Portrait of the Artist as Self-Portrait

Since I'm reading and rereading and annotating and waxing philosophical about Jarman's "Unholy Sonnets" for a paper, I figured I would share my enjoyment and my displeasure with you.

Unholy Sonnet 7

Mark Jarman

In which of these details does God inhere?
The woman's head in the boy's lap? his punctured lung?
The place where she had bitten through her tongue?
The drunk's truck in three pieces? The drunk's beer,
Tossed from the cooler, made to disappear?
The silk tree whose pink flowers overhung
The roadside and dropped limp strings among
The wreckage? The steering column, like a spear?


Where in the details, the cleverness of a man
To add a gracenote God might understand,
Does God inhere, cold sober, thunderstruck?
I think it's here, in this one: the open can
The drunk placed by the dead woman's hand,
Telling her son, who cried for help, "Good luck."

This is definitely one of the best of them. The more I read of the "Unholy Sonnets" the more I see how un-unholy they are. They're actually pretty tame, by the standards of a lot of contemporary poets far more jaded and jarring. (Frankly, the Larkin poem from a recent post is a lot more damning than many of the pieces in Jarman's collection.)


But I like to see it as a man writing himself back to faith. He'd been gone from the church a long time, his wife wanted to start attending again as a family thing. And he deals with God mostly through writing. I can definitely relate - you get burned out or just burned, and it's tough to see the point.


Writing has a way of finding that painful spot you would rather not deal with. It's like that loose tooth you keep tonguing or the scab you've got to scratch - you've either got to rip it out or let it heal. Sometimes both.


I don't know about your experience, but I can hardly put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard (or iPad screen) without somehow getting smacked by my own face in the mirror. It might not be prayer, but it's reflection and self-examination, which seems to be one of the prerequisite courses you have to take before you can graduate to prayer.


Is this an English major thing? Can you relate?