Poetry and spirituality have long walked the same intellectual pathways, closely bonded cousins, if not quite fraternal twins. The Bible itself contains some of the world’s oldest, best- known poetry. Throughout the ages, great mystics like John of the Cross in Catholicism, and Jalaluddin Rumi in the Sufi tradition, wrote poetry, as if poems were natural heirs to a life of prayer and contemplation. Arguably the most popular poet in America today is Mary Oliver, whose explorations of nature almost always lead to meditations on the life of the spirit. Oliver’s is a poetry of both the natural and metaphysical worlds, the body and the soul.
The priest-poet is also a time-honored tradition. John Donne was an Anglican priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins a Jesuit, and Thomas Merton a Trappist monk. Larry Janowski is a Franciscan priest from Chicago. His first collection, BrotherKeeper, is out from Puddin’head Press. His is one of two poetry collections with spiritual themes to emanate from Chicago in the past year. The other is Chasing the Saints from Virtual Artists Collective by Donna Pucciani.
Janowski writes with gritty reverence about the city. He finds moments of transcendence even in the grim daily headlines of The Chicago Tribune. Pucciani’s book is a series of profiles and persona poems about Catholic saints. She subtitled the book “Poetic Encounters,” and approaches her subjects much as a tell-all biographer might. She gives us a St. Francis with dirt under his nails, a Teresa of Avila who fears deep water and dislikes fishcakes.
Neither collection, happily, descends into the pious, sentimental, didactic or devotional tone that plagues what often passes for “religious” poetry. If both collections are “religious” at all, it comes from one of the original senses of the word: to look upon the world with awe. Both collections confirm a belief I’ve long held, that much of contemporary poetry is spiritual. It’s a view that runs contrary to conventional wisdom and would dismay those post-modern, post-narrative writers who believe experience has largely stripped language of meaning. But the fact is, many contemporary poems uncover the sacred in the ordinary. God may merit nary a mention in these poems, but God is in them, in the details.
Chicago is Father Janowski’s “City Of God” and his “Interior Castle.” Its immigrants, second-and-third generation Poles and Irish, its street people, sales people and daily commuters are his modern-day prophets. The title poem of the collection relates the true story of an eight-year-old boy who witnessed his younger brother plummet from a window in the Ida B. Wells housing project. (A group of boys had dangled the five-year-old out a 14th story window as punishment for refusing to steal candy). The older boy desperately races down flights of stairs to try and catch his younger brother. Two Chicago boys, the poet says “I never knew, who will not let go: “…falling / is / like drowning // …but air cares even less / than water, lets you / slip through / without even a wake / to mark your passing … (1)
Janowski reads the urban landscape as if it were a book of Scripture. It’s reading that sometimes ends in solace, sometimes in insight, but more often than not, in mystery. In “Get Your Streetwise!” (the title refers to a newspaper homeless people hawk on corners for a dollar), Janowski encounters a feisty street person who accuses him of harboring a gun in his shoulder satchel (18):
I
always hold the bag like that
don’t want it to slam into people
never touched a gun
can turn it inside out
spill guts on the street
here
look
ungraded papers
poetry books
candy wrappers
look look
pencils
nothing
Many of his poems are odes to the city where he grew up, and where he teaches writing at Wright Community College and says Masses for a small community of Felician Sisters on the Northwest side. In “Luminaria” (35), he writes:
Chicago eats light, sucks it in
like a black hole, hoards it
like a radium dial planning
to stay awake all night because
light – like the grass and flesh
we devour, decays. We
need more. Always. But
unlike broad green leaves
that take their sun straight,
we cannot look full on light
and live. We need the tempering
of angels, moons, or cities …
Janowski mostly shies away from poems that describe his life in a men’s religious order. (“St. Francis used to say, when you have an experience of God, you shouldn’t talk about it because you’re somehow wasting it,” he has said). But there are deft references throughout the poems. He savors the hairdresser’s touch washing his hair. He looks with self-mocking humor at his naked body which “no one sees … except in the eyes off / locker room kind of glance.” Those poems that do deal with his priestly life are searing and authentic. In “What Celibacy Is” (48), he takes an unsentimental look at the vow he took to forgo sexual intimacy.
If this is what
it costs to hold
at heart a hollow
where no sparrow
lives (nothing alive
that needs light),
if this is what God
expects from Yes,
then it is too much
today, although
I pay it anyway …
To read Janowski’s poems is to gain a deeper level of seeing and believing, to arrive at a place, as Mary Oliver once described it, where one sees “through heavenly visibles to the heavenly invisibles.”
Like Janowski, Pucciani is a poet of the sacred in the ordinary. Her collection Chasing the Saints builds on the premise that what makes these men and women holy is, in many ways, their very ordinariness. Her cast of characters includes well-known luminaries: St. Michael the Archangel, St. Patrick, St. Therese of Lisieux, St. Paul and St. Anthony. But there are lesser-knowns too, like Blessed Kateri Tekawitha, a Mohawk Indian not yet a full-fledged saint, but on her way to canonization; St. Lutgarde, a 13th Century Belgian monastic who levitates at prayer, and San Gennaro, patron saint of Naples. A vial of his dried blood is said to periodically liquify and bubble up in its case.
Occasionally, Pucciani steps out of ancient times into the present or near-present, as when she describes her grandmother Giuseppina’s bedroom shrine to St. Therese of Lisieux (33):
Black-veiled, brown-robed, with strawberry lips
and wimberry eyes and hands full of roses,
you stand a foot tall on the nightstand
alongside St. Francis, a bird on his left shoulder,
Jesus, his actual heart exposed and beating
in arterial splendor, and Mary in chipped blue robes
that need a good dusting …
But Pucciani, a public school teacher who has written two previous collections, is at her best when she is imagining new narratives for her pious subjects. St. Jude, patron of hopeless cases, is reduced to hearing the pleas of the aged in nursing homes, who expect, well, miracles. St. Anthony, finder of lost items, has wearied of the people who can’t even locate what’s under their noses (6).
…Favorite item today:
umbrellas – it seems to be raining everywhere
from Hong Kong to Beirut. Yesterday: sunglasses
especially in Australia …
St. Cecilia, patroness of musicians, endures an eternal rest eternally interrupted by drummers, flutists, oboe players, and constant strains of Vivaldi, Wagner, jazz and Motown (10):
At night I leave them to their own devices
in jazz clubs or locked in practice rooms
drinking black coffee and running arpeggios
into the ground. But I promise I will wake them
in the early clear-throated morning, gargled,
lozenged and rosined, knuckle-cracked and ready to play …
Despite her flights of imagination, Pucciani does stay close to the historical record, quoting often from the saints’ own writings (A final entry in St. Teresa of Avila’s breviary: Hold God, and naught shall fail thee). Many previous poetry collections have recast narratives of the Bible. It is a wonder that the saints have not come in more often for this same type of re-envisioning. Ms. Pucciani does it with humor and aplomb.
reviewed by Judy Valente, Normal, Illinois (This review first appeared in The Cresset, Trinity 2008. Follow this link for a pdf of the original review.)
Larry Janowski. BrotherKeeper. Chicago: Puddin’head Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9724339-5-2.
Donna Pucciani. Chasing the Saints. Virtual Artists Collective, 2008. ISBN 0-9772974-6-2.
