A Note on Gjertrud Schnackenberg
A NOTE ON GJERTRUD SCHNACKENBERG
St. Matthew Passion
Gjertrud Schnackenberg
Arrowsmith Press, 2024
Great poems harness the most formidable and complex technical means, and offer something apparently simple and natural. Ars est celare artem, says the maxim attributed to Horace : “The art is to hide art.” Poetry, being an art and not merely a craft, can astonish us, confound us : because the technical means do not explain their end. The poem’s beauty and power remain inexplicable – simply by merging seamlessly into the fathomless “art” of nature itself.
Great poets edify their critics with such examples of the art. There are things more profound and ineffable in evidence here than elegant lines, and rhymes and stanza shapes, something more akin to the storyteller’s art – the ability to set the stage, create an atmosphere, and ring the miniature or tacit narrative shifts with vibrations of meaning, up and down the whole scale of verbal sound.
This is what Gjertrud Schackenberg has accomplished in this brief, muted sequence of eight poems, a meditation on J.S. Bach and his sacred oratorio of 1727. The whole sequence employs a single pattern of spare, unrhymed triplets, with short iambic lines of no set length, all center-aligned on the page. The syntax of its sentences varies from very brief to quite extended and complex, like an aria.
Virtually the entire work takes place in medias res. It opens with the speaker in the awkward act of trying to put an arm through her coat, as she’s about to go out on an errand. But she is halted by the music : and when we return to this scene at the end of the sequence, she is still standing there, though dusk has fallen, it’s grown dark outside.
It seems fitting that this book should appear during Advent season, before Christmas. Because St. Matthew Passion is not only a meditation on Bach’s musical piece. Rather, it is a passionate mimesis – framed by and channeled through the many-layered “instruments” of music and poetry – of the Easter passion of Christ himself. It is a profound, and profoundly beautiful, re-telling – in the foreshortened and lyrical mode of poetry – of the Easter drama.
I can only hint at the masterful, heartfelt touch that Schnackenberg brings to all this. She tells the tale, deftly and swiftly, through the sounds of the instruments : we are drawn into the passions of the Passion, beginning with Peter’s despair and remorse, as he walks far behind Jesus to Golgotha, having abandoned Him in his fateful hour. [Note : you must visualize these quoted stanzas as center-aligned.]
A small midnight procession,
Roiling torches, shouted Greek.
The sight of Jesus, bound, and shoved ahead.
The sight of Peter, trailing far behind,
Then halted in the dark,
Because we cannot lift our feet or set them down again
Without the help –– of God –– a sound
As if the violin had seen
Nothing as sad in all of Israel
Then, in the next poem (“The Passion-sound”), Schnackenberg begins moving into the valence or witness of the instruments themselves, and we are gradually drawn into a single “cloud of witnesses” [my allusion, not the poem’s] which includes the musical instruments, the audience at the performance, the whole congregation (down through the ages), and the Gospel witnesses of the actual (as narrated) events :
It’s unmistakable, the Passion-sound,
As if the winds and strings believe
That God, high in the dark, is listening.
A dark of sound that generates its own
Terrain and clime and meteorology,
Engulfing us among the nameless voices
Calling back and forth
Across the rooftops of Jerusalem,
Come ye daughters, help me, help me mourn ––
The third poem, “Workshop Instruments” is a playful interlude, based on an anecdote in which Bach, in conversation, downplays any special talent he may have, saying : “It’s not remarkable… The instrument will play itself.” The poet turns this on its head :
… –– nothing indicates
He ever found it odd or striking,
Worth remarking on,
That hollow, manmade objects,
Carved in Leipzig’s local workshops,
Understand the Passion’s inward,
Haunting, intimate
Experience of God ––
Here Schnackenberg is passing into her own weave of parables. The ability of the wooden instruments to be possessed by God’s love, and blindly bear witness to it, is a replica of what she’s doing with the instruments of poetry.
The sequence proceeds through the remaining five poems, with gradually increasing intensity, to the penultimate, climactic poem, “Bethany”. This I think is a masterpiece. It’s an episode of recognition, a vision of Mary Magdalen’s own perception of the cosmos, the complete world of nature, as God’s immense expression of Love –– which she, alone, recognizes and acknowledges, in the act of washing Jesus with her “expensive” ointment, and with her tears.
The woman who had seen
The prodigality of the Creation
Pouring out around them
Where they stood –– the kingdom,
Profligate, and present
In the room,
And in its midst,
His royal destitution,
For which she broke the seal
On her jar…
When I happened upon Gjertrud Schnackenberg’s new book this week, I was in the midst of attempting to fabricate my own next steps in poetry : nascent inklings of how to remake some old themes I have already scribbled about for decades. I was having vague notions of how to express my own religious-philosophical ideas, in some way that would depict some insights I thought had occurred to me about the meaning of Christ, the meaning of the Incarnation, and the sense of a vernacular, local, lived continuity, down through the ages, and within the ostensibly broader realm of human thought, history, experience, anthropology… blah blah blah!… Still mulling these things over, as usual. But then this book arrived at my door. And I see that, like every great poet, Schnackenberg has produced a metamorphosis : transforming such abstract, ordinary, and certainly timeworn concepts into that tremendous vitality, that romance magic, that Midsummer Night’s Dream, of… as no less than Wallace Stevens called it… “the poetry of life.”