Image unto Likeness: The Body Breathing Again

Scott Cairns

MY OWN ongoing obsessions have me thinking of the body of American poetry as a body indeed. In the case of that body’s rearkable transformation over the past decade—a decade which has seen a widespread return of religious typology, sacramental trope, and relatively unselfconscious metaphysical speculation—I’m prone to see that body’s recovery of spirit in terms of its resurrection. Worse than that, my own love affair with the mysteries of the Eastern Church have me thinking in terms of that body’s veritable theosis, its deification, its increasing viability as an embodiment of the Holy Spirit, by which I mean the actual Holy Spirit.

How did I get here? Or—if this sounds at all likely—how did we?

After all, it wasn’t that long ago that the inducements of late modernism had most of us pretty well convinced that we would do well to discount anything we couldn’t see, couldn’t empirically observe, subsequently measure. Not such a bad state, really, except that the mouth tended to go dry, and the pilgrim would often wake in the night, both thirsting and puzzled that he still thirsted for waters which couldn’t possibly be.

Then, the strangest thing happened—the postmodern turn helped us to observe that the very lens through which we viewed our apparent world was itself suspect, was—at the very least—necessarily smudged by our own fingerprints, bearing the oils of our own experiences, personalities, other immeasurable baggage. In other words, whereas the modern view led us to be skeptical of verything we saw as well—a circumstance that pretty much granted equal legitimacy (or, if your disposition so dictates, equal illegitimacy) both to things seen and things unseen.

In many quarters, of course, this all preceded our most recent decade, but my sense is that it has been during the past ten years that people of faith in America have ceased to be terrified by the perspectives of postmodernity, and have ceased to view those perspectives as threats to a tenuously held faith. My sense is that it has been during the past ten years that poets of faith have begun to embrace postmodern epistemological troubling as offering a disposition far more closely related to the mystical heart of our faith than were the previous, more familiar, literalizing, poem-killing presumptions and glib certainties that have, in our country, managed to trivialize both Christendom and Christ for more than half a century.

And that may be half of the story—that poets of continuing faith have learned to adapt certain secular sophistications to their own purposes, have learned, in short, to trust God, to trust their vocations, and to trust their developing facilities with language to lead them into speaking discovered matter, rather than spouting familiar, safe, and therefore reductive, soul-crippling clichés. The other half of the story is actually the more exciting: accomplished poets of lapsed or latent or previously unacknowledged faith seem to have discovered a way home; the postmodern turn has availed for them a glimpse of endless possibility and permutation, and once they’d gotten over the initial queasiness of that vision, they’ve detected at its heart a delicious vertigo, a swoon of unknowing; in the place of what may have seemed at first an abysmal emptiness of meaning, they have come to suspect an abysmal fullness.

In the span of relatively few years, therefore, we have witnessed a great increase—poets of faith have grown in accomplishment, writing better poems, and already accomplished poets have discovered a path to faith, and have found themselves inclined to attend to such matters in their poetry. Concurrently—and here, the cause and effect dynamics are probably worth examining—the past decade has witnessed a surprising increase in worthwhile venues for the poems these poets make. Image is admittedly among the first and best, but there are more than a dozen new journals and magazines (most of which didn’t exist ten years ago) offering space to poetry which takes the invisible world as seriously as it takes the visible. Believers who read these publications are themselves becoming more accomplished readers of poetry, demanding more from poetry than the familiar, apoetical verse-testimonies and verse-devotionals that passed for poetry in religious publications just a decade ago.

In short, I’d say that the principal change in American poetry of the past decade is the return of the poetic. And I’m not talking merely about its return to Christian or Jewish writing, but its return to mainstream American poetry in general. For prior to this innovation—the body’s recovery of spirit—the primary mode of both religious and secular poetry has been a sort of Voice of NPR verse essay, a denotative document of prior, personal experience. That is to say, somewhere along the line since late modernity, a great many poets became satisfied to let their “poems” serve merely as references to imagined, or otherwise lived events. The mainstream American poem devolved into little more than a pathos-laden expression of something already seen, already done, something already thought. The new poetry, a poetry which employs language as agency and power rather than merely as name for another and prior thing, demands that it be read and re-read, and poked, and puzzled over as an event of its own. The new poem is not about a thing; it is a thing.

As I’ve said, all of this has led me to think of this new body of work as a body indeed, as a live thing capable of many actions that a simple reference document could never perform, many actions that a writer of such reference documents would never think to expect from his or her text. Among these actions, the new poem (very like many of the old poems that preceded the late modern, aberrant taste for denotative text) is likely to elicit subsequent readings; it is likely to produce (to engender) multiple possibilities of meaning; and it is likely to avail for the reader a glimpse of indeterminate enormity residing in a discrete space.

At this point, I’m nearly tempted to name names, to list the poets whose work strikes me as partaking of this sacramental vision of the new poem. My hesitation to do so indicates yet another exciting difference between now and ten years ago: ten years ago, the list was tidy enough to keep stored on the tip of the tongue. Now, however, hardly a week goes by without my coming upon the work of yet another poet working this way. The list is huge, and the list is growing.

The next step, I suppose, is to proceed with the making of new poems, and perhaps to articulate as well a poetics that distinguishes the new poem from its immediate predecessors, sufficiently addresses the terms of the new poem, and serves to educe in poets on the cusp a desire to partake in the mystery. It would have to be something of a sacramental poetics, and it would have to attend to the mystery of images proceeding unto likenesses.

Scott Cairns first appeared in our pages in Image #5. His poetry collections include Recovered Body, Figures for the Ghost, The Theology of Doubt, and The Translation of Babel. He teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Missouri. He was on the faculty of the 1998 Glen Workshop.

Visit Scott Cairns as Image Artist of the Month for September '99

Issue #22 • Winter/Spring '99