We sent the CRI newsletter out last week with an interview with our resident poet, Pavel Chichikov. That interview, however, was edited, so here’s the full interview, which includes his own favorite poem.
What is it about poetry that attracts you to it?
In the first place there’s the simple pleasure of making something, which is known to everyone who enjoys a craft or a hobby. When I was about twelve I found out that putting words together to make a poem was enjoyable. People who like to build model airplanes or make furniture experience something similar. But when you write a poem there’s more than the pleasure of joining pieces of wood to make a model. It’s like designing and building a model that will actually fly like a real aircraft. If you could find people small enough to get into it, they could go on journeys through the air inside your model, which would no longer be a model but a real airplane. Poems, like paintings or sculptures or symphonies, say deep and complex things about human experience. Like airplanes, they’re vehicles, but a work of art is a vehicle of the soul and the mind as well as of the body.
Words are words, but why can poetry convey something beyond those words that prose doesn’t seem to be able to do?
I’ve never felt comfortable with prose, so I don’t want to say too much about it. But a poem has a ritual, incantatory quality that prose seldom has. This has partly to do with rhythm, stress, and often rhyme. These qualities resonate with something deep inside us that holds the body and the soul together. I hope that in my own work the incantation is a pious one that rises toward God’s glory. The craft and the intention to glorify should come together, if the poem is successful.
How long have you been writing poetry and what first got you started on it?
I remember starting to write at about the age of twelve, but a teacher I had then wasn’t very encouraging. What really got me started seriously was breaking up with a girl friend when I was 19.
I felt awfully sorry for myself, but writing endless imitations of Shakespearean sonnets seemed to make me feel better for a while. I learned a lot by doing it. Imitation of a master in any art is the best way of learning.
Part of the praise of your poetry has been that one can pray over it. How much do you pray when you’re writing it? Or can you say that your poetry is the fruit of your prayer?
Poetry, when it starts with the intention to praise God and His creation, to speak to God, to call on God, even to complain and lament to God, is a form of prayer. The same is true of any other art form. When I finish a poem I make the sign of the cross as a way of offering thanksgiving. I don’t make a big deal of it externally. God knows how grateful I feel.
But poetry is not only the finished work . Poetry is also the exploration of writing a poem, of looking for what it is that you really want to say, and locating in words what it is you’re looking for. The act of writing is also a form of prayer.
If you could give five tips for our audience on how to understand your poetry, what would they be?
First, last and always, look at what the poem is saying literally. If it looks as if the poem is written in code, then either the poem is a bad one, or you’re looking for something that isn’t there. But that said, one also should take into account that the language of good poetry isn’t like ordinary literal speech. The poem means what it says, but what it says is often put into the kind of symbolic, allusive, interactive, imagistic, multi-leveled language that we find in dreams. In that way, poetry is highly economical, and can say many things on many levels at once. As it does so, it leads the reader – or should lead the reader – into a world of elevated awareness, into a world that has always been there but not always seen.
Is there a particularly Catholic view of poetry?
I think there’s definitely a Catholic kind of poetry, because the way of thinking and feeling that Catholics have is formed by our faith and the symbols of that faith. A Catholic who writes poetry but isn’t affected by these is probably alienated from himself. That doesn’t mean that a Catholic can’t read and enjoy poems by non-Catholics. But I find that the poets that mean the most to me tend to be Catholics or Anglo-Catholics.
Why, when so many people are going with blank verse, do you still rhyme your poetry and give it a meter?
Two reasons: Formal verse is generally much more powerful in effect, and it’s much more fun to write.
Who are your favorite poets? And do you have a favorite poem?
It varies with what’s going on in my life, or what I need to read so I can feel encouraged and inspired in my life and in my own work. It’s a common experience that what you may have passed over at the age of thirty becomes terribly important at the age of sixty, or it may be important for different reasons.
Right now two poets I like especially are George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, both of the 17th century and both Anglo-Catholics, though I should mention that Vaughan was not English, but Welsh.
The other night I read Vaughan’s wonderful “They Are All Gone into the World of Light”, for perhaps the fiftieth time.
THEY ARE ALL GONE INTO THE WORLD OF LIGHT
by Henry Vaughan
THEY are all gone into the world of light!
And I alone sit ling’ring here ;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.
It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast,
Like stars upon some gloomy grove,
Or those faint beams in which this hill is dress’d,
After the sun’s remove.
I see them walking in an air of glory,
Whose light doth trample on my days :
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,
Mere glimmering and decays.
O holy Hope ! and high Humility,
High as the heavens above !
These are your walks, and you have show’d them me,
To kindle my cold love.
Dear, beauteous Death ! the jewel of the just,
Shining nowhere, but in the dark ;
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust,
Could man outlook that mark!
He that hath found some fledg’d bird’s nest, may know
At first sight, if the bird be flown ;
But what fair well or grove he sings in now,
That is to him unknown.
And yet, as angels in some brighter dreams
Call to the soul when man doth sleep,
So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes,
And into glory peep.
If a star were confin’d into a tomb,
Her captive flames must needs burn there ;
But when the hand that lock’d her up, gives room,
She’ll shine through all the sphere.
O Father of eternal life, and all
Created glories under Thee !
Resume Thy spirit from this world of thrall
Into true liberty.
Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill
My perspective still as they pass :
Or else remove me hence unto that hill
Where I shall need no glass.
