Standing Open-Mouthed at the Temple of Life or Happy Birthday Denise Levertov

PRIMARY WONDER by Denise Levertov from The Stream & the Sapphire (New Directions)
Days pass when I forget the mystery.
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.

And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng's clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.

I had a different poem picked out for this morning.  If I had been industrious and written this post last night, as I thought about doing for . . . oh, about the first five minutes after I got home from my meditation gatherings, you probably wouldn't be reading this Denise Levertov poem this morning. 
But no.  I procrastinated, as I so often do.  And then I lost my motivation to do anything but take myself off to bed with a good drink and a mindless mystery.

So when I woke this morning and learned via The Writer's Almanac (the e-mail version, you know I don't get up early enough to hear the 6:35 am broadcast on WAMU) that today is the birthday of one of my favorite poets, I decided to post something by her instead of what I had planned.

I've been trying to figure out what exactly it is about Denise Levertov's poetry that resonates with me.  In doing so, I came across an essay on form she wrote for Poetry magazine in 1965.  In it she writes,

But the condition of being a poet is that periodically such a cross section, or constellation, of  
experiences (in which one or another element may predominate) demands, or wakes in him this    demand: the poem. The beginning of the fulfillment of this demand is to contemplate, to meditate;    words which connote a state in which the heat of feeling warms the intellect. To contemplate comes    from “templum, temple, a place, a space for observation, marked out by the augur.” It means, not   simply to observe, to regard, but to do these things in the presence of a god. And to meditate is “to   keep the mind in a state of contemplation”; its synonym is “to muse,” and to muse comes from a   word mean­ing “to stand with open mouth”—not so comical if we think of “inspiration”—to breathe in. 

So—as the poet stands open-mouthed in the temple of life, contemplating his experience, there come to him the first words of the poem: the words which are to be his way in to the poem, if there  is to be a poem. The pressure of demand and the meditation on its elements culminate in a moment of vision, of crystallization, in which some inkling of the correspondence between those elements occurs; and it occurs in words. If he forces a beginning before this point, it won’t work.

Entrance to the temple of Bacchus at Baalbek
I stood here open mouthed and amazed but
didn't write a poem about it . . . yet. 

It seems to me what she is describing here is akin to Lectio Divina, the spiritual practice of holy reading.

 Experience, Meditation, Poem = lectio, meditatio, oratio



Just yesterday I was wondering why I can sit at my desk for two hours and write the first draft of an essay or a chapter or two of a story yet I can't bring myself to write poetry during my daily writing time.  It's not that I don't write poetry, it's just that when I do, it does come from that place of standing open mouthed after a period of meditation. 

So maybe this is that ineffable in Denise Levertov's poems to which I relate, something akin to prayer that my soul recognizes, which it not only breathes in but also breathes out with a sigh.