The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

Barbara Knott: Praise Poems

Happy are they who begin each day looking upon images not only of beauty but of strength. Gaston Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Will, p.55.

O tell me Poet what you do? –I praise.

Rainer Maria Rilke, the poet who above all others understands the need for praise, the love of praise, the purpose of praise, and who exhibits the genius for praise that may prove an inspiration to all of us who enter our work into this column and to our readers, calls out to us with this challenge (Dowrick, 295):

If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself, admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place.

In one of his sonnets to Orpheus, the legendary Greek praise singer whose songs and music were powerful enough to move stones and trees and to cast a spell over wild animals, Rilke declares (Dowrick translation, pp. 252-3),

To praise is everything! The one chosen to praise
reaches out to us like ore from the silences
of stones. His mortal heart presses out
for us an immortal wine.

The value of darkness is enhanced in one of Rilke's pieces from A Book for the Hours of Prayer (Robert Bly, p. 43) by this stanza's placement of God in the mouths of poets:

You are the delicate hour at nightfall
that makes all the poets equally good;
you crowd full of darkness into their mouths,
and every poet, sensing he has discovered greatness,
surrounds you with magnificent things.

My own feeling for depth, darkness, and night has been telling me for a long time that these qualities are insufficiently praised in a culture that invests so much in height, light, and daytime, so you may imagine my leap of interest when I first read Rilke’s poem (Dowrick, 131-2, trans. Mark S. Burrows):

You darkness that I come from,
I love you more than the fire
that rings the world
because it shines only for a single orbit,
and of this creature knows nothing at all.
But the darkness holds everything together:
Forms and flames, animals and myself,
all thrown together,
humans and powers—
and it could be that a great strength
moves all about me where I am.
I believe in nights.

That’s what praise does: it creates an expansion of its object, be it stone, river or woods, moon or rainbow, feathers or fur, hair, eyes or thighs, and elicits a surge of interest in reader or listener—perhaps, if we can trust wilderness philosopher David Abram’s observations about the world's vitality (and I believe we can) — even in the objects being looked at, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, wind or fire or night.

Robert Bly (p. 5) offers this further insight:

It is something out there, with the energy of an animal, and at the same instant it is far inside. Once a man or a woman inhabits that space, he or she finds it hidden inside objects, in walnuts or tree roots, in places where people don’t ordinarily look for it.

Walnut photo by sandy mason

I chose this as one of two photos for the cover of a book of poems because they illustrate so well the theme expressed in the title In Every Carnation: the Body of God, and in the open walnut especially, we can see the metaphoric suggestion that what is “out there” (in the world) is also “in here” (in imagination, ensouled).

Stephanie Dowrick (In the Company of Rilke, p. 171) tells us,

Some of Rilke’s finest and most immediately coherent poems are hymnic still lifes, capturing and holding a moment of something ordinary ‘out there’ and transforming it ‘in here’ through the power of the poet’s gaze. This kind of deep noticing, that involves seeing something freshly and seeing oneself freshly in relation to it, itself provokes a kind of yearning while also expressing it.

She also mentions (p. 181) Rilke’s habit: I was always disposed to concede a multiplicity of shapes to the Possible ….

Metaphor is central both to poetry and to being human. One of the most powerful metaphorical comparisons is between flower and female sexuality. Quoting from David Miller’s Three Faces of God (p. 9):

As Rainer Maria Rilke said, there is in poetic metaphor the “waking of a likeness within us ….” A flower and a woman are experienced in erotic connection when Robert Burns writes, “My love is like a red, red rose.”

Another powerful comparison is between female sexuality and the moon. Who better to show us that than poet and novelist D. H. Lawrence, here praising the moon and beauty and bliss in lovemaking:

Moonrise

And who has seen the moon, who has not seen
Her rise from out the chamber of the deep,
Flushed and grand and naked, as from the chamber
Of finished bridegroom, seen her rise and throw
Confession of delight upon the wave,
Littering the waves with her own superscription
Of bliss, till all her lambent beauty shakes toward us
Spread out and known at last, and we are sure
That beauty is a thing beyond the grave,
That perfect, bright experience never falls
To nothingness, and time will dim the moon
Sooner than our full consummation here
In this odd life will tarnish or pass away.

Gaston Bachelard, in his book The Poetics of Reverie, quotes this from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to illustrate a lover’s effect on the beloved who cries out: Make thy love larger to enlarge my worth (p. 84). He also tells us, When the forces of matter must be awakened, praise is sovereign. Let us remember that praise has a magical action (p.72). Since this is evident in the psychology of humans, he believes it ought, then, to be the same in a psychology of matter which gives substances human forces and desires. So also with the gods, as in this Indian example: Thus covered with praise, Indra began to grow. (from Dumezil’s Servius and Fortune, p. 67, quoted in Bachelard, p. 72)

The poet walks in such a world, where reverie dwells on “praiseworthy space” and, watching the flow of poetic imagery, engages in the psychology of wonder. Bachelard (p. 124) declares, We should so much like to be able to demonstrate that poetry is a synthesizing force for human existence! And I declare that he did just that. I pass his insights along to you as context for this new column devoted to praise poems from around the world.

Keeping in mind our selections from Rilke (out of Eastern Europe) praising praise poems in the German language, and Lawrence (out of England) praising the moon and the night in English, I'd like to call your attention to one more example, this one a classic from the United States, Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," in which he delivers praise to animals, also in English (echoing many discussions in this issue of The Grapevine):

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

Now we turn to the rich treasures in the tradition of praise poems in Africa.

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AFRICAN TRADITIONS OF PRAISE POEMS

My first acquaintance with the designation “praise” poem began in graduate school at NYU where I took a class in creative play with Judith Gleason, a woman who spent significant time on the continent of Africa collecting a large crop of African poems, then translated them from their many languages into English and published them with Viking Press in 1980: a volume called Leaf and Bone: African Praise-Poems.

W. S. Merwin, appointed as U. S. Poet Laureate in 2010, author of over 50 books of poetry (twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize, along with many other awards), wrote of Gleason’s Leaf and Bone:

Since time immemorial the praise-poem has been the fundamental form of African literature, and indeed the staple of all African social discourse. Praise-poems are used to name children and to initiate young people into adulthood. They flatter the host and hail the gods. Yoruba girls undergo formal training in praise-poetry before they marry. And throughout the continent, praise-poems serve as spoken autobiographies and resumes: they are the way in which Africans announce themselves to the world.

This classic anthology of praise-poems has been newly updated by the author to make it the most authoritative volume of its kind. Its poems originate everywhere from the Cape to the sub-Sahara and concern every conceivable subject, from kings and gods to hunters, truck drivers, animals, and bicycles. Elegantly translated and extensively annotated by the renowned African scholar Judith Gleason, the verse in Leaf and Bone is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Africa’s heritage—and a feast for anyone who loves language.

In 1994, Penguin Books published an updated edition of Leaf and Bone. (For those who’d like to have a look at it, some hardcover copies of this book are still available on Amazon.com for as little as $5.)

Among the poems we will present in this column, we are fortunate to have a selection by some African poets whose work I first saw on Facebook after joining Motivational Strips, an international writing group where these poets often post a poem a day, each accompanied by a closely related photographic image. The poems fluctuate between praise for love and the world live in, and outcries against corruption and mistreatment, especially of children. I have created a linked page for each one so that we can continue to post their contributions. We will also create new pages as we go along.

AROUND THE WORLD

Now I would like to introduce you to the Facebook site Motivational Strips that I discovered late last year and where I have made so many international acquaintances among poets and writers. I have dedicated a page to that as well.

SHIJU H. PALLITHAZHETH and MOTIVATIONAL STRIPS

I recommend to you to see what it looks and feels like to be with a fascinating array of people making daily posts, all in English, sometimes irregular but always sturdy, from around the world.

Sources

Gaston Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination (Dallas, Texas: Institute of Humanities and Culture, 2002).

Stephanie Dowrick, In the Company of Rilke (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher: Penguin, 2011).

David Abrams, Becoming Animal (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).

Robert Bly, Selected Poems of Rilke: A Translation from the German and Commentary by Robert Bly (New York: Harper & Rowe, 1981).

David Miller, The Three Faces of God (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986).

D. H. Lawrence, "Moonrise" (https://poets.org/poem/moonrise-0). “Moonrise” was published in Lawrence’s book Look! We have come through! (Chatto & Windus, 1917).

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960).

Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" in Leaves of Grass (New York: The Modern Library, p. 75).