Preface

This book contains spiritual and visionary poetry by women—from the ancient Sumerian moon priestess Enheduanna to poets living among us now. In most cultures women have not often been in positions of religious authority. Yet, as outsiders—whether living as Buddhist nuns in Tibet or in the forests of Nepal; living in convents of Spain, Italy, Germany, or Holland; or writing in Calvinist New England—these spiritual dissidents found their own direct, sometimes heretical, ways to envision the sacred. And they named those ways in verse. Though often deprived of public position, women have always practiced the personal art of writing and so have been prepared to be our spiritual and visionary voices of light.

Though most of the women poets in this book lived in subordinate circumstances, there are a few notable exceptions. As a moon priestess and daughter of the king of Sumeria, Enheduanna was in a position of religious authority. And because she was a spiritual leader forty-three hundred years ago, her work was preserved on cuneiform tablets—the oldest known poetic writing. She is now the first writer known to the world. As poet and priestess, Enheduanna felt esteemed and powerful enough to write: "From the doorsill of heaven comes the word: / 'Welcome!'" In contrast to Enheduanna is Emily Dickinson, who wrote in solitude in Amherst, Massachusetts: "Why—do they shut Me out of Heaven? / Did I sing—too loud?" In bringing together these and the other spiritual poems by women collected here, I have wished to allow these poets to sing loud, whether or not they were welcomed by the heavens or their own social situations, whether they are remembered or largely forgotten.

The spiritual impulse sparks a visionary quest toward self-realization. That quest is usually expressed as a desire for union with nature or a godhead, with a secular or divine lover, with the principle of light, or with the "word." The word may be God's sent word or the ecstatic, visionary experience of writing a poem. Some mystical poets seek a spiritual union in death—a death of being either outside time and space in a flash of eternity or in an afterlife. Death is, in Dickinson's words, the "most profound experiment / Appointed unto Men—." The women poets gathered together in these pages write out of diverse spiritual traditions, yet they share an experience of the self uniting with an outside force through an inner vision. Sappho writes of this spiritual desire for union:

I could not hope
to touch the sky
with my two arms.

Though she claims she could not hope, her words, paradoxically, express a fervent hope that her united soul and body might reach out to embrace the sky and Aphrodite—and make immensity personal, intimate, and transcendent.

Many of the poems in this book are love poems, sometimes overtly erotic ones. These poems are spiritual in the sense that they explore erotic union that is divine and ecstatic. An essential example is the biblical Song of Songs. To justify its inclusion in the Hebrew Bible, Jewish scholars have interpreted it as a spiritual allegory celebrating the marriage of Israel to Yahweh, and Christian interpreters view it as an allegory for the marriage of the church to Christ. For the mystic poets, the Song of Songs represents the loving union between the soul (always as the female speaker) and God. We see this view in many poetic retellings of the Song of Songs, from early Kabbalah to sixteenth-century Saint John of the Cross's mystico-erotic "Dark Night of the Soul" and "Spiritual Canticle." The Song of Songs is the ultimate union of love and spirit and, as such, has been the world's love song of love songs.

Many of the poems collected here addressed to deities are luminously erotic, especially those by the Indian poets Mirabai and Mahadevi, and the Sufi mystics Rabia and Bibi Hayati. Some are even humorous, as in the mocking anonymous poems from the Gatha Saptashati:

Clearly a god is kissing that lady,
making her nipples go stiff.
There is no way to approve of such a lover,
even if he is a god.

Other poets seek spiritual union with nature. Classical Chinese poetry equates nature with the spirit in parallelistic verses: the first line depicts nature; the second the human response to it. In one of my favorite poems the Tang poet Yu Xuanji writes in "For Hidden Mist Pavilion":

Spring flowers and autumn moon enter poems.
Bright days and clear nights are fit for idle gods.

Raised in vain the pearl screen, never lowered.
Long ago, I moved my couch to face the mountain.

The poet attains union with the spring flowers and autumn moon that have entered her poems, along with the bright days and clear nights. The human response to nature is conveyed by Yu's moving her couch to face and meditate upon the mountain and join her yearning spirit with nature.

H.D., Carolyn Forché, Ruth Stone, Marina Tsvetayeva, and others look for spiritual fusion with people. Theirs is a "poetry of witness" that reminds us that the spirit is within everyone and unites us through empathy with the suffering (personal or political) or the joy of each person. H.D. wrote Trilogy during World War II as an antiwar work. She calls for what she names "spiritual realism," arguing against a utilitarian viewpoint that would justify the atrocity of war and dismiss the power of the spirit and of love. She asks "after the bitter fire of destruction" that we

leave the smoldering cities below
(we have done all we could),

we have given until we have no more to give;
alas, it was pity, rather than love, we gave;

now having given all, let us leave all,
above all, let us leave pity

and mount higher
to love—resurrection.

Pity is not emphatic, for it involves distancing oneself from the person suffering. So H.D. exhorts us to "mount higher / to love," which is more painful but closes distances between us.

Death and self-annihilation also have powerful spiritual significance. Some poets, such as Anne Bradstreet, look forward to the afterlife, when they will meet God and be reunited with their dead loved ones. Bradstreet at once blames God and ambivalently praises him for the tragic loss of her grandchildren. "The heavens have changed to sorrow my delight." Yet she chides herself for mourning because the Puritans believed it wrong to grieve too much, to "love the creation more than the Creator":

More fool than I to look on that was lent,
As if mine own, when thus impermanent.
Farewell dear child, thou ne're shall come to me,
But yet a while, and I shall go to thee;
Mean time my throbbing heart's cheered up with this:
Thou with my Saviour art in endless bliss.

As a Buddhist would speak of the impermanence of human life, Bradstreet, waiting for reunion after life, states that she loved her granddaughter "that was lent, / As if mine own, when thus impermanent."

Most religious traditions, Eastern and Western, advocate a death of the self in order to unite with the godhead or with the cosmos. In the following anonymous Sanskrit song the speaker imagines herself becoming one with the lover-god by "vanishing into him":

When he comes back
to my arms

I'll make him feel
what nobody ever felt

Everywhere
me
vanishing into him

like water
into the clay of a new jar.

By a mystical erotic act of self-annihilation the lover merges totally with the deity, is "everywhere," and thereby merges with the creation. In her poem "Wake" Tess Gallagher inverts the idea that loved ones will reunite in the afterlife, uniting with her dead lover while she is still alive. Like the Sanskrit poet, the speaker has a few moments of becoming dead and vanishing into her husband's death. She climbs into bed with her beloved and for a while "wakes dead" with him:

                   We were dead
a little while together then, serene
and afloat on the strange broad canopy
of the abandoned world.

Poets as diverse in religious tradition and era as the Calvinist Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) and the Hindu Mukta Bai (thirteenth century) carry the death of the self into the creation of words and art: the self must be annihilated, the "senses end," and ordinary consciousness transformed into ecstatic consciousness. Mukta Bai writes:

Though he has no form
my eyes saw him,

his glory is fire in my mind
that knows

his secret inner form
invented by the soul

What is
beyond the mind

has no boundary.
In it our senses end.

Mukta says: Words cannot hold him
yet in him all words are.

When the fire burns the mind, the soul invents a divine secret form, beyond boundary, where all words originate, inadequate though they are. "Words cannot hold him," the poet acknowledges, while simultaneously holding him in the words of her poem, naming herself ("Mukta says") and claiming the poem as her own.

Dickinson similarly engages in self-annihilation that results in poetic re-creation or rebirth:

Me from Myself—to banish—
Had I Art—
Impregnable my Fortress
Unto All Heart—

But since Myself—assault Me—
How have I peace
Except by subjugating
Consciousness?

And since We're mutual Monarch
How this be
Except by Abdication—
Me—of Me?

In this poem, which is characteristically tormented, witty, and ironic, the speaker sees that she can have peace only by "subjugating / Consciousness," by separating the worldly self from the spiritual self. The poet seeks the kind of self-abdication that a Calvinist would hope for in order to be reborn in Christ. In the process the poem reveals the impossibility of such a self-banishment and the words on the page leave the traces of the self's assault on itself. Both Mukta Bai and Emily Dickinson venture where the "senses end," where the self burns away, and they return with poetry.

The act of writing poetry is itself visionary and spiritual, for it requires an ecstatic state, a moment elsewhere, a re-creation of the self, and a quest for words to unite with the reader, whether that reader is the Creator—or you.