself celebrating time itself, and words that spark, and the
very “thisness” of persons and things, and paintings and music, because all these
are enfleshments of spirit, little incarnations, the timeless dimension touching
mortality. Soul, wrote Yeats, must “clap its hands and sing, and louder sing/For
every tatter in its mortal dress.” Even in tatters, this world is exactly the stuff that
got redeemed by the mystery of the big capital-I Incarnation, when Creator and
creature were reconciled by a gift that humankind did nothing to earn.
I like taking the risk of a balloon-bobbing carnival-like celebration of the physical
that’s denoted by the word carnality, regretting only the cheap overtones the word
has acquired. But I am also much moved by the word incarnation, both as it pivots
in Christian theology and as it extends into the idea that forms created by
imagination are incarnate bodies, embodiments of the human soul. My regret is that
the extension, so powerfully revealing, has so little currency among us. So I merged
the two words into one: incarnality.
For the few hours of this book, you’ll want to try fusing incarnation and carnality,
religious awe and lusty gratitude, by way of a made-up word. I hope it will help you
to enjoy one man’s double vision of what surrounds us.
Rod Jellema
Washington, DC
January 6, 2004
Writings
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