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Unfinished Poetry
Jack Kornfield on poetics and the inner life
Well-known founder of Woodacre, California's Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Jack Kornfield has had a lifelong passion for poetry. From Rumi to Kabir to Pablo Neruda to Bob Dylan, Kornfield brings the distilled wisdom of poetry from cultures around the globe to his Buddhist teachings.
Here, in an interview first published in Rattle, a biannual magazine devoted to poetry, Rattle editor-in-chief Alan Fox chats with Kornfield about the essential role poetry plays in our lives--whether we're aware of it or not.
Fox and Kornfield share a belief in the power of poetry to transform the way we understand the world. Indeed, Rattle itself is based on the premise that poetry "is something everyone can enjoy." As we read on their website, its editors "look for poems that are accessible, that have heart, that have something to say."
This interview was adapted and reprinted with the permission of Rattle.
When did you first discover the world of poetry? About the time I became interested in Buddhist practice, at Dartmouth College. I was a premed student until Dr. Wing-tsit Chan, an emeritus professor from Harvard, came to teach. He would sit cross-legged on the desk and hold forth about Lao Tzu and the Buddha, and I found it touched me in a way that organic chemistry didn’t. [Laughs.] Later, when I began to study in the monastery, I saw that poetry was really the voice of the inner life; it’s an expression of beauty, a beauty that inspires us to live in a different way. Buddhist teachings are filled with poems, the Enlightenment poems of the Theravada nuns, the Hundred Thousand Songs of Milerepa, the Zen haiku and the mountaintop wandering poems of China and Japan.
When you consider that we’re living in an age of cell phones and television and the Internet, what do you think the role of poetry is in this present day? It’s still essential. It’s spare and tough and tender and tells the truth and gets into the bones. William Carlos Williams wrote, “It is difficult to get the news from poems, but yet men die miserably for lack of what is found there.” And we still create it—it fills our music, not to mention the poets writing in Rattle. But for us to appreciate poetry, there has to be a willingness to be with sorrow.
Most regard sorrow and sadness are to be avoided. You seem to feel otherwise. When the heart opens, you get everything: what the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu called the ten thousand joys and the ten thousand sorrows. The Buddha called sorrow dukkha. His first words upon his enlightenment were a poem: “Oh, house-builder, thou art seen at last.” By “house-builder” he meant “the builder of this house of sorrows.” And so he continues, describing his liberation: “Broken is the ridgepole, smashed the rafters, awakened to freedom, no more imprisoned by sorrow am I.”
We don’t know how to grieve well. When my friend Malidoma Some, a West African medicine man and professor, first came to America, he said, “I saw that your streets are full of the ungrieved dead.” He meant those who died in wars we didn’t want to pay attention to, the ones who died in our prisons and old-age homes. Until we can grieve honorably, we can’t tend the earth. Only tears make it possible for new vision to come.
How does someone who has never grieved start to do that? It took me a long time. My father was a brilliant scientist and also a paranoid, angry, and often violent man who would beat my mother to the point where she had to wear long sleeves in summer to hide the bruises. She hid bottles behind the curtains so she could grab a weapon to defend herself. Emotion was not an easy thing in our house; we were afraid of it. I thought I’d fit very well into the monasteries, where we would meditate and be quiet. But I discovered that to be more alive I would have to learn how to grieve and how to feel joy—they’re the same gate.
One day, I was angry with a senior monk who’d mistreated me. I went to my teacher, Ajahn Chan, and I said, “I’m really angry.” He answered, “Great! If you’re going to be angry, do it right. Sit in your hut in the woods, close the window and door”—it was the hot season—“put on all your monk’s robes, sit all day and be angry and really get to know it.” So I sat there hot and angry. It wasn’t anger at the monk, it was the anger of a lifetime.
When I teach now, I use the voices of poetry to touch our hearts so we can feel again. With a troubled person I might read a found poem like this, from Offerings at the Wall, a collection of notes and snapshots left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.:
“Dear Sir, for 22 years I have carried your picture in my wallet. I was only 18 years old that day that we faced one another on the trail in Chu Lai, Vietnam. Why you didn’t take my life, I’ll never know. You stared at me for so long, armed with your AK-47, and yet you did not fire. Forgive me for taking your life. I was reacting the way I was trained. So many times over the years I’ve stared at your picture and your daughter. Each time my heart and guts would burn with the pain of guilt, for I have two daughters myself now, and I perceive you as a brave soldier defending his homeland. Above all else, I can now respect the importance that life held for you. I suppose that is why I’m able to be here today. It is time for me to continue my life and release my pain and guilt. Forgive me, sir. Please forgive me.”
When I read something so honest, a door opens to all the things we would like to ask forgiveness for, and for everything we need to grieve. If we can do it, then we can maybe live in a different way with one another, individually and collectively.
You’ve touched on a central issue all of us face—that is, how to live our lives. I hear you saying there is something more important than the acquisitive lives we lead. The great fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz wrote: “The mind is ever a tourist wanting to touch and buy new things, then toss them into an already-filled closet.” But when I sit down with people who have chosen ostensibly materialistic aspirations, when I ask them what’s really important, I discover in them a hidden beauty, a hidden longing, and a hidden love for the sacred as well. Poetry gives this a voice.
Pablo Neruda, toward the end of his life, was invited to read in Caracas. He read for quite a long time before a large crowd. Then he asked, “Is there anything else you’d like to hear?” Someone raised a hand and asked, “Would you please read Poem 19 from Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair?” Neruda answered, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t bring that with me,” at which four hundred people rose to their feet to recite the poem. What a culture that is, to have the poet’s voice in the hearts of so many people.
Would you say poetry is more a way to connect with oneself or to connect with others? That’s like a koan. If you connect with yourself, do you connect with others, if you connect with others, do you connect with yourself? The answer is yes and yes.
To play the Devil’s advocate . . . [Laughing.] Please. I like the Devil. The Devil makes much better poetry.
Mark Twain said, “I’d like to go to heaven for the weather but to hell for the company.” In terms of wrestling with demons, why not just lead them into the dungeon and escape unscathed? Because the demons locked in the dungeon come out at night. We don’t have a choice. We have to face our demons—Mara, in the Buddhist tradition—and our own shadow. Only then can we live in an honest way. It’s only then, through tending what lies in the darkness—like seeds underground in winter—that something new grows, bringing beauty back into the world.
Rilke wrote in a letter, “Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist, in understanding as in creating.
“In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!”
