Call and Response: Poetry’s Secret Sources
Where does a poem come from? The immediate genesis for the following poem, which forms the introduction to my latest book of poems, Sing Me a Song, She Said, literally came from a dream, in which I remember hearing a sublime music like nothing I had heard before. When I tried to analyze what I had dreamed, though, two strands seemed to rise above the others: the sounds of plainchant I have listened to over a lifetime, and then, strangely, the Irish soul of Danny Boy.
Besides these, I think I was grappling with the heavenly music Dante speaks of repeatedly in his Paradiso, whose cantos I had been studying then for months, music he heard as he ascended the nine heavens to the Primum Mobile, a music he himself could only hint at as it enwrapped and enraptured him.
A Song I Can Only Try to Sing
Late August, and a fitful dream that in a flash
turned radiant. So soothing was it, so uplifting,
that I seemed enveloped in its arms.
A male soprano’s voice hymned the words,
a blend somehow of plainchant and . . . was it
Danny Boy? I stood—I think—enchanted by
the perfect pitch of it, as if my eyes were fixed
on Jacob’s Ladder, each repetition of the lines
step by step by step lifting me high then higher.
I listened, enraptured, as sweet tone followed tone,
while doves and sparrows fluttered round the rungs,
each one shaped like some blessed note or quaver.How can I tell you what I heard, my friend?
Words, yes, but these were more than words.
Words alive with life and beauty, like those
hills smiling down at me out the car window,
transformed by the setting sun ablaze with
the greenblue gold rippling from the trees as on
we drove, my heart at rest in that gift of grace.
Does any of this make sense to you? Can it?
The poet struggles day by day by day
to get down on the page what he or she
has been given, the heart of it, and share it
with you, if you but have the time to listen.
The poem itself thus asks again the deeper question: where does a poem really come from? I remember my friend, Philip Levine, joking once, about the source for a poem. The Muse visits you in a dream, he said, and gives you the prompt to write about your time working in a Detroit factory. But then, you wake up, discard the nudge to get on with the daily round of things, the Muse moves on, and the next thing you learn is that Adrienne Rich has just written a poem about factory life in Detroit. So, what are the secret sources for writing a poem? Fly-fishing on a quiet stream? Tarot cards? Some busy fly buzzing about the room?
For me it is prayer. And in truth it always has been prayer. And, yes, in the silence of the night, a dream will sometimes come, and stays with you when you wake up. One of those nudges that I believe are offered by the Holy Spirit. You learn to wait, you learn to wait for that tug on your fishing rod, that beautiful, haunting music, that hidden source calling quietly out to you. Poetry as prayer, then, as a calling out to the Spirit calling you. Is this all nonsense? No, because out of this call and response a poem is born and shaped and molded. And then another. And another. And over a lifetime, hundreds of pages of poetry. Ten books of poetry to date. Six biographies of poets. Commentaries and collections of essays on poets and poetry, and two volumes of spiritual meditations.
And this is how it has been for me my entire life. Words offered by a gracious God, as I struggled from childhood—the oldest of seven in a working-class family—to shape a better life for myself with the gift of words and the secret sauce of prayer.
I took a lot of poetry classes at Manhattan College between 1958 and 1962, from the ancient classics up through the mid-twentieth century. But it was in my final semester that I discovered Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins and gave a talk on “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” And that was the gamechanger for me. At some deep level, what I needed was a Catholic poet who had submerged the self in the sacramental vision of things, and whose very language would reveal that world. Of course, it is there in glimmers in a great deal of poetry, if one keeps one’s ears attuned. And I believe that Hopkins’s poetry underlies a good deal of my work.
On the other hand, I also needed to learn to write in the American idiom, and since my mother’s family was from Paterson, New Jersey, of course William Carlos Williams’s poetry, especially the language of his epic, Paterson, spoke to me in a particular way. So, let’s call it a mixture of Hopkins and Williams, and in time other poets, like Robert Lowell (especially his early Catholic poems), John Berryman, with his mixture of the “Dream Songs” and his late Catholic poems, like his “Eleven Addresses to the Lord.” And Hart Crane, who called on Our Blessed Mother so often, especially in “The Bridge.” And—after a lifetime of teaching him—Wallace Stevens, whose poetry moved ever closer to a Modernist Catholic poetics.
And then, there were my mentors and friends and others, whose work struck me. First of all, the man who saw me through my years at the Graduate Center of CUNY, Allen Mandelbaum, who taught me so much about Dante, one of my mainstays. And then the Irish poets whom I also taught: Yeats and Seamus Heaney, my contemporary, whose poetry I deeply admire. Add Emily Dickinson, who once lived just down the road from where I have lived these past six decades, and whose spirit is very much alive. And then there were Allen Ginsberg, my friends Bob Creeley and Bill Heyen and Dana Gioia, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Madeline DeFrees, Mary Oliver, Maya Angelou, Langston Hughes. And of course, my dear friends Phil Levine and Bob Pack, whose poetry I have followed for half a century.
I have always seen my poetry—whatever the surface topic might be—to be a response, a thank you, really, to the Good Lord, who I came to see years ago offered me that gift, so that my work, as it moves on, has tried to reach out and acknowledge that gift. And so too with all six of my biographies, as well as my memoirs, critical essays, books on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. It is what sustains me, and sustains my writing, even through those rough patches when I turned from that light, only to realize that light was the only way for me.
Then, too, having the chance to teach poetry, especially Modern Poetry, first at Colgate and then at Hunter and the John Jay College and Lehman College, before I began my thirty-two-year career teaching at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and then a final sixteen years at Boston College. To teach, yes, but also to learn so much from my students over the years!
And, since I could not always be writing poems, and had no desire to write fiction, I turned to writing biographies—about poets. And since I never considered taking an MFA in poetry, researching the manuscript poems and letters of poets was a way to learn more about poetry and to try to find what drove my poets to write the poems they did. And having written my dissertation on the sonnets of Hopkins, and then expanding that to write about all of Hopkins’s work, and publishing my Commentary with Cornell University Press as I turned thirty, it was on to five American poets of the Twentieth Century. All through the 1970s, I worked on William Carlos Williams—first a commentary on his critical reception, and then on to six long years of writing my biography of him, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, which McGraw-Hill published in 1981.
In the meantime, I taught high school CCD at my local parish, and made a Cursillo retreat in the spring of ’72. And that was another gamechanger for me. Then, in the fall of 1975, I was asked to be rector for a Cursillo weekend. On the last afternoon, we were finishing up the three days of Mass and prayer and personal talks, when my team assembled in a small room where the Blessed Host was kept in a gothic-style wooden tabernacle. As we prayed and gave our thanks, I kept hearing an inner voice saying, “Go ahead, Paul. Ask for what’s in your heart.” I had already been rewarded with the graces of the weekend, thank you. But again—that nudge. So I said, “Okay, Lord. If I could use the gifts you’ve given me in your service, I would very much like to write poetry, especially poetry echoing your presence.” And then the poems started coming, one after the other. Over the next eighteen months I wrote thirty-two poems. Barry Moser ran his Pennyroyal Press down in Northampton, and one day I walked into his office and asked to speak to him. He was busy, but he listened and told me to leave the manuscript, and he would know me if he was interested.
Then, a few days later, he called me and said that he had read the poems and found himself weeping, so, yes, he was going to publish the book in a limited, signed edition. Allen Mandelbaum was there for me then, as well, and also formed a close bond with Barry. That began my fifty-year friendship with Barry. A year later, in 1979, David Godine published a trade edition of the book with its bright yellow cover. So began my work as a poet with the first of ten collections. The second collection, Crossing Cocytus, was published three years later with the help of my friend, Bob Pack, by Grove Press in 1982, followed by Prime Mover, again by Grove Press, in 1985.
In 1990, William Morrow published Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman. Four years later, Norton published my Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell. Norton also published two more volumes of my poetry: Salvage Operations: New and Selected Poems in 1991, at 185 pages, and The Great Wheel in the spring of ‘96.
In the spring of 1999, Norton published The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane, chosen by The Poetry Book Club of The American Academy and listed as a NY Times Notable Books, as well as the Ohioana Award and a finalist for the 23 October 2000 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography. This was the book on which James Franco based his biopic of Crane in 2012, in which I even found a small role acting the part of Alfred Steiglitz.
That same spring of ’99, I made an eight-day retreat with the Jesuits in Newton, Massachusetts, and as I was walking up the back stairs back to my room for the night, after my spiritual director had asked if I would be willing to turn everything over to Christ (I remember jokingly asking him how much time I had before I answered that) I received a strong interior message (once more) telling me to go to BC. After talking with my spiritual director the next evening, he advised me to finish the retreat, but—he added—if the message kept returning, to reach out to someone at Boston College and see what happened.
A couple of weeks passed, and still the message kept coming back. But not knowing anyone at BC—which I had never even visited—I wrote to the president, Fr. Bill Leahy, explaining what had happened, and would he keep in confidential and just let me know his thoughts. Two weeks later, I received an encouraging letter from him, inviting me to come and talk with him. One early summer afternoon I drove down and spoke with him in his office.
Of course, he explained, I would have to meet with the administration and then the department and teach a class (on Hopkins as it turned out) and deliver a talk (on Hart Crane). All of which I did, and soon after I was offered a Chair in English. And so, after thirty-two years at UMass, whose students and faculty I cherish to this day—it was off to BC in September of 2000, a ninety-mile trip to and another ninety miles back. And here’s the thing: I felt I had found my real home among the Jesuits. My oldest son is a Jesuit priest, a scholar of the Church in China under Communist rule, who is now a professor at Santa Clara University in California. So, of course, there was that connection.
Then, as grace would have it, I was asked by Viking Press if I would be interested in writing a book on the Jesuit thirty-day retreat as a layman, and of course I jumped at the chance. I made another retreat at the Eastern Point Retreat House outside Gloucester. The retreat was an extraordinary experience for me, and once again I learned a lot about the need for self-emptying and letting Christ fill that void. Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius was published in March 2002, and was chosen as a main selection of the Catholic Book Club, and awarded first place the following year by the Catholic Press Association.
In July 2002, the University of Georgia Press published God and the Imagination: Poetry, Poets, and the Ineffable. When I look back at what I covered there, I am humbled and amazed by the grace I was given once again. Essays on growing up in Manhattan back in the ‘40s, essays too on John of the Cross, Mozart, Rilke, Thomas Hardy, Hopkins’ Dark Night of the Soul, William Carlos Williams’ Passaic River, Hart Crane’s Brooklyn Bridge, Robert Lowell, Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Flannery O’Connor, Bob Pack, Galway Kinnell’s “The Avenue Bearing the Christ into the New World,” and on.
In July 2005, Paraclete Press published Deaths & Transfigurations: Poems, a volume designed and with engravings by Barry Moser. Barry also designed and illustrated my 233-page book of poems, Epitaphs for the Journey: New, Selected and Revised Poems, published by Cascade Books in May 2012 and—the following year—a limited hardcover edition of 300 copies with a triptych insert. In late 2008, Viking/Penguin published Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life, an Editors’ Choice for the New York Times Book Review. Finally, the sixth (and last) of my biographies was published in April 2016 by Simon & Schuster: The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens.
Then, in August 2019—retired now after fifth-three years of teaching—Paraclete Press published The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernity. There are seven chapters on Hopkins and his influence on other writers, followed by six chapters on Stevens and Berryman, as well as shout-outs to Williams, Pound, James Joyce, and others who have made up the river of language which I—like so many others—keep returning to. Once again I have found myself returning to prayer, and what Catholic poetry can look like in a post-Christian age, asking directly if (and how) one can still write a Christ-centered poetry.
And then back to poetry, with three books published by my old friend and co-conspirator, Greg Wolfe at Slant Books in the last seven years: Ordinary Time (2019), All That Will Be New (January 2022), and Sing Me a Song, She Said (July 2026). Each covers many topics, but what holds them all together is that search for the ineffable, that reaching out in prayer, to be fed with words I hope will speak to the reader, whether it be in dark times or times filled with hope.
So, yes, the poet does struggle day by day to get that elusive, precious something down on the page, and so share it with you, dear reader. If you but have the time to listen.
