Tuesday 3 March 2020

A Poetic Biography of Jessica Powers PHILIP HARVEY

Philip Harvey led Carmelite Conversations on Wednesday morning the 4th of March on the poetry of the Carmelite nun Jessica Powers (1905-1988). The session was essentially a poetry reading, for enjoyment and edification, of many of her poems. Two brief papers were given, a biography of the poet and an introduction to aspects of the work. Here is the biography.

We are told that Jessica Powers’ grandparents came from County Waterford in Ireland in the 19th century. This seems to have happened after the brunt of the famine, but they were part of the diaspora that crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, and even as far as Australia. Her grandparents wound up in Wisconsin, one of those places still being  opened up by settlers, where the family set about farming. A favourite word of Jessica’s is ‘acre’, she even describes God as a “thousand acres”, which is quite a landscape to contemplate. Her poems are also conscious of the American Plains nations of the region.

Wigwams

When the dead white mists
creep up in evening rain,
out of the half-blurred swamp
the ghostly cities rise:
wigwams like gulls’ wings spread,
hundreds across a plain;
and I look out on them
through my grandmother’s eyes.

(SP 168)

These formative memories of tough existence on shared land explain much about the first half of her life, before she entered the Carmelite Order. They were farming people and had to be self-reliant. One recurrent sense of Wisconsin that we gain from her words is its lonesomeness. Evn that bird so often equated with lonesomeness, the whippoorwill, features regularly in her early poetry.

Jessica herself was born in 1905, the third child of John and Delia Powers. Her elder sister Dorothy died of tuberculosis when Jessica was about eleven, so we can imagine that much of her time was spent helping around the place with her parents and two brothers. We are told that she was educated in Mauston at the “Sister’s School”, a place unretrievable on Google but which exists in books. We are told that one of her main early influences was a Dominican nun by the name of Sister Lucille Massart, who encouraged her to write. So perhaps the school was Dominican, but whatever the case it is noteworthy that when Jessica was confirmed at St Patrick’s, Mauston, she adopted the middle name Lucille.

She attended Marquette University in Milwaukee then enrolled in a school of journalism since the liberal arts school did not accept women. We need to recall that she lived in an age where prospects for women were narrow and socially defined. She went to work as a secretary in Chicago in her late teens, but we are told spent her free time reading poetry in libraries. (SP 193) It is around this time she writes the poem ‘Cabaret’.

I shall spend a penny of love,
and a penny of grief,
and a penny for song,
wine that is red, wines that are purple and white;
I shall find a place in the dazzling room of life,
and sit on a chair and sip my wine all night.

Dancers will come like red and gold leaves blown
over a crystal floor, and I shall see
many a reveller wander out alone
through a black door beyond all revelry.

There will be music come on little feet
into my soul, and laughter to be spread
over young wounds, and kisses honey-sweet,
and shining words to keep me comforted.

And I shall wait till the Keeper comes to say
that my hour is done, and he drowns each glaring light
in endless black … and the dancers go away …
and I stumble out alone into the night.

(SP 42)

Although we are drawn into a cabaret, we notice that she remains alone and observant of the world around her passing by. The poem describes a choice she had, though we know what she would not have known at the time, that her life would involve sipping “my wine all night,” only not in a cabaret theatre, but a religious house.

After her mother died in 1925 Jessica lived on the farm for about ten years. She contributed articles to The Milwaukee Sentinel in a column called ‘The Percolator’. But my surmise is that when her brothers married, Jessica needed something more than the farm, hence her eventual shift to Chicago, then New York. A fascinating poem from this period (1932 to be precise) indicates to us a serious calling, though particulars go unstated. It is titled enigmatically ‘Michigan Boulevard, Chicago’:

There is a star above this street for me.
Hither I came of old,
bearing my myrrh and frankincense and gold.

Hunger and loneliness and poverty
I brought for their delight
once in my youth upon a snowy night.

I did not follow to the inmost place
where the Child lay asleep.
It was too splendid; the light dripped too deep.

I saw tears upon the Virgin’s face.
I gave my gifts to her,
and the night ended in a golden blur.

(SP 82)

You would not know from reading this poem that Michigan Boulevard is a high end and stylish street of the city. That is one mystery of the poem, and we also encounter another feature in her work here, her ability to identify very personally with scriptural stories and write them out as her own. In this case, Jessica is the three wise men coming with her gifts to the Christ child. Her three gifts - “hunger and loneliness and poverty” – she gives first to the mother, being too overwhelmed to visit the child

For the four years prior to the United States’ entry into the war in 1941, Jessica lived in New York with Jessie and Anton Pegis. Anton was an outstanding Catholic theologian and thinker, the editor of St Thomas Aquinas and many other works of doctrine and apologetic. It is here that she publishes her first book. She lives in a world of intellectual and spiritual ferment that meets deep needs, engaged in the ground breaking cultural life of the city at that time. Yet, around the time of the outbreak of the war, in similar fashion to Thomas Merton, she chooses to go into monastic life. She enters the Carmel of the Mother of God in Milwaukee, and even though maintaining links with her past life and writing poetry, spends the rest of her life in an enclosed community of sisters. On her clothing day (April 25th, 1942) she takes the name Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit. We meet the mood of the world and the strength of her own decision, in this short poem written at the time.

‘The Little Nation’

Having no gift of strategy or arms,
no secret weapon and no walled defense,
I shall become a citizen of love,
that little nation with the blood-stained sod
where even the slain have power, the only country
that sends forth an ambassador to God.

Renouncing self and crying out to evil
to end its wars, I seek a land that liesa
all unprotected like a sleeping child;
nor is my journey reckless and unwise.
Who doubts that love has an effective weapon
may meet with a surprise.

(SP 39)

While we may see the little nation as made up of those who place love as first priority, it is also possible to think of the world of Carmel into which she now goes as the little nation.

Here is a vignette retold by Bishop Robert Morneau, a friend, supporter, and then later editor of her work.

‘While living in New York in the late 1930’s, before her entrance into the Carmelite community in 1941, Jessica Powers was having a discussion with an editor when the conversation turned theological. What was the greatest attribute in God, truth or beauty? As Jessica Powers narrates the story, she held out for beauty as the deepest revelation of God, whereas the editor sided with truth. The dialogue went on for over two hours with no discernible victory.

‘Years later, in relating this “argument,” Jessica Powers laughed and said: “We were both wrong. God’s greatest attribute is mercy. In the end, that’s all we have and should desire.”

‘To know Jessica Powers is to know someone who lived a God-centered life. Her response to a contemplative calling gave outer expression to an interior summons. For forty-seven years she lived in the cloister, journeying with her sisters (and the larger Church) in a life of prayer, penance and witness. This Godward existence governed her heart. She knew the Center; she also knew the periphery of struggle and darkness. Her trust in a God of mercy and truth and beauty sustained her all her life.”

(RW 9)

In those forty-seven years Sister Miriam was prioress of the community three times. This tells us a lot about her abilities as a leader and administrator, indicating that she possessed considerable interpersonal skills and a dedication to the vows of the Order. There may be papers in the Marquette University Archives that shed light on her roles within community, but for now we have only the poetry. We are told, for example, that she was responsible for the oversight of the shift of the Carmel from Milwaukee to Pewaukee, Wisconsin in 1958. We are not told what happened inside Carmel all of this time, yet something of her work as prioress comes through in her self-identification in the poem ‘Abraham’.

I love Abraham, that old weather-beaten
unwavering nomad; when God called to him,
no tender hand wedged time into his stay.
His faith erupted him into a way
far-off and strange. How many miles are there
from Ur to Haran? Where does Canaan lie,
or slow mysterious Egypt sit and wait?
How could he think his ancient thigh would bear
nations, or how consent that Isaac die,
with never an outcry nor an anguished prayer?
I think, alas, how I manipulate
dates and decisions, pull apart the dark,
dally with doubts here and with counsel there,
take out old maps and stare.
Was there a call at all, my fears remark.
I cry out: Abraham, old nomad you,
are you my father? Come to me in pity.
Mine is a far and lonely journey, too.

(SP 66)

Yet through all of this time she steadfastly produced poetry, amongst all the other kinds of writings expected of her in Carmel. I count six books of poetry published in her lifetime, all by small presses or in-house. Like Thomas Merton, monastic life did not halt her creative processes and her constant questions. A poem entitled ‘Yes’, written four years before her death from a stroke in 1988, epitomises for me both the acceptance of suffering and the openness to mercy and joy that animates so much of her work:

Yes to one   is often no to another
here walks my grief   and here has often been
my peak of anguish   yes is the one need
of my whole life   but time and time again
law forces no   up through my heart and lips
spiked leaden ball   rending as it arises
leaving its blood and pain   yes is the soft
unfolding of petals   delicate with surprises
curve and caress   and billowing delight
out to the one or many   I would guess
heaven for me   will be an infinite
flowering of one species   a measureless sheer
beatitude of yes

(SP 137)

Sources

Morneau, Robert F. A retreat with Jessica Powers : loving a passionate God. St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1995 (RW)

Powers, Jessica. Selected poetry of Jessica Powers, edited by Regina Siegfried and Robert F. Morneau. Sheed & Ward, 1989 (SP)

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