At the workshops, I enjoyed attempting to describe ‘the indescribable’. I realised that just by trying to write about a mystery is enough of a process to turn a handle (or a page), toward the direction of yet another mystery.

During the first workshop our group was given an opportunity to speak about our religious or non-religious lives, our early spiritual upbringings and how many of us, over the years had strayed from whatever faith-based religions we once grew up with. I was curious to hear how other folk, later in their lives, had realised and accepted varying conversions to different organised faiths.

I enjoyed thinking over the potential of one particular moment— capturing present time and place to one particular sensation. Alan’s example was using the register of reading and writing Haiku. He read his own poems and read the work of other Haiku poets, many of whom I didn’t know. I enjoyed his personal selection of international poets. I have not written Haiku but will certainly try my hand at doing so in the future.

This poem developed during Alan Spence’s workshop…

I Remember

I remember late at night eating cold Sunday lunch on my parent’s bed.
I remember standing in the Cathedral waiting for something to happen.
I remember kneeling with my palms open, ready for the sour taste of a blessing.
I remember the Soldier’s Chapel, but where were the soldiers?
I remember jumping long jumps in a shortish playground.
I remember balking before a wooden horse.
I remember Phar Lap’s heart pickled at the National Museum.
I remember my aunt’s vicious Siamese cats.
I remember my dad’s hard arm-swing on a chocolate wheel.

Some other things aren’t worth remembering.
I remember fish bones sticking in my throat.
I remember someone’s palm offering white, crustless bread.
I remember Christmas on the beach, gifts hidden deep in sand.
Was it the old toaster that burnt my hand?
I remember the Diphtheria Ward at the kid’s hospital,
my basement room in the nurse’s home.
But I do I remember the bald young boy with leukemia.
Because his parents lived too far away,
I took him home at weekends.
I don’t remember when he died.

Victoria Ramsay, November 2016

This poem was written quickly (within 10 minutes) during Alan Spence’s workshop.

The repetition of writing, ‘I remember’ became a clever exercise to dredge up past experiences, and in a sense be surprised at the revelatory nature of the experience.  Without thinking, without too much constraint I found myself in a younger state of mind, remembering both the good and difficult experiences of childhood.  Suddenly, the painful detail of a fishbone stuck in my younger throat surfaced, though I was quick to move on from it with the remedy of warm fresh bread.  This poem is pretty well disclosed as it was originally written.  It’s curious to understand the sequencing of memory, how one image follows another, how childhood memories see-saw weightlessly between difficult and memorable, ‘I remembers’.

INVENTION

Invenio – I discover (I think!).
I think.  I discover.

Discovery joins old notions in new ways.
I put things together.  I am a joiner

Of words.  What shall I make?
The world has enough chairs, tables, timetables.

I can put myself together with this time, this place,
A quiet Thursday evening in the Old Town:

With this house full of books, I suspect, full
Of joined-up writing, for joined-up people.

I am not too joined-up, at present, and soon
I will not be joined-up at all.  Sleep, meanwhile,

Unjoins me nightly.  I enjoin sleep to unjoin me
Until the morning, when I will re-join

Myself anew, invent the world afresh
Drop by drop.  Blade by blade.  Breath by breath.

Simon Weller, November 2016

I will try to describe what went through my mind while I was writing this poem…

Taken as a whole, the workshops gave me a gradually deepening experience of the relations between poetry and faith, and gave me some insight into the language register I use in trying to write poetry.

I thought, first of all, of Evelyn Waugh’s account of the Invention of the True Cross by St Helena, a slightly dodgy discovery, and described rather tongue-in-cheek. During the workshop discussion, the notion came up, of discovery being the result of the collision of two things not hitherto brought together, or conjoined.

We were sent away to write something for a timed twenty minutes, with the given title of “Invention”.

I put myself, a rather agnostic member of the Church of Scotland, and a distinctly dodgy poet, into conjunction with the quiet space of the SPL with its awesome freight of poetry and ideas.

I find I am most open to poetic ideas on the fringes of sleep. To understand what this conjunction might yield, I would have to go properly to sleep (something not possible at that moment). When I woke up, it might be that I would see the world afresh. I was certainly confident that this was likely.

The word “join” seems to keep coming up. This was really good luck, because it seems to hold things together, whilst being sufficiently adaptable to encompass almost everything that I wanted to talk about – poetry being both a trade and an enviable skill, the search for completeness, or rather the realignment of a number of components of my self, belief and relation to the world.

I wonder what all this might have to do with a faith journey. But as Les Murray says, religions are poems, and any live poem is an exploration of faith. This was, perhaps, a journey, not to a distant land, but into myself.

“I was raised on a farm, in the Punjab,
where death and life were accompanied
with the utterance of Allahu Akbar.
Each day and each season’s harvest
was an expression of Gods’ grace.”

This is a quote from my most recent poem titled “Faith with doubt,” which I wrote specifically in preparation for my workshop. The idea of a divine creator was as natural and as real as breathing for me. This was re-inforced even more when I studied Physics at Sheffield University in 1984 when a friend handed me a copy of the Bible. I still have that copy and my conversion to what I call “Christ Consciousness,” has been a slow and gradual one.
I do not believe in an exclusive God who favours one religious sect over another but like some Sufis, who are highly spiritual, I advocate an all inclusive God. I practice Yoga and do long walking mediations in nature. Again to quote my poem “Faith with doubt,”

“When I go walking in the brilliant sunshine
I give thanks for each breath,
for the trembling transparent sea waves,
for the way gannets plummet into the sea,
leaving behind a galaxy of glitter,
for the infinite graces of life…”

I am privileged to live in such a beautiful part of Scotland and find God in abundance all around. I love the expression and mysterious act of creating poems and hope to share that thrill of drawing something out of the spiritual domain/experience into the beauty and challenge of language. If any one interested in attending my workshop is bi-lingual and feels inclined to translate either of the above quotes please bring it along to the workshop. I would love to hear your translation and look forward to share poems with you.

Links

Profile page at Arc Publications

Profile page at Scottish Book trust

Poetry is made of language and we live, and move, and have our being in language. Our thoughts, our hopes, our loves, and our faiths are expressed in language. But none of us are truly monoglot; our words and concepts are borrowed from other languages and dialects and as we travel and experience other cultures and faiths, we constantly translate ourselves into and out of other languages and traditions.

Poems are like this. I think of a poem as a made thing, an invention, from the Latin invenio, which means to both invent and discover. In writing a poem, in struggling to shape a response to the world, the poet is making it up as they go along, bringing words together in a form that tries to sound out a truth. But they are also discovering what they believe in the same moment. This is the precarious and exciting task of the writer as they follow the lines of the poem and begin to see where it is taking them.

In this workshop, we shall read some poems together to map out some of the paths other poets have taken across the terrain of faith and conversion. We’ll also think through how different languages and theologies are translated into the everyday world, incarnated and embodied. We shall then write some autobiographical pieces about our own experiences of moving between, into, and out of other faith traditions.

What people mean by faith

Sometimes what people mean by faith

is the ability to believe

in the sheer impossibility

of morning and the way

things happen outside ourselves

even before we wake.

An unseen cat scampers across

a stopped river of cold concrete.

A blackbird opens an orange rimmed eye

and sings. Streetlights flick off suddenly

leaving a slow afterglow of night

and, as the milk-bottles build up the doorstep,

someone receives a letter

giving him another reason to live.