by Grant Hardy
Associate Professor of History, UNC-Asheville
At our last priesthood leadership meeting, the second counselor in the stake presidency asked what we had done in our units to implement the Proclamation on the Family. I didn’t raise my hand because I wasn’t sure it was the right forum, but I had just published a book that celebrates family life. Enduring Ties: Poems of Family Relationships brings together 128 short, accessible poems from around the globe and through the centuries on a topic of universal importance. The poems are arranged by life-stages, so there are sections on growing up, marrying, childbearing, parenting, growing older, parting, and inheriting. Since this is the story of nearly everyone, it is not surprising that I was able to find wonderful poems by some of the world’s most acclaimed poets, but it was striking that such an anthology had never been done before. I am the only Latter-day Saint on the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and one of my colleagues asked whether this was a “Mormon” project. I suppose the answer is no and yes.
The anthology is not a “Mormon book”–it was published by a small literary press in Vermont (by coincidence just a few miles from Joseph Smith’s birthplace), and aside from acknowledging that I graduated from BYU, there are no LDS references or even Latter-day Saint poets. Indeed, wine and coffee show up regularly in the poems and it is evident from the biographical notes that many of the poets did not live temple-recommend-worthy lives. I certainly did not set out to put together an anthology for Mormons. But on the other hand, the attitudes and insights embodied in this collection will surely resonate with Latter-day Saints, and in retrospect it is clear that my interest in this project arose naturally from my deepest beliefs and values, and in particular from my temple marriage. It was not my intention to promote Mormonism as such, but rather to share my love of poetry and my commitment to a way of living that brings together people of good will from across the spectrum of cultures and faiths.
This anthology actually began as a folder in a file cabinet. I am not a poet or an English teacher, but I enjoy reading poetry, and when I find something I like I photocopy it and put it in my “Favorite Poems” file. A few years ago, I noticed that many of these poems shared a common theme–they were about family life in some way or another–and I looked for a collection of poems about living within families. To my surprise, there didn’t seem to be one. There were books of mother-daughter poems, marriage poems, grandparent poems, and so forth, but no single volume that captured the full range of family connections that make up most people’s lives. So I started reading more widely and collecting more systematically. The result is an anthology that tells the human story through poetic glimpses of our most intimate and enduring relationships, arranged as they might be encountered over the stages of a typical lifetime. Indeed, as you thumb through this book you can track the course of your own life–seeing at a glance where you’ve been and where you’re headed. There are poems about relations that children have with parents, siblings, and grandparents; poems about weddings and setting up a household with a spouse; poems of pregnancy, childbirth, and naming; poems of birthdays, sending a child to kindergarten, dealing with teenagers, and then sending children out into the world; poems of caring for elderly parents and aging spouses; poems of loss and poems of traditions handed down through generations.
All of this is obviously of great significance to Latter-day Saints (as well as to their friends, neighbors, and co-workers), yet there are a few poems that speak perhaps more directly to Mormon sensibilities. For instance, Seamus Heaney–a Nobel prize winner in Literature–writes of the importance of family chores in nurturing relationships. At his mother’s death what came to his mind were the hours they had spent in the kitchen peeling potatoes together:
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives–
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.
Yehuda Amichai employs lovely religious imagery as he recalls family prayers (Jewish, in his case) when he was a boy:
I remember my father waking me up
for early prayers. He did it caressing
my forehead, not tearing the blanket away.
Since then I love him even more.
And because of this
let him be woken up
gently and with love
on the Day of Resurrection.
Edward Hirsch describes of the pain of infertility with a metaphor that seems to parallel Latter-day Saint understandings:
We’d like to believe in their souls
drifting through space
Between the Crab and the Northern Cross,
Smoky and incandescent,
longing for incarnation.
We’d like to believe in their spirits descending,
But month after month, year after year,
We have laid ourselves down
and raised ourselves up
And not one has ever entered our bodies.
And the 17th century American poet Anne Bradstreet composed this verse to begin a spiritual autobiography written for her children and grandchildren:
This book by any yet unread,
I leave for you when I am dead,
That being gone, here you may find
What was your living mother’s mind.
Make use of what I leave in love,
And God shall bless you from above.
As with genealogy, this kind of poetry can help us see how our daily activities flow into the regular succession of generations, thus turning the hearts of the fathers to their children and vice versa. Life is not a solitary journey that abruptly comes to an end, rather it is something received and shared and handed on.
As I worked on this anthology, I was struck by three things. The first was the power of poetry to express feelings that are so deep they defy description (a phenomenon we are familiar with from trying to share our testimonies). Indeed, poetry not only helps us to perceive and articulate emotion, it can also create it anew, so that in reading a poem about, say, holding a newborn child or trying to communicate with a sullen teenager, we not only remember doing this, we actually re-experience those feelings. Yet the result is not simply nostalgic; as we mature and gain perspective, the full meaning of such incidents becomes clearer. There is a crucial transaction at work here–poets inspire emotion within us, and we in turn bring our life-experiences to the text. In an important sense, each reader completes a poem, as something significant is expressed and then grasped. This is also why good poems can be read and reread many times over–as we change, so does our understanding of a given poem; each reading becomes a unique encounter that brings together the intimately personal voice of the poet and our own particular life-situation (especially if we read aloud and make the words our own). Astonishingly, the intensity of poetic communication can even let us feel something of how we might respond to events only now imagined–perhaps the death of a spouse, or the departure of a grown child, or the arrival of a grandchild.
My second response was wonder at the continuity of family connections and feelings through history. When I read of Sappho’s delight in her daughter (from ancient Greece) or T’ao Yan-ming’s complaints about his children’s laziness (from medieval China), I am surprised at how similar they seem to my own feelings, despite vast differences of time and culture. It is astonishing that partings that took place a thousand years ago can still move us, or that John Milton and Su Tung-p’o–who certainly never heard of each other–had similar dreams of deceased wives. I have to smile whenever I read Mei Yao-ch’en’s An Excuse For Not Returning The Visit Of A Friend, because it describes my life so well:
On my lap
I hold my little girl. At my
Knees stands my handsome little son.
One has just begun to talk.
The other chatters without
Stopping. They hang on my clothes
And follow my every step.
I can’t get any farther
Than the door. I am afraid
I will never make it to your house.
And this despite the fact that this poem was written around 1050 A.D. (I confess, my love of Chinese poetry started on my mission to Taiwan long ago.)
Finally, poetry captures the complex dynamics of real families. Latter-day Saints know well that there is opposition in all things, and surely there is a certain amount of frustration and disappointment even in healthy, functioning families; it is unrealistic to expect otherwise. Yet sometimes the rush and blur of everyday life get in the way of appreciating what we have. I love Linda Pastan’s observation that
The small irritations that are like salt
on melon were what I dwelt on,
though in truth they simply
made the fruit taste sweeter.
To my mind, each of the poems in this volume is an expression of deep and abiding love, the kind that calls forth what is best in us, that motivates us to keep trying. As we negotiate our way through the various stages of life, we are not always as generous or as wise as we might wish. But it matters that there are people who love us anyway. And the trust they exhibit can sometimes provoke us to unexpected strength and courage. As Celia Gilbert writes in a poem about her mother, “everything in us that answers to good / crowds round her lap / hearing itself spoken for.” These lovely lines, of course, were written in retrospect. The other side of motherhood–the tedium and isolation–appears in Katha Pollitt’s Playground: “Mama! Was it like this? / Did I do this to you?” Both observations are enriched by their juxtaposition. There is a radical notion at the heart of this volume–that meaning in life is found not through individual accomplishment, but in our connections with others. Love is perhaps most genuinely manifest in committed relationships over time, and family connections are usually the most constant, most enduring relationships in our lives.
Publishing a poetry anthology is more work than you might think (certainly more than I anticipated when I began), for it involves not only finding poems and a press, but also negotiating with publishers and poets and literary executors to buy the reprint rights. I sent literally hundreds of letters, e-mails, and faxes. Through it all I was sustained by my family (whom you can see on the inside back cover in a photo taken by our stake executive secretary) and a familiar verse from the Doctrine and Covenants–“And as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom.” The poems in this collection are some of the wisest words I know.
2003Meridian Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
