Articulating Sublimity
By Doug Talley

In the celebrated “Divinity School Address” delivered in July 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson stated, “For all our penny wisdom, for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime thoughts.”  In a prologue to a late book of poems, Los Conjurados, Jorge Luis Borges wrote “After all these years I have observed that beauty, like happiness, is frequent. A day does not pass when we are not, for an instant, in paradise.  There is no poet, however mediocre, who has not written the best line in literature….” (Translated by Willis Barnstone in Selected Poems of Jorge Luis Borges, Penguin Books, 2000).

While the sublime may be absolutely democratic, and free and accessible to all, the gift to consistently articulate the sublime is singularly the province of the working poet and derives not merely from “inspiration”, but rather from persistent, studied effort as well. I distinguish the working poet from the casual Sunday versifier who is occasionally seized with an idea that must be set down in some semblance of a poem.  However worthwhile and commendable that occasional effort might be, it is entirely different from the working poet who daily looks to process and understand the world primarily through the medium of poetry. To this particular stripe of personality the poem is as central and essential to living as daily bread and nightly dreaming.

The Work and Play of Words

A central question for the working poet is how to capture the sublime experience in language with the least amount of corruption to the original experience. Such is the task Kimberly Johnson undertakes in her first book of poems, Leviathan with a Hook, published in 2002 by Persea Books. Dr. Johnson is an assistant professor of the creative writing faculty of Brigham Young University and a recipient of the Eisner Prize in Poetry, the Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. Her approach to articulating the sublime is far removed from the somewhat hackneyed observation that poetry is what is often thought but never so well expressed.  Instead, hers is an invitation into an emphatic consciousness full of strange and delightful twists and turns. I can guarantee the reader will not have often considered the world in the terms that Dr. Johnson sets it. The sublimity of her thought rests not in its commonality with the rest of humanity, but in its uniqueness. 

Leviathan really is an astonishing book. No doubt the casual reader will at first encounter difficulties, but a determined persistence will prove rewarding. From the very outset note certain delightful and persistent characteristics will be noted.  First, Dr. Johnson’s voice sparkles with enthusiasm. She delights in exotic, odd words, words like jabiru and gallinule that a reader does not commonly encounter, but words that nevertheless quicken the pulse with their strangeness. A number of the words, such as “swain” and “unconform” and “nonce”, have a flavor of the archaic, and return the reader to a time when the mother tongue in the keep of Shakespeare and Milton was far richer and more abundant than it is today. Take book in hand and place a dictionary on the lap. A great portion of the delight in reading Leviathan stems from encountering these unusual words, checking their meaning, and then recognizing the intelligence behind their usage. 

Second, the book abounds with unusual new coinages, such as “tazzled” or “frictive”, and it might take a moment or two to decipher them. For example, in the poem “Pater Noster” Dr. Johnson follows the line “maidens shuck their pinafores” with the phrase “swains unbreech”. The word “unbreech” will not be found in your Oxford English Dictionary, but in pausing at the context, the reader will recognize a cousin in the word “unbuckle”, intuit the word means “to take off one’s breeches” and then conclude the phrase means “men (or more precisely, suitors) unclothe”. 

Third, Dr. Johnson resorts to compelling juxtapositions, the unexpected clamping of disparate words, as, for example the phrase, “O mouth clubfooted” in the poem “Te Deum”, or the phrase “What tyrant finery!” in the poem “This Diall New”:

Such juxtapositions keep the reader attentive and nimble and bring to mind the complex word play of the Latin poet Horace.  Writers of a complex style, like Horace and Johnson, are virtually incapable of good translation; too, too much is lost in the effort. (I think it was Ezra Pound who wrote that one could readily grasp the history of English literature by simply tracing how Horace has been translated through the ages.) It is probably easier to imitate such writers in their own language than to translate them into another. 

Fourth, the poems bear the stamp of a distinctive, compelling personality. I admire the way her nature seems to lunge from her work, the way one also senses the shadow of Horace in his poems, an unmistakable stamp of humanity. As with Horace, the reader does not find much sadness in Johnson, yet her disposition seems altogether unlike Horace’s placid, autumnal resignation to the way things are. Hers is an explosive, celebratory enthusiasm for both life and death. She does not merely accept life as Horace did with his characteristic mild humor and irony; she revels in it. She celebrates life and growth, but does not lament death, which she would see as an extension of growth. She does not decry wreckage. She writes in the untitled prologue poem to the collection, “After silence . . . After the tornado”, (that is, after a vast swath of destruction),

What are the bees conspiring? Survival, growth, reproduction. This view of life is infectious and suggests we might connect the minute particle to the cosmic through words alone, as hinted by the cognates “needling” and “needle” in the last lines of the poem “Strung”:

The expansiveness of Johnson’s consciousness seems willing to embrace all the connections of life, including the downfall, the setback, and through that willingness transforms such connections into something sublime – the soul ennobled by simple experience, good or bad, and ennobled by how perception translates that experience into words. 

The Virtue of Difficulty

In college I had a Greek professor who once said that he did not consider it a mark of good style when one had to read a poem more than once to understand it. He was steeped in the stark, clear line of Greek lyrics poets, like Sappho and Alcaeus, and appreciated their genius for identifying a profound, richly complex moment, like the first moment of falling in love, and then addressing that moment with directness and simplicity. These are the very hallmarks of classical Greek style.

But if such a maxim has validity, it comes with its own caveat.  Some poems, some authors, can only be read with profit slowly.  Their richness of thought and style demands a deceleration of pace. Such is the poetry of Dr. Johnson. Her work is challenging, but if she is read slowly, and thoughtfully, she will be understood at some level during the first reading.  Her richness, however, will invite a second and third reading almost immediately. She has not lost sight of the central irony in all writing: Words can mean so many different things, but we always have to make them mean at least one thing for sense and sanity; all else is a gift. 

Consider, for example, the poem “The Voice Yields a Great Storm of Birds”, reprinted here with permission of the author and due acknowledgement to the publisher, Persea Books: 

   The Voice Yields a Great Storm of Birds
  At the wind of the day, the voice
not thunder, but thunderous, a voice
of all waters, walked out through the garden,
called me by name,
Where are you, adama, first among crockery?
 I hid in the bushes.

  The meadow spread
with birds trembled at the noise,
roused, lifted like a frantic
sheet, particolored, flickering,
cyclonic. Rising together, the sociable plover,
the screech owl, least bittern,
the lucifer bird with his garnet throat glistering,
jabiru and gallinule. From hedgerows
around me rose vapors of butterflies, hedging
on thermals like delicate girls, –

  Prismatic air! In which that voice,
those wings, the sunlight multiply.
Beneath the ruckus, it falls on me.
I brush off gravel, shrug wing, show forth.

Upon first reading a clear, precise statement is made of a spectacular scene – one envisions a lion shouting countless birds from the grass cover of the Serengeti. But on repeated readings the context of the scene grows richer and richer – the allusion to the biblical Fall in the Garden of Eden, to the fall of angels in Milton’s Paradise Lost , to the request for accountability God posed to Job out of the whirlwind. Each of these readings leads back to a consistent premise – in the presence of the numinous, we might at first hide, but then at some point must show forth. Implicitly, we know we are little more than nothing, the “first among crockery”, a fashioned clay merely, but we must nevertheless step forward and be something and be somewhere. The central question posed is, “Where are you?” The compelling combination of accuracy, humor and imagination in this poem allows a multitude of happy, creative, variant answers. 

The Allusion to Job

The book’s title and gloss are not accidental afterthought, but a critical premise, a framework by which to fence in and consider the whole. The title alludes to Job 41:1, as cited in the gloss – Canst thou catch leviathan with a hook? This question comes from that section of the book of Job which commences God’s great polemic to man, beginning in chapter 38: “Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said: “Who is this who darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” God poses to Job one unanswerable question after another – Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Where is the way where light dwelleth? Who can number the clouds in wisdom? –  all leading to final questions about leviathan. Leviathan is a symbol of several things, of the sublime, the ineffable, of the extraordinary power of God. Is there a hook, a metaphor, a word, to catch that divine presence? 

Dr. Johnson steps forward to answer, and there is, admittedly, a little arrogance in this undertaking, but also, ironically, a great deal of humility, knowing at the outset, as Job had learned, that such an undertaking is futile. It is no accident that the initial poem of the book begins with the aftermath of a tornado and that the final poem, “Confirmation as a Sign of Spring”, returns to that same image: “Let the whirlwind turn rock into breath, its voice a crash of debris.” The image of the whirlwind and of a voice out of the whirlwind, first and last, is the framing by which Dr. Johnson sets her statement to the world. Whatever her own voice might be able to affirm, however, she tacitly acknowledges that that voice is nothing compared to the voice of the whirlwind. She affirms as much in the poem “Te Deum”:

Insight, not expression, provides access to the numinous. There is no one word, or one metaphor, or any one combination of words or metaphors, which are sufficient to glorify God. 

And yet the attempt must be made. If our agency, our free will, is the only power we possess, the only gift of our own we can offer God, then the words we utter are one of the few manifestations of that offering. What we feel, what we think, what we do, and what we say are the only means by which we express the use of our agency. One of the great joys of life is to carve out an individual statement – a poem – by which our own creative sense of worship is articulated.

Despite its utter inadequacy, speech may nonetheless serve as one means to search for God. The last section of the book is entitled “Eastward” as in the phrase “eastward in Eden”, alluding to that Garden where God is found. And God is found in the end. The divine presence is alluded to everywhere (as in the Latin titles “Te Deum” and “Pater Noster”) and felt in almost every word, but nowhere is that sacred word uttered in English until finally articulated in the last word of the last line of the last poem of the book,   “Concordance is the name of God”. All the previous words of the book comprise and lead inevitably to this one last word, God. Concordance is the name of that Being, the sum of all things, the harmony of all things, as in Concord.  Words are living, breathing creatures, with a body and spirit of their own, and in the service of God, they are delicate, like the butterflies mentioned earlier found “hedging on thermals”. Dr. Johnson has been most careful how she has taken the name of deity on her lips and has taught us as well – we should all be so careful. 

A Final Test

Is a rich mouthful to every person’s taste? In the world of my final resting place it would be. What is not to like when another’s personality is complex and mysterious, which, in truth, is the nature of us all? What is not to like when a writer is gifted enough to express that complexity and mystery? Cato the Elder, an old Roman statesman, offered a simple rule when surveying farmland, which applies equally as well to the survey of literature: 

So much of the landscape of Dr. Johnson’s poetry is rich and satisfying, the reader will feel drawn to it again and again and with each visit deem it good.