I just watched Derek Walcott's reading of his poem "Forty Acres", it was
fantastic & deserves more attention than this strange Alexander woman's
prosaic, uninspired, Maya Angelou-like hankering for something 'poetic'
without BEING poetic. Walcott gave us something strong & beautiful, much
like Obama did with his speech.
KS
2009/1/20 Gerald Schwartz <[log in to unmask]>
> Spiritual Life: Poetry and prayer: Parallels of invocationMuch the way
> that, say, Lorenzo Thomas' work is, I must say Rev. Dr. Joseph E. Lowery's
> Benediction was more poetry than Alexander delivered, proving in full that
> POETRY SPEAKS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE akin to prayer. The benediction, like
> authentic poetry, was an activity. It activated.
>
> I am less concerned here, at the start, about what one prays -the creed of
> prayer-than that one begins an inner life of words, praying, or poetry, and
> that one finds a certain attitude of inner life. This can be found by at the
> very start of Lowery's work, of his saying focal words, using even secular
> prayers, including a poetics, even for those of us who have not found God,
> grace, a religion, or a church.
>
> If his benediction was not petry, it is like poetry, like swimming--one
> has, sometime, to jump into the words or water and hope that something will
> be there. That something will hold one up. One has to learn the strokes,
> maybe, on dry land beforehand.
>
> His prayer itself opened the dimension of the other, of the higher or the
> divine. Like an authentic poem, one prayer, is like one grain of sand on the
> beach-it starts the dialogue.
>
> Alexander's poem, without its focus words, was poetry that cannot help a
> person in the direction that leads to prayer: that of wholeness, or healing,
> which is the secret realm of holiness.
>
> Lowery's poem/prayer begins with the cultivation of an attitude, not just
> in stillness or some strange church, and this is where his poetry can help
> prayer: What is the magic word? You need not be a church person, an Muslim,
> a Jew, or a Christian to say this poem, or even a believer, but it can
> invoke the same attitude of reverence or relaxation response -that prayer
> awakes in a person.
>
> Lowery evoked a poetry activating the memory, attitude, and perception, and
> it may be a good beginning or refresher for persons interested in eliciting
> the peace, power, and the active inner life of prayer. After all, prayer and
> poetry originally come from the same place, and much early poetry was
> sacred. Poetry, like prayer, accompanied ceremonies both at the temple and
> at the court. They were observances of the priest and king. They had the
> function of ritualizing, raising, and celebrating a sense of higher life.
> They were a training and discipline of inner attitude towards public and
> divine and even supernatural events. They were the developers of the
> culture.
>
> Alexander failed to recapture some of these beginnings of us and the world
> through both poetry and prayer.
>
> Poetry, from the Greek word poesis (to make), like prayer from the Sanskrit
> word pras or prcchati (for asking), often calls on unseen powers and
> addresses nature, the lover, time, or the West Wind as Thou. This is the
> mood of invocation. It is, philosophically and grammatically, the vocative
> relation: the poet calls out "0 Thou" to the universe. It is the grammatical
> case, the vocative, in inflected languages which calls out or invokes. This
> vocative relation-the grammar of calling out-is a personalizing, a
> connectedness with destiny, death, love and chance, shared by prayer and
> poetry alike. The vocative relation, or mood of invocation, is the calling
> out of the soul to life itself, be it the West Wind, Joy, the fountains and
> meadows, or love, or time, or even death.
>
> Alexander's poem, though well-constructed, accomplished none of this.
>
> Lowery, in his inner life, impersonated the world, and all poetry is a kind
> of prayer to the universe.
>
> Lowery's prayer, can be memorized poems and repeated, revealing an inner
> landscape that can offset the evil, trouble, and turmoil of everyday life,
> the kind dished up for us by the past eight years of the previous failure of
> an administration.
>
> Lowery's Benediction set the mood of invocation, waking up the inner
> dependence we have on beauty, truth, and goodness, and will go farther than
> Alexander's poem to help us actually create it. It put us between a prayer
> and a meditation. The attitude of the soul, the poem, enlivens the moment.
> This is the kind of waking up of the inner life that the vocative relation,
> whether addressed to God or no, can bring.
>
> The Benediction more than the poem invoked meaning, which is indeed, the
> interface between prayer and meditation. In meaning we make an effort not
> just with the heart but also with the mind to awaken the sense of words so
> that as we repeat the formula or poem, we are discovering thought afresh.
>
> Lowery's poem/prayer works, too, because he realizes the outward world
> changes. Days change. But the word Grace, constantly repeated, can measure
> all vicissitudes. It is the same with poems that we have internalized,
> making life ours in an inward song that no outer circumstances can change.
> This is that inward landscape of the relaxation response that can be such a
> great relief against stress, effecting even musculoskeletal,
> fight-or-flight, and psycho-immunological symptoms. Here Lowery addressed
> his love. The attitude of the poem is a prayer.
>
> Alexander's poem failed to activate the inward life. It had no sense of
> what it means to build soul out of words, memory, repetition, and attitude.
> Absent was a kind of undertone, as if the mind were whispering to itself, to
> love, to destiny, to the universe. There was no inward speech, whether
> prayer or poem, between language and thought.
>
> The Benediction poem was part prayer, part meditation. We can pray it, but
> we can also meditate it.
>
> Right now, we need this kind of meditation to help us crawl our of our
> nightmare.
>
> It is, on the whole, possible to meditate poetry and, as Re. Dr. Lowery
> did, to poeticize a meditation into a prayer.
>
> Gerald Schwartz
>
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