Jacob

Wrestling with angels is a dangerous business. At the very least, you risk frustration, as you can never quite pin down what exactly you’re seeing in words. At worst, you risk revealing to yourself and others exactly where you’ve been, and being told you’ve gone the wrong way. At best you can expect a startling transformation of the self and the world around it, a shift of perspective that leaves what you thought before dim and dreamlike, the closest a person can get to a second chance, a rebirth. Always though, it seems to me, you experience the consequences of trying to access the beliefs you hold wordlessly, trying to bring them to light and interpret them in a new way: discomfort and pain, the dislocation of a worldview.

In this brief collection of poems, arranged around the poems “First Angel,” “Second Angel,” “Third Angel,” and “A little lower,” I am still wrestling with my angels – with what I take for granted, what I think I understand, and what I don’t, really, about family, men, and my upbringing in the evangelical church. I didn’t mean, when I began writing the poems that would go into this portfolio in the fall, to confess myself so directly, to write about the things that mattered most to me, the things I was most angry about, the things that bothered me: I started out writing about Tarot cards (“Endgame,” “Dear moon,” and “Death Reading”) because I thought I needed a prompt bordering on the archetypal and mystical to inspire me. I then drew on what I wrote in spring to anchor these experiments, rewriting my own intellectual and spiritual history in the process (“Waiting on Mount Katla,” “Pearl Culture,” and “Chapter XIII”). Finally, I was struck by a series of figures that came to mind as angels in sequence, figures as forces, for good or for ill, I wasn’t sure which, that are the closest I’ve come yet to really grappling with ideas or spiritual experiences I can’t quite put into words now that I no longer rely on strict religious doctrine (or any other sort of doctrine if I can avoid it) to organize and legislate what I think and feel.

Although the overarching themes of Christianity, spiritual experience, discomfort, endings, and healing are present to greater or lesser extent in these poems, they are in various stages of development, and don’t necessarily all fit together as well as I envisioned. I’m not sure whether the transition from “Waiting on Mount Katla” to “Pearl Culture” is smooth, just as I’m not sure whether the ideas within “Waiting on Mount Katla” achieve an easy synthesis. I think there are too many images in both “First Angel,” “Third Angel,” and “A little lower,” and that with more time, I would pare these poems down further, though I am not sure how - “Third Angel,” frankly, I don’t think is a finished poem, and “Second Angel” is perhaps too brief. I am most pleased with “Chapter XIII,” a poem that can read as three sequential short-lined poems or one continuous, stilted poem from left to right, because I think its form best reflects the complexity behind a statement of religious belief and its relationship to the evidence of history, personal or collective.

These poems frustrate me. I want more time with them, I want to write more angels, better angels, and the opportunity to play with different, riskier, and more demanding forms that could make their content both less obscure and less declarative, less total, because they really aren’t the final word. I’m still wrestling, and won’t stop till I feel properly blessed.