A Poet’s Quest of Spiritual Intimacy
The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, held in even-numbered years since 1986, is the largest poetry event in North America. Nearly sixty internationally acclaimed poets read and discuss their own poetry and lead conversations focusing on various topics concerning poets and poetry. The mix of poets varies greatly from biennial to biennial, yet many of the best beloved poets in America participate.
Events are held all day and evening in performance tents accommodating anywhere from 100 to over 2,000 people. During each day of the festival, ten or more separate stages offer different activities simultaneously. In 2006 nearly 17,000 people attended.
Each festival has special programs for high school students and for teachers of all levels, elementary through college. More than 4,500 students and 2,000 teachers from throughout the country participate in conversations and readings designed specifically for them during the first couple days of the festival.
This year’s festival was held this past weekend at the newly renovated Village of Waterloo in New Jersey. Waterloo is a restored symbol of nineteenth century existence. Many of the village’s buildings, including a blacksmith shop, apothecary, grist mill, saw mill, gunsmith, and pottery barn provide the perfect settings for the exchange of literary art and ideas.
One of the highlights of the weekend was the Sunday morning reading of Rumi and like minded international poets by Coleman Barks and Jane Hirshfield, infused with the improvisation of the jazz ensemble The Paul Winter Consort. At one point Hirshfield rendered the best reading of Emily Dickinson I’ve ever heard.
Barks is considered the pre-eminent translator of the thirteenth-century Persian poet, Jalaluddin Rumi. Rumi is one of the great spiritual masters and poetical geniuses of humankind who founded the Mawlawi Sufi order, a leading mystical brotherhood of Islam. He was an accomplished scholar in religious and positive sciences. If there is any underlying theme in his poetry, it is his relentless and devoted love of his Beloved, God.
Consider the following poem by Rumi. In it on the literal level, there is the speaker’s implied quest to find the answer to a perennial question, what is love? Though the poem uses words which imply that he is talking about the intimate love between two people, the speaker actually implies that the same intimacy applies on a spiritual plane. The first obvious hint comes with the capitalization of Love.
The Meaning of Love
Both light and shadow are the dance of Love.
Love has no cause; it is the astrolabe of God’s secrets.
Lover and Loving are inseparable and timeless.
Although I may try to describe Love when I experience it I am speechless.
Although I may try to write about Love I am rendered helpless; my pen breaks and the paper slips away at the ineffable place where Lover, Loving and Loved are one.
Every moment is made glorious by the light of Love.
- (The Essential Rumi, translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, 1995)
Boldly the speaker proclaims that we love God as intimately as we ever have loved a human being. This act is not perverse; rather, it is expressed to indicate the level of desire we can have even on the spiritual plane. Since we as humans can barely understand our physical lives, it seems logical that the feeblest and noblest attempt at having and explaining a relationship on a spiritual plane be described in physical terms.
The perfect metaphor for spiritual love, then, becomes the words we use for physical love in its most exquisite and purest expression. If we remember the passion we feel when we first fall in love, a passion sustained in all its dizziness and utter devotion to our beloved, we can identify with the intensity of the speaker’s attraction to his beloved, who is God.
As the speaker as poet continues to pursue his relationship with his Beloved, he gives attribution for his inspiration to his only muse, his Beloved. He can express his best testimony and art when said in terms of his and our strongest emotion, i.e., love.
Art as Flirtation and Surrender
In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,
but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.
- (The Essential Rumi, translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, 1995)
The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, held in even-numbered years since 1986, is the largest poetry event in North America. Nearly sixty internationally acclaimed poets read and discuss their own poetry and lead conversations focusing on various topics concerning poets and poetry. The mix of poets varies greatly from biennial to biennial, yet many of the best beloved poets in America participate.
Events are held all day and evening in performance tents accommodating anywhere from 100 to over 2,000 people. During each day of the festival, ten or more separate stages offer different activities simultaneously. In 2006 nearly 17,000 people attended.
Each festival has special programs for high school students and for teachers of all levels, elementary through college. More than 4,500 students and 2,000 teachers from throughout the country participate in conversations and readings designed specifically for them during the first couple days of the festival.
This year’s festival was held this past weekend at the newly renovated Village of Waterloo in New Jersey. Waterloo is a restored symbol of nineteenth century existence. Many of the village’s buildings, including a blacksmith shop, apothecary, grist mill, saw mill, gunsmith, and pottery barn provide the perfect settings for the exchange of literary art and ideas.
One of the highlights of the weekend was the Sunday morning reading of Rumi and like minded international poets by Coleman Barks and Jane Hirshfield, infused with the improvisation of the jazz ensemble The Paul Winter Consort. At one point Hirshfield rendered the best reading of Emily Dickinson I’ve ever heard.
Barks is considered the pre-eminent translator of the thirteenth-century Persian poet, Jalaluddin Rumi. Rumi is one of the great spiritual masters and poetical geniuses of humankind who founded the Mawlawi Sufi order, a leading mystical brotherhood of Islam. He was an accomplished scholar in religious and positive sciences. If there is any underlying theme in his poetry, it is his relentless and devoted love of his Beloved, God.
Consider the following poem by Rumi. In it on the literal level, there is the speaker’s implied quest to find the answer to a perennial question, what is love? Though the poem uses words which imply that he is talking about the intimate love between two people, the speaker actually implies that the same intimacy applies on a spiritual plane. The first obvious hint comes with the capitalization of Love.
The Meaning of Love
Both light and shadow are the dance of Love.
Love has no cause; it is the astrolabe of God’s secrets.
Lover and Loving are inseparable and timeless.
Although I may try to describe Love when I experience it I am speechless.
Although I may try to write about Love I am rendered helpless; my pen breaks and the paper slips away at the ineffable place where Lover, Loving and Loved are one.
Every moment is made glorious by the light of Love.
- (The Essential Rumi, translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, 1995)
Boldly the speaker proclaims that we love God as intimately as we ever have loved a human being. This act is not perverse; rather, it is expressed to indicate the level of desire we can have even on the spiritual plane. Since we as humans can barely understand our physical lives, it seems logical that the feeblest and noblest attempt at having and explaining a relationship on a spiritual plane be described in physical terms.
The perfect metaphor for spiritual love, then, becomes the words we use for physical love in its most exquisite and purest expression. If we remember the passion we feel when we first fall in love, a passion sustained in all its dizziness and utter devotion to our beloved, we can identify with the intensity of the speaker’s attraction to his beloved, who is God.
As the speaker as poet continues to pursue his relationship with his Beloved, he gives attribution for his inspiration to his only muse, his Beloved. He can express his best testimony and art when said in terms of his and our strongest emotion, i.e., love.
Art as Flirtation and Surrender
In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,
but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.
- (The Essential Rumi, translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne, 1995)
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