"At this shoreline of the inarticulate:" Prayer or Letter Poems

For this assignment, you have a choice. Three choices, actually: write a prayer poem, write a letter poem (also called an Epistle Poem), or combine the two assignments and write a letter to God.In 13 Ways, there are prayer or letter poems on pages 12, 72, 257, 288, 256, and 255. Sacrament of the Mundane also has several of each.

PREP FOR FRIDAY'S CLASS: read these poems, and start thinking about particular poems that make you stop and think, distract or disturb you, make you want to respond.Both poetic forms are about communication, messages, venting, questioning, finding ways to articulate things that cannot be articulated. I focus on Prayer Poems for this blog, since these are often raise more complex questions for writers than the Epistle.

Poets on Prayers and Poems (bold emphasis added):

Odysseus Elytis, the Nobel-prize laureate from Greece captures a sense of this when he says poetry is "the art of leading you toward what goes beyond you." - sounds a lot like prayer.

Edward Hirsch says,“There are ways in which poetry is similar to prayer. Serious poetry seeks the transformation both of the speaker of the poem and the reader waiting somewhere down the line. ‘To understand poetry,’ Garcia Lorca once said, ‘we need four white walls and a silence where the poet’s voice can weep and sing.’ One enters that space with the hope that, through the making of language, the making of poems—poesis, after all, means making—one will be taken away, one will go where one hasn’t been before. We hope to be possessed.”

Pattiann Rogers takes up the theme, commenting, “In a very real sense—real to me, anyway—my poems are prayers. They’re prayers that say, under their words, ‘Here, I make this in praise, in confusion. I make this while knowing nothing. Accept this, accept me.’ I believe that when human beings perform creative acts of imagination and do so with reverence and joy, they are praying. They are bestowing honor.”

Robert Cording sounds a similar note: “Both poetry and prayer acknowledge the limits of the ego. In this sense, their origins are rooted in invocation—a calling out to that which cannot be seen or logically understood and which ultimately cannot be put into language. As Wilbur writes in his poem ‘For Dudley,’ ‘All that we do / Is touched with ocean, yet we remain / On the shore of what we know.’ For me, prayer and the kind of poetry I admire...reside at this shoreline of the inarticulate. Both embody a longing and a reaching toward the inconceivable. Both refuse to be silent when they face that mystery, though they both admit that all words reach toward and end up in silence.”

As you'll see, "prayer" is a word that opens many, many doors. What is prayer? Who prays? Who listens to prayers?Sandburg creates an extended metaphor (a conceit) in this poem:

Prayers of Steel

by Carl Sandburg

Lay me on an anvil, O God.

Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.

Let me pry loose old walls.

Let me lift and loosen old foundations.

Lay me on an anvil, O God.

Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.

Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.

Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.

Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.

Sandburg's imagery of beating, steel spike, girders, fastening, and the line "let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper" also brings to mind images of Christ on the cross, an image he may or may not want us to imagine as our own Crucifixions, our own sacrifices. Or is this Jesus speaking? Or is Jesus speaking for us? How does Sandburg's use of industrial jargon make this poem both contemporary, and American?

Patrick Donnelly's poem, below, does several things at once: it praises, it gives thanks, it questions God, and it brings prayer into the mundane, everyday life in ways that can be both surprising, and refreshing. Donnelly reminds us that prayer need not be formal, or ritualized, to be heart-felt and meaningful; that pleasure in the world is, in fact, another form of prayer.

On Being Called To Prayer While Cooking Dinner for Forty

When the heavens and the earth

are snapped away like a painted shade,

and every creature called to account,

please forgive me my head full of chickpeas, garlic and parsley.

I am in love with the lemon

on the counter, and the warmth

of my brother’s shoulder distracted me

when we stood to pray.

The imam takes us over

for the first prostration,

but I keep one ear cocked

for the cry of the kitchen timer,

thrilled to realize today’s cornbread

might become tomorrow’s stuffing.

This thrift may buy me ten warm minutes

in bed tomorrow, before the singer

climbs the minaret in the dark

to wake me again to the work

of thought, word, deed.

I have so little time to finish;

only I know how to turn the dish, so the first taste

makes my brother’s eyes open wide--

forgive me, this pleasure

seems more urgent than the prayer--

too late to take refuge in You

from the inextricable mischief

of every thing You made,

eggs, milk, cinnamon, kisses, sleep.

-- Patrick Donnelly

Joy Harjo's "Eagle Poem" (SM, 8) is one she's put to music, further blurring the line between prayer and poetry. Listen and watch at http://www.youtube.com/watch?

Carolyn Forche, author of "Prayer," creates an invocation of sorts. Read aloud, the chanting quality produces a powerful experience. Listen to her read at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqLLeOzyzlI (don't worry; she is introduced in Greek, but reads in English).

Prayer

Begin again among the poorest, moments off, in another time time and place.

Belongings gathered in the last hour to be taken, visible invisible:

Tin spoon, teacup, tremble of tray, carpet hanging from sorrow’s balcony.

Say goodbye to everything. With a wave of your hand, gesture to all you have known.

Begin with bread torn from bread, beans given to the hungriest, a carcass of flies.

Take the polished stillness from a locked church, prayer notes left between stones.

Answer them and in your net hoist voices from the troubled hours.

Sleep only when the least among them sleeps, and then only until the birds.

Make the flat-bed truck your time and place. Make the least daily wage your value.

Language will rise then like language from the mouth of a still river. No one’s mouth.

Bring night to your imaginings. Bring the darkest passage of your holy book.

Writing Tips:

Prayers can take the form of a Beatitude (praise), Vespers (evening prayer), Matins (morning prayer), supplication (request), blessing, even a rant (see the Book of Job!), as well as many other forms. Experiment with your personal religious knowledge about prayer: is there a particular form you love? a form you'd like to argue with?

In Sacrament of the Mundane, "Poem in My Mother's Voice" by Susan Browne starts off,

When my mother meets God,
she says, Where the hell have you been?

Jesus Christ, don't you care about anyone

but yourself? It's time you wake up,

smell the coffee, shit or get off the pot.

Now, this is not necessarily the way everyone's mother speaks to God, but it gives you an idea of the broad definition we are using for "prayer" in this assignment. If prayer is a form of communication, Browne's poem hits the mark with originality and a great sense of scolding God in just the way a mother might reprimand a child for being careless with someone's feelings or property.

The key to a prayer poem: stay in the concrete for much of the poem (earn those abstracts!)' strangely enough, prayers full of abstract imagery are rarely compelling for anyone but the speaker/writer.

Go ahead. You have permission!. What do you want to say about prayer?