In Search of God

John Humphrys, the BBC broadcaster, is in search of the elusive laurels of ultra-gravitas that descended on David Frost, the greatest media figure from the British isles (along with Malcolm Muggeridge and maybe Alistair Cooke). Last week he broadcast his morning radio reports from Iraq (the safer British zone) and this week his BBC recordings include in-depth discussion with religious leaders from various faiths, on the question of God.

I am always glad to hear intelligent debate on the issue of faith, especially as the UK is a startlingly atheistic (and perhaps not coincidentally often very selfish and materialist) society. However, Humphrys, who entered into dialogue with the Archbishop of Canterbury this morning, is the pouting answer to his own question.

Rowan Williams, the Anglican who speaks with the media man, is tentative, light of touch, profound, agile, and above all, immensely patient. Humphrys wades in like a ten-ton baby grand crashing down some spiral staircase into a hotel lobby. The approach is the answer to the question: is there a God?

But Humphrys is too thick to see it. Thick not with a lack of intelligence - but thick with himself. The media is such a cruel mistress - it gives so many layers of armour and so many luscious coats of honour to the self, that, despite its thin skin and surface delights, it often makes it difficult for a media personality to go truly naked.

So it is with Humphrys. Citing the usual examples of horror in the world (a child with cancer, Beslan, the Holocaust) he then ultimately asks: why can't I have faith like yours? A more sustained contemplation of the dialogue, one that could step out of the commonplace rituals of doubt, would no doubt note the egoism in the very asking of that question. Nothing wrong with a sincere hunger for faith - but Humphrys trots out tropes that every high school debater confronts (religion brings war, freedom is incompatible with God's power, etc). He is a ghost in the rhetoric.

I have noted a truth about God, one which those who cannot sense Her miss: God is where we least expect, when we least expect, and that is Her proof and value. In the last six months I have lost a grand-father, an uncle, and my father. This year alone, also, a young friend was struck down by a hit and run driver, and another is dying of cancer. My faith in God has not been (entirely) lost by these grim times.

Instead, life has deepened, considerably darkened, but its underlying seriousness and beauty, has, if anything, come into stark relief. To use a metaphor which may sound familiar, a November light has come in the window - at once more faint, at once more pure - and it is this note of faint but still-sustained beauty that is God in the world.

God is the despite, is the still, is the just about, is the almost - may even be simply the perhaps, or it could be. God is the barest sliver of hope, when all hope is gone. As such, it is a via negativa, and one's faith can only be fully sounded when the instrument one plays is beyond need, is denuded of the self - when one mourns not for one's own self, but for a greater love of another.

John Humphrys seems a good, capable, serious man who works in the British media. However, he should respect the sacred nature of the answers he seeks, enough to know, that one cannot find the truth in a shallow vessel, in a loud and brassy instrument. It is how one asks that answers. Ask quietly, and without hope of finding. The asking for God opens the horizon of a possible world where the answer might be -

She may be there.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/about/meet/pres.shtml?humphrys

A Manhattan Project

The Manhattan Review (founded and edited by poet Philip Fried) is one of the best serious little magazines for poetry in America - and one of the only ones to that keep its finger on the pulse of contemporary British poetry.

Its latest issue, Fall/Winter 2006-7 (vol. 12, no. 2) features poems and/or translations by marvellous poets such as Mahmoud Darwish, Marilyn Hacker, Polly Clark, Pascale Petit, W.N. Herbert, Yang Lian, Penelope Shuttle, Ruth Fainlight, Hal Sirowitz, and many more.

It also has a review of the Oxfam CD, Life Lines, which I edited this summer and which has so far sold over five thousand copies since its launch four months ago.

The reviewer, Frank Beck, says: "it is hard to imagine how anyone with an interest in poetry in English could fail to find this recording fascinating."

To order this essential CD online, go to the link below:

http://www.oxfam.org.uk/shop/online/poetry.htm

To learn more about The Manhattan Review and order it, go to:

http://www.themanhattanreview.com/about.html

Poem by Hal Sirowitz

Eyewear is thrilled and happy (not always a combination you'd expect) to welcome Hal Sirowitz as the Friday poet. Sirowitz (pictured) is the former Poet Laureate of Queens, New York. His latest book, Father Said, was recently translated into Icelandic. He's the most popular translated poet in Norway. He is also one of the greatest of the first wave of American slam poets, whose work arose during the heyday of the Nuyorican readings. His Mother Said poetry collection is a best-selling classic, merging humour and poetry in a new key. Time Magazine has called him "a bit of a cult hero". He's one of the truly unique voices in contemporary American writing today. I've included him in as many of my anthologies as I could, from Poetry Nation, to Short Fuse, to Babylon Burning. Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome, Hal Sirowitz...


Pride Not Deserved

You can't have
a sex life unless
you have sex,
father said. You
can't have a post-sex
life either. All you can
have is a pre-sex life. But
that's nothing to be
proud of. Every one has that.

poem by Hal Sirowitz

Stobb On Babylon Burning

William E. Stobb is a fine American poet, and a commentator on poetry. The link below leads to his thoughts on the e-book anthology I recently edited for Nthposition.

http://www.miporadio.net/WILLIAM_E_STOBB/index.html

Snorkel Is Back!

Eyewear thinks you'd enjoy Snorkel, the lively and innovative online magazine that aims to connect Australian, New Zealand and international poets generally. Oh, I have a poem in this issue, too, so an added incentive to check it out.

http://snorkel.org.au/004/

Poetic Artifice Can Be Fun

For those into constraints, of a poetic nature, the latest from Lance Newman...

http://3by3by3.blogspot.com/

So Which Is It?

Only in England would the literate (if not literary) media still be bamboozled about Paul Muldoon (pictured) or rather, flabbergasted or then again puzzled - by his command of word-play, puns and other linguistic paraphernalia in his writing.

How else to explain the contrasting versions of Muldoonland displayed in recent issues of The Economist (October 21st-27th) and The Guardian? The Guardian's Saturday book section (The Review) has rightly selected his latest collection from Faber, Horse Latitudes, as Book of the Week, snatching it from the ghetto of the poetry review demi-page. James Fenton, himself a former Oxford Professor of Poetry, and major English poet, welcomes the book, Muldoon's tenth, as "an event". But over at the (more conservative) Economist, the unidentified reviewer is more economical with their praise of another new Muldoon publication, his Oxford lectures, The End of the Poem.

The reviewer of these 15 lectures seems slightly overwhelmed: "He dives into the etymology of words, and then relates these discoveries to far-flung biographical and historical fact. At times, his insights can be acute, at others far-fetched and almost outrageously fanciful. ... Mr. Muldoon's literary method, for all its delightfully readable questings, seems to add hurdles rather than eliminate them ... undermining the the notion that poetry has a universal appeal."

There is almost nothing insightful in these remarks, and it staggers the imagination to consider this was likely written by a leading (if anonymous) London critic or poet. The first question is 1) what is far-flung about historical context?; 2) when did reference to the etymology of words in a poem become in any way part of a fanciful methodology?; 3) since when was the reading of poetry a race, or rather, a race that was meant to be short of hurdles?; 4) The Economist seems to want as unrestricted access to the "meaning" of a poem as it does to markets; 5) "Poetry" does not - and never had had - a "universal" appeal - and only the worst sort of bumbling Liberal Humanist from 1904 would want it to (say in some proto-Kipling way).

Rather, poetic language has always been separated from the language of commerce, trade and politics (the quotidian) by precisely its recourse to what Veronica Forrest-Thomson famously called poetic artifice. One does not have to go as far as her in excising external expansion to realize that interpretation of poetry is best when it starts with some idea of the poem as a unique construct of signs and strategies, and moves on from there. It is true that this chafes against Muldoon's interest in the fallacy of the author, but only until one stops to recall the reasons why he wants to tie life and times in to the lingo - to show how poets only refer to the world that resonates with the playful, formalist elements their art ultimately relies on to thrive.

So-called "mainstream" British poetry still tends to suspect any poem or poet that does not wear its metaphor on its clear-as-glass sleeve. It would be far more useful to consider that both the concepts of "lyric ego" and "poetic artifice" form part of a spectrum of culturally-established aesthetic options and opinions, and could be just as interestingly conjoined as opposed, in quite the right poetic setting. Indeed, Muldoon's work is a superb example of such a place, where the innovative and the lyric join hands. It is this that puzzles those that want their poems universal, not in the university.

Meanwhile, Eyewear keeps its lemon-coloured Muldoon Collected close at all times, as an Arnoldian touchstone of bon mots, and considers Muldoon one of the great poetic stylists of the last 50 years, along with Ashbery, Charles Bernstein and a few others. Few other poets have so successfully made their eccentric signature tone and rhythm so seemingly inevitable (Dickinson, Auden and Larkin come to mind as precursors) in the process making a world. Of the great Irish word-wits, he seems to have become part of the list that includes Swift, Wilde, Shaw and Joyce.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1927298,00.html

http://www.paulmuldoon.net/