A Conversation with Robert Cording—Ben Palpant

An Interview by Ben Palpant | Words Under the Words No. 8

This post belongs to a series of interviews between Ben Palpant and important contemporary poets.

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I saw myself in a small clear pond.
I didn't look good. That's when
I heard my son again, who liked to chide me
in what he called my poetry voice,
give me the advice of a fortune cookie:
"Let the emptiness remain empty."
And then: "Stop writing down
everything you think I'm telling you.
This is your afterlife, not mine."

—from "Afterlife" By Robert Cording

Let me put all my cards on the table here and just admit, up front, that I chose to interview Robert Cording not primarily because he is a first rate Christian poet (which he is), but because he has entered the abyss called grief and his poetry testifies to the one whom he found at the bottom: God. The word "testify" is, perhaps, not quite right. I mean to say that his poetry sings of God. He is like a bird caught in a well, a well that we sidestep as long as possible, but which we, too, must fall down sooner or later. I suppose another way to put it is that I chose to interview Cording because I want his company when that day arrives. I chose him because he would remind me that nothing can separate us from the love of God (Romans 8:38-39). 

Not even grief. 

Cording opens his latest book of poems with a quote from Epicurus: "Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death, we human beings all live in an unwalled city." Cording is an unwalled city. And he knows it. That's perhaps all I need to say by way of introduction, but I'll say this, too: he is no graveside haunt. Instead of a pale, morose aspect, his is rosy and sun kissed. Instead of getting strung out on the opium of despair, Cording is clear-eyed and hopeful. He would be the first to demystify his title as poet, to tell you that he is just a regular guy who lost his son like many before him. He would be the first to say that when it comes to his poetry, he’s just trying to say what he doesn’t know how to say. 

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Right out of the gate, I confess my intentions to Cording. "You should know that I have a singular plan for you." He laughs. "My other interviews touch here and there on grief, but none of them stays on the subject. I thought it would be helpful for us to do so today. Why don't you start by telling me about your son." 

"Happily. Well, let's see. We lost our son six years ago, in October. Daniel had terrible back problems for five years. The disks in his spine were disintegrating, so he would have these spasms that put him on the ground and he couldn't walk. He was young, late twenties when it started, and had been a very good athlete so they didn't want to fuse his back. Instead, they decided to shave away the extrusions. To deal with the pain, they prescribed him opioids. He definitely became addicted to them. He knew it. The doctor knew it. But they didn't stop prescribing them because it was the only way to deal with the pain. He died of an accidental drug overdose. The more important thing is not his death, but his life. He graduated with a degree in philosophy and architecture, did a summer program at Harvard in architectural design, and started his own business refurbishing houses. His work was very physical. I know I'm biased, but the thing that made Daniel extraordinary was that he took the question Why? seriously and he never settled for easy answers."

"He was a student."

"Yes, and, in a way, his death offered no easy answers. You know, we don't know how to make sense of death. We can't move past it or get around it, so we have to embrace it. I know that sounds strange to say it that way, but I truly believe that if we don't embrace death in the way that we should embrace joy—as an inexplicable thing—then we harm ourselves. We end up mourning eternally for something that we can't have again. The only defense we have against death, if you want to call it a defense—I would call it an offense, myself—is love. Solomon says that the only thing as strong as death is love. I believe that remembrance is a way to love. That's why I started writing about him. Writing is an act of love and an act of remembrance. It seems to me a necessity to make Daniel a daily part of my life, just as he was when he was alive."

"You're leaning into love as much as possible."

"Yes. You can't sidestep anything when you do that and you have to accept what happens to you. You know, some of us are tempted to control every circumstance so that nothing bad ever happens to us, but that way of living always collapses on itself. Those kinds of people are always unhappy. We just don't have control over much in life. We have control over our own actions, of course, but not much more than that. We have to embrace those things that are out of our control. Leaning into love means doing more than accepting Daniel's death—hard as that is—it means holding the grief as closely as I can. It means not protecting myself from grief but making the grief as intimate as possible. It allows me to hold him close, even in death. We have to embrace the loss in order to embrace our son most fully."

"I was talking to a young person the other day who said that she had worked her whole life to evade trouble, to control her circumstances, but it seemed to find her. She had entered a very dark place, but it was when God took away her control, when he put her in the very place she dreaded most, he met her there. All she had left was God. That seems to me to illustrate what you're talking about."

"It does very much. I'm reminded of John 16:7 where Jesus tells his disciples that he must go away so that they might be comforted. I'm not sure how to explain that, except to say that maybe the Holy Spirit, the comforter, gives us a presence inside the absence. When I embraced Daniel's absence, I felt comforted."

"You bring up the Holy Spirit's work in your life. I'm wondering what his role is for you as a poet. Do you see the Holy Spirit as the equivalent of what the ancients referred to as the Muse?"

"I would. I think one of the things we've lost is the invocations that the older writers used to make before they wrote. The first time I went through the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, I worked with my friend, Father MacDonald, who said at the start that we would invoke the Holy Spirit so that, maybe, something could happen here. With just the two of us, we needed some help.” He laughs. "I really feel that way about my writing. Poetry is always trying to see beyond what we can see. We know that's impossible and yet we can, as Scripture says, see through a glass darkly. We know more than we can say. Every act of writing is also a failure to say what we most want to say, but it is an attempt to do so. It's an attempt to describe what it means to be alive in this world. The seminal experience of my life is that I live in a world that's good, but so many bad things happen in it. And yet, I've never lost the sense that the world was good at its core. For me, everything begins with Genesis 1."

"It seems to me that your poetry has always pointed to the goodness of creation in some way."

"Yes, I would say that it's the touchstone of all my writing. I was lucky enough to find my obsession in college. It happened in a funny way. My mother, who thought I was just in a dreary mood because I wore so much dark clothing, wanted me to be happier. She told me to sit down and write a list of all the bad things in life on one side of a paper and then write all the good things on the other side. So I did. Being the person that I was, I began with the bad things. This was in the late 60's, with racism, the Vietnam War, a seemingly endless list. But when I got to about thirty or forty items, I had this incredible realization. If I can list all of these bad things, why do I have this abiding sense that life is still good? I really did feel that life was, in the end, good. I've spent the rest of my life writing about that sense of the goodness at the core of things."

"You remind me of my conversation with Paul Mariani, who said that his hero, Gerard Manley Hopkins, just wanted to write at God's dictation, to hear the Holy Spirit as clearly as possible and for his poetry to reflect clearly what he hears. That seems to me to be where you find yourself."

"Yes. My favorite poet is George Herbert. For Herbert and Hopkins and myself, the dilemma is that maybe we love the language, the poetry, we use to describe God more than we love God. This was the dilemma I ran into when writing about my son as well. I wanted The Unwalled City to be more than a book about grief, I wanted it to be artistic. I wanted it to be beautiful. That sounds crass, perhaps, to write something artistic about your son who died, but there it is. I did want to write something that was crafted, that was beautifully written. I wanted something more than diary entries or spilling my heart on the page. As a result, the book is highly structured. I think if I'm going to move people in any significant way, I must move them by the artistry and not just the sentiment."

"Andrew Peterson once said that the job of the Christian artist is to adorn the dark. That's what you're doing in this book. You're trying to adorn your son's life and his memory in a way that doesn't feel gaudy or artificial, but in a way that honors him best."

"And it requires a grateful heart to do that."

"Yes, it does."

"But that's exactly what I felt cut off from when Daniel died. This was true for two years. It was hard to be grateful. All my life, I have felt that gratefulness equals a kind of contentment. I think that's true, but it was just not within reach for a while. My wife and I would take a walk every day and I don't think she looked up for six months. Finally, one day we took a walk, and I saw two hawks doing this aerial display, a kind of mating ritual, and I said to her, 'You have to look at this. It's unbelievable.' After that, the natural world helped us live again. Wordsworth felt this keenly. He's one of my favorites because he felt like the natural world could help in more ways than we know, including helping us be better people. I believe that, too. Like Hopkins, I believe that every moment of every day, the world shows us the ‘grandeur of God.’"

"This must have an effect on your choice of poetic form. Your work is eclectic in its forms, but I'm wondering how you choose. You know, a sonnet is a lovely way of artistically making a point, but it might not be the most effective way to express our deepest passions, whether rage or utter exaltation and joy. Sometimes forms can be too constraining."

"I never actually think about the form initially. Whenever I've written a sonnet, it actually started out as something else until I realized that there was a sonnet there that the poem was asking to become. For me, writing about grief was a matter of bringing in voices, prose voices, formal poetry voices, raw poetry voices that are uninhibited, and my son's voice, too. I wanted my son to speak. I think he has the best lines in the book."

"Did you have poets that ministered to you in times of grief?"

"Yes. George Herbert's poem, ‘The Bag,’ was utterly consoling to me. It opens with these lines.

Away despair! my gracious Lord doth heare.
         Though windes and waves assault my keel,
         He doth preserve it: he doth steer,
         Ev’n when the boat seems most to reel.
          Storms are the triumph of his art:
Well may he close his eyes, but not his heart.

I realized that, yes, I, too, must not close my heart. If Christ would not close his heart, then why should I? No matter how difficult the grief, you must not close your heart."

"It's a self-destructive act."

"Yes."

"Do you find that, if we are honest, sometimes we want to destroy ourselves in times of grief, to close our eyes, even  literally and permanently? Maybe we want to put ourselves on some kind of pyre rather than face naked grief."

"Indeed. But Christ did not close his eyes."

"No, he did not. Your words remind me of when Christ appeared to the disciples after he rose from the dead. Thomas, in particular, was a man like me, a skeptic, a man whose grief accentuated his skepticism. In my opinion, skepticism was a way of shielding himself against pervasive loss. Christ doesn't just say, ‘look, here I am.’ Christ invites him to put his hand in Christ's side. It's a kind of invitation to embrace death fully, to really come to grips with what happened."

"Yes. It's an invitation to be fully human, to face death, and, as a result, the incomprehensibility of resurrection. In Wordsworth's "Peele Castle," a poem about the death of his brother who drowned at sea, he says that the death of his brother humanized his soul. I think that's really true, but only if we embrace death as we ought to embrace it. The grief actually makes us more human, more compassionate, more attentive to our connections with each other."

"I don't know if you've found this to be true, but it seems to me that you can spot a kinship rather quickly with someone who has suffered deeply."

"Yes, it's true. As a teacher, I was always very moved by students who had suffered terrible things at an early age. I felt a deep compassion. I'll tell you something about when Daniel died. Whether it was a good parenting decision or not, I told my other two sons that we were going to go down to the funeral home to be with Daniel after he died. I wanted them to see their brother before the funeral home doctored him up, before they changed him to be more fit for public viewing. So we went, the three of us, and sat with Daniel for over an hour. I told them we were going to stay with Daniel's body until we had grown comfortable with death, as comfortable as we can become. We wanted to honor him by letting his death imprint itself on our bodies. I made my sons touch their brother's face. Six years later, they say that they were really grateful for that experience."

"Your story reminds me of Nikos Kazantzakis. His autobiography, Report to Greco, is really wonderful. But I'll never forget one moment in his childhood when war broke out and flooded the streets. If memory serves, they bolted the door and sat against the wall, listening through the night to the sound of bloodshed. In the morning, when life began again, his father took him into the streets to show little Nikos the dead. At one point, they came to a man who had been hanged and, I think, burned. His father made him kiss the man's feet. The difference between your story and this Kazantzakis story, at least as it seems to me,  is that his father was saying to Nikos, 'This is reality, get used to it.' But yours was an act of faith."

"The first person who died in my life was my great-grandmother. I was very afraid, sitting in church, knowing that she was dead in the coffin at the front of the church. When it was time, my mother marched me all the way up to the front of the church and took my hand and placed it on my great-grandmother's cheek and on her lips and then on her forehead. My mother told me that I would always have the touch of her. It was a kind of gift, a kind of embracing death rather than simply facing it."

"At one point in the book, you quote Henry James who said that we work in the dark. Could you unpack that for me and especially in terms of writing poetry?"

"I've always believed that we live in a world that is untranslatable, unexplainable, but intelligible. That's the part that everyone leaves out when they talk about mystery. They talk about mystery as if it will one day no longer be a mystery when we have all of the facts, but there is no accounting for most things, actually. Most sacred mysteries are beyond our grasp, but that doesn't mean they're unapproachable or unintelligible. That's why we can have the gifts of physics and mathematics, all the disciplines we teach. But when we're writing poetry, we're trying to approach through intelligible things that which is a mystery. As a poet, you try to move as close to mystery as you possibly can get. Poetry is especially suited to this because it uses images. Frost says that poetry says one thing in terms of another. Poetry allows us to do what discursive writing, rational arguments, don't allow. In poetry—because it uses images—something can mean two things at once, sometimes paradoxically. This is often how we experience life—like suffering and joy—but poetry makes that which seems beyond reason, intelligible, rational. It helps to make a kind of sense out of our experience."

"Ephesians 2:9 says that we are God's poiema. How have you thought of that word in the context of grief."

"Yes, the word literally means workmanship, something made. We live in a created world. God has made us. God has made everything. Just think of the planet we live on, spinning as it does at such a velocity through space. God made it spin in such a way that we don't fly off of it. And it remains just at the right distance from the sun so that we neither fry nor freeze. The only explanation for this exactness is divine love. That's where the word workmanship comes into play. When Moses climbed the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments, the Israelites made a golden calf. They made it out of fear. But when God tells them to make the Ark of the Covenant, they make it out of love."

"That's an interesting distinction."

"Well, I believe that God wants us to make like he makes, as an overflow of love. Christians, especially, ought to make out of love. You know, I never felt angry at the loss of my son because I don't believe God took my son’s life as a destructive act. God is always making. That's what he does continually. And I believe that at the heart of life is the choice to embrace God's work, even at great personal cost. My work as a poet, my relationships, my daily decisions depend upon embracing the God who makes and will always make as an overflow of love."

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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.

Cording is the author of several collections of poetry, including Life-list (1987), Heavy Grace (1996), Walking With Ruskin (2010), Only So Far (2015), and Without My Asking (2019). Cording has received numerous honors for his poetry, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He has served as director of From the Fishouse and was poet-in-residence at the Frost Place. Cording taught for many years at the College of the Holy Cross and was a poetry mentor in the MFA program at Seattle Pacific University.