Thick and Dazzling Darkness

Religious Poetry in a Secular Age

Peter O'Leary

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231545976
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

How do poets use language to render the transcendent, often dizzyingly inexpressible nature of the divine? In an age of secularism, does spirituality have a place in modern American poetry? In Thick and Dazzling Darkness, Peter O'Leary reads a diverse set of writers to argue for the existence and importance of religious poetry in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature. He traces a poetic genealogy that begins with Whitman and Dickinson and continues in the work of contemporary writers to illuminate an often obscured but still central spiritual impulse that has shaped the production and imagination of American poetry.

O'Leary presents close and comprehensive readings of the modernist, late-modernist, and postmodern poets Robinson Jeffers, Frank Samperi, and Robert Duncan, as well as the contemporary poets Joseph Donahue, Geoffrey Hill, Fanny Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Pam Rehm, and Lissa Wolsak. Examining how these poets drew on a variety of traditions, including Catholicism, Gnosticism, the Kabbalah, and mysticism, the book considers how modern and contemporary poets have articulated the spiritual in their work. O'Leary also argues that an anxiety of misunderstanding exists in the study and writing of poetry between secular and religious impulses and that the religious nature of poets' works is too often marginalized or misunderstood. Examining the works of a specific poet in each chapter, O'Leary reveals their complexity and offers a defense of the value and meaning of religious poetry against the grain of a secular society.

1

A MYSTICAL THEOLOGY OF ANGELIC DESPAIR

Writing Religious Poetry and the Trilogy of Frank Samperi

Idcirco accidit ut, quantum illos proximius imitemur, tantum rectius poetemur. Unde nos doctrine operi intendentes, doctrinatas eorum poetries emulari oportet.

—Dante, De Vulgare Eloquentia

[Thus it comes about that, the more closely we try to imitate the great poets, the more correctly we write poetry. So, since I am trying to write a theoretical work about poetry, it behoves me to emulate their learned works of poetic doctrine.

—trans. Steven Botteril]

FRANK SAMPERI, POET

Frank Samperi belongs in the category of the overlooked talents of American poetry of the last fifty years. He wrote his best poetry in the 1960s and saw it published partially in the 1970s. By the end of the seventies, he had nearly entirely faded from the publishing scene, living in obscurity until his death in 1991. Born in Brooklyn in 1933, Samperi—an orphan and autodidact—as a young man sought out Louis Zukofsky; letters between them date back to the time Samperi was twenty-four.1 The older poet mentored him, connecting Samperi eventually with Cid Corman, who became his champion and publisher in Origin. Samperi was a fixture of Origin’s Second Series, presented with the likes of Zukofsky, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Gary Snyder, Lorine Niedecker, William Bronk, and of course Corman himself. These connections led to the publication of an untitled trilogy of books in the early 1970s by Grossman/Mushinsha. Composed of The Prefiguration (1971), Quadrifarium (1973), and Lumen Gloriae (1973), these books collected eighteen pamphlets and small books Samperi had written in the late 1960s. The trilogy of books, designed and printed in Japan, is strikingly beautiful, featuring rich and unusual stone prints by Will Peterson on the dust jackets, as well as oblong pages (10½" × 5¼"), making for one of the handsomest sets of books of American poetry from this period.

What is at stake in choosing to be a religious poet? The work of Samperi, an obscure poet who wrote out of an explicitly Catholic vision of the universe, demonstrates the risks and challenges the religious poet faces. Samperi’s masterpiece is his Trilogy.2 In the introduction to the recent republication of these books in a single volume, I wrote,

No description, however complete and subtle, can adequately paraphrase the experience of reading Frank Samperi’s magnificent Trilogy. Not even reading each of the three volumes separately accounts for how firmly the cumulative achievement of this poetry impresses itself on the imagination. At once minimal and theologically dense, obscure and crystal clear, abstract and symbol-laden, joyous and melancholy, Samperi’s poetry in his Trilogy is ultimately angelic, laden with divine messages and abiding in a realm that intermediates the worldly and the heavenly.3

Given the grand presentation of the initial publication of the three books in the Trilogy, one might presume some attention was paid to the poetry. Samperi’s trilogy received only two reviews: one by the poet John Taggart (discussed below) and another by Cid Corman, the latter being less a review and more a praise of the poet. Despite this neglect, Samperi continued to publish poems in Origin and Caterpillar as well as collecting his poetry in occasional editions published by small presses such as Elizabeth Press and Station Hill. And even after he ceased to publish, he maintained active correspondence with a few poets, chiefly Corman and the Australian poet Clive Faust, and continued to write, producing, along with poetry, a translation of Dante’s Paradiso. But Samperi’s work stands or falls on the Trilogy. It is the most complete presentation of his work available, it is reasonably discrete, and it can be read beneficially as a progression, beginning with poetic foretime in The Prefiguration, establishing theological and doctrinal principles in Quadrifariam, and attaining a formal poetic completion in Lumen Gloriae, which is under half the length of either of the other two collections. In appraising Samperi’s poetry and in speculating on the plight of the religious poet, I will focus entirely on Trilogy.

The challenge of reading Frank Samperi’s poetry is the challenge of reading religious poetry. Is Samperi a poet of vision, of singular insight? Or is individual vision antithetical to the doctrine he emulates in his poetry? In the Western tradition, when we think of great religious poetry, we think of Dante, Milton, Blake. Each a poet of vision, of singular insight. Each also a Christian. Samperi emulates Dante, mainly, who looked through the communal vision of a medieval Catholicism, out of which his own vision emerged and was focused. Samperi frequently appeals to the “theological poet” who seeks after “Eternal Form,” of which Dante for him is exemplary. Samperi’s theological poet is removed from the world, a lonely predator of the adoration. His separation and solitude are essential to an understanding of God’s purposes: “true work can only have for its vision the Eternal the final identification forgone the abstractive useless” (from “Anti-Hero,” in Quadrifarium).4 Who is the audience, then, of the theological poet who writes out of the abstractive useless? Samperi’s “theological poet” seems an anachronism. By reverting to a medieval imagination and cosmology, he seeks to fortify his poetic vision. Imitating Dante can make for an auspicious beginning and can even sustain great work over the course of a lifetime. (Consider the examples of Pound and Eliot.) But Samperi’s work resonates with belief, conviction, and despair in a way that seems both to depend on the work of his modernist forebears and then also to transform it into something else, something I would call a mystical theology of angelic despair.

There is a major tension between any communalistic adherence to religious belief and an individual talent, and this tension is powerfully augmented in poetry. As a poet informs her work with peculiar vision, it individuates and takes on value. The poet who asserts a communal vision acts as a ventriloquist. Her poems are the dummy. Who speaks? Not the poet. Doctrine speaks. Or dogma speaks. Communion, in the sense of the people joined together, is essential to Catholic faith and prayer. You can’t believe merely in private. It is only in communion that collective prayer can be offered and felt, through the vehicle of the liturgy. Other forms of prayer—petition, which is private asking; meditation, which is listening to God; or contemplation, which is silent attendance to God’s presence—rest on the bedrock of communion. But poetry is not prayer, even when it is offered as prayer or is prayerlike. Poetry is making. It is an emulation of God’s enunciation and the subsequent vocables uttered at creation. A grandiose claim. I mean that making poetry arises out of the same original creative urge. (In the Septuagint translation of Genesis from Hebrew into Greek, the word translated in the King James Version as “created”—“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth”—is ’epoiisen, which shares the same root as poetry, “to make.”) And this is not the urge of prayer. Samperi’s poems are not prayers, though they involve petitionary claims and often resolve into marvelous contemplations of natural and supernatural forms. But his poems do make powerful religious, even theological claims, wrestling with and then awarding victory to doctrines and visions the Catholic Church has validated over the centuries. His work is especially keenly attuned to a medieval Christian imagination, one he appears to emulate in his work even as he elaborates that imagination into something thoroughly modern.

DEFINING THE SPIRIT

I first encountered Samperi’s work in John Taggart’s essay “The Spiritual Definition of Poetry,” which is a review of Samperi’s Trilogy. Taggart’s essay is expository, in that it describes Samperi as an essentially visionary poet, and it is critical, in that it presents Samperi as a poet who has not lived up to the visionary potential of his own poetry, which is to say that while vision may have informed Samperi’s writing, the poet has merely asserted that vision, rather than composing one himself (which is what, according to Taggart, Blake and Dante did). Toward the end of the essay, Taggart proposes a poetic program for obtaining this vision. “There are two ways to secure this definition,” he writes, “for poets who would write from the visionary imagination”:

1) arduous study of and complete immersion in mythic and spiritual literature; 2) a like immersion in language. Poets will have to find their own path in the first area. They may choose to follow Plato through P...