Poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi is given the time, space, and opportunity to reveal her passionate self in an extensive interview with The Rumpus. The conversation with Brian Spears touches on John Coltrane, boxing, the extended story, spiritual faith, transcendence, Twitter, the body, and metaphor. Among other things.
She says:
I think lots of folks could be qualified as people of faith but choose not to be or don’t allow themselves to be or are forcibly kept from it because they don’t fit into a specific category. What do you do if you don’t believe in God but you do believe in prayer or miss prayer? What do you do if you believe in God but don’t believe in Heaven or Hell? What if you love church or shul but don’t believe in God? What if you love to sit zazen but do not resonate with the Buddha? These are all real issues. And there are many more. I think one advantage that my grandmother had was that the church was so much a part of the community and the civic life (and truly not in a proselytizing way) that one could go to church and think about faith in a really holistic kind of way. And this wasn’t a New Age church at all. But God lived in your actions and what you made of your life (that could include art) and so that actually could fit all kinds of views and ways of being, even in that very New England Episcopalian space. I think of her going back home and my grandfather laughing about “Bible thumping” and it makes me feel a little sad though I think she was pretty fine with it and perhaps that was because she had a clearer understanding of the space than he did.
I don’t think anything can be everything but I do think poems (and all kinds of making) are part of that search. I can say the word void but I choose to think of it as poems attempting to speak towards an enormous silence. Not in an attempt to fill it so much as an attempt to speak alongside it and perhaps to get an answer and also to push into the possibility that silence is the answer. For me that is why writing and prayer are not so different or at least the practice. I don’t expect an answer when I pray.
I know plenty of people who think prayer is futile or ridiculous. I wonder if that has to do with their expectation of response. For me praying is not about asking for things just like writing a poem isn’t about asking for things. It is about the asking. Period. Not asking for but simply asking. The way the voice goes up at the end of a sentence when a question is asked. When I write a poem and when I read a poem that really pushes me and when I pray I am moved into the deepest space of questioning.
Calvocressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart and Apocalyptic Swing, both from Persea Books. She is now the force behind the sports desk for the Best American Poetry Blog -- and no, that's not even an ironic name for it. The sports desk is really is about sports. And it comes to us in the context of poets and poetry. Be still my beating heart.
Comments