I don’t know why poetry is so important to me. Sometimes I think about it and sometimes I simply sit and read it. When a new New Yorker magazine comes in the mail, I read the letters, look at the cartoons, and note the few articles I want to read. But even if there are no articles I that catch my eye, since Kevin Young has become the poetry editor, I usually set aside the magazine to read the two poems later.

This morning read the two poems in the September 13th issue.

I remember once someone on TV, I think it was Eric Hoffer, saying that he read and read and when he found a good sentence in a book he celebrated for a month. I feel that way about poems. When I find a line or two that I connect with I feel celebratory.

“Poetry Reading,” by Adam Zagajewski | The New Yorker

“Just then a speaker started playing
the songs of Billie Holiday—she sang
from immortality, without fear
But no, not quite, her fear was now
perfectly formed, refined”

“Tin,” by Jane Hirshfield | The New Yorker

“I studied much and remembered little.
But the world is generous, it kept offering figs and cheeses.
Never mind that soon I’ll have to give it all back,
the world, the figs.”

Of course there are many ways I read poetry. I love trying new poets. There are other poets that I continually refer to and reread. T. S. Eliot. Dylan Thomas. Anne Sexton. William Blake. Shakespeare. Charles Bukowski. Others. And of course, Homer who is never far away these days.

One of the reasons I don’t turn my back entirely on the religion of my youth is the poetry of the Bible and hymns. Like those phrases in poems I fall in love with, some phrases from the Bible and hymns are embedded inside me.

I continue to read Colin Wilson’s The Outsider. Although I have rejected what I hoped would be gaining insights to thinking about outsiders now, I want to follow his thinking throughout to the end. He describes a character in Herman Hesse’s Demian.

Almost like poetry, Bible passages, and hymns, Hermann Hesse is lurking inside my head. I read many of his novels and culminated in adapting The Glass Bead Game as almost a credo at one time in my life. It was this book that lead me to sit in the waiting room of my piano teacher in Ohio and do my own version of Yoga exercises and even meditation in preparation for a lesson. To this day my ability to relax as I do music has something to do with that and the fact that Richard Strasburg, my teacher, showed me some very good relaxation exercises at the keyboard. Exercises that I used as both as a student and as a rock and roller to relax as I practice or perform or even at the occasional bar gig. I still use these to get in touch with my musical self.

I’ve read Demian but I don’t remember much about it, like the speaker in Jane Hirschfield’s poem above, Wilson describes Emil Sinclair struggling with two worlds. The comfortable world of his family home and “paths that led into the future.” What interests me is Wilson’s description of Sinclair’s family home: “… his middle-class, well-ordered home…” with “straight lines and paths that led into the future. Here were duty and guilt, evil conscious and confession, pardon and good resolutions, love and adoration, Bible texts and wisdom. To this world our future had to belong; it had to be crystal clear, beautiful and well-ordered.” Wilson lapses into quotes from Hesse.

Later he describes Sinclair’s relief at returning from an troubling but typical adolescent disturbance in his life. Then Sinclair “sings the dear old hymns with the blissful feeling of one converted.”

The language alerts me to my own little journey. I don’t remember falling in love with any hymns or even Bible scripture as a young person. I remember watching.

I watched my Father preach three times a week: Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening. I watched my Father sing solos and my Mother sing duets with my him. I remember watching the hymns in the hymnbook, looking at the music as well as the notes as most everyone sang in the little Tennessee church were my Dad was pastor. But I never personally had a “dear old hymn” I could sing with “blissful feeling” of any kind.

Sinclair’s lapse is temporary. He will return to the friendship and struggle with Demian.

For myself, I am content and even feel invigorated to find poetry where ever I can, from the wonderful singing of Billie Holiday to the odd warped little memories in my head of Bible and hymns.

I have had a copy of Colin Wilson’s book, The Outsider, in my library for a long time. I find I mean something different than he does by the word, “outsider.” I read the first chapter yesterday sitting in my car with Eileen by the lake. The waves were quite spectacular for Lake Michigan. So instead of sitting on the channel as we sometimes do, Eileen parked in front of the beach.

When I think of outsiders, especially those I admire and identify with, I think of people who have not chosen their lot. This means Blacks in the U.S., Indigenous peoples of the Americas, people born in another country but brought here as children to be reviled by government and society alike, and so on. I read a theologian once who said that societal ideas often come from the margins of society. This also appeals to me.

Wilson’s outsiders disapprove of what they are outside of. In fact, their disapproval seems to be intrinsic. He redraws the meanings of H. G. Wells, Sartre, Camus, Kafka, T. S. Eliot and others. He frames their ideas as critiques.

This may be. But for my own part, I identify with outsiders because from a young age I found life confusing. I was born into the Christian tradition and community. But as I grew up I found myself more comfortable with distance between me and it. This didn’t feel like critique only confusion and questioning.

I can remember being in my early teens and sitting in West Court Street Church of God in Flint, Michigan, during a service, thinking the thought, What are we doing here? Where did all of this come from? Certainly fundamental Christianity did not hold meaning for me. My parents were unsurprised. I find that interesting. They continually said they were glad that I and my brother found ways to connect to church in our lives. It was almost like they didn’t expect us to do so.

I think Colin Wilson misreads the thinkers he cites. He hasn’t really brought up any clarity around ideas of meaning in life other to cite Sartre’s main character in Nausea whose existential crisis is temporarily alleviated listening to Sophie Tucker sing “Some of These Days.” This of course struck home with me. Because besides my own connections in life to people I love and who love me, the meaning I have found in life is definitely in beauty like that.

Significantly, Tucker represents to me the outsider. Jazz is (was) an outsider music.

Wilson decides in the second chapter of his book that such reaction is illogical and won’t work in the longer run and is only a “glimmer of salvation.” Maybe that’s the problem with his approach way back in 1956. He was looking for salvation.

For me these problems are interesting to think about but pale in the light of the more extreme debasement of beauty into the handmaiden of profits and glibness. Hari Kunzru quotes Theodore Adorno in his Into the Zone Podcast “It’s Always Sunny in the Dialectic.” Entertainment music is a tool of power, Adorno said, that lulled listeners urging them to consume instead of provoking genuine and emotional intellectual response.

For me the key is the word “genuine.” I trust my own responses to art (music, poetry, novels, essays). I seem to have a bullshit detector combined with a love of beauty, at least for myself.

On another note I have begun reading Brian Catling’s The Vorrh.

I follow Terry Gilliam’s Facebook feed and he mentioned this book as a great read. Good enough for me since I admire his work immensely. I interlibrary loaned it and am over a hundred pages into it.

Gilliam has a blurb on the copy I am reading as does Alan Moore. Catling himself seems to be a rather well known artist in England. This book is the first of a trilogy. It was published in 2012. The subsequent volumes are The Erstwhile (2017) and The Cloven (2018).

The prose style is fascinating. It took me a while to get in sync with it as a reader. It reminded me of adjusting to the prose of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. In fact in it’s fantastic (literally) nature it reminds me of Gormenghast.