INTRODUCTION

Poetry is a profoundly relational art, an invitation to connect: with the poet, with the poem, and through the poem with each other, with the deepest aspects of our shared human experience. Poetry is also, I believe, a fundamentally spiritual art. It draws on the same powers of insight and imagination, wisdom and compassion, wonder and awe that form the basis of our spiritual response to the world. Artistic expressions of that response extend as far back as the earliest cave art 40,000 years ago, where luminous half-human/half-animal beings seem to rise out of the rock from the spirit world. Some anthropologists now believe that such art was created by shamans and that the caves themselves were spaces where sacred rituals were performed. They have found that the paintings always appear in those caves with the greatest acoustic resonance and were thus best suited for singing. Right from the very beginning, the impulse to make art has been inseparable from a desire to make contact with the sacred.

In “O Darkness,” which appears in the Reverence section of this anthology, Danusha Lameris points to the primal mystery at the heart of artistic-spiritual expression: “What we do not know lies in darkness. / The way the unsayable rests at the back of the tongue. / So let us sing of it…” What can’t be said can be sung. And like song, poetry can become a conduit for the unsayable, a way to embody what lies just beyond our conscious knowing. My teacher A.R. Ammons put it this way: “Poetry is a verbal means to a non-verbal source … a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.” Not all poems take us to that still point or make contact with the sacred, but great poems do, and poetry itself—who knows how?—is inherently possessed of this power.

Within this broad framework of poetry as a fundamentally relational and spiritual art, I have chosen the organize this collection around the themes of grief, gratitude, and reverence for several reasons: because these emotions can move us beyond the small self and its egoic concerns; because they call us to remember our true nature, who we really are; and because they offer the felt experience of connection we all long for, consciously or unconsciously. But those reasons did not fully emerge until well after I had started thinking about this book. In truth, I felt drawn to the themes grief, gratitude, and reverence without at first exactly knowing why.

In December of 2021, while staying on the Oregon coast, the shape of this collection finally came into focus. I had been wanting to create another anthology, one devoted exclusively to modern and contemporary poetry, ever since The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy was published in 2017. But it wasn’t until that winter day, sitting on a rock looking out at the Pacific, that the three themes of of the book suddenly came to me. I felt some resistance initially—I was uncertain about how grief, gratitude, and reverence fit with each other—but they kept suggesting themselves to me, and in the end it felt right to bring them together even if I didn’t fully understand how they were connected. I trusted that a deeper underlying logic would make itself clear. I knew at the outset that they represented powerful emotional states we needed to experience, individually and collectively, in a much more conscious and embodied way.