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A Good Problem
Carolina Quarterly, Summer 2008, Volume 58, Number 3
Epistles by Mark Jarman
Spill by Michael Chitwood
Review by Evan Gurney
When it comes to the genesis of poetic creation, not all we see is good, particularly when the subject is God. It's a topic worthy
of cautious reverence among poets for a number of reasons. Too often such art indulges in a sort of saccharine evangelism, leaving
the more difficult issues associated with deity unexplored. Other works devolve into existential angst - what seems to be an
irresistible temptation to many confessional poets - and still other writers, commonly the more childish of agnostics, spend
their verses shouting at God, too easily forgetting that native human instinct to search for meaning in a mess of a world, or perhaps merely protesting too much. But when tackled by masters of craft such as Mark Jarman and Michael Chitwood, matters of the divine become "a good problem," to use a cliche Chitwood finds and remakes in one of his pieces, a problem that generates all sorts of profound questions and leaves readers to find their own answers.
I do not wish to suggest that either poet's most recent offering, Jarman's Epistles or Chitwood's Spill, limits itself to merely these questions. Both works are just as clever and poignant in their examination of the human as they are when wrestling with deity. Their poetry is as much of the body as the spirit. But for the purposes of this review I wish to focus on their engagement with the divine, how these two poets voice a spirited conversation with God, simultaneously celebrating and disputing the mysteries of divinity. Readers may debate whether there is indeed a God, but all will surely agree the work of Jarman and Chitwood, contemporary poets of the highest order, is some kind of blessing.
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If Jarman often intellectualizes matters of the divine, Chitwood's poetry finds God at the blood level, his poetic veins pulsating with
a peculiar brand of small town Appalachian Methodism. He can't escape it. The book's first stanza sums up what seems to be both blessing and curse:
Everyone he knew believed in God.
They believed in cake batter.
They believed in spirit levels.
Conflating religion with carpentry and baking, Chitwood explores a world in which the divine remains thoroughly immersed in local cultural fabric. Like the transfusion bag of platelets he describes in his title poem, the stuff of Heaven falls inexorably into Chitwood's work with the assurance of gravity, spilling into everything else he chooses to examine (and these concerns continue to find voice, as evidenced by the poem "Dead Reckoning," published elsewhere in this issue's pages). Throughout much of this collection Chitwood's poems doubt wisely, to reference Donne a second time, dramatizing an intimate struggle with the divine that feels like the
essence of authentic prayer.
Indeed, if Jarman provides readers with Pauline epistles, Chitwood offers us a miscellany of prayers, spoken by adolescents as well as the elderly, equally ridiculous and profound, at times orthodox but often wickedly irreverent. The collection feels like the poetic incarnation of his short essay, "Talking to God," published in Finishing Touches, which describes the cacophony of prayers drowning out the voice of God:
Seems like all God's children are praying. Whole flocks of prayers are winging their way
to Heaven like a giant migration.
It must make an awful din for the Almighty. It must sound like a roomful of first graders
all talking at once.
In Spill we often feel like we're listening to an ironic brand of ventriloquism, as Chitwood channels the voices of a jumbled psalmic choir. We hear a child's impassioned plea for God to heal his dog. We witness baptisms in a rainy deer stand and participate in holy pilgrimages made by ticks and lice. We reach the sublime heights of bathos in the culminating pun of "On Being Asked to Pray for a Van," when the speaker ends a long litany of ironic requests with a delightful snicker: "Creator Spirit, Holy Maker of
the Universe, / give them gas." That same subtle hint of derisive humor courses through "If I Should Die before I Wake" until the
sarcasm transforms into a genuine appeal for divine protection: "Old last thing said, / before I die / let me wake." Chitwood
even evokes legends of Beowulf or Sigemund, those vestiges of a
pagan myth we cling to with almost as much ferocity as religion,
through the alliterative effect of "Snapper" - "Legend lives in a
snapper, weir-walker." And "Kingdom Of," a song praising the
wonders of the workshop, where "Whatever gets made here gets
made well," feels like a response to Nancy Willard's "A Hardware
Store as Proof of the Existence of God." These various generic
models lend a liturgical feel to the work, a sense of ceremony that
belies the absurdities they often articulate.
Chitwood's concluding piece, "Afternoons in October," describes
an unknown but welcome presence - "its footfalls or paw pads, /
its track-making" always eluding his senses, "a calm stepping that
seems to come from all around." It's a fitting end to the collection,
encapsulating his own poetic process, which steps carefully
through the world he sees and remains content to dwell in wonder.
Indeed, he seems to relish the mystery. Like Jarman, Chitwood
refrains from reductive definitions or easy answers, marshalling
his imaginative language instead to gesture toward possibilities
and ~otential meanings. Initially these startling ~hrases merely
thrill the reader for their dazzling inventiveness - its own kind
of pleasurable compulsion - but underneath that linguistic
play resides a powerful narrative, a search for the unknown
and inexplicable, as Chit-wood enacts a curious and enthusiastic
conversation with the world. Sustaining this exploration is a quiet
confidence that there is indeed meaning, whether it exists in the
Word turned Flesh or the poet's own words, fleshed out of living
memories and saved on the page. |
