“From
that time forward a profound change set within me.”
—Edward
Carpenter, after reading Leaves of Grass
“Because you have, as
it were, given me a ground for the love of men I thank you continually in my
heart…For you have made men to be not ashamed of the noblest instinct of their
nature.”
—Edward
Carpenter to Walt Whitman, July 12, 1874
When
I read Carpenter’s autobiography, particularly passages on the experience of
reading Walt Whitman, there was such a familiarity. Years ago, I too had what
Will Self describes as an epiphanic moment of empathy, when I first read a poem
by Carl Phillips. I will not mention the title of the poem, as Phillips has
since annulled it, but it was the gateway to all of his poetry. He is the only
poet whose work has evoked the same emotions in me as music does. Reading a
poem like “Custom” is very much like listening to Jessye Norman sing “Thy Hand,
Belinda” or Yolanda Adams sing “In the Midst of It All”—I know myself better
having done so. It is an immense gift that poetry gives its readers and why we
must never lose it. Here is Carl Phillips at his best:
Parable
There was a saint
once,
he had but to ring
across
water a small bell,
all
manner of fish
rose, as answer, he was
that holy, persuasive,
both, or the fish
perhaps merely
hungry, their bodies
a-shimmer with
that hope especially
that
hunger brings,
whatever
the reason, the fish
coming unassigned, in
schools coming
into the saint’s hand
and,
instead of getting,
becoming food.
I have thought, since,
of
your body—as I first
came
to know it, how it
still
can be, with mine,
sometimes. I think on
that immediate and
last gesture
of the fish leaving
water
for flesh, for
guarantee
they will die, and I
cannot
rest on what to call
it.
Not generosity, or
a blindness, trust,
brute
stupidity. Not the
soul
distracted from its
natural
prayer, which is
attention,
for in the story they
are
paying attention. They
lose
themselves eyes open.
Epigraph 1: Carpenter,
Edward. My Days and Dreams.
George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1916.
Epigraph 2: Traubel,
Horace. With Whitman in
Rowman and Littlefield, 1961.
"Parable":
Phillips, Carl. Quiver of Arrows.
York