The Beat: Mathias Svalina and Gerard Manley Hopkins

Alan May: 00:07

Welcome to The Beat. Today, we’ll hear the poet Mathias Svalina read and talk about a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins called “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection.” Svalina will then follow by reading his own poem, “Terrible Baby.”

Mathias Svalina: 00:33

"That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Cloud-puffball, torn tufts, tossed pillows / flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-

built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs / they throng; they glitter in marches.

Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, / wherever an elm arches,

Shivelights and shadowtackle ín long / lashes lace, lance, and pair.

Delightfully the bright wind boisterous / ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare

Of yestertempest's creases; / in pool and rut peel parches

Squandering ooze to squeezed / dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches

Squadroned masks and manmarks / treadmire toil there

Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, / nature's bonfire burns on.

But quench her bonniest, dearest / to her, her clearest-selvèd spark

Man, how fast his firedint, / his mark on mind, is gone!

Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark

Drowned. O pity and indig'nation! Manshape, that shone

Sheer off, disseveral, a star, / death blots black out; nor mark

Is any of him at all so stark

But vastness blurs and time / beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, / joyless days, dejection.

Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. / Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; / world's wildfire, leave but ash:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, / since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, / patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.

I think I was drawn to that Gerard Manley Hopkins poem because of the ways that he enacts an experience of the sublime in it. He lets the poem do the work of making a new experience for the reader in order to play with that experience. It's aimed at the natural world. It's a poem ostensibly of attention to the natural world, but it's also a poem in which language does things the world cannot do. When he writes that "the clouds all chevy on an air-built thoroughfare," that they are "heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs / they throng; they glitter in marches," he makes the reader conjure an experience that is both terrifying and confusing and delightful and enthralling. All of that allowing for that turn to "In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is," that turn that brings the language away from his thick anglo-saxon-based coinages and neologisms into direct and clear prose. And I love that sense of the poem inventing its own world, creating its own small space and logic that only works within the self. And I think that's what I take away from Hopkins so much. I don't share his religious beliefs, I don't share his aesthetics, but I share that faith in poetry's ability to make something real in the world, not of the world, not a reflection of the world, but poetry's ability to create a thing that is a new experience each time you read it. And while I'd never put myself up against Hopkins quality-wise--I mean[laughs] uh, that dude's too good--I think there's something about that attempt to make the little world of the poem in this thing I wrote last summer called "Terrible Baby." So I'm going to read it.

"Terrible Baby"

After the rain you step outside. A tree has fallen in

the field, insides hollow & rotted, this tree that had

seemed so solid, so tall, now fallen in the field that

you swear had been an apartment building before

the storm, an apartment building you stared at each

night, windows golden with privacies, old men on

the balconies, loose faces dangling over cigarettes,

bats rising from the chimney at dusk like a boy

falling down an entire flight of stairs, hitting each

stair, cartwheeling, almost seeming to come apart, &

then landing, unhurt, on his feet. Go to the hollow &

rotted out tree. Dip a hand into the rot. Pull out a

single apple, the size of a knuckle, as round as the

chord that has ringed in your head since the

morning you slid the wrong side of the knife across

your skin & your body undid itself & a baby

emerged from your undoneness. A terrible baby.

The kind of baby only a king could love. Then the

terrible baby takes his first steps, dragging you,

undone as a storm, behind him.

Alan May: 07:07

You just heard Mathias Svalina read “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and his own poem "Terrible Baby." Svalina was kind enough to record these poems for us in Richmond, Virginia. Mathias Svalina is the author of seven books. His most recent, America at Play (published by Trident Press), is a collection of absurdist instructions for children's games. His poetry collection Thank You Terror was published earlier this year, & his first short story collection, Comedy, is forthcoming soon. Svalina was a founding editor of Octopus Books. He’s led writing workshops in universities, libraries, community spaces, and in prison. Since twenty fourteen, he has run a dream delivery service, traveling around the country to write and deliver dreams to subscribers. Through the Dream Delivery Service, Svalina has worked with the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, the Poetry Foundation, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson. Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in the London suburb of Stratford Essex in eighteen fourty-four. He studied classics at Balliol College in Oxford and theology at St. Beuno’s College in North Wales. He was ordained in eighteen seventy-seven as a Jesuit priest, and he served in London, Oxford, Liverpool, Glasgow, and Stonyhurst. He also taught classics at Stonyhurst College and Greek literature at University College, Dublin. During his lifetime, most of Hopkins’ poems were read by only a few friends. In eighteen eighty-nine, Hopkins died of typhoid fever, and he was buried in Dublin, Ireland. One of his friends, Robert Bridges, became Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in nineteen thirteen, and he saw to it that Hopkin’s poetry would be remembered. He edited Hopkin’s first collection, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which was published in nineteen eighteen. You can find books by Matthias Svalina and Gerard Manley Hopkins in our online catalog. Also, look for links in the show notes. Please join us next time for The Beat.