Necessary Trouble: A Conversation with
Poet David Whyte
Lois P. Jones interviews David Whyte
NOVEMBER 7, 2019
THERE ARE POETS who are theologians and philosophers. There are
theologians who have brought their ideas to industry and the workplace. There
are industry trailblazers who have employed their philosophy to inspire
leadership. Then there is David Whyte.
Whyte’s life as a poet has created a readership and listenership
in three normally mutually exclusive areas: the literary world of readings that
most poets inhabit; the worlds of philosophical, psychological, and theological
enquiry; and the world of organizational leadership. The author of nine books
of poetry and four books of prose, Whyte holds a degree in marine zoology and
has traveled extensively, including living and working as a naturalist guide in
the Galápagos Islands and leading anthropological and natural history
expeditions in the Andes, the Amazon, and the Himalayas. For over 20 years he
has been developing a body of work and a series of seminars focused on the
conversational nature of reality.
His dynamic recitation and explication of poetry creates a bridge
to individuals grappling with the challenges of life and leadership that are
difficult to articulate. I was introduced to Whyte’s work fairly recently, when
I attended a talk inspired by his most recent collection, The Bell and the
Blackbird, which focused on living between the enlightened and the everyday,
the invisible and the visible, the disappearing and the becoming.
As a poet and a seeker of self-knowledge, I wanted to meet the man
behind the words and learn something of his repertoire of over 350 poems. Many
podcasts, CDs, interviews, and books later, I’ve returned to the collection
that found its way into my life during a time of paralyzing indecision. The
Bell and the Blackbird is a collection of effulgent and profound work, but it’s
also a way of being in the world.
I live my life in widening circles,
that reach out across the world …
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours
LOIS P. JONES: As you’ve told it, the title of your collection The
Bell and the Blackbird recalls a recurring meme in Irish poetry of a monk
standing on the edge of the monastic precinct and hearing the bell calling him
to prayer, saying to himself that the call to silence is the most beautiful
sound in the world. Simultaneously, he also hears the call of the blackbird
from outside the monastic walls and says to himself, that’s also the most
beautiful sound in the world. The call to both deepen and continue to expand
our reach into the world brought to mind Rilke’s widening circles. Is it
possible to achieve both, and why is this concept so important to you and your
present work?
DAVID WHYTE: The sound of the bell is the call to prayer, to
depth, to a greater context than the one you are inhabiting. The blackbird is
the world calling to you as it finds you now and perhaps, even more
importantly, as it finds itself, with no need for improvement. Hearing the bell
and hearing the blackbird, at one and the same time, is the encapsulation of a
way through all our present difficulties in this polarized, conflict-ridden
world. In fact, it may represent the essence of contemplation, not as passivity
or removal from engagement, but bringing together that simultaneous sense of
intimacy and distance that all human beings feel at one and the same time in
one physical experience. We live at that crossroads of intimacy and distance in
a marriage, in a work, and indeed, just walking across the park. Every day we
are constantly trying to eliminate distance or create it in our lives, we are
constantly trying to create intimacy or run a hundred miles from it; our
unhappiness lies in constantly choosing between the two. The image says there
is (a) way to hold both by understanding the essence of our identity as always
being at that crossroads, that the foundational miracle of human incarnation is
the ability to experience and hold them both together at one and the same time.
You are irretrievably alone, and you also belong to others and to the world in
ways you cannot ever fully comprehend. Both are true, and letting that meeting
place come alive inside you is where good poetry and perhaps more importantly
the life human beings have wanted for themselves since the beginning of
conscious time become a real possibility.
That radiance
you have always
carried with you
as you walk
both alone
and completely
accompanied
in friendship
by every corner
of the world
crying
Allelujah.
LOIS P. JONES: In a world that relies heavily on escapism, you continually invite
your readers to come to ground in reality. As I consider the body of your most
recent collection as well as the arc on which it travels, I’m brought to the
recurring theme of invitation. There’s even a gorgeous piece invoking the
sacred called “Prayer for Invitation.” Do you believe it is our own power we
sometimes fear in the invitation to examine the self?
DAVID WHYTE: Perhaps more accurately, it is our fear of not being large enough,
generous enough, or brave enough to fully incarnate that power. One of the
reasons we refuse to make proper, clear invitations to others, why we are
fearful of making invitations, whether in leadership in the corporate world, or
in the intimacies of a marriage, is that the invitation is always interpreted
and received in larger ways than we intended. A real invitation always leads to
a real conversation, to a way forward, not to an arrived platform. It is many
times a way forward we do not feel we are equal to: part of this way forward is
to start to learn to have faith in the conversation itself as our way forward
in a good work or a good marriage — a little like writing poetry.
LOIS P. JONES: In the section “Blessings and Prayers,” the poet examines the act
of blessing in various contexts. It seems to take on broader connotations than
the distinctive Christian archetypes. What is a blessing to you in the truest
sense of the word?
DAVID WHYTE: I have a very physical sense of that extraordinary power, having
grown up on a daily basis with my Irish mother’s tradition of “blessing.” She
was extraordinary in this regard in being able to wish things for people they
did not even know they needed. We tend to think of blessing as simply wishing
the best for someone else, but a real blessing is far more transformative in
its power and agency. A real blessing is a brave articulation of powers or
circumstances that the receiver has not the confidence nor the imagination to
wish for themselves. We might even, in a poem, be able to get beyond our own
boundaries and wish the same for ourselves.
I pray for you world,
to come and find me,
to see me and recognize me
and beckon me out,
to call me
even when I lose
the ability to call on
you who have searched
so long for me.
I pray to understand
the stranger inside me
who will emerge in the end
to take your gift.
LOIS P. JONES: The last two sections of The Bell and the Blackbird focus on your
poems of Australia and Japan. You’ve said “[w]e are each a river with a
particular abiding character, but we show radically different aspects of our
self according to the territory through which we travel.” As an itinerant
traveler, is there a particular, radical aspect of David Whyte you’ve never
shared before?
DAVID WHYTE: Probably around my love of regional cuisines, and I might say,
seeking out the often obscure, cultural settings in which they are served! I
will walk a long way for a very short meal! A famous noodle shop in a remote
rural town in Japan; a local, as yet undiscovered back street restaurant in
Provence. A paella shack on the Andalusian coast; an outdoor barbecue or Braai
in the wilds of South Africa. My constant traveling and speaking, and through
those travels, being hosted so generously around the world, though it can be
exhausting, has its many compensations!
LOIS P. JONES: There is marvelous lyric compression in your poem “One Ear”:
After the heat,
my head resting
on a cool
buckwheat pillow,
one ear listening
to the river.
LOIS P. JONES: You are familiar with a legion of poets and have studied and sat
with Zen teachers. Did immersion in the Japanese landscape allow for your sense
of internal concision, and if so, in any particular way?
DAVID WHYTE: Having grown up with the last gasp of a classical education in the
North of England, and in the midst of a veritable thicket of inherited English
and Irish poetry, I was always intrigued by the natural openness, the freedom,
the spaciousness, and the easy vernacular of the Chinese and Japanese poets. In
my first wanderings through the Himalayas in my 20s, I carried The Penguin Book
of Chinese Verse, and was astonished at the clarity with which it described
both the landscape and peoples I saw, but more tellingly, the essence of the
journey I was on myself. Later, when I came to the States, I was more than
inspired by the easy vernacular of the Chinese and Japanese influenced poets Gary
Snyder and Robert Sund. My first book, Songs for Coming Home, is an homage to
that lineage. Only after that book, and that apprenticeship, did I begin to
build in a facility for narrative out of the inherited English, Irish, and
Welsh traditions I had grown with.
LOIS P. JONES: The various sections of The Bell and the Blackbird point to ways
in which we might use the imagination, especially the sensory imagination to
both deepen and remain present in the world. In the current sociopolitical
climate, I’m often drawn to the shelter of my writing nook, yet none of your
poetry or essays shy away from the human condition. What particular area
concerns you as a poet right now, and how do you look to reimagine it?
DAVID WHYTE: As I said at the beginning of this interview, I don’t think we get
to choose between the necessary shelter of our writing nook and taking that
work, and the way of being we have shaped in that writing, out into the world.
Climate change is perhaps our greatest test ever as a species. Does the way we
were shaped by our evolution preclude us from having the imagination, the
global communal willpower to change? I am an Irish and Yorkshire rebel,
something of a Luddite, a poet who needs at times for the world to go away,
whether it is warming or not. I work with others in my own very idiosyncratic
way. My very success in speaking, writing, and reading makes me inclined — out
of a very ancient evolutionary impulse, and like many others who are successful
— to harvest while I can, even if it may, unwittingly, contribute to it being
the last harvest for others. How do I get beyond myself and even beyond my
artistic inheritance and help the broader ecological situation, rather than
hinder it? This is a daily question for me, a daily trouble for me, but it’s
good trouble; it’s necessary trouble. If you are a completely happy person in
today’s world, you are not paying attention!
Just Beyond Yourself
Just beyond
yourself.
It’s where
you need
to be.
Half a step
into
self-forgetting
and the rest
restored
by what
you’ll meet.
There is a road
always beckoning.
When you see
the two sides
of it
closing together
at that far horizon
and deep in
the foundations
of your own
heart
at exactly
the same
time,
that’s how
you know
it’s the road
you
have
to follow
That’s how
you know
it’s where
you
have
to go.
That’s how
you know
you have
to go.
That’s
how you know.
Just beyond
yourself,
it’s
where you
need to be.
Lois P. Jones is a poet and poetry editor of Kyoto Journal, host
of KPFK’s Poets Café (Pacifica Radio), and co-host of Moonday Poetry.
