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How does your faith make your poetry beautiful?
I usually find out what I believe by writing. I write myself into beliefs. And I think of beliefs as provisional. They're not things that constitute anything fixed. It's very easy for me to entertain lots of possibilities, to wear a lot of beliefs, to test them out, to plumb them. I tend to be a skeptic about firmly held beliefs. I think the world confounds them constantly. So each poem is really a little enterprise in which I'm finding out what I think and what I believe as I go.
G. K. Chesterton once said, "The moment you have a fixed heart you have a free hand." He thought that freedom and surprise were most healthy, most robust when they have a fixed point. If everything is surprise, then nothing is.
That's one of those comments that's very interesting, but I'm somebody who immediately entertains the opposite of what I hear, and I know the opposite of that statement is true also. The unfixed heart gives you a free hand: both things are true.
A little earlier you said that you tend to be a skeptic about firmly held beliefs. Do you ever entertain the opposite of that? Are you ever skeptical of the firmly held belief in skepticism?
I would substitute "cynicism" for "skepticism." The skeptic is in search of language or truths that pass hard tests. The cynic, as Wilde says, "knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." I'm skeptical of the cynic.
Imagine for a moment that you live in a Christian universe. I know that you are not there personally, but your poetry, I think, invites these questions. What sort of poetic style do animals express? And let me just give you a concrete example of what I am asking about. A line that I really love in your poem "Nature" talks about how you like the "preposterous mad god creations," the rhinoceri and things like that. How do animals reveal a wild God?
I don't know what you mean about poetic style in relation to animals. But all the things in the world, collectively, attest to some kind of grandeur. And Christians would like to call that God. I have no problem with that. I think of God as a metaphor. God is a metaphor for the origins and mysteries of the world. I don't want to quarrel with people who believe in their version of that great mystery. My quarrel is with those who hold that their religion has the answer. If we examine things cross-culturally, we see that there are many gods. As a species, we are god-creators. Every culture seems to need its god. And so I tend to think anthropologically about such things.
In that line about the "preposterous mad god creations," how is it that they are somehow revealing a wildness in God?
Yes. I am entertaining that notion, and you are right to call me on it. But to me, it is a comic notion. Those tapirs and rhinoceri are so wonderfully grotesque.
They look otherworldly.
Yes. It attests …
To a creator.
Or to the mysteries of evolution, which probably somebody smarter than I could trace. These moments in my poems are all probings, not beliefs. They're provisional. And sometimes I'm just having fun. This takes us back to where we started. I try to put people in some agreement with reality, with the real, to discover—without pre-existent impositions—what is out there, what the world is like. It is a constant groping toward. One of the things for me, as an ex-Catholic—and it's always amazing to my friends—is that I am an ex-Catholic without guilt [laughs].
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