The Absolute, Relatively Inaccessible
Walter Wangerin Jr.
Foreword by Scott Cairns
The Absolute, Relatively Inaccessible
Copyright © 2017 Walter Wangerin Jr. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Cascade Books
An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
www.wipfandstock.com
paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-1669-3
hardcover isbn: x978-1-4982-4062-8
ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-4061-1
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Names: Wangerin, Walter, author | Cairns, Scott, foreword.
Title: The absolute, relatively inaccessible / Walter Wangerin Jr. ; foreword by Scott Cairns.
Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2017.
Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-1669-3 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-4982-4062-8 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-4982-4061-1 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Poetry.
Classification: ps3573 a477. 2017 (paperback) | ps3573 (ebook).
Manufactured in the U.S.A. 08/15/17
Foreword
When Mystery Matters Most
Over the years, I have received a good many poems from a good many clergy folk who were keen to offer their wisdom in verse form. Most often—nearly always—what they have offered is but a curiously unsatisfying species of sermon. Their slender texts generally manifest little sense of why they were not simply presented in prose, or simply offered from the pulpit of a Sunday morning.
Genuine poems, of course, are not sermons. Nor are they bits of received wisdom pared into narrow shapes of parsed out, line-phrased syntax. Poems are not opportunities for one person to teach another something that he or she has seen fit to share. That is not to say that one doesn’t learn a good deal while poring over a genuine poem; the poet herself is the first to do so, in the very midst of shaping the poem at hand.
Poems—if they are truly poems—are best understood as scenes of meaning-making, sites where a poet or a pastor or a pastor-poet has himself trusted language—the agency of the very word—to lead him into seeing and saying what he could not otherwise have seen or said. Tended with care, that site can continue to serve as generative scene for further meaning-making when a duly attentive reader brings her own energies into the chewy linguistic mix.
I begin with these admittedly cranky observations in order to contextualize—as well as to set apart from the commonplace—the exceeding delight and surprise I experienced as I pored over this late book of poetry from Walter Wangerin, a man whose novels, essays, stories, memoirs, and—yes—sermons I have savored for the better part of four decades.
From his first poem (a lyrically charged ekphrastic beauty called “Adams’ Photograph of Stieglitz”) through intermittent narratives, epistles, meditations, and clear to the last long poem (a brilliant midrash on the Mesopotamian Poems of Heaven and Hell, and a bona fide tour de force) Wangerin the poet has done what few Christians, few clergy, and few servants of the word ever accomplish; he has set aside our common penchant for easy consolation, favoring a strenuous pursuit of authenticity and truth, wielding as his only tool a tenacious faith that language—its echoing music, its provocative cadences, its taste on the tongue—will lead him into glimpsing otherwise unavailable knowledge. One presumes that such an uncommonly fierce devotion to pressing language for a glimpse of truth has come about through Wangerin’s serious illness of some ten years.
I think it is fair to say that most of us, most of the time, manage to make it through our middling days with little need to press beyond what we might call the accessible, our paraphrases of truth. That is to say, if we are blessed with reasonable health and manageable family lives, we can keep at bay the nagging suspicion that what is exceeds what we can say or know. We can continue to cling to our familiar terms as if they proved a satisfying terminus, a likely end of discussion.
That said, suffering has a way of nudging us ahead; the apparent becomes insufficient, our knowledge becomes patently unsatisfactory, and we are thereby obliged to reconsider the terminal as a new point of departure, the beginning of yet another passage, leaning into the Absolute. Thus nudged, the poet has but one way ahead, and that is to press language for revelation.
Walt Wangerin has written that, under such circumstances, “It isn’t okay to be bitter.” One discovers in these poems, however, that it is okay—even efficacious—to be honest in the darkness, reaching for whatever light the dawn affords. This is when mystery matters most, when we no longer care to be comforted by the partial and the insufficient, but rather risk all such comforts for a finer sense of the Enormity in which we live and move and have our being.
As the voice of his first poem affirms, so too does the poet labor. The poems of this late collection, The Absolute, Relatively Inaccessible, manifest both a tribute and a legacy
whereby each man defines,
each man revises
the dark and the daylight.
One revises in order to see, and to see again, and to see truly, ever so.
—Scott Cairns
Adams’ Photograph of Stieglitz
In 1939 Ansel Adams photographed the photographer Alfred Stieglitz while the latter stood in an indiscernible corner of his gallery, An American Place.
Your praise is never disintegrating . . . I can see only one thing to do—make photography as clean, as decisive, and as honest as possible.
Adams’ letter to Stieglitz, November 1963
1.
So white
the twice-high ceiling
and white the walls that stand background
to the old man’s figure;
so white the corner-join behind him
it scarcely makes a shadow.
Existence purified, you might say—
except for this one dark thing,
Alfred Stieglitz, whose right
