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. 

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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. 

"I am the oldest of seven siblings. I know my mother did the best she could, taking care of the seven of us, while working night jobs at the publishing houses down in Garden City, and drinking to medicate herself against my father’s outbursts of rage. Sad to say, but there it is. Once, he wanted to pull me out of school at sixteen and work full time in his gas station, but my mother, who knew I had unusual learning skills, said that would only happen over her dead body. Thank God for mothers like that."

"You obviously never entered the priesthood."

"Pretty soon after I wrote that poem, I decided that—as much as I loved the Catholic rituals and especially literature—Greek, Roman, English, European—I wanted to get married and have a family of my own. At Manhattan College in the Bronx, I took as much religion, literature, philosophy, Latin, Greek, and history as I could. My father wanted me to pursue a “respectable” course of studies, like engineering or law, to make sure I made a decent living, but I kept returning to English, and decided at the last minute to major in that."

"So you discovered the poets at Manhattan?"

"It was only in my last semester at Manhattan, in the spring of ’62, that I discovered my first great love: the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Here was a Catholic poet who had radically rethought the direction of poetry, and that had a profound impact on me and many other poets. I think, too, that I have always been influenced by the sacramental nature of beauty, and how it can manifest itself in the stress and music of language. 

   "While he published virtually nothing in his 44 years of life, he kept writing. It took his close friend, Robert Bridges, thirty years after Hopkins’s death (from typhoid) to finally publish Hopkins’s poems in a slim volume. There’s so much to love and admire in Hopkins’s work."

"You've written about Hopkins extensively."

"I’ve published two books on Hopkins, the first being my heavily-reworked dissertation under the guidance of the great Dante scholar and poet, Allen Mandelbaum, which Cornell University brought out in early 1970. And then, thirty-eight years later, in 2008, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life published by Viking/Penguin. 

"Do you have a favorite Hopkins poem?"

"Although I admire them all, my favorite is “The Windhover, ”the sonnet Hopkins wrote in late May of 1877 as he prepared for his ordination to the priesthood. It would take pages and pages to do the poem the care it demands to be fully appreciated.  He dedicated this sonnet in the Petrarchan mode to his hero, “Christ our Lord.” You'll notice how the first eight lines all rhyme on the word “king,” four with a strong stress (king, wing, swing, thing) and four with unaccented syllables (riding, striding, gliding, hiding), like the lift and fall of the windhover’s wings, as it flies into the winds off the hills of northern Wales.

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
    dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
    As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Then, in the final six lines, we watch as the windhover buckles and drops to the ground. It is Christ in the Incarnation, and Christ as he falls and sacrifices himself for us, a sacrifice far lovelier and more dangerous than anything before—the way a plough with sheer plod cuts through the dirt and turns up thousands of speckled quartz pieces, previously hidden, but now shining for us to see. Or the way those blue-bleak embers in the fire grate break through the iron grating and—as they fall—gall themselves (think of the vinegar gall pushed up to the crucified Christ’s lips as he was dying) and gash gold-vermilion: his blood turned to the gold of our ransom: 

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
    Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
   No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

“In The Mystery of It All, you wrote that Hopkins pleaded with God for the 'peace that came with writing not for himself. . . or the New York Times… He hoped from now on to sweat out his writing at God’s dictation.' Do you share that hope? How do we prevent the allure to write for self-expression or for something other than merely the humble dictation of the Spirit’s work in us?"

"I do share that hope. Since I believe that the gift of writing poetry has been a blessing from God, it is that grace to which I return whenever I undertake to write a poem: the Holy Spirit as Muse. What did Hopkins say? 'The only true literary critic is Christ.' I’m grateful for all the rest, but that focus remains the true north compass."

"What was the hardest hurdle you had to overcome as a writer?"

"Here was the issue for me: not just to write, but to write what you want to write about. I wanted to be a college teacher. As a college professor, I soon learned to take the axiom “Publish or Perish” seriously. But I also felt a responsibility and a deep drawing to write about the underlying sacramental tensions there in the daily mysteries we encounter. Hopkins understood this, Flannery O’Connor understood it. So did Levertov, Lowell, Berryman, Crane, and Stevens.

"Hopkins struggled mightily with insecurities about his poetic work. It seems to me that those feelings are common among poets. Have you felt that inadequacy too, especially given the weightiness of a sacramental vision?"

"Lynda Kong recently wrote in Mockingbird Magazine, 'I didn’t know how to pay tribute to such a great God, or to register the complicated and contradictory experiences of being a Christian with my measly words, my dull words. . .I didn’t know how to offer a new voice, in a new century. I was intimidated.” I understand her sense of trying to sing in the shadow of one’s predecessors. But you must venture out and try to write what you believe you were meant to write. And you look for those poets who seem to speak to you directly and learn what each of those poets can teach you—inscape, beauty, daring, the American idiom. You get knocked down, the dark angel somewhere in the rafters laughing at you, then you get up, and you go forward again. And you do what you can. And somehow the light breaks through again, thank God."

"It seems to me that your later poetry, more than your earlier poetry, is addressed more and more to friends—those still living and those who live in your memory. Is poetry a way for you to hold onto memories as you age, to keep those you love alive in your heart?" 

"That's beautifully phrased. Yes, more and more of my later poems are addressed to friends and family—the polestars of my life, to thank them. And, of course, there’s my immediate family—my dear wife Eileen, that game changer ever since that evening I met her at a college gathering in a bar in Mineola (me from Manhattan College, she from St. John’s University) back in December 1959. And then my three sons, and our grandkids and their jokes at their grandfather’s expense. I can’t think of any greater blessing than breaking bread with them at family gatherings. Truly, they have made all the difference to my life. There are also poems for my mother and father, poems both sad and happy. And of course, my six younger siblings." 

"You refer to your time as poetry editor at America Magazine as a time when you saw a great deal of poetry that lacked the spiritual dimension. You saw poems that were strong on religious sensibility and the verse forms were strong, but the poetry was lacking. Can you elaborate on what you mean? Is the problem a shallow spiritual life culture-wide? Is it because we have become unmoored from the Scriptures? How do we write poems that are more than simply religious, poems that lift us into another spiritual dimension?"

"Good question, Ben. And a difficult one as well. Many religious poets seem to think that if they just fill the lines with quotations or hints of quotations from the Bible that that will suffice. It will not. Nor will the poem that uses poetic formulae—a sonnet, a cinquain, a triolet, a sestina, heroic couplets, the ballad form, and so on—result in a satisfactory poem touching on the spiritual dimension. Certainly not a Catholic poem. As Emily Dickinson said, it’s only when the hair on your head seems to respond that you are in the presence of the real poem. Personally, I read poetry every day, but only rarely do I feel I am in the presence of a poem that truly matters. 

Here’s one thing for sure: the poet herself or himself must enter the poem, must be somehow there in the poem, spending his or her blood as the words flow out and on. And this, my friend, cannot be faked. The perceptive reader will spot it and the interchange will end. Now, this is true of all real poetry. But the poet who seriously invokes the Scriptures has an added obligation to meet the words found there and create a music that will serve as a worthy diadem for that diamond. And that will come at a cost, a struggle. 

"In The Mystery of It All, you describe Scott Cairns as one of those poets who offers grasshopper transcendency, the momentary lift or epiphany, in which the spiritual dimension is, for a moment, glimpsed before it disappears. What is that evasive thing you are talking about?" 

"William Carlos Williams wrote a magnificent epic American poem, titled Paterson. There’s a passage where the poet walks across the park on Garrett Mountain and notices the grasshoppers leaping into the air, their wings catching the sunlight for a moment, so that they seem transformed, and then quickly settle back into the high grass. I have taken that to mean that momentary lift, that epiphany, in which something is for a moment glimpsed before it disappears. It can be the shimmering silence—that radiant white space, a momentary lifting of the spirit, something akin to the silences between and among and in and through those sounds transformed into musical cadences. The thing that returns us again and again to the mystery of the well-wrought poem. 

"Your comments remind me of Paul's words in his first letter to the Corinthians, when he writes, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

"Yes, that's exactly it. The best poems give us a peek into something most of us—if we are attentive enough, the way the poet must be—grasp now only momentarily. It’s a blessing, a gift, a grace the poet offers, something the poet catches in the shadow of the sun, a gift from the good Lord, a grace note, for which the only real response would be a profound thank you."

"You're talking about a glimpse of light." 

"Yes. I’m not speaking here of the poets of darkness, of whom there are plenty, thank you. I’ve been there, taught them, tried to understand them, in a sense, to even out the field. But they are little help to me, especially as I grow older. My journey here is coming to a close, whether I like it or not, so what can I do but acknowledge the darkness and search, search for the light? My Catholic faith is essential in this search. It helps me to accept grace and give that grace back to others in whatever ways I can. It helps me listen to others, acknowledging their pain, rejoicing in their joy, accepting love and giving that love back in the written word.

It's been seventy years since my first poem—followed by biographies, memoirs, critical essays, reflections, and more poems. But each time I write, I must face the blank page, and then begin with a line, and then another and, perhaps the next day, another and another, in the end surprising myself, if not my Creator.”

"That's a wonderful answer, Paul. I think it has become a full-time job to hang on to hope, especially as we age. I'm thankful for your example in that regard. When it's all said and done, what do you hope you have accomplished in your life? What are several things you believe your life has testified to?"

"When I look back to my youth growing up on New York’s East 51st Street back in the 1940s, I find myself lucky first of all to be alive. Those were tough years. I nearly lost my feet when I was three when I tried to take a bath in the kitchen sink early one morning just after my father had left for work and the hot water scalded both my feet badly. If it hadn’t been for a new wonder drug called penicillin, the only option would have been to amputate both my feet at the ankles. And then there was the time when I was six, returning alone in the late December dark after going by myself to see Walt Disney's "Song of the South." Harry’s teenage gang cornered me and then poured kerosene around my feet—they’d been burning Christmas trees tossed out onto the streets—and then lit matches and taunted me. I cried and shouted, but no one would help me, not even a gentleman slouching around the gang and minding his own business. My mother came running up the street shouting, my little brother in tow and my sister in the baby carriage. My father took care of that the next morning when he confronted Harry’s family, knocked Harry’s older brother just home from jail across the room, and told Harry’s father, sitting there silently, to make sure Harry stayed away from me.”

"You have survived a great deal."

"I suppose that's true. But I'm not alone. Like most people, I’m a survivor. I have no hearing in my right ear—a condition I was born with—and so I’ve had to work hard to make sure I hear what someone says to me, and having taught classes and seminars for over half a century has often been a challenge. But you go into the class, welcome all of your students, joke if you can, and listen carefully to what they say. The benefit of that is that I’m a good listener, and listen attentively to what someone says. I’m also a Catholic Christian, so there was always this sense of hope, that the Good Lord would be there for me, and that I would try to bear witness to that. Which is why I chose the name Christopher—Christ Bearer—for my confirmation name. 

Years later, in 1975, when I served as rector at a retreat and was in the makeshift room where we kept the tabernacle with the Eucharist, I could hear Christ prompting me, “Go ahead, Paul, ask for what’s in your heart now.” I answered that I was fully satisfied with the work my team had done in witnessing and that was sufficient. But again, the prompting. “Go ahead, ask.” And I said, “Well, Lord, if it is your will, help me to be a poet, dedicated to you, lifting you up in ten thousand ways we find in what we call the ordinary.” And within a year, I had somehow managed to complete an entire book of poems, my first, called Timing Devices, poems that would leave an impact. If you look at the list of books I’ve published over the past half century—spiritual memoirs, essays, critical texts, those six biographies, and a thousand pages of my own poetry, it does amount to a bounty, thanks to the good Lord, and the patience and support of my dear wife of sixty years, Eileen, truly a blessing for me. 

"A while ago, you described Eileen as a game changer. Tell me about her."

"When I look across the table at her, I realize that none of what I’ve done would have been possible without her. I don’t know, but it seems we men often take for granted what our women do to keep the home together and functioning—the daily chores of shopping and preparing meals, raising a family, and then being there for the next generation as well. Truly, as I meditate on this, I see in those meals—in that breaking of the bread—an incredible abundance of love and grace. Of course, she’s been there in all the good times and the bad times, even—to tell the truth—when I wasn’t there for her. For many years, she typed out all my writings, my dissertation, drafts of essays and poems. And she has read everything I’ve written over a lifetime. She has always made astute insights into what I’ve written. 

"She sounds like a wonderful poem herself, a poem God has been writing in your presence for all these years. Let's close this conversation with one more question. How would you finish the following: “Dear Poet. . .” 

"Well, I would probably speak to all the poets with whom I’ve journeyed over the past sixty years. There’s Father Hopkins, of course. And there’s my beloved Dante. And Bill Williams with his search for the American idiom. And the brilliance of Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane. And those early years especially of Robert Lowell, as he knitted the warp and woof of Hopkins and Milton into his “Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” and then later the brutal honesty of his “Skunk Hour,” as his majestic vision collapsed, only to have to be rebuilt as he could, in spite of his mental travails. Then add my dear Miss Emily and Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, Marie Howe, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Robert Hayden, and Wilfred Owen. And while we’re at it W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney, both of whom I taught in seminars."

"That's amazing."

"Well, there's a long list of poets for whom I'm grateful. Bob Pack, Phil Levine, Eddie Hirsch, Garrett Hongo, Scott Cairns, and my dear friend, Martín Espada. I shouldn't forget to mention the greats: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Virgil, Homer, Sappho. You can see where this is going. Well, I say, thank you. Thank you all for a rich and bountiful life filled with poetry. Amen. 

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Ben Palpant is a memoirist, poet, novelist, and non-fiction writer. He is the author of several books, including A Small Cup of Light, Sojourner Songs, and The Stranger. He writes under the inspiration of five star-lit children and two dogs. He and his wife live in the Pacific Northwest.

Paul Mariani is the author of nine poetry collections and numerous prose books. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2009, he won the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry and, in 2022, the Flannery O'Connor Lifetime Achievement Award from Loyola University Chicago.