Alexandria “Lexi,” Alithia, Amerie, Annabell, Eliahna “Ellie,” Eliahna, Jackie, Jailah, Jayce, Jose, Layla, Maite, Makenna, Maranda, Nevaeh, Rogelio, Tess, Uziyah, and Xavier, plus educators Eva and Irma. Grieving the deaths of nineteen children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, and more than a dozen people wounded.
I remember an international student from England who asked me once in disbelief during an office hour conference: “Why do you allow guns here like you do? My father was in the secret service, and when he retired, he had to turn his firearms back in. We don’t have guns, and we don’t have gun violence.”
I had no answer. I have no answer.
I turned to other questions I can begin to answer on an incredibly still gorgeous blue-sky Sunday morning. Contemplating how growing up in the South influenced me as a writer and translator. And, because I’m always up for learning more about how women navigated systemic obstructions, reading a dissertation by Dr. Han VanderHart on seventeenth-century women poets, thanks to Twitter.
Which tells me that writing and rewriting, reading and taking notes are sometimes more comforting to me than even walking in sunshine. Putting good ideas/feelings, and healthy challenges into my brain is a kind of nourishment when my self is existentially frustrated. Being a focused student is soothing, healing.
My good friend Darrell Z. Grizzle invited me to do a future online interview for his blog, Story & Spirit in the Shadow-Haunted South. His kind idea, to help get the word out about my translation of the spiritual classic Practice of the Presence by Brother Lawrence, releasing on August 23, 2022. Two of his questions, “What is your connection to the American South?” and “How has that connection to the South informed your work as a writer?” got red dirt on my knees again.
I grew up in the rolling ancient hills of northwest Georgia. If you haven’t felt and seen and walked through the lacy soft mist embracing those hills when they’re green and it’s early morning and it wraps you up in its beautiful mystery, you haven’t yet lived. The purple of those morning glories will teach you the meaning of glory like nothing else can or will. And its long-weathered, rust-shaded dirt is hard, packed by history. The ack-swat-whack at unassailable horse flies down deserted, asphalted back roads where I walked regularly taught me the meaning of persistence and made the pesky gnats of my mother’s south Georgia seem nowhere near vexing.
My much-loved neighbors influenced me a lot. I grew up in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and they taught me Southern Mountain English and culture, how neighbors help each other, or as they said, holp each other. Beautiful language—How over there is over yunder way and a photo is a pitcher and there’s a joke my classmates told me in 5th grade about did I know that the wise men in the Christmas story were actually firemen because they came “from afar.”
Partial to bib overalls, my neighbors worked at deafening looms making denim for the cotton mill owners, and grew and canned their own vegetables. And raised sardined yellow chicks in long stinking chicken houses. While rocks and trees deep in the woods where I played had Cherokee carvings on them. And several of my high school friends who are Black whispered to me they had been shot at driving through a town nearby. And church was a screed or screech or scree of brimstone from a booming pulpit while women quietly tended nursery. And my childhood held other trauma for me. While I also found school almost impossible during decades of undiagnosed dyslexia and deep anxiety.
But the homemade ice tea was so sweet, so cold, and so delicious I can still feel my teeth set on delicious edge just by thinking of its amber light in a clear pitcher. Peaches were worth eating with the fuzz on, so juicy they drip down the chin. A neighbor called me into her garden one summer afternoon, pulled and offered stunned me a huge ripe red tomato, said, “Bite hit,” and only then tasting that deep sweetness did I learn why tomatoes are indeed fruit. I watched a neighbor’s house burn slap to the ground and then other neighbors took off work and built them a new one, while I helped clean the trailer they lived in until it was done. And, yes, the guns that were everywhere made me as nervous as Fiver. I have stories about guns I’ve written down for myself but don’t tell.
How do all of these stories and more shape a writer/author and a translator of spiritual texts?
I think of Rilke’s reminder to Franz Xaver Kappus—”Herr Kappus”—in Briefe an Einen Jungen Dichter (Letters to a Young Poet). I “try to have love for the questions themselves,” and I hear Rilke say again, “Live the questions now.” But how do we live the very hard questions now facing us all?
So often quoted, Rilke’s wisdom has become a bit of a blunt saw, so I refresh its teeth by looking at the original German, both beautiful and useful: “zu versuchen, die Fragen selbst liebzuhaben” (“try to have love for the questions themselves“) and “Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen” (“Live the questions now”). “Perhaps then,” Rilke adds, and I translate, “one day far from now you can gradually, without realizing it, be able to live into the answer.” This is dependent, he says, on the possibility that his young letter-writer does exercise his inherent power for “conceiving and shaping a sacred, healthy way of life.” If you like, you can read Rilke’s July 16, 1903 letter yourself at poetryintranslation or in German at Google books.
And what does Rilke have to do with my reading Dr. Han VanderHart’s dissertation this morning? Living the question for me means staying open to all I don’t know. Especially to that which doesn’t seem to be of any immediate practical use to me, but that pulls me to it for some unknown reason. Through all of life’s ups and downs, my journey has been profoundly enriched by listening to what and/or who I don’t know. Just being curious and genuinely interested in what others are doing is worthwhile, which today included this: “Gender and Collaboration in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry: Philip and Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, Katherine Philips and Mary, Lady Chudleigh.” Listen to that title. I’m a fan of dissertation titles. Just reading it reminds me how solitary and brave and vertigo-inducing writing a dissertation is. (Yes, it’s also quite a community effort, but paradoxically, at its core, writing a dissertation is one long terrifying leap off a cliff, just you.)
Through Twitter logic, I stumbled happily onto VanderHart’s Twitter page: @hmvanderhart. I checked out linktr.ee/hanvanderhart, then ordered their What Pecan Light book of poetry, because I have spent countless hours in hushed, dense pecan groves, picking pecans for hours on end for my elderly neighbor for quarters that I stacked up very high, when I was ten or so in Perry, Georgia, and I fell in love with the way the light comes through pecan tree leaves, and anyway picking pecans is very meditative if you’re the meditative type. Then I went in search of VanderHart’s work on these four women writers: Mary, Aemilia, Katherine, Mary. Let’s admit it: One of the unsung, quiet joys of the truly chaotic, clamoring internet is you can access and read as-yet-unpublished dissertations and masters theses.
What is so great about VanderHart’s dissertation is it brings Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke; Aemilia Lanyer; Katherine Philips; and Lady Mary Chudleigh to light, to breathe today’s air. I’d never heard of these writers. Or if I did hear of Mary Sidney Herbert, it was in passing, because of course I read Herbert’s brother Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy and Astrophel and Stella, but his younger sister would’ve been sadly soon forgotten on the high-altitude hike to a PhD Phi Beta Kappa.
VanderHart’s work elevates the poetry of these women, which they describe as “explicitly and warmly interested in the other.” We need more empathy and more interest in “the other”—in each other, I thought. To my delight, the dissertation’s through line demonstrates that the poetry of Herbert, Lanyer, Philips, and Chudleigh “does not merely resist, challenge or subvert male patriarchy networks, but that their poetries enact an engagement with them that creates literary and social spaces for women readers and writers.”
These poets made healthy community through writing. That’s it in seven words. I was happy to learn about their “collaborative writing,” and loved following VanderHart’s analysis of how the work of these women “acknowledges social bonds and community and, in fact, sees these practices as essential to the writing of poetry itself.” My teaching and writing keep me grounded in community, and seeing this example from several centuries ago inspires me, I mused.
My favorite chapter was on Mary Sidney Herbert. What a good Sunday morning read. Mary collaborated with her brother Philip Sidney in making psalm verse paraphrases. When he died in battle at thirty-one during the Eighty Years’ War, over 100 psalms were left for her to finish. She was grief-stricken, but carried on. In this chapter VanderHart directs keen attention to the act of revision—to “re-seeing” itself, a process I love for being so intimate with who I am (becoming) as a writer and a person.
VanderHart shows us Mary Sidney Herbert’s loving, brilliant work up close. Previously, Herbert was branded by scholars as a so-called “inveterate tinkerer who found it difficult to make up her mind” (quoting William Ringler, but also an epithet, VanderHart notes, used by Gary Waller, Harold Love, J.C.A. Rathmell, et al.). This chapter’s discussion of “the joy of revision,” particularly of Herbert’s “joy” in her “care[ful,] attenti[ve]” revisions of Philip’s psalms, and of revision itself as an activity “closer to that of a musician playing variations on a favourite theme” (quoting Harold Love) reminds me of the unfinished nature of all writing that is truly alive, even the most polished.
When I read that Margaret P. Hannay describes the Psalms in the Tanakh as a “divinely inspired expression of human experience,” I thought how I feel just the same about Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence. It’s genuine wisdom. Always universal.
I loved discovering that Philip Sidney chose not “sinners” but “bad mates” in his poetic paraphrasing of Psalm 1, making the language “richer and more steeped in early modern life practices than the more abstract language of the English Bible translations,” as VanderHart observes. John Donne would later say that in The Sidney Psalter Philip and Mary “teach us how to sing.”
Next, VanderHart’s chapter on Aemilia Lanyer explores the life and writing of this Londoner, whose poetry was “expressly concerned” with cultivating a community of reading, writing women. Lanyer wrote from the margins. VanderHart discusses that she was “probably a Jew, married to a gentile instrumentalist associated with the production of royal music.” Lanyer reminds us that “to write from the margins, . . . is to write from a perspective of self-deprecation and unworthiness. Or at least a performance of humilitas.” As an olive-skinned woman coming of age in the South, margins are familiar terra firma.
Poet Katherine Philips intrigues VanderHart for how she “amends the concept of Stoic retreat by making sociability central to its conception as well as central to her writing process.” Philips’ poetry centers relationship and friendship rather than the expected Stoic retirement for self-discovery, self-healing. And poet Mary Chudleigh is fascinating for how she creates a “collaborative conversation” in the unlikeliest of places, with minister John Sprint, and her “Ladies Defence” is a wonderful argument for self-kindness.
VanderHart’s engaging dissertation ends with this paragraph about these remarkable poets they’ve brought blinking and bright-eyed into the klieg lights of the twenty-first century:
“With or without rooms of their own in which to write, early modern women in seventeenth-century England wrote with and for each other. To bring the modern language of collaboration to their poetry is to highlight an attention to audience and community integral to the production of their texts. The four women whose work this dissertation examines did not view themselves as writing alone but in a company of other women, readers and writers. These chapters argue that these four poets did not have the luxury or privilege—despite some of their aristocratic statuses—of considering themselves as working alone or autonomously. Whether the aim in addressing each other by name was praise, invitation or, as in the case of Lady Chudleigh’s poetry, a deployment of ‘reciprocal esteem’ taking the form of corrective dialogue, the recognition of specific others forms the occasion of the poem itself.”
Thankful for these poets, I reflect. I also do not consider myself writing alone but in the company of others, readers and writers, present and past, connecting these diverse strands: Grizzle, Rilke, VanderHart.
My friend Darrell Z. Grizzle and I write in different genres, but share similar interests, especially concerning books and kindness. Long ago, in a galaxy far away, he emailed me out of the blue to ask would I come to his book group discussing my Cloud of Unknowing translation. I hesitated because I was really busy teaching full-time and raising two young children, until Darrell said, “And I have to tell you I LOVE your footnotes.” Done. Our friendship and collaboration expand my world, helping me enter more deeply into “living the questions,” as Rilke says to his epistolary companion, while the seventeenth-century women poets also “lived the questions” against all odds, as Dr. Han VanderHart’s excellent work brings to life. How? Community. That’s what they all share. Sacred, healthy community is oxygen.
The same is true for Brother Lawrence. He was living as a friar in a Paris monastery at the same time, and right across the channel from the amazing women writers Herbert, Lanyer, Philips, and Chudleigh, who elevate community in their poetry. Community made and kept the friar’s spiritual classic Practice of the Presence alive. It has endured, been in print, read, and loved over 300 years, yet was only published in 1692, a year after his death, because of his friendship with Joseph of Beaufort, because of their conversations, and because Joseph and other friends wanted to read more of their friend’s writings.
Brother Lawrence also spent his days “living the questions” in community. He asked himself, and others asked him: “How can I heal? How can I find peace? How can I develop a friendship with the Divine? How can I become more like Love? How can I become Love?” His response was simple: “Practice the presence.”
Sacred, healthy community is oxygen.
Thank goodness Love is closer to us than we may think. Brother Lawrence experienced that 24/7, and when he writes, “God,” I think “Love,” because as we read his work, we realize it’s all about true love (amour is one of his favorite words). The Divine is Love to him, and for anyone hankering for more of God, Love, Wisdom, or however a person might conceive of Meaning or Ultimate Reality, the friar’s Practice of the Presence is balm.
Clicking into news, Love is easy to forget these days. I remind myself, it’s worthwhile to remember that, as Brother Lawrence also says, “Everything is possible for those who believe, even more for those who hope, still more for those who love, and most of all for those who practice and persevere in these three powerful paths.”
I see him limping toward the kitchen to begin cracking eggs for omelettes when that line came to him.
