God + Other Ideas: Poems in Four Acts
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God + Other Ideas - Jacob G. Hope
Copyright © 2017 by Jacob G. Hope
ISBN: 9781543907841
Up to 700 words of material may be excerpted and shared as long as the quoted sections reflect the letter and context of the original and do not involve monetary exchange, with the exception of compensation for a book review. If you would like permission to excerpt and share more than 700 words, or to share excerpts in a context that involves monetary exchange other than a book review, please contact the author.
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Please stop by at jacobghope.com for news on ongoing projects, including a more complete website and future publications. I hope you enjoy the book.
For the love of life
Table of Contents
Table of Poems
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
Act 1: Kiss the Earth
Act 2: Fire into Air
Act 3: Water for the Soul
Act 4: Winds of Change
Curtain Call
Concluding Remarks
Commentaries
Poems by Titles, First and Last Lines, and Dates
Table of Contents
Table of Poems
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
Act 1: Kiss the Earth
Act 2: Fire into Air
Act 3: Water for the Soul
Act 4: Winds of Change
Curtain Call
Concluding Remarks
Commentaries
Poems by Titles, First and Last Lines, and Dates
Table of Poems
Act 1: Kiss the Earth
Testimony
In Praise of the Still and Sweet
In Winter
Four Values
Temple Poem
A Little More Time
If I Could Dance Into My Past
The Sparrow Outside the Diner
Tell Someone, or, The Hourglass
Postscript to ‘The Hourglass’
God
Oh What Great
At the Great American Health Bar, Manhattan
Beethoven on a Greyhound
Act 2: Fire into Air
On Passionate Love
Desperate Times
On Religion
On Religion, Original Version
Desires Are Like Fires
Greensky Hill
Sailors of Life
Today is the Day
The Flame Wilbur Kept
Something Other than the World
Postscript to ‘Something Other than the World’
A Glad Good Effort
The Heart at Wounded Knee
In The Morning
Encounter in June
Long Dark Night
Act 3: Water for the Soul
The Symphony of Life
The Waking Dream
The Waking Dream, Later Version
Streams
The Attachment Years
The Flower and Its Desert
Another Tao
Plotinus in Love
On the Other Side of Sadness
Not Only the Rain
A Directionist Testament
A Time Within Time
Joys and Sorrows: A Poem for Pablo Casals
Act 4: Winds of Change
Hope Only Needs a Window
At the Venice Glassworks
The Cart, the Wine, the Rose, the Drummer
A Blessing for the Game
A Blessing for the Game: Postscript
Some People Are Temporary Islands
Midnight Soft Light
Rumi, Waiting for Heaven
Instantaneous Awakening
Rumi and Basho and the Rain
Fire, Do Not Fear the Rain
Praise to He
Postscript to ‘Praise to He’
Cycle
Lao Tzu and Rumi
Hoping and Finding
The Four Feathers
Curtain Call
Still Waiting for Knowledge
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my family, friends, and teachers for their encouragement, kindness, and patience. This book sometimes felt like a group effort, or at least a product of many influences. Though some of the people I have known are far away, many are also here. To paraphrase a saying of Confucius in the Analects, If you really care about someone, there is no such thing as far away.
I also want to thank Harold Bloom, the author of Genius, The Western Canon, and many other books, for his willingness to look over the manuscript. He is 87 years old, has taught at Yale for 61 years, and presumably has better things to do than examining the work of a struggling poet. He did so anyway. On his advice, I have consolidated and focused the manuscript.
Though I have not known them personally, I am grateful to the thinkers of the past. The life of the mind can be a lonely life, but I am glad they chose to live it, whether they were lonely or not. I particularly doff my hat (though I rarely wear hats indoors) to the legendary Lao Tzu and the historical Rumi, who together conspired to invade Act 4, and did so with great style and verve. Or so I think. But I am biased, because I assisted in their invasion.
Lastly, I appreciate the many people who have read or listened to my poems over the years.
Jacob G. Hope
July 29, 2017
Preface
The following collection of poems is chronological but non-comprehensive. It includes a selection of pieces written between January 22, 2014, and September 5, 2016, organized into four Acts, and a single-poem Curtain Call. This device was inspired by Thackeray’s use of a theatrical metaphor at the beginning and end of his novel, Vanity Fair.
I have sometimes printed an alternate version of a poem along with the primary version. This practice, along with the ‘Postscript’ poems, is intended to provide a conversational, improvisational quality to the work.
Some of the poems also have Commentaries about them towards the end of the book. I have chosen not to make any marks in the text to indicate which poems have commentaries on them, as I thought it would be distracting to those who wanted to read the poems on their own. If you want to see which poems have notes on them, I have included asterisks to indicate this in the section Poems by Titles, First and Last Lines, and Dates.
Introduction
All the way to heaven is heaven.
~Catherine of Sienna
In selecting these works, I have tried to abide by E.B. White’s advice, which I found at Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings, that it is the duty of writers to lift people up, not lower them down.
For the most part, I think this is a positive collection. I have also tried to suggest the gritty, determined resilience, and the sustained desires to connect or reconnect with other people and ourselves, that can help us pull through harder times.
I believe in a gritty innocence. By this, I mean the choice to hope in spite of some experiences, because of others. But I do not endorse a sugar-coated view of the world. As the Chinese Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu wrote, Can a man cling only to heaven and know nothing of earth? Can a man cling to the positive without any negative?
(The Way of Chuang Tzu, Merton, p. 88.) I do not claim to cling to the heaven of the positive without knowing the earth of the negative. That is the earth we rise from. And perhaps we need not think of earth as a negative, after all.
In addition to attempting a constructive vision, another guiding principle of this collection (which I believe may also have appeared at Brain Pickings) is Freud’s statement that the meaning of life is love and work. I do not endorse Freud, but I do endorse this sentiment. There are few better three-word remarks about the good life, and this view appears repeatedly in what follows. There are other things, but they are not the things that count. Even leisure, which people so often long for, is corrosive unless it is imbued with love. But when leisure is loving, it is almost as good as loving work, and sometimes better.
The Concluding Remarks given at the end of the work provide a prose summary of what I have tried to convey here. But I believe that the rudiments of the worldview I have sketched, and the breadth of tolerance and sympathy it seeks to express, are emotionally and intellectually present throughout this collection.
I also want to admit that, much of the time, the worldview I seek has more tolerance and sympathy than I do. I seek goals I have not achieved. But courage is necessary for nearly everything of worth, and courage means, in effect, Keep trying.
On a related note, a famous quotation by John Buchan says, It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken.
This is close to the truth, but I would rewrite it as follows: It’s a great life, if you never stop bouncing back.
It’s a little bit longer, but it’s also a little bit truer. All of us weaken sometimes. The question is whether or not we bounce back.
Act 1: Kiss the Earth
Testimony
I will testify
Despite the extraordinary difficulty of being heard-
In the midst, not only of noise,
But of things worth hearing,
From everywhere in space and time,
And from the various modes
Of activity and thought.
I will testify
By saying things everyone should hear,
Just as everyone should be heard;
Yet each will reach only a fraction,
However large.
But this is not a testimony of mourning,
For it is extraordinarily easy