Nothing You Can Carry: A Conversation on the Poetics of Faith with Susan Alexander
Susan Alexander is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently Nothing You Can Carry (Thistledown Press, 2020). In 2019, she won the Ross and Davis Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry. As someone who is interested in the presence of faith in contemporary poetry, I was struck by the quiet, spiritual weight of her poems. Like love and grief (other predominant themes in her work), God has both an ordinary and devastating presence in Alexander’s poems. I am very grateful to have had the occasion to talk with Susan Alexander about the intersections of faith and poetry..
—Dominique Béchard
DB: I think it’s safe to say that Nothing You Can Carry is steeped in spirituality. Sometimes this is overt—there are multiple poems in which God is an actual character or addressee. Often, the poems have a spiritual sense, but don’t appear to be theological per se. Could you begin by speaking to your own religious roots and influences, and to the ways in which you wanted the collection to grapple with faith?
SA: I am so glad that you see the spirituality in my poems. I don’t always see it myself. This is just how I encounter the world around me.
I think my first experience of God was the colour yellow – buttercups up against the grey asphalt siding of our house. My theological teaching came in the form of fairy tales, myths and legends followed by the Narnia books and Tolkien’s trilogy. I saw and I still see the natural world as animate, as having autonomy and importance in and of itself, beyond human utility. Scratch my surface and you will find a pantheist. My father was agnostic, and my mother had grown up Pentecostal. I think their compromise was the United Church, but by the time I came around, youngest of seven children, getting the family out the door rarely happened on a Sunday morning. As an older teenager, I encountered Christianity again in an intense, evangelical form through friends who had been “saved” but I rejected it and became anti-Christian. The divine seemed much more present in the forest and the ocean than in people.
I was finally drawn into the Anglican Church through marriage and a wonderful Irish priest named Herbert O’Driscoll whose sermons were filled with poetry, science and history. The liturgy reached into the deep past and somehow connected me to ancient forms of faith that made sense to me: the confession that we are not the way we want to be in the world, the corporate meal, eating the body of the God – which truly is what I think we do at every meal. I found a way of entering a religious worldview that includes the divine presence in the natural world. There was room for mystery.
For the most part my faith is embedded in the poems, but I do reach into liturgy and scripture for forms. Some of the ideas in the poem “Clamavi” had been rolling around in my head for a year or two until I borrowed the form of intercessory prayer in which one person on behalf of the whole prays for the world, the church, the community, those in need, the sick and the departed. Of course, the intercessor is not supposed to try to change God’s mind or convince God to act, as the speaker does in this poem. A similar thing happened with “The Whirlwind Speaks Questions Burnco Rock Products Ltd.” I’d been trying for several weeks to write a poem about the province of BC giving approval for a gravel mine in a Howe Sound estuary – the poem was for Yvonne Blomer’s Sweetwater anthology. My early years as a journalist left me with the appetite for research and fights. I’d read through a few decades of wildlife reports for the area, but as soon as I tried to write about the situation, I had a polemical rant or a sermon or an editorial, but not a poem. Until I turned to the book of Job and found a form, a container.
DB: Thank you for thoughtfully tracing your influences. For me, this “room for mystery” is what I find most beautiful about faith, and about poetry like yours—which seems at peace with not-knowing, yet still moves with restless, questioning intensity.
I’m interested in the epigraph you chose for the book, from Lorna Crozier’s poem “Star Cluster”: “choosing, / over heaven, / this common patch of earth.” Do you see your poems as reflective of this fragment, or as pushing against it? Is there a way, for example, your poems might desire, or argue in favour of, both heaven and earth?
SA: The poems in the collection are argumentative, aren’t they? Though I hope some of them push or persuade the reader to be still. Perhaps all poetry aspires to just this – it asks for our attention, and Simone Weil said that absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
I had to persuade my editor Seán Virgo that the Lorna Crozier epigraph fit my manuscript. The earth is for me something like the body of God. Not synonymous with God, who I believe is present within and beyond us. The theological term is panentheism. But where else do we touch the holy except in the material, including weather, rock and water? I am sceptical of theologies and philosophies that tidy up and package reality for us. The idea of heaven as a perfect afterlife is intriguing but not compelling. I will find out soon enough, or not. The epigraph invites us to experience wonder. It uses traditional dualism to invite us into an eternal moment. I cannot choose one above the other, but see that heaven and earth are both somehow present within these particular wildflowers. Heaven is here if we have eyes to see.
DB: Thanks for clarifying! I’ve been reading a lot of Christian medieval theology lately (Eckhart, Gregory of Nyssa, etc.) and I’ve been somewhat put off by their insistence that we must reject all earthly matter in order to attain union with God. However, I like this idea of dualism as an invitation “into an eternal moment”! This leads into my next question.
Galway Kinnell once wrote that “when you go deep enough within yourself, deeper than the level of ‘personality,’ you are suddenly outside yourself, everywhere.” I am reminded of this while reading your work; there’s a first-person speaker throughout the book, but the ‘I’ seems less concerned with the autobiographical and more in favour of accessing some deep emotional truth. I was also struck by a couple of lines in your poem “Threnody” that read: “You’ve been writing this poem for decades, / rewinding time until you don’t exist.” Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about poetry as a spiritual gesture, of a poem’s speaker as a proponent of this going deeper than personality to the point where the ‘self’ is replaced by a kind of cosmic feeling.
Can you talk a bit about your intentions as a poetic speaker? Since one of the sections in your book is called “Confession,” how much does the act of confession, religious or otherwise, play a role in your work?
SA: After reading your question, I just had to look up the Kinnell interview – brilliant! And then my self, the little I, immediately defaulted into comparing and I felt like I had nothing whatsoever of any value to say. This is where the problematic self gets me, which I do aspire in my poetry to transcend. I think the state you describe as a cosmic feeling is an ideal for me. My dearest hope when I write out of a particular time, place and experience is that the poem will move the reader through the particular into a wider field.
Poetic confession is an act of vulnerability that allows the reader to truly see the speaker of the poem. Personally, confession gives me a way to be honest, come clean. I may not do anything more than admit my fault; it may not lead to action or change, but it is a step along the way. This works in relationships as well. I am not who I want to be. The speaker in my poems often reveals to me ways in which I have been living in denial. When I discovered confession in liturgy, I felt relief. It feels exactly right to corporately name the things we have done and have left undone, the ways we have not loved our neighbours as ourselves, and I include cedar trees and sea lions as my neighbours.
Confession is a way of processing shame, personal and corporate. I want to reflect on my irresponsible privilege: how the shirt I bought online that looks so terrific and was a great deal could have a huge carbon footprint attached to its manufacture and transport and maybe was made by a child in terrible conditions; a shirt that may be garbage in a year or two when the colour goes out of style. My poems about the environment are not us against them. I am no innocent bystander. I am an economic beneficiary of a system that has degraded the earth and atmosphere and is threatening the existence of countless species, including homo sapiens. If I deny this knowledge, I have no way forward. Confession gives me a chance to acknowledge that I am implicated, embedded within and benefiting from a sick system.
DB: I get the feeling reading your work that the divine is something that has been lost (the first phrase of the collection’s first poem reads: “I miss the old gods”), and I simultaneously get the sense that the divine is something that remains (I like this moment in “Eschatology” when you write: “This life from loss. This living / plaited with the dead”).
I was hoping you might clarify some of your ideas regarding mourning’s relationship to faith. Do you see these poems as elegies? What’s the relationship, for you, between mourning the divine and mourning the planet?
SA: I do think our consumer-driven world has lost touch with the divine. That doesn’t mean the divine is not there to be found. What is missing, I think, is our searching. We keep mistaking ourselves for gods. Rilke writes in one of his poems “When we win it’s with small things, / and the triumph itself makes us small. / What is extraordinary and eternal / does not want to be bent by us.” We all live in a human-centric world which is likely more intense if you live in the city. I am lucky enough to live in a rural setting where I can disappear into the woods or get out on the water or just look out the window at birds, forest, mountain and ocean. The bigness and otherness of the natural world helps me get right-sized and that is when I can connect with the divine.
I do see many of these poems as elegies: I am mourning the divine and the planet, but I am also mourning ourselves and future generations, as we destroy our home. I am inspired by Jan Zwicky’s poems of environmental witness. She forces the reader to look with her speaker at the dying world and what is being lost. “The one sin is refusal” she writes in her poem “Courage.”
In my prose poem, “Kashkul, Beggar’s Bowl,” there is a line: “You never got kicked out of Eden – you are living HERE!” Humans are well-adapted to the world in which we live. Yet even though we have known better for decades, we continue practises that alter our environment into something increasingly hostile to us. We refuse to look at the consequences of our actions or take responsibility for them, all for the sake of current comfort and convenience. I do have hope that we can turn it around. In fact, I believe that the earth itself is what could heal us. It is the ultimate carbon sink if only we can wake up and change our cultural values of progress and growth at any cost. If we don’t wake up, we will be threatened with extinction like other species. The planet and life will go on without us. It doesn’t need us, we need it.
Our western culture is not very good at contemplating death. The elegy faces death squarely and that is why so many of these poems are elegies. On a personal level, I went through an intense period of mourning when I lost two nieces I loved to cancer. They were cousins and died within weeks of each other. The poem “Eschatology” is dedicated to them. Over the last few years, I’ve watched a friend suffer after the suicide of her daughter, a daughter lose her partner to cancer, my sister lose her son to the opioid crisis. The grief of losing a young person is intense. We cling to them and they haunt us with their lost youth, their lost years. Each time we mourn, I think our grief attaches to all the griefs that came before it. Often the language around illness is filled with war imagery: fighting, battles, conquering. But in the natural world, death can bring nourishment. Death in the forest has a beauty and an economy. A dead tree can host so much life: insects, birds, fungi, mosses and ferns. A dead deer feeds the turkey vultures and other creatures. The natural world knits together death and life and I find that hopeful.
DB: Thank you for that beautiful response—I love this idea of personal grief attaching “to all the griefs that came before it.”
Another thing I love about this book is the way it moves. It’s more intuitive than anything I can actually place. There’s a great emotional range. And I like the way you employ tone in your poems to evoke religious forms: prayer, parable, confession, contemplation, etc. Did you find that writing these poems, being immersed in their formal workings, changed your perception of faith? Have they helped you articulate things that were previously mysterious to yourself?
SA: I am so glad that you see the spiritual underpinnings of this book. My expression of faith doesn’t always match traditional forms of piety. I think shaping this book was deeply intuitive but also revealed to me the spiritual nature of my writing – it helped me to own it. So much religiosity is about certainty and safety. But faith involves living with uncertainty. The ethicist Margaret Somerville says the opposite of faith is not doubt, the opposite is certainty. I love how many characters in the Hebrew scriptures are often rash, and full of complaints – so am I. They are much more earthy, like the flawed characters of Greek mythology and legend. The poetry of the Psalms, the Song of Songs, the book of Job are filled with beauty, paradox, lament and mystery, not with linear answers. Tell me a story or sing me a song – I will pick that a thousand times over any systematic theology.
Mystery is a key word for me. I am attracted to the mystics, who I think of as revealing their experience of the divine as opposed to constructing doctrine. Julian of Norwich had the vision of everything having one being with God. Whoever loves God loves all that is. And I would add that whoever loves a bird or a tree or the ocean or the night sky or another human being opens up the heart to knowledge and love of the whole.
I am not sure how much that appears in my writing. After all, my poetry describes less than ideal things. Some of my poems in the book are conversations with despair. My poem “Canticle for Sea Lions in Howe Sound” grapples with the tension between protest and praise.
DB: I am also attracted to the mystics, and find personal experiences of faith much more compelling than doctrine (which has a place, of course, but a secondary one).
In another interview, you mention Lorna Crozier’s God of Shadows as inspiration (I haven’t read it yet, but I recently picked it up). Do you have any other spiritual or theological reading suggestions, poetry or otherwise? Are there other mediums, besides literature, that have helped shaped your own approach to theopathy?
SA: Theopathy is quite a word -- it made me think of pathology + theism!! I went to the dictionary and I see that it has to do more with the experience of the divine or absorption in devotion. Lately I’ve been getting that experience from looking at the lupins coming up on the island after the rain. They gather these large droplets of water in their green palms. Sometimes there are a string of tiny water beads along the leaf’s many fingers. I have a hard time being still, but for me the moment of seeing can be a doorway to the holy.
Getting back to your question about literature—until I started writing seriously, much of my reading of poetry was centered on dead white men: the Romantic poets, T.S. Eliot. I related to Keats and Wordsworth, their epiphanies and also to Virginia Woolf, her moments of being. I am very fond of George Herbert, the 17th century priest-poet. Many of his devotional poems speak to me—particularly the famous last poem in his posthumous collection, The Temple. “Love 3” is an intimate masterpiece of a poem that shows deep unconditional love even as the speaker acknowledges unworthiness. To me this poem speaks of divine love’s tenderness, acceptance, and understanding of the human condition. It is the type of love that I would most like to exemplify in my own life, though I know I will fall short. Derek Walcott’s poem “Love After Love” is, I think, a gloss of this Herbert poem, and his speaker invites the reader into a profound and healing love of the self. Don’t you love how poems speak to each other over the centuries? I wanted to write devotional poetry, but I couldn’t write like Herbert; it felt artificial to me and far beyond my skill with language. Lorna Crozier is a mentor to me and studying with her helped me to claim my voice. Her God of Shadows is a delightful book – funny and intelligent, reaching out with lyrical precision to caress the magnificence of our world, its feathers and wind.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the place where I experience the divine regularly is in nature, in the intense green moss on a cliff after days of rain. God is in the greenness. The violet green swallows feeding outside my window. The rare sighting of a humpback in the bay. So much of what I see of the divine arrives in a moment of revelation, the whale breach and then the calm surface of the channel. For a moment if I am attentive, if I am lucky, I will see something that enters my soul. Love is in these moments of greenness, of swallows, of barking sea lions. I see the Beloved.
DB: The way poems speak to other poems over time reminds me of what you said earlier about individual grief connecting to the griefs of others. Maybe it’s possible to think of these connections as a manifestation of the divine, as mystery intertwined in our lives.
Thank you very much for the care you’ve put into these responses! I hope everybody reads your poems—they definitely should.
