Forum Series on Poetry
We Become What We Behold
A Series on Poetry, Beauty, and the Sacred
Presented on three Sunday mornings during the Sunday Forum by Allison Seay, associate for religion and the arts (information about other Sunday Forum speakers is here).
Companion text: Jane Hirshfield’s The Beauty (available in the Bookshop @ St. Stephen's)
Allison Seay joined St. Stephen's staff in 2016 as a member of our family ministries team and associate for religion and the arts. In the fall of 2016, she presented a three-part series in the Sunday Forum as a primer and companion to our newly-inaugurated poetry series, and especially a March visit by the poet Jane Hirshfield.
Part 1 // October 9, 2016
An Introduction to Poetry: What is it we are beholding and why does it matter? How can we find poetry in our daily lives?
On one hand, as much as we are searching for how to live better, eat healthier, and participate in the world with mindful clarity, it is also true that we tend to seek not what is good for us but what is familiar to us. And we are often good at destroying what is unfamiliar.
For many, art has become the stranger, even the enemy, and some of us would prefer to keep it at bay, outside the door, something we see as not applicable, at best, and certainly not a necessity. Art becomes the thing we’d deal with if we had more time, more space, more ability, more capacity.
But what if it’s much simpler? What if art can be defined essentially as Beauty? What if the distinction is not so great between making art and beholding art and that one is no more noble than the other? What if poetry, more specifically, is not something to get through, but something to delight in? And what if beauty is available to us if only we will behold it?
This talk will explore what it means to “behold” as readers of poetry and witnesses to the world’s beauty while also orienting those who might be unfamiliar with poetry to some of its elemental joys. Gustave Flaubert claims, “There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it.” So how can we train our eyes and ears to notice it in our seemingly ordinary lives? In poetry, the work is not that we uncover all the things we think the poem is hiding from us; rather, the work is as simple (and as difficult) as beholding what already is. Art carries a particular truth and, as Jane Hirshfield says, it “adds to the sum of the lives we would have, were it possible to live without it.”
We will look at two of Hirshfield’s poems from The Beauty as a way of entering into an invitation that we might, by appreciating poetry, behold the world more carefully, more attentively, and with an enriched understanding about our own emotional landscapes.
Part 2 // November 6, 2016
The Extraordinary Ordinary: beholding through listening
To ask how poems work is to ask how WE work. And much of our “work” is as inner — emotional, spiritual, silent — as it is outer. Our external worlds are busy, noisy, and sometimes competitive — often running counter to our essential selves. That is, what we appear to be is often not what we actually are and our external obsessions are often separate from our inherent value as children of God. One of the healthiest ways I know to explore the space between what we have and what we want is to turn inward and turn to poetry. It is in art that I am more able to gauge my emotional hunger: What is being fed and what is being starved? When we stop worrying about whether we are beholding “correctly,” we are much more likely to behold truly.
This talk will return to Jane Hirshfield’s poems as a way of putting into practice what we know by heart: how to appreciate that which delights. “In poetry’s words,” says Hirshfield, “life calls to life with the same inevitability and gladness that bird calls to bird, whale to whale, frog to frog. Listening across the night or ocean or pond, they recognize one another and are warmed by that knowledge.”
Part 3 // November 13, 2016
Becoming Beauty: How do we become what we behold? What is to become of us?
This talk will explore questions concerning identity. Who is it / what is it we are becoming? What is my identity and how is my life changing?
When Jane Hirshfield says that “attentiveness only deepens what it regards,” I think she means that the more careful we are — with what we see, what we say, what we behold — the more we are rewarded in beauty, in joy, in astonishment, in knowing our existence and the existence of others is abundant and wonder-filled. “Why ask art into a life at all,” Hirshfield says, “if not to be transformed and enlarged by its presence and mysterious means? Some hunger for MORE is in us — more range, more depth, more feeling, more associative freedom, more beauty. More perplexity and more friction of interest. More prismatic grief and unstinted delight…”
Poetry is not necessarily the answering of questions, but the re-phrasing of questions in new and interesting ways that lead us deeper into essential truths about our selves, about what it means to be human, to love, to grieve, to doubt, to suffer. In this way, poetry is a way of making sense of the world so that we might have some reliable understanding of our predicament and our blessing on earth. We will close with another reading from The Beauty and observe the ways we have been moved from one emotional state to another simply by beholding what has been here all along.