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Poetry Off the Shelf: Poems of Transcendence

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off the Shelf from the Poetry Foundation, December 20th, 2012. I'm Curtis Fox. This week: poems of transcendent hospitality. In secular precincts, it's easy to forget that Christmas is a Christian holiday because it is a pagan orgy of excess as currently practiced. But for Christians at its core, it is a holy festival celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ, their Lord and savior. So when we were casting about for a poet to read a few poems that reflect the season, we asked a Christian poet. Spencer Reece's poems are frequently published in Poetry magazine. He is a chaplain to Bishop Carlos Lopez Lozano of the Reformed Episcopal Church in Spain. Spencer, you're now in West Palm Beach, Florida, en route to Honduras. If you don't mind me asking, what are you going to do in Honduras?

Spencer Reece: Well, I won a Fulbright to go there and work on a book of poems by the girls in the orphanage there. They're going to write poems in Spanish and English along with their watercolors. And at the same time, they're making a documentary feature film about the orphanage and the making of the book, and my going there, which is being executive produced by James Franco.

Curtis Fox: Really?

Spencer Reece: And Dar Williams is doing the soundtrack to the movie.

Curtis Fox: How big is this orphanage, and how many girls are there?

Spencer Reece:
There are 74 girls there, abandoned and abused, every one of them. Babies to 17 years of age who would have been left on the street in Honduras, faded to prostitution, or at the very best to be a maid.

Curtis Fox: It sounds like quite a trip.

Spencer Reece: Yeah.

Curtis Fox: OK. So, one of the poems you chose for our program today was by George Herbert. And it seems to me you might have at least a few things in common with Herbert, who was an Anglican priest and deeply religious. Is he one of your favorite poets?

Spencer Reece: I think he is one of my favorite poets. He always has been one of my favorite poets since I was in my 20s. He was sort of like my hero. He's just very clear, very humble. He turned to the priesthood not at the very beginning. He worked in parliament for a while before he became a priest, and he was only a priest for three years. He died at the age of 40.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, it's similar to you because you didn't become a priest until rather late in life.

Spencer Reece: That's right. I had thought about it when I was in my 20s, and I was reading George Herbert then, but I didn't formally go back to seminary until I was 45, after my first book of poems was published when I was 40.

Curtis Fox: Now, the Herbert poem you chose is “Love (III).” “Love bade me welcome”; that's the way most people know the poem. It's very famous, but it would still help if you set it up a bit.

Spencer Reece: It's one of the only poems that Herbert wrote about imagining what would happen to him in an afterlife or kind of thinking about what might happen to him. He was a poet, very much living in the present moment. I suppose that's another thing I admire about him. And the poem is a conversation between him and Christ and what they would be saying to each other at a little dinner table.

Curtis Fox: Well, I have a very different interpretation, I think, than you. So, I'm looking forward to talking about it right afterwards. Why don't you give the poem a read? This is, “Love (III)” by George Herbert.

Spencer Reece:

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.

Curtis Fox: So the poem begins as kind of a domestic poem. In the first part of the poem, Love could be a human lover. Could it not?

Spencer Reece: I suppose it could be.

Curtis Fox: He's kind of playing with that notion, I think.

Spencer Reece: Yeah, you're probably right. I never thought of it that way, but yeah, that would make sense.

Curtis Fox: And we don't know that love is a supernatural being in this poem until well into the second stanza when Herbert says, “Love took my hand and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I?"

Spencer Reece: Right.

Curtis Fox: Now we know we're in the presence of something very serious. And it's not a lover at that point. And you saw it as a poem of the afterlife. Now what makes you think that's the afterlife? “Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back guilty of dust and sin."

Spencer Reece: Well, he's just being welcomed by Christ and sitting down to a meal with him, which is not something that has happened to him in the book before. So, it's something that's taking place in another realm and another world.

Curtis Fox: I've always read this poem as a kind of conversion experience. A sinner goes in and has a conversation with God and comes out submitting to God.

Spencer Reece: I see. I think I know what you're getting at in that, in the poem, Herbert sort of talks back a little bit to God. There's sort of a debate that goes on in the word love or Christ, and I think it's a hallmark of the Anglican Church, which holds up reason unlike, say, maybe a more Catholic poem, which might be more dogmatic. One thing that makes the Anglican Church a little bit messy—and it's a little messy right now—is that we do get to argue, and, so, in a kind way, he's sort of talking back or questioning. That's one of the things that makes the poem a little unique too.

Curtis Fox: So, the end of the poem, these famous last lines: “You must sit down says, Love and taste my meat. So I did sit and eat." So, here we have a poem where somebody walks in a house. He's greeted warmly. He sits down and he eats. Tell me about the importance of that symbolically to a Christian.

Spencer Reece: Well, it's a very intimate moment in the church. We represent that in the Eucharist, which is sort of like a little dinner party every Sunday. But it's when we eat, however we eat, it's a moment when we look at each other. And in today's busy world, with everybody on devices and not looking up or listening, it's probably one of the few moments when people sit down and look at each other. And that's what happens in this poem. And it's a moment of recognition and intimacy. And my favorite story in the Bible falls at the end of Luke. It's called, “The Road to Emmaus,” where the two disciples, Cleopas and an unnamed disciple, are on their way out of Jerusalem, and they don't believe what they have seen. And they think maybe it was all made up. And so they travel to this little town and a stranger falls among them. And when they sit down to table and they break bread, they realize that the stranger is Christ and they're overcome with recognition, and then Christ begins to disappear. And it's very poignant because it's a very human moment, as it is in this poem, too, that we don't always realize what's in front of us until it's gone. And you know, now being a priest and church and offering the Eucharist, as I have done now all over the world, it's a privilege and an intimate moment to offer. The parishioners in Spain who are struggling, the extra heroes from the other countries who are out of work, and you encounter them in this intimate moment of looking at each other. And Herbert would have known that, too.

Curtis Fox: The other poem you chose was “Christmas Tree” by James Merrill, which was originally published in Poetry magazine in September of 1995, about seven months after Merrill died. And the speaker in this poem is the Christmas tree itself. Spencer, is there anything else that you'd like listeners to know before you read it about Merrill or about this particular poem?

Spencer Reece: Oh, well, sure. He was one of the only sort-of-well-known poets that I knew. I knew him the last five years of his life. He had been diagnosed with AIDS, but he was keeping it a secret at that time, so that no one knew that he was about to die. And I want readers to know that he was very kind and he was very brave to know that he was about to die, not letting anybody know. And he was offering me help and support and encouragement as a very young poet who probably wasn't writing anything praiseworthy at the time. The poem is an amazing poem because it's a concrete poem in the shape of a tree.

Curtis Fox: Yeah, a Christmas tree. Yeah.

Spencer Reece: To describe that to somebody without reading the poem, the chances of a failed poem would be pretty great.

Curtis Fox: Yeah.

Spencer Reece: The poem is in the voice of the tree, but it's also in the voice of James. And it's also with echoes of Christ in the poem as well. So, although he was pretty much a lapsed Episcopalian, as he told me, those reverberations are in the poem. It's quite poignant upon reading it to think that it was one of the last poems that he would leave the world with.

Curtis Fox:
Yeah. Go ahead and give it a read. This is “Christmas Tree” by James Merrill.

Spencer Reece:
To be

Brought down at last

From the cold sighing mountain
Where I and the others
Had been fed, looked after, kept still
Meant I knew—of course I knew—
That it would be only a matter of weeks
That there was nothing more to do.
Warmly, they took me in, made much of me,
The point from the start was to keep my spirits up.
I could assent to that, for honestly,
It did help to be wound in jewels, to send
Their colors flashing forth from vents in the deep
Fragrant sable that cloaked me head to foot.
Over me then they wove a spell of shining—
Purple and silver chains, eavesdripping tinsel,
Amulets, milagros software of silver,
A heart, a little girl, a Model T,
Two staring eyes. Then angels, trumpets, BUD and BEA
(The children's names) in clownlike capitals,
Somewhere a music box whose tiny song
Played and replayed I ended before long
By loving. And in shadow behind me, a primitive IV
To keep the show going. Yes, yes, what lay ahead
Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my chemicals
Plowed back into earth for lives to come—
No doubt a blessing, a harvest, but one that doesn't bear,
Now or ever dwelling upon. To have grown so thin.
Needles and bone. The little boy's hands meeting
About my spine. The mother's voice: Holding up wonderfully!
No dread. No bitterness. The end beginning. Today's
Dusk room aglow
For the last time
With candlelight.
Faces love-lit,
Gifts underfoot.
Still to be so poised, so
Receptive. Still to recall, to praise.

Curtis Fox: Spencer, I don't think anybody will ever be able to write a Christmas tree poem after this Christmas tree poem. This is the Christmas tree poem to end all Christmas trees poems. It's so beautiful and so perfect in so many ways. There's lots to like here. But tell me what draws you to this particular poem?

Spencer Reece: He was a master of multiple forms. I mean, he could write any form probably in one afternoon. And for one of the last poems he ever wrote, he chose one of the simplest childlike forms, a concrete poem in the shape of a tree. It's almost like a child cutting it out of construction paper as he was getting ready to say goodbye. It's just kind of beautiful. It's beautiful to me as the Herbert one is, because they both speak to us intimately at this time of year and the Christmas tree becomes more than something decorative.

Curtis Fox: It's more than decorative, but it's also kind of...it's not a fancy tree. It's pretty humble. They have funny little ornaments and pencils up. It's nothing elaborate. There are gifts under the tree. And, so, he's not condemning the materiality of Christmas. He's celebrating in some respect at the same time. Which is kind of wonderful. But in another respect, it seems to me, and what I admire about this poem so much, it seems to me to be a description of a good death and that old-fashioned use of that phrase, good death. It's the way we'd all like to go at being still receptive to the world and still able to praise.

Spencer Reece: Well, that's it, isn't it?

Curtis Fox: Yeah. So, do you read this religiously at all? You mentioned it earlier; does the Christmas tree bear some resemblance to Christ and its resignation?

Spencer Reece: Well, you know, I mean, it's a symbol of that time of year. And some of the language is very, very Episcopalian. It comes right out of the liturgy. It's in the Episcopal doxology, praise God, from whom all blessings flow. Praise him, all creatures here below, praise him above ye Heavenly hosts. Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost. And in our Eucharistic prayer we say, recalling his death, resurrection and ascension, we offer you these gifts. So, you know those words. To praise and recall are right there, front and center.

Curtis Fox: Yeah.

Spencer Reece: At the stump of the tree.

Curtis Fox: Spencer Reece, merry Christmas and good luck in Honduras.

Spencer Reece: Thank you.

Curtis Fox: Spencer Reese's first book of poems, from 2003, is called The Clerk's Tale. And his second book of poems, The Road to Emmaus, will be published in April of 2014. Let us know what you think of this program. Email us at [email protected]. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintet. For Poetry Off the Shelf, I'm Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.