Review by Philip Harvey first published in Text, Vol. 29, Issue 1, April 2025. Thanks to the editors Aidan Coleman and Verity Oswin.
Kevin Hart
‘Lands of likeness : for a poetics of
contemplation’
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2023
Paul Dry Books, Philadelphia, 2024
However, the lectures chart the altering
understanding of the term ‘contemplation’ itself, with strong accent on
cultural definitions through time, which means that a reader hoping to find
here a manual on how to practise contemplation in their own space and time may
be disappointed. Such a reader must pick through considerable background and
digressions to find the valuable sentences to aid them in their progress. No,
the lectures are a matrix of appreciations and understandings of changing variations
of contemplation, overlain on examples ancient and modern that Hart considers
exemplify those variations. It is a conversation between theology, philosophy,
and literature. The results are a kind of anthology of possibilities about how
contemplation works, complicated in creative ways by the encounter with the
poetic act: attention is ultimately upon the poem itself as an object of
contemplation.
A hermeneutic of contemplation is based on an essence that
“can be beheld in an act of understanding that might or might not be infinite.”
(87) By looking at this essence we may “lose ourselves”, in Schopenhauer’s
formulation, or become “conscious of our intentional acts,” in Husserl’s.
Coleridge is a third poet-philosopher in Hart’s triumvirate who is drawn on to
exemplify the shift between the before-and-after of Western thinking. The
before is characterised by mystical theologians like the Patristic St Augustine
(he who found himself in “a land of unlikeness” far from God) and quintessentially
the medieval Richard of St. Victor. This is because Hart wishes to show a
chronological trajectory, a hermeneutic of contemplation where “ascent is
replaced by modes of manifestation”, ‘ascent’ being shorthand for early and
medieval Christian contemplative practice as a process of advances, and ‘modes
of manifestation’ shorthand for Romantic and modern ways of intent and
intentional observation. These modes are critical for his consequent close
reading of Wallace Stevens, A.R. Ammons, Charles Péguy, Geoffrey Hill and
others.
Out of this wide-ranging appreciation,
certain valuable ideas emerge about these two multi-definitional phenomena,
contemplation and poetry. One of the most interesting and central is reading a
poem as a templum, an idea he returns to with summary cogency in the
Afterword. Raising the mind to God through prayer, using an object (e.g. a
cross, a candle) as a focus, was a practice developed in early Christianity, in
part an adoption of the Roman practice of viewing the templum, the
rectangle of sky or sacred space through which birds flew. In this way Romans
could predict the outcome of battles or crops. Christians turned their
attention to God. Likewise, there was lectio divina, the reading of
Scripture which led “from reading to meditation to prayer to a dilation of the
soul and gliding before God.” While all of these practices are still common
within church, Hart proposes that “more of us, students and teachers, along
with anyone who can read, can learn how to enter these other lands of likeness,
often far from divine simplicity, that we call poems, and, if we make good
choices in what we read, we have the opportunity to grow in wisdom when dealing
with others and ourselves.” (326)
Hart has a winning way of lapsing into
poetry even when at his most philosophical. An extended explanation of
Husserl’s phenomenology ends with an empirical observation more worthy of
Eliot: “Some philosophers might wish to live glassily in a perpetual noon, but
for better or worse we live in a world in which shadows fall across us.” (81)
Herein lies a dilemma, one not avoided by Hart, that poetry as an outcome of
all language will not always live up to the contemplative expectation. Much
poetry is not much use in this regard. His caveats are welcome at this point,
that we must be selective and fortunate in the poetry we do find. His lectures
on particular modern poets serve as models of how a reader may proceed. He also
hastens to advise though that this manner of contemplative reading is not bound
by any one religion, culture or language.
Reading a poem as we would when, as a group, we engage in lectio
divina, is something that probably happens more often than anyone imagines.
The religious devotion some readers give to a poem, or even sometimes an actual
poet, is a fairly common thing to observe in the 21st century.
However, these lectures advocate a method of reading poetry that is more than
simply enjoyment, interpretation and reader-response. It presupposes a reader
who actively meets the poem with contemplation as the guiding principle. This
is one risk in adopting such a strategy without forethought or an understanding
that that is your intention. Another risk is to treat the poem as some work
offered up for the illuminati. Contemplation is available to everyone, always
was always will be, while the visions often inherent in an individual poem
could well lead a reader into gnostic convictions of one kind or another.
A Gifford lecturer is expected to define his terms, which in
this case results happily in some definitions of poetry. Hart’s several
extended efforts in this regard should be prised from the monolith and prized
in their own light. For example, here are some lines from a whole page of the
same:
“Poems are not all depth or height; they have surfaces,
sometimes glittering and sometimes resonant, that can beguile us and give us
pleasure. If a poem leads us to reflect, it does so often through idiom and
tone, rhythm and rhyme, surface phenomena, that simply will not go away. We
feel them on the tongue, and we return to them to experience the feeling of
them time and again. No one who has fallen in love with a poem could truly say
that it is a purely cognitive event. It is an experience with experiences, the
poet’s and one’s own.” (46)
II
Turning to Kevin Hart’s wiry and vernacular
autobiographical memoir ‘Dark-Land’, is to encounter an altogether different
beast. The erudite worldview of international academe and the language of
liberal scholarship is replaced by the tough existence of an East End childhood,
one of insular parochialism, limited prospects, and streets the locals call
banjos – “a dead-end road that ends in a circle.” Hart’s self-presentation as
someone who is hopeless at everything – home, school, society – comes as a
surprise to anyone who reads the self-assured and worldly arguments of his many
thoughts on contemplation. To the point where we wonder how these two people
could be the same person.
Inwardness is one clue; a curiosity about
books and their contents, another. He admits an early fascination (a term that
is addressed in one Gifford Lecture at length) with religion, even though his
family seem to have only the most passing connection with church.
Complexes are identified by the adult Hart,
but cannot change his lifetime perception that his parents “seemed resigned,
most of the time, to the melancholy fact that their son lived at a tangent to
normal life.” (112) Elsewhere a relation is recorded as saying young Kevin,
“’e’s like a snail, that one. Just pulls ‘is head in.” Disposed to live inside
his own world, discovery of an outlet like poetry may simply have been a matter
of time.
He likens the sudden surprise move to
Australia as going from sepia to Technicolour. Reasons for the family’s shift
to the exotic location of Brisbane are kept deliberately conjectural by his
family, and even by him in the book, all part of the “secret childhood” aspect
of its subtitle: people don’t talk about things like that. This places it
squarely in the literary genre known as Ten Pound Pom.
The language of ‘Dark-Land’ is taut, sharp,
short. It is reminiscent of some of Hart’s more recent biographical poetry – a
tightened narrative mode that, curiously, does not invite extended
contemplation. The author would seem to have adopted this style of writing for
the occasion, one that speaks in shock, surprise, anxiety about what’s coming
next, a poetry of difficulties. The pressure valve released on all this
restricted energy is a wry, observant adult humour.
Yet there is a connection between the two
books. They are both sophisticated exercises in poetics. That is to say, why do
we make up poetry and how do we read it? Where does poetry come from? Where is
it going? And to whom? Why is it different from other art forms and other forms
of literature? The lectures ruminate on a lifetime of experience in how to read
a poem. The memoir tracks why all sorts of hidden, private experience in
childhood might erupt out of need into words of very concentrated language and
delivery, and in patterns.
The Text article is here: https://textjournal.scholasticahq.com/article/137478-text-reviews-april-2025
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