Mark Jarman - Epistles

Interview

Epistles are, of course, a tried and true literary convention. What you do in the book startles and invigorates the form. What forces went into forming the strategy for this book? When, and how, did you know this approach would turn into such a rich vein for you?


One of the forces that set me to writing these poems was the impact of the sort of tragedy reported daily in the papers. I had to find a way to remind myself of the goodness of God, as if I were explaining it to someone else, as Paul says, “For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” I found myself writing a version of a Pauline epistle, like his first letter to the church at Corinth, which is addressed to a community that has been quarreling and threatens to fracture. I wrote the poem in prose, and I included chapter and verse numbers as you would find in the Bible. Subsequently the poem underwent extensive revision and became the first poem of the book, “If I were Paul.” Like the rest of the poems it now appears simply as a series of paragraphs, without the numerical apparatus. Another force that led me to these poems was the need for a different rhythm, after ten years of writing in traditional verse forms. The appeal of the prose poem, to me, was the apparent contradiction of the genre: how can you have a poem in prose? I had worked in the genre before I wrote that first Epistle. The title poem of my book Questions for Ecclesiastes is in prose, and there is a prose passage in the poem “History” in my first book North Sea. To justify the prose poem as a form or just to make it work was a challenge that appealed to me. After writing the first Epistle, around 1996 I think it was, I continued until the impulse was exhausted. That is what usually happens with my writing.


St. Paul often arouses passionate responses, both positive and negative, from contemporary believers. What is your take on his relevance for the current moment? How important were his letters in the composition of Epistles?


It is not St. Paul’s letters alone that are the models for Epistles. Hebrews, with its great, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen,” is considered by many not to be a letter of St. Paul. I also like the letter from St. James. You will also notice that I have titled my first poem “If I were Paul.” I understand why he arouses passions. And I cannot excuse some of his opinions. But it is his metaphors that amaze me. When he is trying to make the community in Corinth understand its integrity, he writes, “For the body does not consist of one
member but of many. If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, ‘Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell?’” Those who fault St. Paul, quite rightly, for his narrowness, miss the inclusiveness and
wildness of metaphors like these. My aim in Epistles was to write poems that would be addressed, not as St. Paul’s are to a community of like-minded believers, but to anyone who wanted to think about
mortality or love or fate or tragedy or failure or happiness, subjects that may or may not have a theological relevance. I hoped the poems would have a heterodox inclusiveness, while still being recognizable as collections of metaphors about belief.


I love the exactitude of the science that enters the poems, often, and at surprising moments. Are you a reader of contemporary science texts?


Once in awhile I will read a science book meant for a general audience, Douglas Hofstader’s Gödel, Escher Bach, or John Gribbin’s In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat, or Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, and admire the way abstract concepts are made concrete through illustration and metaphor. I suppose the most famous example is
Einstein’s use of the railway train to show what happens at speeds approaching the speed of light. Such illustrations usually reach into contemporary culture and technology, if they are going to be effective. On the other hand, Richard Dawkins, in The Selfish Gene, describes the behavior of flocking birds to illustrate self-preservation. At this level, the popular level, scientists look for plausible illustrations of their theories, no less than theologians look for the substance of faith to share with believers. When I first read about the explorations of the depths of pi , the millions of places taken to the right of the decimal, and the random patterns that occurred, especially the strange repetitions of the same number, I was struck by the possibility of a kind of pre-existence—the numbers were there to be discovered. I know that is more magical than mathematical reasoning, but it is the kind of thing I try to bring into my poems.


What do you see as the relationship between the methods of science and those of literature to explore human reality?


Science is knowledge, after all, and has been much more effective at explaining the creation than religion has been. But the terms of explanation, when it comes to human reality, for both science and religion, are literary. As T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney admits in “Fragment of an Agon,” “I gotta use words when I talk to you.” And I imagine the Epistles, every one of them, as talking to you.


Though the poems do not shy from the litany of human cruelty and sorrow, I find a hopeful tone prevailing. This manifests, for example, in a faith in the importance of what pleasures we can discover in the everyday. Am I on the right track? Could you comment?


Yes, I think you are on the right track. The two epigraphs for the book, the passage from Hebrews, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen,” and the last line of Robert Frost’s “The Census-Taker,” “It must be I want life to go on living,” are indications of that hopeful tone. In Frost’s poem, a census-taker describes a clearcut forest with an abandoned tarpaper shack, and speaks of “The melancholy of having to count souls / Where they grow fewer and fewer every year,” and compares the desolation of the place to ruins from antiquity. Yet he imagines the people who lived there and concludes his account by locating the source of his sorrow: “It must be I want life to go on living.” I can’t imagine anyone who does not want life to go on living, but in the face of so much that would make the world a ruin, we have to remind ourselves why. I think of the Epistles as reminders that life, beyond its meaning either as a tragedy or comedy, is worth living. And that God, a mystery of science, is good.


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