The Book of Psalms is unlike any other part of the Bible. In the Hebrew Bible, it follows the Prophets and begins the section called “Writings.” That is to say, it mediates Malachi and Proverbs. The King James Bible places Psalms between Job and Proverbs, following the end of the Babylonian Captivity as recounted in Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther.
A song of praise both sacred and lyric, yet, unlike the Song of Moses, or Miriam, or the Song of Deborah, or the Song of Hannah, a psalm makes sense independent of its original context. Its lyric “I” (implied or stated) is always the reader/reciter, its setting the present moment. The reader steps inside the song, outside the self. The “place” of the psalm dwells in the sayer or singer. Hence the uncanny power of the word “Jerusalem.” Recited, psalms speak in as many voices as there are people who say them.
Some of the fourteen essayists in Poets on the Psalms treat the invitation extended by the editor, Lynn Domina, as an occasion to talk about their own poetry. Others take the opportunity to teach a psalm or psalms, exercising scholarship, associative commentary, or close reading. Some look to the landscape to talk about psalms, some look at themselves. Some expand the meaning of a particular psalm or line autobiographically; others employ psalms to articulate their understanding of what’s happened to them, and where understanding ends. Some anchor in the grave occasion, others in the intimate.
Given that these are poets’ responses to one of the oldest poetry books in the world, the unanswered question is, What makes a psalm a psalm? I don’t think it’s enough to ask, as Carl Phillips does of his poem “Anthem”: “If I call it a psalm, is it? / —Isn’t it?” Psalms are simultaneously public and private, in voice, in matter, and in occasion. The Psalmist is often sore-tried, surrounded by enemies, wondering how long and why the wicked prosper, and when his chance will come, but nowhere is the incomprehensible confused with the willful.
Catherine Sasanov calls poetry “the form we turn to … when our hearts are broken.” She recalls a television interview where a man recounted his escape from one of the World Trade Center towers. “He broke down completely,” she wrote, when he told “how people working their way down the stairwells began to spontaneously recite the Twenty-Third Psalm together.” The psalm of trust is a prayer, a song of hope that, here, flies in the face of the evidence, and is of course a poem. But the poem part seems the least of it. Aside from the problem of everyone knowing it, what poem by what poet, in any language, would answer these exigent circumstances?
A pilgrim on the road away from the Catholic Church since age seven, Sasanov remarks with some amazment that as an adult she had learned the King James Version of the 23rd Psalm completely and by heart. “Not by assignment, catechism, or other kind of coercion,” she says, but “little by little, death by death, wake by wake.”
For her part, Angie Estes recited Psalm 23 in Baptist Sunday school “in the same uninflected, incantatory tone with which we chanted the Pledge of Allegiance each morning in public school.” There are two kinds of memory. One, mimetic, is Memory, the mother of the Muses. The other kind of remembering is testimony, witness, heeding, which can be its own commandment and fulfillment.
Estes’ commentary on the 23rd Psalm is an essay upon “want,” that which “I shall not.” Her personal catechism summons memories of Florence, and a mosiac of passages from Dante, Gertrude Stein, the Oxford Bible Commentary, St. Augustine’s Expositions of the Psalms (for him it was number 22), a Baptist hymn (“In the Garden”), Edna St. Vincent Millay, Christopher Smart, James Crenshaw, Walt Whitman, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire, to reconcile herself with the death of her cat. Intellectual propriety and emotional candor perform an exegetical dance that never draws too much attention to either partner. Comparing “In the Garden” with “thy rod and thy staff they comfort me,” Sasanov hears the hymn lyrically, as a love song, and musically, as a waltz.
Janet McCann learned psalms by heart as a child. She doesn’t read them the same way she does poems of John Donne or T. S. Eliot, as self-disclosing texts. “It is work reading the Psalms, and I have little energy to spare for their loveliness as literature,” she writes. And so she reads them alone, as she did as a child, letting the psalms’ voice drive out her own voices, and speak in their place. Psalms are alternative to the poetry William Blake cried down as imitating Greek and Roman models: “Sing unto him, sing psalms unto him” does what it says as it’s said.
When Robert Ayres was in sixth grade, Mrs. Finkbeiner made each member of the class choose and memorize a psalm. Ayres chose Psalm 121, which he later recited at his grandfather’s funeral. Ayres’ essay on the 15 consecutive Songs of Ascent follows the singer’s pilgrimage from lament to blessing, from Egypt to Jerusalem, from the suppliant to God. If not in parallel then in sympathy, Ayres himself grew from a boy performing a required task into a man able to articulate that which need be said.
Nothing comes from nowhere. In seminary, Ayres traced the descent of Psalm 121 in the Book of Common Prayer from Miles Coverdale’s 1535 translation of the Latin Psalter, back through the Greek Septuagint, which was translated from the Hebrew Bible around the time of Alexander the Great. He notes that recent scholarship has discovered antecedents of the Hebrew song in ancient Canaanite poetry.
As a poet, Ayres found it difficult to voice longing—and a deep discontent approaching lament—in conventional verse as practiced in the writing workshop. “In the Psalms,” he understood, “lay a whole sea of discontent, an ocean of lamentation. But how do the Psalms work, as poetic speech, as lyric poems?”
That’s the question asked in Psalm 137:
They that carried us away captive required of us a song;
And they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying,
Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land?
How, indeed. The Hebrew Bible is written in a language that’s not been spoken since, perhaps, the time of David, but certainly not since the fall of the Temple. The oral tradition originates with the elders appointed by Moses, to whom he taught, explained, oralized the Law. So, even when the tribes of Israel were wandering the wasteland, the religion which they lived (as distinguished from the form in which it was received) was in the vernacular, not in the sacred tongue. In historical memory, the vernacular Bible (even for Jews) makes the religion, just as commentary in the language of exile makes it possible to practice.
Or maybe, as Enid Dame suggests, the voice needs to be heard more ways, no matter what the language. She was the only Jew in her small town Pennsylvania school until third grade. Though far from Orthodox, she was nonetheless aware that there were differences between her family and the others, the them. Her problem was, how to read the Gospels with Jewish eyes.
The Gospels borrow both verses and details from Psalm 22. The psalm’s first verse—”My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”—is spoken by Jesus on the Cross. Laments from later verses—”They that see me laugh me to scorn: … They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture”— are recorded by the Gospel writers as narrative and dramatic details. The Gospels witness the Crucifixion; they are written by journalists at a solemn event. Their point of view is not interior, expressive, but objectified. Psalm 22, however, is (like so many others) a cry of the heart, concluding with a hope that may be construed as prophetic. Dame suggests that Mark and Matthew, having “reconfigured a poem to serve the needs of prose,” have created a context that allows us, belated readers, to imagine a Jesus who, like the psalmist and ourselves, “continues to talk to the God he feels (and we feel) may not be listening.” This poem of individual isolation coupled with hope for unborn generations connects the two religions. Dame hopes “our own ‘unborn generations’ ” may find new ways to read each other’s books that will outlast the family feud recorded there.
Laurance Wieder is a poet living in Charlottesville, Virginia. He is the editor of The Poet’s Book of Psalms (HarperSanFrancisco/Oxford Univ. Press) and the author of Words to God’s Music: A New Book of Psalms (Eerdmans).
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