A Conversation with Paul Mariani—Ben Palpant
An Interview by Ben Palpant | Words Under the Words No. 7
This post belongs to a series of interviews between Ben Palpant and important contemporary poets.
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But in the waste of time it all comes down again to Ecco Homo. Behold: one more human being beaten, this one on the playing fields of Mineola.
—from "Matadero, Riley & Company" By Paul Mariani
When I started interviewing poets of faith in January 2024, I asked a publisher for suggestions. He immediately mentioned Paul Mariani, calling him an "elder statesman of contemporary poetry that engages faith." That's not the kind of praise I hear very often and so it gave me pause. I had read Mariani before, but his status had been unknown to me. I asked the publisher if he would elaborate.
This is what the publisher wrote: "Well, in the late 1980s Paul had already established himself as a leading poet and biographer of poets but he took a risk by starting to write and publish poems that directly engaged with his Catholic faith. You have to understand that this was still in a time when the major gatekeepers of the culture were militantly anti-religious. He demonstrated that you could be a major literary figure in the midst of the mainstream public square and be a person of faith -- at a time when many Christians preferred to huddle in a subculture."
A response that helped me realize that Paul Mariani has been doing the hard spadework necessary for cultural cultivation long before I started writing. Truth be told, I have been the beneficiary of his work for many years now.
Thinking through his life's work, it is difficult for me to choose whether to ask him about his own poetry or to discuss his formidable efforts at writing about other poets. I decided to split the difference.
"You seem to have twin engines that propel your work: a love for poetic expression and a love for poets. When were those seeds planted?"
"Well, when it comes to writing poetry, I wrote my first poem in the Spring of 1957. I was training to join the Marianist teaching order, living in community, sleeping in a large dorm each night along with about forty other novices, attending morning Mass (said in Latin back then), and being fed by a small group of German nuns who lived across the way. One day, another order of local nuns posted a poetry contest for a religious poem about Lent or Easter. I asked Brother Clyde if he could help me write a sonnet on the Passion of Christ. He couldn’t, he said, but he directed me to a battered book of poems that contained definitions in the back about poetic forms. I sat down and studied the forms, figured out the intertwining of the rhymed lines and the nature of the five iambs. Over the next several days, I hammered out three quatrains and titled it “Forgive Me.”
I help to beat and scourge Your back a crimson red And place a crown of prickly thorns upon Your regal head. Your sacred name and character I mock and ridicule. O Lord each time I flee Your love I prove myself a fool. I hurt and help to make You fall along the Dolor's way And scorn Your mother and the others as they watch and pray. I strip Your garment from Your limbs and from Your whip-lashed skin. Yes, all of this I do to You when I commit a sin. I help to drive the ugly nails into Your feet and wrists And mock Your kingly deity with sland'rous waving fists. Each time I sin against Thee, Lord, I help to break Your heart. Lord, help me hate my sins and evermore from them depart!
"I'm amazed that you held onto that poem. Did you win?"
"The good nuns awarded me with a ten-dollar first-place prize. I spent that money on a beautiful rosary for my mother."
"Tell me about your mother."
"Both my parents dropped out of high schools on the upper East Side when each turned sixteen, thanks to the Great Depression. My father delivered carloads of food by truck and horse-drawn wagon. My mother, smart and gracious as she was, had lost her father—a Cavalryman who fought with Black Jack Pershing in Mexico (in pursuit of Poncho Villa and then in Northern France, where he was mustard gassed on France’s northern front and died in ’32, when she was nine. My mother was a week shy of her seventeenth birthday when she had me.
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