Beauty, Poetry & Becoming A Saint
It was a joy to spend a day this past week at my undergraduate alma mater St. Peter’s University in New Jersey thinking about, talking about and most importantly listening to poetry. I appreciated stepping away from the news for a while — especially after viewing surreal footage of the president of the United States hawking luxury cars on the White House lawn.
It was a relief to be with people who feel equally passionate about poetry and believe one way we will endure the chaos entangling our country is by appreciating and creating beauty.
For several years now, I have sponsored bringing a distinguished poet to St. Peter’s to speak to the English major and creative writing students about about why poetry matters and why it is for everyone.
In the past we’ve heard from such fine poets as Marie Howe, Edward Hirsch, Kathleen Norris, Cornelius Eady and James Crews as well as novelist and poet Rosellen Brown. This year’s poet was Fordham University Professor Angela Alaimo O’Donnell who sees in poems echoes of sacrament, as poems take everyday objects and occurrences and point toward something larger, something ineffable, even invisible, as a sacrament does.
I first met Angela at a conference at Chicago’s Loyola University titled, aptly enough, “The Catholic Imagination.” When I was working toward my masters in creative writing at another institution - not St. Peter’s — many of my instructors and fellow students looked askance at any poetry that hinted of the spiritual life. In fact you were thought of as oddball if you practiced any type of religion, except perhaps Buddhism.
I found that sad. The Catholic imagination bursts with creativity. It recognizes the role of grace in daily life and the sacredness of what Scottish poet Kenneth Steven calls, “the little moments.”
Angela too understands this well. As she told the St. Peter’s students, when we make any kind of art — whether it’s a sculpture, a painting, a poem or even an elegant meal — we are engaging in the on-going creation of the world.
Poems are more than just words on a page. They are resistance against loneliness. In my own life, poetry has been what the ancient Celts called, an anam cara, a soul friend. I’ve turned to poems in moments of celebration as well as times of grave disappointment and loss. More than once, it was a poem that talked me out of walking off a cliff of despair.
Writing poems empowers us to tell our own stories, and so they are also a way of leaving behind a record. It’s why so many of us write about family members, the people who have fascinated us, the experiences that marked us. As Angela put it, writing a poem is a way of stopping time, and by doing so we get “a little taste of immortality.”
That was evident in the number of poems read during an open mike after Angela’s talks that touched on the theme of loss — loss of a father, a mother, a sister, a friend, a lover.
Poems are more, though, than expressions of our personal lives and a resource for the nourishing the inner life. Poems can convict us, broadcast the truth of our societal failings, and move us to be more merciful and understanding. In short, more humane.
Some of Angela’s most unforgettable poems are in a sequence she calls “Border Songs,” found in her 2023 collection, “Holy Land.” Using an eight-line poetic form that draws its power from repeating various lines, Angela built the poems around news events chronicling the trauma asylum seekers and immigrants were suffering at the southern border during the first Trump administration. I use these poems in retreats I guide.
This is a “Border Song” about a father and a daughter who perished crossing the Rio Grande River. They washed up on the shore with the father’s arms wrapped around his daughter as if still trying to shield her from harm. The image of the drowned father and child became an emblem of the suffering and tragedy that was taking place daily at the time.
Border Song #15
Face down in a river lies a father
Beside him lies his little daugher
The saddest death is death by water
He held her when the current caught her
He did not leave, he did not falter
Face down in a river lies a father
His arms around his little daughter
Something else Angela told the students has also stayed with me. We should call those who give the world beauty, “saints.” They add to the soul of the world just as surely as those who feed the hungry, serve the sick and shelter the homeless. And what is the gift of beauty if not another form of showing mercy?
As we move into the second week of Lent, can we add to the beauty of the world by writing a poem, creating a picture, planting a tree or some flower seeds? Who among us wouldn’t like to be a saint?
