Stranger in a Strange Land

Our most influential critics are anthologists. Out of a chaos of texts they create order: something called “Victorian poetry” or “African American literature.” (And then there is that superanthology we call the Bible.) Yes, many of the breed are ponderous, predictable textbook brutes, conceived in committees and already obsolescent even as they are being printed. But the best anthologies–Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes’s Rattle Bag, Czeslaw Milosz’s A Book of Luminous Things (see p. 14 of this issue)–are personal choices, at once richly idiosyncratic and immediately persuasive: they make us see in a new way.

Add to that select company David Impastato’s Upholding Mystery: An Anthology of Contemporary Christian Poetry (Oxford University Press, 369 pp.; $25, hardcover). Impastato is a brave man. On the one hand, he is challenging the poetry establishment, where the reigning orthodoxy is well represented by Helen Vendler’s flat assertion, in the Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry, that nowadays any poetry that counts assumes the absence of transcendence. To that crowd, Impastato’s subtitle is an impertinence or a joke.

And the Christian community? You have a general readership that never pays attention to poetry, except for the wrong reasons. The editors of the Christian Century, bless them, include poems in every issue. No one seems to notice. But early this year (March 19-26) they made a big mistake. They published a poem, “Pilate Speaks,” by Maria Garriott, without a consumer notice: “WARNING! This poem contains irony.” For the response, see the issue of July 2-9. The Christian literati, meanwhile, are many of them uncomfortable with anything labeled “Christian.” They don’t want to be seen as the literary equivalent of “contemporary Christian music.” That seems to leave a market of at least 500 or a thousand for this anthology. But Impastato must be charming as well as brave, because his book is issued by Oxford University Press, no less, and a handsome job they have made of it.

Instead of attempting to cover the whole spectrum of contemporary Christian poetry, Impastato has selected 15 writers, each of whom is generously represented, arranging their work in thematic sections (the first of which, appropriately, is “The Cross”). I’ve said the best anthologies are strongly personal, and that applies to Impastato’s with a vengeance. We have Daniel Berrigan and Wendell Berry; Scott Cairns, David Citino, and David Craig; Annie Dillard, Maura Eichner, and Louise Erdrich; Geoffrey Hill, David Brendan Hopes, and Andrew Hudgins; Denise Levertov, Les Murray, and Kathleen Norris; and finally Richard Wilbur. What a surprising lineup! I read a lot of poetry, but four of Impastato’s choices–Citino, Craig, Eichner, and Hopes–were completely unknown to me when I started this book. And the poets included are a very heterogeneous lot: no aesthetic manifesto links Annie Dillard’s found poetry with the narrative verse of Andrew Hudgins or Les Murray’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sprawl with Geoffrey Hill’s scrupulous cadences.

This isn’t a “movement” anthology, then, but neither is it simply a whimsical collection. “As separated by tone, attitude, and style as the poems of this anthology are,” Impastato writes,

taken together they create what critic Jonathan Holden calls a “revolutionary core” of work. By offering a vision not just to a single community but to the cultural mainstream, they may begin, Holden feels, “a partial desecularization of the modernist hegemony.”

It is nice to be the good guys and girls for a change, isn’t it–the ones subverting “hegemony.”

For those who shun poetry because they associate it with a certain arty-farty ambience, a word about Impastato’s title is in order. Against materialists and cynics of every variety who sneer at “mystery,” Christians have no choice but to affirm it at the very core of belief: the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, the Incarnation, the Resurrection. Are not our very lives deeply mysterious? But invocations of mystery can easily shade into the ethereal, the unreal, and that is a tendency that Impastato resolutely avoids.

His title is drawn from a poem by Denise Levertov, “Man Wearing Bird,” which begins with a cryptic epigraph from the Boston Globe: I saw a patient standing in the middle of the driveway. Something was moving on his head. Levertov takes that spare, absurd scenario and weaves a poem out of it. The speaker is the patient (a “mental” patient?), with a pigeon on his head: “This is my pigeon / and I its prophet,” he affirms, and later: “I am a column, a pillar of / righteousness, upholding / mystery.” What? It’s a long way from the Four Spiritual Laws, but that is the way poetry works. Or as Scott Cairns puts it: “My only rule: If I understand something, it’s no mystery.” This is a wonderful book. Give copies of it for Christmas, and get one for yourself. If you are a teacher, order it for a class, and tell your colleagues about it. Spread the word.

With this issue we begin our third year of publication. This is a good time to say thank you to all our subscribers. Your support encourages us greatly. A special thanks goes to our sustaining subscribers and to those who gave scholarship subscriptions for students. Your generous response exceeded our expectations.

John Wilson, Editor

Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 4

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