POETRY AND THE SACRED
Blanford Parker:
Our first speaker w ill be
Jane Hirshfie ld ,
the autho r of
several books of poetry, mos t rece ntl y
The LilJes
of
the H eart.
Steve Kowit
is a poet whose work includes
Pass iollate j o
II
Yl/ ey
and
Lll rid CO I!fess iolls.
AI
Zolynas
is th e co-edito r o f
Mell
<!f
O llr Tilll c: A ll A lltholoJZ)' (?f Male Poetry
ill
COlltclllporary Americn. Jack
Miles
wo n th e Pulitze r Pri ze fo r no n-fi cti on
in 1996; and
Adam Zagajewski
is, of course, one of th e mos t impo rtant
Po li sh autho rs o f o ur time.
Jane Hirshfield:
I was asked to give a general context fo r loo king at Czeslaw
Mil osz's poe try in its relati onship
to
th e sacred. Some of what I am leav–
ing o ut: Ca th o li c th eology, the trag i-comi c vision , Simo ne Weil , Thomas
Merto n, actual spiri tual practi ce, the poet's deep sympathy w ith Buddhi sm.
Some of what I am hoping to cove r: exil e, praise, time, and, sli ghtl y mo re
diffi cult to name, th e way th e poe t's relati o nship to th e sac red wa termarks
hi s re lati ons w ith o thers.
Exil e, one n-ught think, belonbTS
to
a difte rent domain, yet in virtuaJly
every culture, the sense of exil e is one perfume of the sacred, hoverin g always
nea r. The connection is visibl e even in the ea rli es t poem in world literature
for w hi ch we know the autho r, the " Hymn to lnanna," w ritten by the
Sumerian Enheduanna in 2300 BCE . T he daughter of a Mesopotami an king,
Enheduanna was dragged from her templ e during a time of wa r, then stripped
of her clothes, probably raped, and ca rried deep into the desert to live among
lepers. Under these untender circumstances she composed her hymn . Yet the
bi ttern ess of thi s early poem 's occasio n is also embl emati c. O utwa rdly, sepa–
rati on is as fundamental to speech as is nearness: communica tion means some
gap must exist, needing to be crossed . And inwa rdly, the sense of exil e arrives
concurrently with our earli es t consciousness of the sacred . O neness precedes
all knowledge; exis ting serenely beyond the reach of word and thought, it is,
in the Taoist phrasing, unbo rn . Consciousness and the knowabl e sacred are
born only when that primordial oneness breaks apart.
T hrough exil e, then- bo th curse and gift in tradi tio ns of the spiri
t
worldw ide-the knowing self comes into being. Th e doctrin e appea rs in
the Indian Vedas, in the G reek philosoph er Empedocles, and in the
Mani chean traditio n that appea rs so often in Milosz's poems as he po nders
the image o f the wo rld as abo ri ginall y di vided, th e wo rksho p of a demiurge,
and po nders, too, human li fe as a conditi on of es trangement. The paradox
is thi s: wi th th e arri val o f two ness comes also the longing fo r unio n, and
bo th intell ectual pursui t and pursuit of the sac red come to hold the deep
fl avor o f eros. Knowledge and its namings are literall y acts of "wooing" in
H omeri c Greek, and an ero tic mu rmuring into the ea r of the beloved is a
vo ice continuall y hea rd in Mil osz's poems, as they li st th e subs tances of
existence, the plants and foodstu ffs and cosmeti cs. T he ac ts o f sacrifi ce,
