Spencer Reece. Acts. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024.
AFTER SELECTING SPENCER REECE’S The Clerk’s Tale for the Bakeless Poetry Prize in 2004, Louise Glück wrote of his debut, “Emanating from Spencer Reece’s work [is] a sense of immanence that belongs more commonly to religious passion.” Reece’s third collection, Acts, continues his exploration of immanence, focusing on love as an immanent quality. Readers may have already encountered Reece in Image’s pages, either in his essay on Emily Dickinson in issue 76 or in James K.A. Smith’s editorial from issue 109. Rather than recapitulate the achievements of Reece the poet or the biography of Reece the queer Episcopal priest, I wish to reflect on immanence as it is achieved in poetry and on how it manifests in Reece’s work, keeping in view some other poets and theorists who have written on the subject.
In the Poetics, Aristotle writes:
First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures, and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity.
Aristotle understands that we learn through observation, and that we take pleasure in reproducing life. All is mimetic desire. To emphasize the importance of accurate mimesis, Aristotle advises that poets learn their craft in the following way:
In constructing the plot and working it out with the proper diction, the poet should place the scene, as far as possible, before his eyes. In this way, seeing everything with the utmost vividness, as if he were a spectator of the action, he will discover what is in keeping with it, and be most unlikely to overlook inconsistencies.
Really attend to the image, Aristotle advises. The image’s fidelity, its integrity to the message, is the message. If the likeness is authentic as art—meaning in some kind of harmonious relation with the world as it is—then the observer who contemplates the image will affectively identify with it. Aristotle adds, “The poet being an imitator, like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects—things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be.”
Since Aristotle in 330 BCE, there have been reformulations of his central tenet concerning mimesis. For Longinus in the first century CE, it was phantasiai or visualizations. Pound in the early twentieth valorized phanopoeia or imagism. Bachelard famously stated that “if there be a philosophy of poetry, it must appear and reappear…in total adherence to an isolated image; to be exact, in the very ecstasy of the newness of the image.” No matter one’s theory of poetics, one must include within it a representation of the world as it is. In accordance with Aristotle and Longinus, in his poem “In Solitaria Stanza,” Reece winks at immanence, writing of a painter, “He strives to be clear. / He always paints what isn’t there, but is there.” An artist, in other words, can bring spirit out of matter and vice versa. Reece is the poet of both together.
In What Poets Used to Know, Charles Upton writes a quixotic poetic text that is half in conversation with religion, or rather the theological underpinnings of knowledge as it concerns poetry, which he conceives of as a way of knowing; the other half is in conversation with spirituality, which he doesn’t explicitly define, but which seems implicitly defined as the capacity for belief—a belief in beauty and truth as the utmost goals of expression, and a life dedicated to the honoring of that pursuit. Spirituality is of course notoriously impossible to define precisely as a thing, though it is more graspable as an action in the world. For his part, when it was time for goodbye, the New Brunswick–based Alden Nowlan would say to poet friends, “Keep the faith.” He meant: keep the faith in art. Art requires keeping in the form of a maintenance of belief in the power of art itself. Art is care-ful and needs care.
Upton writes that poetry “is always pressing the discourse to be what it says and become what it knows.” I would define immanence in the spirit of the first half of Upton’s sentence. Immanence is, of course, a term used by different scholars in different ways. The Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory explains it to mean “that which remains in,” and as rejecting “the idea of an external or transcendent ground.” It adds that in this kind of philosophy, “God does not sit on high judging humans, rather we are at one with His substance.” In other words, immanence means that within the world is all we need to know; that all we need to know is similarly in the self; and that this world, this self, are consubstantial with things as they are, with truth and beauty. To return to Upton’s sentence: poetry, then, must be true—it must try to represent things as they are—but also it must strive to live up to its representation at the same time, to not only be trustworthy—to convey the truth of the things which are—but also, because of the immanent properties of language, be the thing which is.
Bachelard’s phenomenology seems to be in agreement, for he writes that “in many circumstances we are obliged to acknowledge that poetry is a commitment of the soul.” In the commitment is a maintenance function, a health preserved through positive action. Upton adds close by that “we can see that poetry, at its best, is a standing, walking and breathing challenge to the speaker to be as good as his word.” In this way art and life are coterminous: art strives for and to be the things which are, just as the self tries to immanently arrive in the world, both of these things infused with what we can know of God, who is no sky king or transcendent being on high, but rather the simple truth that everything, all around us, is alive, and artists must honor these things as Aristotle prescribes: mimetically. How can poets honor the things which are, if they lie? If their deeds are not consistent with their words? Upton writes, “To say something but not do it is to extend the name and image of Reality into imaginative forms that one has neither the power, the integrity, nor the right to realize.” The things which are require a behavioral fealty, a respect shown in comport.
For Reece, immanence is achieved through several strategies. The first and most obvious is the clarity with which he brings forth the world. Consider the preposterously gifted animacy of his “Stille Nacht”: “Moon / your nipple / hardens / over / Vienna… / the church / chews / Jesus / the Danube / slaps / the buttocks / of Europe.”
Here, Reece compares the moon to a lover’s nipple, though the work does not end there but is instead refined, situated in space, and further described as hardened, most likely by desire. (There is much desire in Acts.) Further: the church masticates its central figure with a verb that could mean ruminate on, or bite. This ambiguity is intentional, for Jesus was the making manifest of the mystery. Rather than a water-related verb like splashes, the river whacks an ass—and not just any ass, but that of a continent. The effort taken here, the descriptive precision, the streamlined metaphor, make things clear as things are likened to other things. The images are infused with mimetic energy. In an interview with Jonathan Farmer in the Paris Review, Reece admits that “metaphor and simile expand the reality and possibility of things. The metaphors and similes are often about surprise—whatever is being connected is not expected.” Like everyone else, including Aristotle, Reece values metaphor. But rather than valuing the mere establishment of connection by comparison, Reece recognizes that reality and possibility are the phenomena at play. Reece understands that the objective is not comparison, nor the mere establishment of a relation, but rather a bringing forward of what was always there—the inherency.
In my early twenties, I scavenged first editions of Alden Nowlan’s books from anti-quarian bookstores in Halifax. One of these was The Things Which Are, a beautiful hardcover I still read obsessively. Yet no poem in the text contained the titular phrase, nor any explanation of it. I interpreted the title to mean the work in the book: Nowlan was focused on capturing images clearly and concisely, perhaps in a way that reflected an improving craft.
At long last, I finally encountered Nowlan’s reason in my mid-forties, offered in an interview that had escaped my notice, one conducted in the 1970s. The interviewer asks, “Things, their physical appearance and texture, dominate a lot of your poetry. Is this a religious position? Do you believe in immanence?” Nowlan responds,
I have a very strong, almost primitive, sense of the sacredness of objects and things.… In my poetry I try to tell the truth. It’s a losing battle because there are so many truths you can’t really tell but I try to show the thing as it is. That’s the reason why I named one of my early books The Things Which Are after St. John the Divine being told by an angel to write “the things which thou hast seen and the things which are.”
Not included by Nowlan, the end to the quotation from Revelations 1:19 is: “and the things which shall be hereafter.” The circle closes, and we return to Aristotle.
The second of Reece’s immanence strategies is channeling the quotidian. His images can be Poundian, as in “Stille Nacht,” but more often they are born from a messy world, as when he writes of being a bishop’s assistant in Madrid:
I shuffle papers, check email, write letters
(we still do), keep track of Ordinary Time,
always shifting, recall appointments
(never on time), answer the door, which gets stuck,
celebrate the mass, attendance sparse, Spaniards
prefer movies, open and close the door for AA,
dust off all the Bishop’s whatchamajiggers,
recount and recount all the offering figures,
put the rent in hiding places, and on the dirty rag rug
I use the broken taped vacuum that fails to suck.
This parenthetical, heavily comma-ed, even occasionally repetitive style (“answer the door…open and close the door”) recalls an editor’s comment in Poetry from 2015: Reece “imitates a habit of conversation—how we hem and haw as we hunt for the right words.” The editor then asks, “Do Reece’s intentional infelicities feel appropriate, or do you mourn the poem’s lack of concision? Are you moved by the speaker’s persistence in the face of his inarticulateness?” These questions seem answered by the editor’s own choice of the word “imitates.” As I have shown, Reece can be concise. But he channels the immanence of being immersed in the quotidian. He brings forward the items of daily life in a looser, conversational fashion because these items exist in that same register, in a larger world of relations. It is this world and the speaker’s imbrication in it that is mimesis.
My belief: that the words are in the world, and that we are consubstantial with the world, that we are immanent along with it, the words become our world. One might begin in emotion (it is rare to conceive of a poem first in terms of time), yet the image must be perfectly realized, otherwise the emotion will be mismatched. The things which are require the image which is correct, and from there all other things can be verified.
Any poet who wishes to write on love must read Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet. In it, Carson informs us that the “English word ‘symbol’ is the Greek word symbolon which means, in the ancient world, one half of a knucklebone carried as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Together the two halves compose one meaning.” Not the cliché of two hearts beating as one, not a unity of being, but coherence—meaning that exists once the message has been connected, once the object and its greater reification have been brought together. The love poem is not only an expression of desire for the other. It is also a divination of meaning, a revelation of an object into a contextual system, the object longing for context and the context longing for the object. As Carson elaborates, a lover is “half of a knucklebone,” a “wooer of a meaning…inseparable from its absence.” We cannot know, even as we must know. Something is known when the beseecher arrives at the other, and yet only in part. There will always be the time when there was no context, only object, and vice versa. Carson elaborates further: “Only a god’s desire can reach without lack. Only the paradoxical god of desire, exception to all these rules, is neverendingly filled with lack itself.” Finitude reigns. Lack itself is infinite—making love the ur-subject of poets, who are doomed to the partial as part of their vocation.
As Reece points out in the Paris Review interview, “Acts is about love.” Indeed, one of its most ringing lines (from “Fiesta de Corpus Christi”) is “Whatever the question the answer is love.” This can be love for a place, specifically Madrid (from “La madrugada después de mi salida”: “I will never love a city more than this one. / Every night love disrobes on nonsensical streets”) or for a lover, specifically Manuel, whose “love can grow with forgetfulness.” Notwithstanding love, in Reece’s conceptualization of the world and faith, desire also informs his poetic’s spiritual mechanics. Consider “Tres crepúscolos”:
…I swear to you I swear I swear
by all the sugar blood and sap of the animals
I swear there is not one thing in this universe
no not one thing nor the universe beyond full of holes
and planets and asteroids that is not buried
with opportunity and desire.
Contra Carson, Reece’s poetic espouses a superabundance of opportunity rather than finitude. One senses a transcendent, kenotic love here, rather than Carson’s curse of self-boundedness.
Since the Enlightenment, when humans began to figure things out via the scientific method, with its love of quantification and instrumental view of knowledge, poets have faced the problem of what to do with all the data. Bachelard is especially pertinent here, perceiving how poetry militates against such an epistemology. He is on record as criticizing “the growing rationalism of contemporary science” and famously turned toward a consideration of “the ecstasy of the image.” He effects his rebellion thus: “And how should one receive an exaggerated image, if not by exaggerating it a little more, by personalizing the exaggeration? … In prolonging exaggeration, we may have the good fortune to avoid the habits of reduction.” In other words, who cares about restricting oneself to what can be measured or physically corroborated? Go further, into the mystery of the object and one’s relation to it. Exaggeration and personalization might seem in contradistinction to my dogma of representing the things which are, but I assure you this is not the case. Exaggeration and personalization make the representation more detailed and, when apropos, more true.
In the modern hierarchy, you recall, information comes first and knowledge comes second. Our age loves data. But just as wisdom can be created by knowledge, so to—as per Eliot—wisdom can be lost by knowing too much. Upton says something similar:
We are forced by our education, and by all the material processes of modern material life, to see things only in their becoming, not in their being; to understand a great deal about how they work or where they come from, but less and less about what they are. To see things as they are, in this sense, is to see them as symbols, not mere material results; it is to see them not historically but sub specie aeternitatis.
To understand the things which are, we must enter the world of poetry. We must use metaphor and create symbolic language. When speaking of such things, I am invoking both knowledge and wisdom. But do not misunderstand my position as disdaining information; if anything, it makes gleaning information even more important to get right. A poet who has the wrong relationship with information will never succeed.
On the other hand, Carson is right too. An awareness of finitude allows a poet to recognize that beauty is always in excess. A citational series of agreements between luminaries: as Rilke advises, “If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place.” More Rilke: “Things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable, occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated, and most unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existences whose life endures alongside ours.” Nowlan: But life is so vast and complex that no writer can convey more than a few grains of it.” Bachelard: “All we communicate to others [as poets] is an orientation towards what is secret without ever being able to tell the secret objectively.” And as Longinus contends: “Anyone who looks at life in all its aspects will see how far the remarkable, the great, and the beautiful predominate in all things.” The fact that we cannot know everything, that the secrets of the world are closed to us, is why we continue to reconnoiter there and make art in hopes of achieving the sublime. Long before an instrumental turn in modern culture, Longinus knew that a tool-based understanding of the world is inadequate to understand the things which are, the world as it is: “We may say of all such matters that man can easily understand what is useful or necessary, but he admires what passes his understanding.” In the end, poetry is about mystery, the paradox being that the mystery is one of infinite possibility, and yet is defined by what we do not know—the knowledge we lack. Or as Reece puts it wonderfully in two instances:
Faith, faith, Tomás Morín, since you asked,
settles on Madrid, an afterthought, the thing
that happens after thought and what happens
after that. (“La madrugada después de mi salida”)
Knowledge, fact, certainty: these are beyond us. But there is poetry to approximate the paradoxes, to articulate the partial knowledge:
——poetry is what we do while we wait
to come into the kingdom where what we see
——is not how it went. (“Tres Crepúscolos”)
After, we come to know what we never knew. Poetry allowed us to sing the mystery before it could finally be resolved, someplace beyond us, in what is to come.
Shane Neilson is a poet, physician, and critic. In 2025, he will publish The Reign (Goose Lane), the second book in a trilogy about his home of New Brunswick.