Many of us know Maitreyabandhu as a Buddhist teacher and writer, but he’s also a published poet. So we thought it would be interesting to find out about his view of the role of poetry in spiritual life. Here’s what he had to say:
I wondered if we could begin by talking about your journey to reading and writing poetry. Do you remember the first poem you ever read?
I can’t remember the first poem I ever read – I mean we’re all introduced to poems as children through nursery rhymes and so on, so I presume I was read those sorts of poems. But I didn’t do very well at school so poetry was always seen as being above and beyond me. As I grew up, I guess I thought it would be good to read poetry and that I’d rather like to be the sort of person who did, but that wasn’t enough to actually motivate me to do it.
It was Shelley’s ‘Mask of Anarchy’ that really got me into reading poetry. I was having a conversation with my friend, Devamitra, about two years after I’d got ordained. I’d read a little bit of T. S. Eliot when I was at art school, and I remember Devamitra saying to me that Shelley was a better poet than T. S. Eliot. I was convinced that he wasn’t, even though actually I’d not read anything butT. S. Eliot. So Devamitra read me the first five verses of ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ and I just thought ‘Oh that’s wonderful. I don’t know what that is, but if that’s poetry I want more of it.’ And then I read all of Shelley and Keats and Dante and Auden, and I’ve been reading poetry pretty voraciously ever since.
But it was only about ten years ago that I started to take my own jottings and poems at all seriously. I was always very embarrassed by my writing; it seemed sort of presumptuous to write poems. Still, now, I’d never call myself a poet. That’s like calling yourself a saint – it’s something that people might say of me long after I’m dead if I’ve written anything worth writing, but I wouldn’t ever use that word now if I can help it.
You mentioned that you were at art school before you started writing poetry. So has the relationship between Maitreyabandhu the Buddhist and Maitreyabandhu the artist always been an easy one?
It’s never been an easy relationship. I tried for a long time to find a way of making painting work with my spiritual life, but I found it very difficult to integrate a commitment to spiritual life with a commitment to painting. In a purely practical sense, I can fit poetry into my life more easily than painting – I can take the poems on the train and fiddle with them; I can spend a bit of time before I see somebody just working on a line break or a verse. But there are negative sides to writing poetry, too – it’s very obsessive, for example. There’s a poem in my first collection, The Crumb Road, that went through 94 drafts – you can end up working on them forever.
Probably the most negative part of writing poetry is that it’s reawoken my ambition – my ambition to be published, to win prizes, and so on. And that search for prestige is completely opposite to my spiritual commitment. So if I’m not careful, poetry will just become another high-level distraction. I need to keep focusing on first-level spiritual and human issues – on being a Buddhist first and someone who writes poetry second.
But your recent poetry collection, Yarn, includes poems about the Buddha. So was that an attempt to bring together the two worlds?
Yes, the first section of the new collectionYarn is definitely the most explicitly Buddhist set of poems I’ve written. But you can never write poems for ideological reasons, even for good ideology. I can’t write Buddhist poems because I’m a Buddhist. I can’t write poems about the Buddha because I think it would be good to have some poems about the Buddha. You have to be possessed by the poem – the poem just needs to be written; it has to catch you so that you want to write it.
Also, I find that spiritual poems are usually pretty dreadful! It’s like me suddenly saying, ‘And now I’m going to say something meaningful and spiritual.’ If someone says that to me, I immediately feel, ‘Oh no!’ It’s a bit like if somebody says, ‘I’m now going to tell you a joke.’ You think, ‘No, please don’t!’ You have to discover something meaningful, you have to find a joke in what you’re saying; you can’t pre-package it.
But I do believe there is a kind of meeting point between Buddhism and poetry, and one of the great gifts that Bhante Sangharakshita gave us was his vision of the arts as being part of a genuine Dharma life. Both Buddhism and the arts are opening us up to a ‘more’ of life – I think often people read poetry because it gets them in contact with what Wordsworth called ‘unknown modes of being’ – states of consciousness that go beyond your everyday consciousness. Just by using the language we speak, poetry somehow casts a spell that gives us some purchase on unknown modes of being. And of course that’s what the path to Enlightenment is all about, too.
Your new book, The Journey and the Guide, is an introduction to Sangharakshita’s five stages of spiritual life. In the book, you include a number of poems to elicit the stage of receptivity. Can you talk a bit about why you decided to do this? How can poetry help us become more receptive?
Yes, at the end of each chapter idea there’s this sort of semi-chapter exploring spiritual receptivity, or just receptivity really. I wanted people to experience receptivity, not just read about it. And I thought of poetry because when you read a poem, partly what the poem is saying to you is ‘slow down’. Unlike prose, it’s broken up into shorter lines, and there’s all that white space around it which is symbolic of silence I think. So the very metaphor of poetry is a metaphor of receptivity, of quiet. To read a poem well you need to be receptive.
You’ll notice that the poetry sections in the book are in a different font. I wanted to change the mood of the book so it’s not all about giving information, even valuable information. I wanted another mood that’s about just letting yourself really take the poem in and pause and open out a bit more.
And if we want to experience the ‘more’ of life that Buddhism is offering, I think we need to learn to be more receptive. In fact one of the most radical things we can do at the moment is not do anything – not buy something, not download something – we’re losing the art of not doing. I think even reading a book now has become a bit analogous to sitting down to meditate – it seems to take more effort than playing a film on YouTube or watching a movie clip online. So I also wanted to just encourage people to read.
And your book does that well because it’s such a good read!
I’m really pleased to hear that, because that was what I wanted. I didn’t want people to read the next chapter because they felt they ought to or that they should – even that they thought it would be good for them. I just like talking to people, having conversations with people and making friends. So I see the book as a kind of conversation between me and the reader. And I’m hoping the reader’s response will be one of enjoyment.
Because reading in general is something to be enjoyed, to be savoured. I remember the great poet Philip Larkin was asked in an interview how long he’d studied poetry. And he said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, you don’t study poems, you read them’. And I thought, that’s quite right – yes, we can study poetry, we can study Buddhism, but it’s only worth doing that if we’re then moved by them more deeply.
So the book, too, was an opportunity for me to just share my love of poetry and the Dharma. I wanted to say, ‘Look. This is why it’s so good. And this is why it’s important to your life, because you’ve got the same issues as Elizabeth Bishop in this poem or Auden in that poem, and the same issues as the Buddha two thousand years ago.’
So obviously the Buddha wasn’t a writer, but do you see him as a kind of poet?
Well, the Buddha did say that he was always aware that he was using language; that life didn’t fit words. And, if you think about it, that’s like an incredibly developed poetic awareness. We could say that the Buddha is like an ultra-poet, a transcendental poet, who was always trying to use words to go beyond words. Perhaps if we understand that about the Buddha, we’ll understand his teaching much more deeply.
So can poems take us on a journey that leads all the way to Enlightenment?
I don’t think they can on their own. I think that poetry – like all the arts – can help us deepen our lives, but you do have terrible stories of artists, even at the top of their game, acting very badly towards other people. We also need some kind of ethical framework if we are to develop spiritually, and that’s where positive emotion comes in. The five stages of spiritual life – integration, positive emotion, receptivity, spiritual death and spiritual rebirth – are mutually supportive. And poetry can play a big part in that journey, even poetry that isn’t explicitly about the spiritual. You can go and see Shakespeare’s King Lear, for example, and come out of it feeling quite clearly, ‘I now understand human life more deeply.’ That’s what great art gives you – it deepens your understanding and perception of life, and your sympathy with it.
Lastly, what would you say to someone who sees themselves as completely unable to understand or engage with poetry?
Well, there’s no obligation! But I think to make human progress, we do need to become more cultured, in the genuine sense of the word – it comes from ‘cultivated’, like cultivating a field. We need our minds to be dug up and enriched and manured, and that’s difficult if we’re just filling our minds with rubbish; with dross and triviality and The Great British Bake Off. The level of culture at the moment is extremely thin, so we need to actually go out and make an effort if we are to become more cultured. That doesn’t have to include poetry, but the great thing about poetry is it’s really cheap – you can buy a volume of great poetry for next to nothing and you can pop it in your pocket and carry it around with you. You could start with a good analogy like ‘The Rattle Bag’ or one of the Bloodaxe anthologies, or choose a poet like Elizabeth Bishop or Auden and just read three poems a day, perhaps before your meditation or on the train back home, and you’ll soon get really into it.
All you need to remember is the poet is always concerned to talk to you, whether it’s Shakespeare or Milton or Spenser or Alice Oswald. They’re really concerned to talk to you, and they’re trying to talk to you on the train, at home before you take the kids to school – and what they’re trying to say to you is really important. Of course poems want to be read, they’re like angels that need to be imagined; they can’t live until they’re read and they live more deeply the better you read them. So run off and get your anthology! There’s so much to enjoy. You can carry enjoyment round with you in a little volume – it’s great!
Find out more about Maitreyabandhu’s new books, The Journey and the Guide and Yarn
