The Ways of Affirmation

A Conversation with Luke Hathaway 

I often wonder what direction my career endeavors would have taken had I continued playing guitar after I graduated college. With a degree in hand and no real job prospects on the horizon, I put down that acoustic instrument in favor of poetry, hoping it would provide the answers I was looking for. It most certainly did, but I can’t help but pause and think that if I had not given up learning music, the linguistic rhythm I was starting to develop on the page might have also translated into unique chord progressions and memorable melodies. Perhaps the couplets I was composing would have doubled as lyrics and full-fledged songs. As a young writer, I was under the impression that I had to focus on one medium in order to fully perfect it. Speaking with Luke Hathaway, a poet and librettist, I know now that this could be the furthest mentality from the truth. In his newest collection, The Affirmations (Biblioasis, 2022), the music blares on every page, and the themes of love, faith, vulnerability, longing, and the attempts at navigating the everyday labyrinths of darkness sing with as much precision as they do emotion. 

I was fortunate enough to sit down with Luke to discuss his poetry, his inspirations, and the directions his heart stretches to nowadays.  

---

Esteban Rodriguez: Luke, thank you immensely for your time. The Affirmations was such an amazing reading experience, and I wanted to start by looking at “New Year Letter,” which details a speaker’s process of writing a letter to a friend who is a “devotee of Auden” (W.H. Auden). In the third paragraph of the preface, the speaker states that Auden is in their letter, along with the influence of other great writers and thinkers, and the following lines toward the end of that paragraph profoundly stayed with me long after: 

There are other 
spirits, familiar and unfamiliar–the poet Rilke, the lay-
theologian Charles Williams, one of Bach’s unknown 
librettists, the great poet Anon…– but for the most part 
they are like the guests at a dinner party: one doesn’t need to 
know their names (I hope) in order to enjoy the conversation. 

Poems always seem to take on a life of their own, a life that doesn’t need to be tied strictly back to the poet. Do you find that your poetry extends beyond you? How much of yourself do you find in your work? 

Luke Hathaway: The Affirmations is the most autobiographical of all my books, in the sense that two of its poems are really letters: their epistolary nature is not simply a trope. I wrote them to communicate with certain others in certain moments, sending them as space- and time-abridging arrows; but it’s true as you say: poems have lives of their own, and arrows — no matter how well made & how carefully aimed — will take their own trajectories and find their own marks, and sometimes even redound upon the archer.

ER: What has W.H. Auden meant to you and your writing? Are there any other writers and/or artists that continuously provide inspiration? 

LH: I identify with Auden: I am silly like him. ‘You were silly like us; your gift survived it all’, he wrote, in his elegy for W.B. Yeats. (Of course, one hopes one’s gift — whatever it is — survives one.)

When he was old, in the words of Thekla Clark, he (Auden) became ‘almost beautiful’. (I’d rather be almost beautiful than beautiful, any day.) 

Auden fell in love (again) in middle age and came in that to a new realization of both his spirituality and his queerness.

He was like me beguiled by the Anglican communion with its fealty to the poetry of the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible — that double river that flows, a secret source, beneath the limestone of our/English everydayness, connecting us with the radical love of Herbert and of Donne. But, queer like me, Auden must have found an uneasy home there — in the Anglican church, with its readings out of Paul.

Like me he wrote libretti, and must have felt as I do the fascination of what’s difficult (‘theatre business, management of men’ [Yeats] — ha! As if they ever could be managed or were ever [simply] men!), & understood the metamorphic freedom of the actor’s art.

I think it is these fleeting (& selective) autobiographical fragments that make me feel connected to Auden, more than it is any one or small number of his poems (though as I say in New Year Letter, his meter’s home to me — like him I am beguiled by the English meters, & find them flowing in me even when I mean to keep them out).

I like his essays, and many of them influenced me when I was younger; my mentor Richard Outram, another figure who appears in New Year Letter, gave me a small pamphlet version of The Dyer’s Hand; it’s still on my shelf, and I take it out sometimes — a touchstone.

I suppose this brings me to the second part of your question: “Are there any other writers and/or artists that continuously provide inspiration?” 

I think here of my many dead friends: Auden, Herbert, Donne, & Yeats; Shakespeare & Dickinson; the psalmists and the authors of the Book of Job and the Song of Songs; the Gospel writers; the ancient bards whose work’s ascribed to Homer; the ancient bards whose work’s ascribed to Mother Goose; & c. & c. These are poets whose work I have not simply from the page but from an oral tradition that was passed down to me by my teachers (sundry blood relations & chosen relations, parents/godparents/queerparents …), in the classroom and outside it.

I think, too, of those friends who were living but have joined the dead in my own time: Richard Outram, Steven Heighton — they haunt the pages of The Affirmations (though Heighton was still alive at the time I was working on these poems). 

There are friends, too, who are still living — alive and I trust well and thriving — but who have passed out of my life, for reasons of relational breakdown: these are sad ghosts, and likewise stalk my pages. 

But most of all I think of the living friends with whom I am connected now, thanks be to God, and with whom I still work in communion and community: my singer/scholar friend Daniel Cabena, the dedicatee of the The Affirmations, who commissioned many of its poems as words for music; my poetfriend Colleen (Coco) Collins, whose multimodal work’s a wellspring for me; my godfather Peter Sanger, whose caring scholarship and austere poetics are with me always; my composer colleagues (James Rolfe, Benton Roark, Andrew Balfour, Zachary Wadsworth …) who dream up performative worlds with me; & c. & c. & c. My dear friend and former partner John Haney is a visual artist, and his work and his influences flowed through me in the long time in which we made a life together; my current partner Melissa Marr is likewise a visual artist, and I am moved by her close attention to the morphology of the world.

ER: There were multiple moments where I had to put your book down to contemplate the message or lyricism or detail emanating from the page, and I couldn’t help but linger on the poem “Mercy” for a while. For our readers, the first half of the poem is below: 

Something there is that doesn’t love a line 
of verse, that sends the frozen ground-swell under 
it, and spills the upper syllables in the sun. 
I want to say it’s poetry and yet it isn’t poetry
exactly, this loving rearranger of the stones 
so carefully laid–or not just poetry. 
Time too misremembers: my 
child’s face revised from moment to moment. 
And my own. 
When I come to the river of memory, I want 
to know the proper words; I don’t.… 

These lines had me thinking about what nourishment literature, and more specifically poetry, does and doesn’t provide, and I wanted to know what comforts did writing The Affirmations bring you? What silences still remain? 

LH: What good questions.

I think that writing is or can be a comfort, because it brings us into contact with that which is beyond ourselves — even if that is only (& there’s nothing only about it) our language(s), which is an inheritance from our ancestors and an ongoing, metamorphosing gift from and to all sentient creatures. When we write we are part of this tensive network, even if we aren’t sure what the audience/s of our compositions is/are going to be. And sometimes, we do have a clear audience in mind — even if it’s only one person — and then their intuited presence can shape our prose or verse in ways that are intimate.

Once we finish a work it is out of our hands, however. It is, in that way, like an arrow — the image I used above (which I’ve inherited from Outram). It will find its mark, which may or may not be the mark that we intended. For me, this has (actually) been a grace.

My friend and colleague Michael DiSanto asked me, on reading the long poem New Year Letter, ‘not whom it’s for but, did you ever get a response?’. My feeling is that, when you send a letter like mine or Auden’s — or like Emily Dickinson’s (‘This is my letter to the World / That never wrote to Me’) — a letter that calls on everything you are to write it, then everything you receive from the universe ever after is the response. This may include silence.

Silence can be awful, an extremis (Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?). It can also be a comfort, however — a part of the rhythms of conversation. It can be full of meaning. These are some of the things that verse — with its systolic/diastolic rhythms, its decorous relationship with the page — has taught me and is teaching me.

ER: Can you speak about “A Poor Passion” and its role in this collection. 

LH: The Passion — that transition story — is central. The shape of the book is seasonal and liturgical; thus, the transformation of winter into spring, as it occurs chronologically in the collection, is linked to, seconded by, this ritual (re)telling of a story about a transformation beyond death into life.

There’s more I could say. The work emerged from my relationship with Daniel Cabena, a long time friend and fellow maker, whose singing and scholarship perennially inspire me. We got thinking about Oscar Wilde — his fashion, his theology, his panache. And also his Passion, for Wilde in his prison letter De Profundis tells a (queer) story of death and rebirth that finds serious and consistent analogies in the story/ies of Christ. We were moved by this, as also by the fact that Wilde was reading the Gospels in prison (and, as he did so, ‘queering’ them — avant la lettre). Our Passion became an expression and exploration of this — even as it also helped me to find language for my own queer loves, my gender transition, and what I suppose I might call my religious trauma.

The work is full of queer and trans voices; our dream (mine and Dan’s) is to bring it to life with a diverse company of performers — perhaps under the direction of Kathleen Allen, a choral conductor working out of Toronto who has a magnificent vision for the possibilities here. 

The Poor Passion presents in the pages of The Affirmations as a long/dramatic poem; it is also a contrafactum — an offering of new words for old music, new words designed not to replace the old words, but to be in conversation with them. The basis of the contrafactum is the Johannes-Passion of Johann Sebastian Bach, an oratorio based on the story of Christ’s Passion — the sentencing and death, at the hands of human beings, of a human being who is (also) God — as it is told in the Gospel of John (for me, as for Wilde before me, the great queer gospel). 

Like mine, Bach’s libretto involves both sacred and secular texts and stories: into the substrate of the gospel narrative, as told by a performer who plays John the Evangelist, is set a beautiful array of love songs, performed by various members of the singing company, and sometimes by the company as a whole. This is an aspect of the work I’ve leaned into. Its effect is to meaningfully dissolve the boundary between sacred experience and secular love, between individual and communal experience — a healing effect. For me, it is a restoration of something — a kind of fluidity — that in the worlds I grew up in had been to such a large extent arrested it seemed lost.

ER: In what ways does The Affirmations interact (complement and/or counter) your previous collections? 

LH: The book feels sui generis: really like the only book I’ve written, even as it’s also the fourth (book of poems). That sense of starting over — very real.

ER: What conversation do you hope The Affirmations has with your future work? 

LH: I’m not sure at all. “My future work” sounds so optimistic! I think I’ll be lucky ever to write again.

At the same time, I am writing, working away on things, mostly libretti: two for the composer James Rolfe — and one of these is based on a poem from The Affirmations (“Caeneus”). So I suppose I’m already responding, in my way — and/or listening to the responses of others. Music is a through-line: it’s there all through The Affirmations, and it seems to have signalled a way forward for me, when the poems ran out (or seemed to).

ER: The theme of love is quite evident, but there are moments when darkness takes center stage. I’m thinking of “Nocturnall,” near the end of the collection, and the following lines: 

Trust who compose in darkness: 
the return of light 
is not to be 
believed, 

nor sought with lanterns. 

In order to wait “[f]or the sun,”  you must first experience night. Can you speak a little about this poem and how “darkness,” (philosophically, religiously, poetically) can add perspectives to our worldview that aren’t so easily understood? Does writing about love always include writing about darkness? 

LH: I’d like to think it isn’t so, but The Affirmations is among other things about the necessity of suffering. As John Heath-Stubbs’ writes, reflecting on the mystics’ ‘way of affirmation’: the ‘[The Way of Affirmation], lived to the full, is not necessarily less hard than the Way of Rejection, for it will, sooner or later, involve the affirmation of the images of suffering and loss, along with the others.’

Lots of writers who are important to me have written about the importance of darkness in the spiritual life. Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis is a great text here:

I remember when I was at Oxford saying to one of my friends — as we were strolling round Magdalen’s narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in the June before I took my degree — that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion in my soul. And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-gilt side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom…..

In the Christian mythos, God themself seems to have considered an experience of darkness — not just of darkness, but of total eclipse — to be critical to a full and fully human life. Simone Weil writes of this:

To undergo suffering and death joyfully was from the very beginning considered a sign of grace in the Christian martyrs — as though grace could do more for a human being than it could for Christ. Those who believe that God himself, once he became man, could not face the harshness of destiny without a long tremor of anguish, should have understood that the only people who can give the impression of having risen to a higher plane, who seem superior to ordinary human misery, are the people who resort to the aids of illusion, exaltation, fanaticism, to conceal the harshness of destiny from their own eyes. The man who does not wear the armor of the lie cannot experience force without being touched by it to the very soul. Grace can prevent this touch from corrupting him, but it cannot spare him the wound.

But literal darkness is also important to me. It affords rest; it provides cover – privacy, freedom – especially for those of us who have been banished to the margins. If the meek inherit the earth, the queer inherit the night. 

For the speaker in Wilde’s great prison poem, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, the darkness that permits encounter between gay lovers is ‘the holy night’. I don’t read shame and secrecy in this phrase: I read the blessedness of holy cover from the panopticon of repressive systems, heteronormative and patriarchal. As the compline ritual has it: Keep us as the apple of an eye. / Hide us under the shadow of thy wings. 

My grandfather Nick Blatchford, a newspaper man and queer spirit, once wrote a column in which he lamented the installation of a floodlight at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery: in that banishing of darkness, they’d banished the old soldier’s-friend, he said — that little bit of daily privacy, in a regimented life.

But then, too, God is with us in the darkness: not as our accuser; as our redeemer. As the psalmist writes: If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. / Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.

ER: I often lament the fact that my grandmother wasn’t around to read my debut poetry collection. I hadn’t quite started my literary endeavor when she was alive, but I think it would have been fascinating to see her thoughts about how I’ve depicted our lives along the Rio Grande Valley, where we’re from. Nevertheless, I’ve always been grateful for the readers that have encountered and spent time with my work. Who is The Affirmations for? And if a person, past or present, could spend time with your collection, who would you love for it to be? 

LH: Despite what I said above about my dead friends, whose voices echo in the pages of The Affirmations, I write for the living:

‘You ask me if I write for him,’ says the speaker in New Year Letter; ‘I say I can’t, because he’s gone.’

In a very literal way, as I have said, the book is for Daniel Cabena, a singer-scholar and animateur, and my dear friend. It is dedicated to him. If my wish was for him to spend intimate time with the book, it has been granted: he spent eight hours in a recording studio with this slim volume (& its author), singing and speaking its poems into the record, in the form of an audio book. Dan had commissioned and/or inspired many of the poems in the first place, as words for music; and he created new melodic material for other poems — poems I felt were antiphonal in nature; he finished these poems, by allowing their interpolated lines to sound forth in a voice that is literally other — other than my own, and also other than a speaking voice. It is a singing voice, a voice that connects with folk traditions (pub songs, ballads …), with the matrilineal transmission of lullabies, with ritual and prayer.

The book travels beyond its dedication, however; any book does, I feel, if it’s worth its salt. When we’re reading it well, it is for us. We step into the position of the dedicatee. 

(Your retrospective wish for your grandmother to have read your early poems: it makes me want to read your early poems, through your grandmother’s eyes. Not that it’s possible, vernacularly speaking; but your wish makes me stretch my heart in that direction.)

George Johnston wrote that great poems aspire to the condition of anonymity – to have been written by no one. Great poems probably also aspire to one day be read by everyone.

ER: I really love the way you phrase your sentiments toward my grandmother reading my poems. In what personal and literary directions are you currently stretching your heart?

LH: Towards music, towards music — …. There’s so much more I wish to understand about this poetic medium: about rhythm, about melody, about intervals and modes, and modes beyond the European …; about how allusion functions in this aural medium; about the somatic effects of music; about how to use my new changed/changing voice to sing…. This is an important new direction.

And then, also, I stretch my heart towards plot: towards an understanding of the art of narrative – dramatic structure, causal relation, the limitations and capacities of characters and character. All this is a great mystery!

And then, also, toward dance – embodied art; movement and gesture….

I have become a performer in middle life, the time when many performers retire from the stage, and/or turn to careers in writing or directing. But I am intrigued by the possibilities of an embodied art, including of an embodied language of limitation: the way on stage we show our limits as well as our capacities. The body aging, the body broken down…. In my case, too, the trans body, in all its non-normative beauty.

These directions in my work (the gestural, the durational, the present, the embodied …) break down the art-life binary to some very large extent: the personal and literary directions become the same.

I think about the (gestural/durational/present/embodied) ways in which I exist in the world, in which I go through the days that I am given….

I write to you from a sunny morning in Kjipuktuk. Out my window I can hear a springbird singing (I stretch my heart to know its name: in English? In Mi’kmaq? in French?), and I can see the tresses of the weeping birch stirring in the breeze. The breeze comes in through my window also, and it is very gentle: hard to imagine on a morning like this that I’m just blocks from the sea.

I’m in a third-storey apartment; in its one bedroom, my elder kid is still asleep. My younger kid is sacked out beside me here, in the bed that takes up much of the main room. My heart stretches towards the workday, the prospect of trying to move, with word and deed (breakfast?) these small now-sleeping bodies out of sleep and into the day, of getting them to school and me to my partner’s apartment, where I’ve been working (for a change of scene): grading a stack of papers, at this time of year….

Yesterday I learned a big grant for an opera project has come through, so my heart is stretching in that direction also: wondering about narrative, wondering about plot…. Wondering what it will be like to work with this particular new group of collaborators: a whole new batch of human relationships opening up there. I pray to God to make my heart open and gentle to and in this work, to make me a good listener, to allow me to contribute something from out of my capacities, my lived experience, that will help to make it good.

All of this seems like – feels like – is – a tremendous grace. There have been times in my life when I was in such profound mental/spiritual/emotional crisis that my heart couldn’t stretch in any direction at all; I was in agony, my attention solely given to the task of trying to weather these contractions of pain.

This, and I have lived a privileged life. That’s also true.

As we draw this interview to a close my heart stretches also in your direction, gratefully.