Correspondences Page 53
Spirituality in the poetry of Judith Wright takes embodiment, its colours.
moods and events very seriously. Reflecting on her life's work she wrote:
The poems have been written out of the events, the thinking and feeling,
the whole emotional climate and my own involvements at that time.
...no historian is likely to provide the necessary emotional background
of the times during which the poems were written. Much has to be left
to the reader's own response in imaginative terms - and that is not a bad
thing, provided that the reader has been encouraged to use her or his
imagination. But imagination and feeling are now devalued in favour of
the harder values of so-called rationalism.
From the rational viewpoint, what one produces must be in some way
useful. What use is poetry? It certainly does not provide a living for the
poet ... What it does, for the poet, is to express and exemplify the feeling
which brought the poem into existence; that is, to help with the process
of understanding one's life and its meaning. For the reader, it can help
in the same way. That is what art is for.67
Poetry and other forms of art see and attempt to say the events, the thinking,
feeling, understanding, meaning and mystery of life on a planet and in a
universe of beauty and terror. Spirituality in the poetry of Judith Wright sees
and creatively and imaginatively says "humanness", "dailiness" and
"relatedness" to the rest of creation. The poetry sees the divine within
"dailiness" (Grace, C.P. p.331).
In this context a spirituality emerges that is somewhat uncomfortable with the
word "spirituality", carrying as it does connotations of dialectical, oppositional
differences. To see God, Divine Mystery, as "non-dialectical, non-oppositional
difference" 68 is to rethink traditional theology and spirituality. This is to be
neither anti-theological nor anti-spiritual. It is to seek, to think, live and feel
correspondences and relatedness in place of hierarchies, dualisms and polarities
This way of being lives in the "play of opposites, their interpenetration the
fission and the fusion". I see no contradiction in accepting that "we are all us
born of fire, possessed by darkness” ("Patterns", C.P. p.426).
67 Collected Poems 1942-1985, Foreword
68 Taylor, RLA- p. 94
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