1 of 3
|
|
The Book of Psalms is unlike any other part of the Bible. In the Hebrew Bible, it follows the Prophets and begins the section called "Writings." That is to say, it mediates Malachi and Proverbs. The King James Bible places Psalms between Job and Proverbs, following the end of the Babylonian Captivity as recounted in Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther.
A song of praise both sacred and lyric, yet, unlike the Song of Moses, or Miriam, or the Song of Deborah, or the Song of Hannah, a psalm makes sense independent of its original context. Its lyric "I" (implied or stated) is always the reader/reciter, its setting the present moment. The reader steps inside the song, outside the self. The "place" of the psalm dwells in the sayer or singer. Hence the uncanny power of the word "Jerusalem." Recited, psalms speak in as many voices as there are people who say them.
Some of the fourteen essayists in Poets on the Psalms treat the invitation extended by the editor, Lynn Domina, as an occasion to talk about their own poetry. Others take the opportunity to teach a psalm or psalms, exercising scholarship, associative commentary, or close reading. Some look to the landscape to talk about psalms, some look at themselves. Some expand the meaning of a particular psalm or line autobiographically; others employ psalms to articulate their understanding of what's happened to them, and where understanding ends. Some anchor in the grave occasion, others in the intimate.
Given that these are poets' responses to one of the oldest poetry books in the world, the unanswered question is, What makes a psalm a psalm? I don't think it's enough to ask, as Carl Phillips does of his poem "Anthem": "If I call it a psalm, is it? / —Isn't it?" Psalms are simultaneously public and private, in voice, in matter, and in occasion. The Psalmist is often sore-tried, surrounded by enemies, wondering how long and why the wicked prosper, and when his chance will come, but nowhere is the incomprehensible confused with the willful.
Catherine Sasanov calls poetry "the form we turn to … when our hearts are broken." She recalls a television interview where a man recounted his escape from one of the World Trade Center towers. "He broke down completely," she wrote, when he told "how people working their way down the stairwells began to spontaneously recite the Twenty-Third Psalm together." The psalm of trust is a prayer, a song of hope that, here, flies in the face of the evidence, and is of course a poem. But the poem part seems the least of it. Aside from the problem of everyone knowing it, what poem by what poet, in any language, would answer these exigent circumstances?
A pilgrim on the road away from the Catholic Church since age seven, Sasanov remarks with some amazment that as an adult she had learned the King James Version of the 23rd Psalm completely and by heart. "Not by assignment, catechism, or other kind of coercion," she says, but "little by little, death by death, wake by wake."
For her part, Angie Estes recited Psalm 23 in Baptist Sunday school "in the same uninflected, incantatory tone with which we chanted the Pledge of Allegiance each morning in public school." There are two kinds of memory. One, mimetic, is Memory, the mother of the Muses. The other kind of remembering is testimony, witness, heeding, which can be its own commandment and fulfillment.
Estes' commentary on the 23rd Psalm is an essay upon "want," that which "I shall not." Her personal catechism summons memories of Florence, and a mosiac of passages from Dante, Gertrude Stein, the Oxford Bible Commentary, St. Augustine's Expositions of the Psalms (for him it was number 22), a Baptist hymn ("In the Garden"), Edna St. Vincent Millay, Christopher Smart, James Crenshaw, Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire, to reconcile herself with the death of her cat. Intellectual propriety and emotional candor perform an exegetical dance that never draws too much attention to either partner. Comparing "In the Garden" with "thy rod and thy staff they comfort me," Sasanov hears the hymn lyrically, as a love song, and musically, as a waltz.
share this page
RSS Feed
