Joshua Luke Smith
I listened to an interview with Joshua Luke Smith on The Sacred YouTube channel, twice. It was very good. Quotes below:
He recited two poems:
"I was in prison last week talking to the guys about the church. They asked me to do a talk about the church. And it was an amazing context to do it. Because I was just like, look, this is what the church is always meant to be, as in this, like, in the prison chapel. You know what I mean? Bunch of people in recovery sharing some bread, you know, you know, like, and we've turned it into a game of who performs the best and we take that out onto the streets and I just, oh... it's... it's excruciating."
"The poet is a vocational life of living as a listener and as a witness, paying attention to the world around you and offering words in service of the unsayable, you know. Like I hope to offer words that don't, you know, fill the gap for the sake of it, but bring language where there seems to be none...
If I can quote some Eliot towards the end of Little Giddings in the Four Quartets, he says, 'we will not cease from exploration, but arrive where we started and know it for the first time.' That's poetry...
This is Raymond Carver. 'And did you find what you were looking for in this life? I did. And what was that? To call myself beloved and to feel myself beloved upon the earth.' Oh, it's just like four lines, and I can go about today...
There's a Japanese poet I've just come across. I can't pronounce his name, but I'm not going to tempt you. And he says, this is his poem. 'Seventy-one years old. How did a dew drop last this long?'"
"Like, that's what every young man needs. Will you bind my wounds? Will you catch me when I fall? And as long as I don't have an image of that, like, my relationship to my wounds is going to be different. And my expectation of like, trust in the world is going to be different.
And there's just some amazing examples of people doing this that I'm aware of in terms of, you know, the initiation for men, for young men, some brilliant men around the world who are like, reclaiming the art of initiation. And those are the fundamentals of it.
Welcome into a community of men where we will bind your wounds and we will catch you when you fall, you know what I mean? So your wounds are no longer your excuse for living in this perpetual cycle of wounding others, nor is, like, your suspicion about the world your kind of invitation to create more systems that oppress...
I feel suspicious of like any kind of man up language, but I also feel suspicious perhaps of any like, you know, forsaking the identity of what it is to be a man, a man who binds wounds and a man who catches those that fall."
"This phrase, 'this is it,' can be said in one of two ways. You know?
This is it, or this is it! The life you long for is hidden in the life you have, you know. There's no ladder that's going to take you where you want to go. It's actually getting more rooted in the life you have."