“My Religion is Poetry”

(Part 1 of the Partially Understood series, where I try to write freely about what I think I know)

When I was in Jerusalem and asked whether I was religious, I reflected and knew at that time that poetry was my religion. It wasn’t something that I had to make great effort against myself to seek out (and that is how I know I was devoutly religious); it was something that came to me joyously, like breathing magic air. Poetry was what I looked to for spiritual and moral guidance. It was what helped me understand my experiences in the world and what to do about them.

It helped me see that whatever I was experiencing, there was someone else who understood it. Often it was just the feeling of being understood, like I’d found in Baudelaire, but sometimes it extended to the wisdom of someone who could communicate with some connection to truth some advice, something to take from the experience and be edified. 

But what is poetry? I say poetry and sometimes I refer to that art of words put together in lines, and my definition immediately extends to lyrics in music. I think of the way I can look at a person and think “they have a poetic expression”—and what am I referring to? The way they communicate the sublime, I think; the way they make visible their connection to their unconscious—I say this and I imagine a relaxed face with partially parted lips and blank eyes while the body is in motion somehow. 

The Madonna and Child - Barnaba da Modena, at the Louvre

So that when I say poetry is my religion, I’m discovering I’m not referring to the poem but the feeling of the poem, the feeling of connecting to the art, the feeling of being moved by it. Is that what we mean when something is “poetic”? I think in my case that’s right, and when I refer to the spiritual raptures, extasies, and sudden feelings of something so great that it’s like passing from your body into universes—the feelings that sometimes occur in religion—I think of them as the same spiritual things as are gotten elsewhere, and on these feelings I most worry about two things: 1) is the feeling true? 2) where can you get the most of it? 

Blue Sky Noise album cover by Esao Andrews, not at the Louvre

Any false acting in spirituality is doleful and is the worst form of wanting to experience something and wanting others to see it in you too—though maybe here I’m referring to love—and though there are some who experience intense feelings of love toward themselves and others induced through the insights and experiences that religious scriptures give, I find the scriptures only occasionally loving, and not loving often enough to induce me to breathe them. No; I find my love in poetry; I find my scriptures in the wealth of poets’ representations of thought and feeling from whenever we started writing to now when hopefully we will never stop.