A Review of Homage to Søren Kierkegaard, edited by Dana Gioia and Mary Grace Mangano

Review by Matthew King

Dana Gioia and Mary Grace Mangano, eds., Homage to Søren Kierkegaard: Poems in Memory of Reverend Ronald Marshall. Wiseblood, 2023.

Review by Matthew King

Dana Gioia, in his Preface to Homage to Søren Kierkegaard: Poems in Memory of Reverend Ronald Marshall, writes that “there is no other poetry anthology like it.” Such claims are usually tolerable hyperbole, but in this case Gioia’s can’t reasonably be doubted. Perhaps none among the philosophers could equal the intensely personal Kierkegaard as a poetic muse, but still, one might expect there to have been an interesting set of circumstances leading to the existence of a volume of poems in homage to any philosopher, and indeed there was, as recounted in the Preface and the Introduction (each delightful, touching, edifying, and succinct), by, respectively, Gioia and Jane Harty, the widow of the volume’s dedicatee, Ronald Marshall. Marshall was a pastor at a Lutheran church in Seattle who, as Gioia puts it, venerated Kierkegaard the way Catholics venerate their saints. In 2013 Marshall contacted Gioia, then poet laureate of California, offering him a commission to write a poem on the occasion of Kierkegaard’s bicentennial, which Gioia ultimately accepted. After Marshall’s untimely death in 2021, Harty found among his files an outline for a book of poems based on prompts from Kierkegaard, which she sent to Gioia; the latter, she writes, “convinced [her] that it absolutely needed to be finished.” Hence a contest was devised as a means to procure poems, inspired directly by Marshall’s prompts or otherwise by Kierkegaard, that might realize Marshall’s vision for the book. It was, to invoke the most clichéd (pseudo-)Kierkegaardian phrase, a leap of faith on Gioia’s and Harty’s parts; their seeming Abrahamic faith in the project’s success has been richly rewarded in the resulting anthology.

Harty provides some brief examples of Marshall’s own Kierkegaard-inspired poetry, which show both that he would have been a strong contender in the contest in his honor and that his premature death preempted the completion of what would have been an equally wonderful, and fascinatingly different, volume of poems. That book would have been unified by the voice of someone whose Kierkegaardian concerns were oriented urgently around his ministry; the present book contains a stimulating variety of voices and perspectives, which has in part to do with the fact that Kierkegaard is an epitome of (Lutheran) Protestantism, while the magazine Dappled Things through which the contest was run, like Gioia himself, is Catholic. In fact, Gioia says he initially declined Marshall’s offer of a commission because he found Kierkegaard opaque, but “a poem came” when he realized that this opacity was due to the fact that Kierkegaard “represented the extreme end of Protestant interiority that had been difficult for [his] Catholic sensibility to understand.” Gioia doesn’t explain this—he seems to have identified the problem as the solution—but it is fitting given how Kierkegaard sometimes astonishingly demonstrates that seemingly opposite concepts are not just mirror images but, when pressed hard enough dialectically, may be revealed as barely distinguishable from each other. Indeed, curiously, beyond his particular difficulty with Kierkegaard, it was a more characteristically Protestant attitude about writing poems that led Gioia to decline the commission: he writes that he told Marshall he was “hopeless at writing occasional poems” because for him “poems came either unbidden or not at all.”

There are two poems in the book that may be seen to work particularly overtly with a dialectic between typically Catholic and Protestant sensibilities. One is Dante Di Stefano’s unrhymed and unmetered Petrarchan sonnet “Blessed Restlessness”, which contrasts Catholic continuity with Protestant disruption as its narrator recalls the rituals of the Church in the midst of the mortal crisis of a car crash. The other is Tristan Macdonald’s “Crucify Him”, the narrator of which recounts his offense when

          In the Passion narrative at Palm Sunday Mass,
          the priest broke from the prescribed liturgy,           
          assigning us Your part instead of the crowd’s

but then, after reporting that he himself

          spoke the crowd’s words loudly and proudly,
          wanting to rise and rebel in the American way:
          a lone cowboy against an errant sheriff

he reproaches himself for the Pharisaism of his own, ironic, self-assertion, as he had earlier reproached the priest for his “Pharisaical decision” “to distance [the congregation] from sinners.”

Macdonald’s poem invites the reader to ask what is redeemable in individual selfhood, and this question is perhaps the most persistent theme in the anthology. Gioia and Harty both note that Marshall had this passage from Kierkegaard’s Christian Discourses prominently framed: “I will seek my refuge with the Crucified One … to save me from myself.” Yet for the Kierkegaard of, for instance, The Sickness Unto Death, discovering an appropriate sense of one’s own self, grounded in its relationship with the God who created it in its particularity, is the key to overcoming despair—that is, to salvation itself. This seeming contradiction is grist for Kierkegaard’s dialectical mill; poets, however, may tend to one side of it or the other. Paul Bussan’s “The Kierkegaardian Oath of Authenticity” seems the clearest possible assertion of one side; in its entirety it is:

          I do solemnly swear,
          upon pain of blasphemy,
          me, the whole me,
          and nothing but me,
          so help me, God, to be.

A few pages later, Michial Farmer’s “Dysmonium” offers a seeming counterpoint, provocatively suggesting that Kierkegaard’s dictum “purity of heart is to will one thing” demands of me (referring to the poem’s narrator but also any of us), with regard to what he calls “the drunkard’s choir of my psyche,”

          to transform
          the lunatic cacophony into plainchant—
          a ruler’s single line, the mathematical
          precision of the passionless, musical spheres.

Meanwhile, Jeanette W. Stickel’s “Pneuma” expresses a similar idea in similarly musical but more overtly religious language:

          Pass through me Breath of Life,
          make my notes pure—shape the music
          of my broken life by your spirit,
          make it one with yours.

As one might expect of a project overseen by Gioia, there is a formalist tilt to the poems in this anthology, although several of them—including Gioia’s own contribution—are on the formal-ish side of free verse. And as one might expect of a formalist-leaning collection of poems resulting from a contest, there are quite a few sonnets, but there is an interesting variety of these (as already indicated by my characterization above of Di Stefano’s), some of which show how formal poems can be at their best when they stretch their forms. This is especially so when form is altered to harmonize with content, as in Fr. Stephen A. Gregg’s third-place winning poem “Two-Step”, which is a sonnet with a Spenserian rhyme scheme but irregular meter, embodying in disjointed time the movement of Kierkegaard’s (as opposed to Hegel’s) uncertainly dialectical thought, beginning like so:

          This is another step, not astray
          but syncopated, please, —it never lands
          in old time. Write that down: The way
          I play forever, improvise off-hand
          the eternal pattern—step, and stop, and stand.

Paul J. Pastor’s second-place winning “That Which Cannot Rest Content” is a yet more irregular (unrhymed, with one striking exception) sonnet, to the extent that it may not be immediately identifiable as a sonnet at all (and in a book of poems most of which are readily accessible, Pastor’s stands out as one that calls for slow and careful reading, and re-reading). Its first line (disguised as an epigraph) is a neat bit of iambic hexameter from Kierkegaard—“Suppose there was a king who loved a humble maiden”—which Pastor follows with three such lines of his own, before the orderly pattern begins to break down to match the disorder in the king’s own heart:

          And in the king’s good chest, suppose an anxious thought, 
          which counsel or rebuke could not dispel; suppose
          the nibbled notion that his favour once conferred
          would sour, like stale wine on last night’s table.

Jesse Keith Butler’s third-place winning “Lightning Strikes Churches” also neatly marries form and content (see his New Verse Review poem “The Butlerian Prohibition against Thinking Machines” for another example of his nimble inventiveness with form), in a different way, its four amphibrachically metered stanzas each narrowing from four beats per line to three and then two for the quick jab of the repeated line “When lightning strikes churches,” then broadening back to three beats as the flash fades.

Another third-place winner, Nadine Elsworth-Moran’s “Stealing Figs While on Holiday in Greece”, is a tritina, which is a shorter variation on the sestina. Sometimes form forces poets to do things their poems might be better off without; Elsworth-Moran’s poem, for me, is an example of the opposite, as best illustrated in the inversion forced by this enjambment: “so brilliant / is their scheme, I must brilliant / be to release them from affliction.” Being forced to get back to the repeated word “brilliant” sooner than a speaker normally would in standard contemporary syntax adds to the poem’s thrilling, rushing exuberance.

Kierkegaard has a reputation as a dour and austere philosopher but there is a good smattering of humour in this volume (as is apparently fitting in tribute to Marshall, who Harty writes had “an infectious laugh” and who she calls “a Rascal-Saint”). The book ends (as the music of chance would have it—apart from the prize winners, the poems appear in alphabetical order by poet’s last name) with Gail White’s delightfully, lightly ironic “Sonnet for Some of Us,” which begins:

          Blessed are those who take what they can get.
          Who marry someone who is not the greatest
          beauty or athlete that they’ve ever met.

Matthew Carey Salyer’s third-place winning “From the Papers of One Still Living” I am sure would have been deemed prize-worthy on the strength of these audaciously amusing lines alone:

          For God’s sake,
          look at the hideousness of the swans in Central Park,
          or the beautiful childishness of tourists craning
          their necks to see rooflines scrub the white doll
          skin of heaven.

This is the closest the anthology comes to anything like gritty Seidel-esque sardonicism; a very different kind of irony is deployed to droll effect by Ron Houssaye, whose poem is titled “The Passions of Søren Kierkegaard” and gives in the most contrastingly flat style imaginable a summary of Kierkegaard’s biography, concluding, piling irony upon irony, that since “the most delightful passion of Søren Kierkegaard may well be Irony,” “tragic is not a word that fits S.K.”

For me the most comic moment in the book is provided by Joyce Schmid’s lively “Sarah Complains to the Lord About Kierkegaard”; I laughed out loud when I read the lines:

          Not until he tied poor Isaac up,
          stretched forth his hand and actually
          raised the knife to slay his son
          did You step in and send an angel to command,
          “Lay not thine hand upon the lad,”
          an angel too polite to add, “You lunatic.”

Schmid’s poem would be one of my contenders if I were awarding additional prizes to poems in this book; two others would be the similarly themed “Three Portraits of Abraham” by E. Edward Horne and “Rereading Fear and Trembling” by Mia Schilling Grogan. Horne’s poem begins with a brief, thoughtful meditation on slaughtering a goat; in its concluding stanza, after the poem’s narrator’s son expresses fear that he will share the goat’s fate, the narrator comments provocatively, much in the spirit of Fear and Trembling: “Forgive me father, for I have only sinned.” Grogan’s poem, written in terza rima with a couple of arresting departures, is meanwhile one of several in the book (including also Schmid’s) which, to me, resist that spirit and, more generally, Kierkegaard’s tendency to melodramatic severity in both his philosophy and his personal life:

          Now, when I reread this
          book, mostly I worry about Søren—all his fear-
          filled titles, clear evidence of anxiety, of a sickness
          we treat today. Honestly, I wish for him a life
          with Regine and the freedom for the greatness
          he achieved, not either/or.

This being a prize anthology—speaking of the Kierkegaardian spirit, and of comedy, one has to wonder (though I don’t mean this as an objection) what he would have thought of being the subject of a competition for prizes—one may be curious how the winner stacks up against the rest. There is no doubt that the first-place poem—“The Wreck of the København” by Hugh Savage—distinguishes itself, first of all in that at forty-eight lines it is the longest poem in the book, much longer than all but a couple of others. This may seem a trivial thing to mention except that, as any poetry contest veteran knows, whether longer poems are more likely than shorter ones to win contests is a persistently vexing question. Insofar as the answer to that question is “yes”, in this case one can see why there is good reason for it (though Ellsworth-Moran’s tritina makes a particularly strong case for the prize-worthiness of brief poems). Of all the poems in the book there is the most there there in Savage’s, which engages with Kierkegaard by vivid illustration rather than exposition; it needs space to lay out, in rollicking sestets of rhymed pentameter, its gripping narrative of shipwreck (which makes several charming apparent allusions to Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” perhaps mischievously including Lightfoot’s line, which he was persuaded to alter in live performance, implying that someone doomed the ship by neglecting to secure the main hatchway). These are bookended by two stanzas invoking the biblical figure of Absalom by way of the ship’s figurehead of Absalon, the founding bishop of Copenhagen. The poem concludes:

          Absalon: Absalom (son of David): Ab Shalom!
          “Father of Peace”, Hammer of the Wends,
          conduct these sailors safely to their home—
          to where the seas are not high nor the winds cold,
          to where their life begins right where it ends:
          a place beyond the limits of the world.

This sounds almost like conventional Christian homilizing on hope for the dead, but the ironic invocation of Absalon and his biblical eponym, two warrior “fathers of peace,” indicates that we are on the ground of Kierkegaardian dialectic: here “life begins right where it ends” is not a play on words with a safely understood meaning (let alone a comforting untruth) but an actual paradox in need of elaboration, and what might be salvageable of any soul, either within or “beyond the limits of the world,” is a matter radically in question.

Matthew King used to teach philosophy at York University in Toronto, Canada; he now lives in what Al Purdy called "the country north of Belleville", where he tries to grow things, counts birds, takes pictures of flowers with bugs on them, and walks a rope bridge between the neighbouring mountaintops of philosophy and poetry. His photos and links to his poems can be found at birdsandbeesandblooms.com.