Good on you, Ken (you can tell which list I've been hanging out on).

Except, as you predicted (must have been inspiration), "I have never ever
met a writer, especially a poet, who did not--implicitly
or explicitly--acknowledge something greater than themselves, someone..." I
think I understand the mechansims by which the brain throws useful things
at me as if from outside--"splitting" seems to be an impotant strategy of
our human consciousness--but it doesn't concern me all that much what the
source is, one accepts it with wonder and appreciation, except when it
interferes too much with things like sleeping and eating.

If there were a heaven and I got there I'd hope to be sharing it with the
ghosts of folks who like me always worried about whether they were
compassionate enough towards others--not very different from the folks
still in the flesh that I care most about, including several on this list.

Maybe that's why my favorite non-scriptural religious text is Pilgrim's
Progress.

That there may be no goal doesn't keep us all from being pilgrims.

And I imagine Bob Creeley and feel warm for a moment.

Mark




At 01:37 PM 5/10/2005, you wrote:
>David Riddell wrote:
>
>>It has been my observation from recent
>>comments to this Poetry site
>>that contempt for God seems to be
>>a prerequisite for those who deem
>>themselves experts in this field.
>>
>I really ought to stay out of this.  Alison kind of suggested we let go
>of this, I think.  But.
>
>I've expressed a couple of views here in the recent past that have made
>me (at least offline) about as popular as a pack of cigarettes in a lung
>cancer hospice.  One of the lessons I took away from the experience was
>when to talk and when to shut up.  Not for fear off offending people:
>just because I am hardly a 100% believer in anything except that
>so-called Power Greater Than Myself and I have neither the right nor
>obligation to hit people over the head with privately held and sometimes
>tortuous convictions unless I can write them at least as well as John
>Donne and George Herbert.  Alas, I stopped channeling Herbert after
>Ph.D. exams but it was fun while it lasted.
>
>I find that Being everywhere.  I do not believe in revealed truths
>emanating from any one place: the Bible (either Scripture), Koran, Big
>Book of AA, various sutras (even the Kama), the writings of Rabbi Joseph
>Soloveitchik, Rumi, Rilke, Jane Kenyon, or Mary Oliver.  Maybe there are
>people who find THE Truth in any one of these volumes.  Other people
>find pieces of Truth in all of them.  In the meantime the Being is out
>with me and the dog when we're walking in the evening.  The Being is in
>the eyes of my aging cat.  The Being is in the eyes of my grown
>children.  Sometimes the Being is even here, among the scoffers,
>sinners, moneylenders in the Temple, and tax-collectors...so you seem to
>think we are.
>
>>Humilty....Look it up in your Dictionaries.
>>
>Sarcasm will get you nowhere in this place.  Dismiss it.
>
>>...or whether
>>each one of us has been predestined
>>to either Eternity with God or Eternity
>>without God.......for this I am anti-
>>intellectual?
>>
>Okay, you are popping a variant of Pascal's Wager on us.  The point is?
>
>>Of course,if you are more interested
>>in reading literature that endeavours
>>to discredit Biblical Truth,then
>>read as much as you like.As I said,
>>I am not an Apologetic.
>>
>Yes you are.  I used to know a Jesuit priest in New York to whom I
>addressed the following question: "When you pray, do you ever wonder if
>someone is listening?"  He replied "About once a day."  If you like
>blasphemous poetry, consider Robert Browning's "Bishop Bloughram's
>Apology":
>
>"You call for faith:
>I show you doubt, to prove that faith exists.
>The more of doubt, the stronger faith, I say,
>If faith o'ercomes doubt."
>
>I am missing something here in your dismissive comment about literature
>that discredits Biblical truth.  Name six.  You seemed to have banished
>the idea of doubt, of questioning, of a personal search.  It's all in
>the Bible?  A great deal about faith is there, but not about everything
>else.  Other people have spoken and written wisdom, other people have
>been--to use what I suspect is a shared terminology--divinely inspired.
>Will you dismiss Christopher Smart's "Jubilate Agno" because it's not
>Holy Scripture but the writings of a madman?  Will you dismiss Eliot's
>religious verse because the guy was apparently a lousy husband?  Or
>Auden because he was a homosexual?  I can stop right there because I
>have never ever met a writer, especially a poet, who did not--implicitly
>or explicitly--acknowledge something greater than themselves, someone
>who gave them the gift, who nurtured the gift, and who allowed them the
>occasional fear that one day the gift could be taken back (watch, now
>they're going to come running:-).  Therefore (he said, clearing his
>throat), any poetry I read is implicitly an acknowledgment of some
>aspect of the Divine, and by that I do not mean a female impersonator
>from Baltimore who acted in John Waters movies.  Any poem I write, good
>or bad, is given to me--not by transcription a la those urban legends
>about Georgie Yeats and automatic writing, but to work with and at until
>I get something that may be satisfying to me or hopeless.  The labor
>itself is the joy and the gift.
>
>I'm so glad I stayed out of this.....
>
>Ken
>
>--
>Kenneth Wolman
>Proposal Development Department
>Room SW334
>Sarnoff Corporation
>609-734-2538