The Spirituality of Poetry:

an Internet conversation with

DON DOMANSKI

by John Herbert Cunningham

Don Domanski was born and raised on Cape Breton Island and now lives in Halifax. His latest work, All Our Wonder Unavenged (Brick Books, 2007) won the Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry and the Atlantic Poetry Prize, as well as the 2008 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award. In 1999 some poems from the same book won the CBC Literary Award for Poetry. Two of his eight books of poetry, Wolf Ladder and Stations of the Left Hand, were shortlisted for the Governor General's Award. Published and reviewed internationally, his work has been translated into Czechoslovakian, French, Portuguese, Arabic, and Spanish.

Which do you prefer, the Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu, or the Lieh Tzu, and why? What effect has Taoism had on your poetry?

A difficult question to answer, they are all excellent books. If I had to pick one I would choose Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, translated by D.C. Lau, which I think is a beautiful translation, very poetic. There are many versions that miss the mark, like so many translations of Rilke, which are rather flat and uninteresting. Lau's phraseology captures for me the real essence of the Tao Te Ching. Taoism has had a large influence on me, since I first read about it when I was fifteen. I recognized immediately that it was important, that it spoke to me, and that it would help my understanding of the world. Taoism places humanity in nature, not above or outside it, seeking to live simply and in harmony with the natural world. As Lao Tzu wrote, "Humanity follows the earth." Taoism tries to erase self-imposed boundaries that human beings create regarding nature, to take away that sense of otherness that most of us feel. Over the years my work has tried to align itself with this respect for nature and its mystery. I've also tried to balance the opposites, the duality we face in our lives, and the same duality that nature deals with; fears and hopes, the light and shadows that pass back and forth across our thoughts daily. Most people try to ignore it of course; especially the dark shadows that well up from the impersonal depth of the unconscious. In the end if it is ignored it will spill over in our lives, find expression in negative actions and reactions to the world.

Taoism has tried to understand both realities; the conscious and unconscious, to walk that thin line that separates the two, knowing we live out our lives on that tenuous strip of influences, that neither is damaging if embraced and understood. In other words the Taoist view of wholeness includes the positive and negative, living and dying, illness and health, etcetera, this is expressed beautifully of course in the yin yang symbol. A Taoist understands that dualism supports the universe and that there is a greater reality beyond these expressions of existence. As the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching read, "The way that can be spoken of is not the constant way. The name that can be named is not the constant name." Taoism understands that the naming of things has only a short life, which a word points at rather than names. "Names are only the guests of reality," to quote Hsü Yu. Poets in their hearts know this; know that we all fail in the end, that we can only hope to make gestures in the ongoing dialogue with silence. Those gestures are all we have as human beings and they are exquisitely beautiful, like the wing of a bird in flight, the flowing movement of a shark, or the reflection of the moon in water, no different, no greater.

Let me end this part of the interview by quoting the first page of the Tao Te Ching, translated by D.C. Lau, to give your readers who haven't read the book a taste of its contents. I first came across this as a teenager and I still think it's one of the most spiritually satisfying texts I've ever read.

The way that can be spoken of
Is not the constant way;
The name that can be named
Is not the constant name.
The nameless was the beginning of heaven and earth;
The named was the mother of the myriad creatures.

So always rid yourself of desires in order to observes its secrets;
But always allow yourself to have desires in order to observe its manifestations.

These two are the same
But diverge in name as they issue forth.
Being the same they are called mysteries,
Mystery upon mystery --
The gateway of the manifold secrets.

In your afterword to Earthly Pages: The Poetry of Don Domanski (p. 54), you state that the"general sway of the mind over the ground of being can be an intimate, intense experience, opening us to the new textual opportunities. Intuition shamanizes language, bringing back to the cognitive process the abandon of nature itself. The wilderness inherent in this new position frees us from the restrictions of habitual thinking, it allows for spontaneous reorderings of intent and meaning." Do you see poetry as shamanistic?

The word shaman comes from the Tungus people of Siberia, having its origins deep in the Paleolithic. With the advent of monotheism, shamanistic practices were marginalized throughout the western world. Yet organized religions still contain expressions of it in their symbolic and mystical relations with God. All cultures that practised shamanism shared a belief that the shaman worked to create a connection between the known and unknown world. On that level I think all art is shamanistic, that it grew out of the same intuitive need to express and connect with a larger reality and nothing much has changed since then. From what we know, the shamanistic tradition came forth as the interpreter/originator of the various artistic forms: drawing, music, dance, song, etc.--as it still is among indigenous cultures around the world. Shamanism was based on a magical sense of the universe that human beings found themselves in and the natural response was a magical one, of wonder and interpretation. There is still an element of magic in all art, the element of surprise and the emotional tug, the pulling of rabbits out of hearts. In the Les Trois Freres cave in the French Pyrenees there is perhaps the oldest depiction of a shaman. It shows a person with the paws and ears of a lion, legs, feet, arms, penis and beard of a man, the face of an owl, antlers of a deer and the tail of a fox. It looks as if he is dancing and has been dancing since around 15,000 BC in the darkness of that cave. When we write are we not wearing similar garb? Are we not dressing ourselves in the skins of metaphor, simile, etc., in all the mental representations needed to perform our rituals on the page? Are we not also dancing in the dark?

In his introduction to Earthly Pages, Brian Bartlett writes: "Domanski's past isn't so much one of social, economic, or nationalistic struggles, as one of geological and biological change . . . mythic resonances, and religious, philosophical, and scientific thought. Domanski's imagination is drawn not merely to the past in general but specifically to the primeval, to the origins and early manifestations of things, now known only fragmentarily." How do you respond to this statement?

I agree with that, but would add that much of my work focuses on the present moment of the poem, and each moment is by implication already ancient, connected to all the beginnings that have existed. The roots of every second of time run deeper than we are likely to ever know. I'm always mindful of the "early manifestations of things," the very primeval connections in all of our responses to the world. I include these in my poems because this is our grounding, because we, as a species, don't often look over our shoulders at our own deep history and the far deeper history of the earth itself. As human beings thinking of possible futures we need to be aware of our past, the immensity out of which we have grown. Not to be aware of the sheer enormity that leads to the creation of this very moment is to be blind to the universe itself, to where we have been. To look deeply is to see that all living things share a common ancestor, a single beginning, that we are profoundly connected to everything on earth, not just sentient beings, but to the very stones themselves. So to look at our roots is to expand the very notion of who we are, both collectively and individually. It's seeing reality and being moved by what we see, feeling respect and veneration for the intimate world we find ourselves in. We live cheek to jowl with all other creatures on this planet, so to be a realist is to keep this present in our thoughts every day, not to close our eyes to the wonder of our collective birth, our common rising out of emptiness. That fact that this planet is alive, that it's teeming with life and not an empty sphere is astonishing in itself, but also to be aware of that reality, no matter how limited our awareness might be, is also astonishing. That consciousness grew out from a molten orb that was created approximately 4.5 billion years ago is stunning to even contemplate. And when I speak of consciousness, I'm referring to plants and other animals as well. We are, in a real sense, all in this together, we have one mother.

In reviewing both Earthly Pages and All Our Wonders Unavenged, I wrote regarding your spiritual progress that "Prior to this book [All Our Wonders Unavenged], much of the spiritual sentiment seemed to be that of a latent Christianity with explorations into other religions--Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism, etc. That exploration seems to have settled into an expression of the spirituality of a secular humanism with a respect and awe for the spirituality to be found in nature." Would you agree with this? Where would you disagree?

I grew up in what was essentially a Christian country; this has all changed, of course, and for the better. I discovered Buddhism and Taoism at a young age and Sufism much later. The influence of Buddhism and Taoism made a profound difference in my life, from the age of fifteen on, which was the same age that I began to write poetry. I wouldn't say that I was writing out of a Christian or latent Christian context, I was and still am using the mythologies of various religions. By mythologies, I don't mean something that's dead or untrue; rather, I'm referring instead to the living human heart that attempts to understand our position in the vastness of space/time. I'm not a secular humanist: there's far more to the cosmos than the ideas contained there. Neither do I think of myself as a Buddhist or Taoist poet. Poetry itself is my spiritual path, my prayer and meditation, my way of acknowledging and venerating the amazement of being. I bow to that amazement in my work, try as best I can to honour and approach its essence. To me it is fundamentally a religious feeling, religious in the same way Albert Einstein meant when he wrote, "The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of profound interrelations is of a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at the scheme that is manifested in the material universe. It does not lead us to take the step of fashioning a god-like being in our own image--a personage who makes demands of us and who takes an interest in us as individuals. There is in this neither a will nor a goal, nor a must, but only sheer being." That religious feeling for me is summed up in the word being, in the enormity of that single word. Beyond that word we have the nameless, as the Tao Te Ching says, the wordless. Poetry attempts to grasp that silence beyond language, but fails each time, only being able to point to it with a common understanding that the poem creates between poet and reader. Poetry isn't so much made of words, but of gestures beyond the words themselves.

About your most recent book, I also wrote that "The 'subtle change' that was evidenced in Parish of the Physic Moon erupts into a radical revision of his style in All Our Wonder Unavenged. Although he had serialized some poems earlier, this becomes a predominant style. And many of those that are not serialized are written in prose poem format. Not only that, but he adopts a much more prosy style in general with the long lines which, in Parish of the Physic Moon, still retained a poetic expression now verging towards the prose end of the continuum." If you agree that these changes occurred, then why did they?

What you're referring to isn't a prosy style as such, but the use of the longer narrative line. I was, and still am, exploring the possibilities of that line, changing the focus and hopefully bringing out new potentialities. It's been interesting what subtle and not so subtle adjustments occur in the poem because of the longer breath. For instance, I now find room for myself; the "I" has been appearing more and more often. For most of my writing life, I wasn't all that interested in placing myself in the work. Now it seems more natural that I at least make reference to being present. Previously, I was trying to focus on the 'is'ness of a thing, now I see that as a viewer I can be part of that 'is'ness, that my seeing makes me a participant in the context of the work. It wasn't my intention to open up the poem in that way, but with the longer narrative line it became instinctive to explore that possibility and, as always, I followed my instincts as best I could. Also, the longer lines help to encompass more of that sense of being in the world, of embodying in words the human experience of awe and reverence. Back when I was younger, so many poets were writing about themselves--their rather small concerns. I felt I was drowning in a sea of those poems. So I took my poetry elsewhere, trying to find new ground, a new perspective. I was trying to pay attention to what was left out, overlooked and, of course, I still am. It was in my nature to do so--even at five years old, I was fascinated by nature, by the details, by what was neglected--which is just about everything, when you think about it. So I was true to my concerns, but very cautious about being too present, about taking the focus away from where I felt it should be. In a way, in those early poems I was familiarizing myself with what was around me, taking stock and trying to see below the surfaces. Now I see myself as part of the whole, simply another aspect of nature, standing there with everything else, with the immensity of being. The narrative line has allowed me to realize this, to at least appear at times in my work, without worrying about losing the prime importance, the sacredness of what's surrounding me.

What are you doing now?

Well, at the moment I'm finally getting back to a routine of work, after about eighteen months of absence from the process. I've begun a new manuscript and it's been a tough slog trying to regenerate my work, to focus the poems in a different way, to connect it to my last book and expand its concerns. I always take a long break after finishing a manuscript, I need to stand back for awhile and allow myself the small grace of silence, to live for a time in the stillness between words.