"Russian protest
occasionally reappears in some of the later poems in the guise of a
rubber duck."
RML:
Well, I look forward to the new ten poems... Yes, the male presence
is interesting, something I've played with in Dear
Mary, though more as a
possible erotic presence or sexy male hunk than menacing presence.
I
love Robert Lax's work, but it's so bare and minimal that I don't
often find that it leaves room for associative texts, variations or
responses, whereas the annunciation is already part of a complex web
of ideas, images, theology, belief systems and associative stuff that
one can go on forever responding and reinventing. I mean just that
jump from angel to devil to snake to Jim Morrison of the Doors is
easy. I can't do that with Lax! (He might have been relieved.)
What
I do like is the sense that both Lax and Merton were in many ways
recluses who lived apart from the world yet were able to
intelligently observe and comment on it. I feel too awash in
information, images, texts and music to get that kind of perspective.
Though I wouldn't mind being a hermit in Tuscany for a while – as
long as I could fly to New York or London every so often. And before
you laugh, remember Thomas Merton was the kind of solitary person who
sometimes jumped over the monastery wall to drink whisky with his
friends and publisher. A civilized way to live, I feel.
SC:
Perhaps. Merton scores very low in Hermit Top Trumps though.
RML:
Possibly, although I think he has high spiritual superpowers which
sometimes win out.
Anyway,
what about this idea of themes and specifics within a web of stuff
rather than on its own. Did you feel the Fra Angelico was outside
your subject areas? How did you get from that painting to the ideas
you used?
SC:
I didn’t. As you mentioned earlier, the annunciation has a complex
web of associative images, texts and references in popular culture,
so I came to it through different means. I don’t think I looked at
the painting until we were several poems in. I’d written a few
poems about Mary previously concerned with the bodily reality of
giving birth. At the time of writing the Snow Angel Annunciation
poem, I was mostly inspired by Pål
Moddi’s version of Pussy Riot’s Punk
Prayer, the music
video of which features the Norwegian folk-singer sitting on the
steps of a church near the Norwegian/Russian border in sub-zero
temperatures, the church having decided that it was too politically
risky allowing him to play inside the church. That sense of faith
being silenced and being forced to exist in the margins is present in
that poem. Russian protest occasionally reappears in some of the
later poems in the guise of a rubber duck.
I
imagine when I look more closely at Fra Angelico I will be more
interested in him. I like monks and nuns… not in a 1970s
Nunsploitation kind of way though.
I
have this web of ideas developed over thirty years of varying degrees
of religious education, misinformation and re-constructed fragments
in which to piece together my annunciation poems. Sunday school,
Catholic friends at university, Jesus cartoons, religious music, a
research interest in mysticism and the Robert Powell movie Jesus
of Nazareth left
plenty of material to build my new annunciation nest with.
Can
you think of any more hermits for Hermit Top Trumps?
RML:
I guess Thoreau has to go straight in the set. Perhaps Saint Francis
and some of the Desert Fathers. After that I kind of run out of
steam. I don't think hermits is a specialist area of mine at all! If
I thought harder it would be rather heavy on Christian mystics and
recluses though, despite my shelves full of poets.
Marginalized
belief is interesting... Sydney Carter, the poet and songwriter
('Lord of the Dance' is his most famous) writes well about spiritual
doubt, and the tension with faith, which of course is much more
interesting than people who are sure about everything. My friend A.C.
Evans always talks about the 'leap of doubt', with a nod to
existentialism and gnosticism, as well as a cynical take on occult
and conspiracy theories. My own mix of Sunday school, church and
reading liberal and postmodern theology, along with the death-of-god
and humanist strands, not to mention fiction by the likes of Charles
Williams and Tim Winton has produced my own peculiar take on it all,
which as I put in 'Sudden Impact':
We
must look at what
we
see, make up our minds, pay attention
to
surfaces and the different ways they
catch
the light through religious smoke.
This
religious smoke, along with new age smoke, and fundamentalist smoke,
seems to me to cloud everything.
It's
not so much faith being silenced, as doubt being silenced; we are
asked not to question at all. And if we don't engage with thinking
and questioning we seem to end up with pick'n'mix anything-goes
woolly new-age nonsense.
===
© Sarah Cave & Rupert Loydell 2017
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