on spiritual poetry

I've been thinking about posting something on my blog that is actually about poetry. Should you have read any of my previous posts, you by now are asking yourself the question: "What's her day job, and when is she going to go do it?" The fact is, I'm enjoying the "academic" summer vacation, teaching doesn't start until fall. SO, I divide my time between a) being up to no good and b) writing about it. And of course there are responsibilities such as a baby (not mine) and a puppy (not mine either) in the house; though neither is mine there are hours in the day devoted
to making sure one little one has his "binky" and the other doesn't poop on the floor.

Now that I've broken my promise to write about poetry for an entire paragraph, I'm going to ask the question which I refuse to answer: what IS spiritual poetry? which begs the question (which I will NEVER answer) what IS spirituality? Now for my answer to the latter question: it's that thing people write all those tacky bestselling books about. So what is spiritual poetry, a response to that kind of book, the kind that explains the whole universe and gives simple practical steps for being happy and getting what you want???

When people talk about spiritual poetry, names like Rumi and Rilke come to mind. To be a spiritual poet, your name has to begin with a R and end with a long e sound (as in the Incorrect
pronunciation Rilkee)

OK, that's the long and short of it.

Well, I was reading Rumi last night as I do once every six months or so. Yeah, there's that age-old (or late twentieth century?) distinction between the spiritual and the religious. Great minds like Monica Lewinsky have said things like "I'm a very spiritual person, just not religious."
Rumi is not your run-of-the-mill Muslim though I believe technically he was Muslim. Now, at this exact moment I don't have a single Rumi book on hand to refer to. But Coleman Barks,
Rumi's best-known translator, has said things like: "Rumi's religion was everything," or "Rumi's religion was love." These are not direct quotes.

There are those who would claim for poetry a greater capacity for communicating whatever that thing is we call spirituality. A poet whose name does not begin with R, namely Dickinson, has a poem that begins: "I dwell in possibility/a fairer house then prose."

Is spirituality about "possibility?" A quote from a Rumi poem entitled "The Many Wines":

Drink the wine that moves you
as a camel moves when its been untied
and is just ambling about

Rumi supposedly (I've heard more than once) never actually drank wine, but used wine as a metaphor. He was big on this thing he called "freedom" --- I do feel, myself, that the practice of poetry gives unparalleled freedom, by which I don't just mean "freedom of speech." I mean I don't groove on poetry because I can use the f-word if I want --- actually I USUALLY save my vulgarity for shouting from behind a closed window at other drivers.

I would be doing much better if I had the book with me that I was reading last night. But here's my question: does poetry have limits??? Mark Strand says:

"I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes. These limits exist in turn within the limits of the individual poet's conception of what is or is not a poem."

Does this sound like something Rumi would have said, or Dickinson??? One of my favorite Rumi poems, which I would quote in full if I had it here, ends:

poems
are rough notations for the music we are.

Rumi has a thousand metaphors for God in his poems. No, I'm sure he has more than a thousand. And yet he says that no metaphor can describe whatever it is. He was a compulsive talker, singer of poems, but he often seemed to indicate that silence was --- what did he say silence was? He recommended silence. He also said prayer was one level of spiritual communication, meditation a higher level, and the highest level sohbet, or conversation.
He seemed to frequently "converse" with people who weren't there. Or, one supposes, with God. Should we lament that he was born too soon for Haldol?

I maintain a certain level of suspiciousness, myself, about spirituality, about all those bestselling books of which I've read a few, but I'm not like my dad who, when he says "that sounds spiritual" may as well be saying "that sounds like horse----." I don't, for example, believe with tha Kabbalists that it is possible or even desirable to purge ourselves of every trace of
negativity, that if we do we will literally live forever. Rumi doesn't believe this either, I remember one place in a poem where he says "good and bad are mixed."

If I thought I could only say "good" things, either out loud or in my poetry, I would be mute and have a severe case of writers' block. No, I don't think that to be a spiritual person or poet is to be "good" or virtuous at all times. To me, what is spiritual is to be a witness, not in the specifically
Christian sense (like JWs and other evangelistic types), but in the sense of being present, as Rilke said (finally I'm going to quote Rilke) in the 7th Duino Elegy: "Truly being here is glorious."

With that I will say my amen, and make the note that I hope there is something worth commenting on in all this drivel...

--- Harriet.