Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention by David Marno (review)

The strongest religious poetry does not versify doctrine, even though it takes it with extreme seriousness, not only because believers are called to submit to ecclesial authority in matters of faith and morals but also because doctrine seeks to make divine mystery comprehensible. In the right person (a very rare thing) an engagement of doctrine and divine mystery can prompt experience of God. Immediately, a qualification is required: this "experience" is of a relationship, real or imagined, which shifts from year to year and sometimes from day to day. One hopes to be present to God or senses that God is absent; and a poet for whom the current of religion is powerful responds in verse, sometimes seeking to persuade himself or herself of being present to God or crying in anguish that one is exposed to a peril: the danger of divine proximity, whether as all-consuming love (Jacopone da Todi) or as implacable judgment (William Cowper), or the danger of divine withdrawal (John of the Cross). Only as a consequence of a special Grace does religious experience appear as Erlebnis; it tends to propose itself as Erfahrung, an opening of a path on which, by turns, one has the sense of being accompanied or being abandoned.

Part of that Erfahrung is the writing (and reading) of poetry as a way of life. Poetry can be a spiritual exercise: a fuzzy set of diverse self-prompts to focus on the love of God and neighbor, if one belongs to the Abrahamic traditions, and, if one is not "religious" in one or more of the Western senses of that word, to attend to the natural world and to accommodate oneself to its rhythms and the end of all rhythm. When we read A. R. Ammons's "The City Limits," for instance, we find ourselves invited to share in a secularized version of what Bernard of Clairvaux called consideratione. More generally, when reading poetry, especially that poetry which seeks the highest reaches of experience, which shade into non-experience, we pass from thinking, and even consideration, and broach the higher realms of meditation and contemplation. As David Marno says in his innovative book on John Donne, we begin to practice attention. This practice may be active at first but, in time, it is passive attention that is fostered. One cultivates the gaze in order that what is given can be appropriately received.

One way to understand what is involved in writing and reading poetry is to see those activities as described on the one hand by "spiritual exercises" and, on the other, as exercises in phenomenology. Of course, this quest for understanding requires us to go beyond what Pierre Hadot says of spiritual exercises; it returns us to the special issue of Fontaine subtitled De la poésie comme exercice spirituel (1942) with a brief to begin again from there. It also requires us to go beyond Edmund Husserl's insistence on phenomenology as a "rigorous science" that supplies firm foundations for epistemic judgments. Rather, spiritual exercises will be broadened to include all that a poet does in order to train himself or herself to receive what gives itself, and phenomenology will be courted as purified awareness of the many ways in which manifestation occurs. For Marno, as an exacting reader of Donne, the crucial distinction is between poetry as concerned with what gives itself and poetry as elaborated in modes of invention. We might demur over his statement that Donne's Holy Sonnets "are already phenomenologies" (34), for while it is true that they are "exercises of attention" (34) one has to recognize that they sometimes proceed by way of conceits rather than openness to the "regions of being" by which God gives himself and which doctrine seeks to figure in propositional terms. Some poems, including a good many of Donne's, are only partial phenomenologies; and there is virtue in recognizing...