![]() ![]() a love so overflowing that it demanded God." Perhaps this awakening, which we might as well call grace, has given him a "strange and surprising excellence"-his own phrase about what distinguishes good poetry from adequate work. His diagnosis, along with his falling in love with the woman he married and a period when his writing "went dead," as he said, led to a conversion of sorts, from religious and spiritual apathy to a searing "sacred attentiveness. More than most of us, perhaps, he lives alert to the extraordinary gift of every moment. As he began to discuss publicly three years ago, he has an inoperable cancer both rare and mysterious, one that kills some people quickly and some after decades. Let's start with Christian Wiman, partly because he is so young (a mere 44) and doomed. Some perhaps do not receive the trumpet flourishes they deserve because their egos and styles are so deliberately unadorned, like William Stafford and Les Murray and Mary Oliver some have reputations built in other forms but are startlingly good poets, like Thomas Lynch and some are young and getting better with each book, and make some poems that give you the joyful willies, like Christian Wiman. ![]() Sometimes I think that great poetry is the highest literary art because it has to claw past such an ocean of terrible muck.īut rising above the surface of the ocean are islands-some massive, like Yeats and Homer and some smaller but no less riveting, like Constantine Cavafy and Wisława Szymborska. This is why we are so often left cold by lesser poetry, because many poems are merely precious, allusive, self-conscious and self-absorbed without being memorable, moving, startling or accessible. So, if we are serious about attentiveness-which is to say, if we are hard at work spiritually-we read poetry on the chance that it might move and startle and illuminate us, that it might be memorable in ways that other written (and sung) language is not. Yes, inspire how very many times have we been lifted by songs and poems, chants and litanies, a twist of words that exactly caught the way we felt but could not say? More times than we can ever count, yes? ![]() I know there are some among us who court silence as their prayer, but I cannot imagine a world shorn of the music of language, the dance of words, the mysterious ways that lines and sentences and images conspire to awaken and elevate and inspire us. Would we have come even this far toward the Light? Think, for example, of a world in which the thin Jewish man Yeshua ben Joseph did not speak so colorfully and memorably of forgiveness and grace. If we do not, as a species, speak memorably and listen ferociously, we have no horizon, no map, no theme. Poetry is crucial to us as human beings, for speaking memorably and listening ferociously is perhaps how we best evolve and pray powerfully and stutter toward grace and peace and joy, toward a world where no child weeps and violence is a dark memory. Seven years after the accident, Francesco continues to improve, in addition to running a thriving business.Some tiptoeing toward answers: Poetry is "memorable speech," said the (great) poet Wystan Hugh Auden, "about birth, death, the Beatific Vision." Or, in less lovely words: good poetry, great poetry, is the distilled salt and song of the way we speak it is espresso speech, perhaps it pierces and penetrates and illuminates, it makes us see fresh. It is now sold nationwide in stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Fred Segal, and featured in Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, and So Francesco and his father began to experiment, and Clark's Botanicals skin care line was born. Francesco's accident left him unable to sweat out toxins, leaving his skin less than healthy. To avoid having his lungs suctioned, he sang, loudly, for hours. Opportunity for experimental treatment, and Francesco used all resources available to speed his recovery. His father, a doctor himself, investigated every Within days, he was breathing on his own. Paralyzed from the neck down, doctors announced that he'd never move from his bed or breathe without assistance. A nocturnal dive into the pool's shallow end changed everything. Francesco Clark was a twenty-four-year-old with a bright future when he went to the Hamptons for the weekend.
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