Steward of God's Mysteries

Think of us in this way, as servants of Christ and stewards of God's mysteries.

I Corinthians 4:1


I always try to begin my writing days with a lectionary reading, and part of today’s reading seems appropriate to Margaret. I’ve selected the opening line from one of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. It’s easy to dismiss these opening lines as stock greetings, but now and then, a line like ‘stewards of God’s mysteries’ can catch your eye and make you pause.

I think of Margaret as a steward of God’s mysteries. In the foreword of volume one of Always Now, Margaret makes this comment. “At times one is blessed with poignant awareness of things seen. Exact rendering of those heightened moments can evoke the right word now and then – and create an appetite for more such word-events.” Her language here is typically restrained but the key word is ‘blessed.’ Are poets not ‘blessed’ with poignant awareness of things seen? Is not this awareness given, bestowed? And in that blessing – that dispensation given to the artist – is awakened ‘an appetite for more such word-events?’

In Margaret’s poetry, I see ‘exact rendering’ at work, the finer technicalities in ‘evoking the right word.’ Margaret used forms like the sonnet and had an ear for rhythm although she speaks of that ‘ground bass, iambic pentameter, taking over.’ Poet Barb Nickel comments on the musicality of Margaret’s poems in an essay entitled “For Margaret Avison, a Pianissimo Threnody.” She notes the rhyme and the half rhymes in her work, the meters and beats. She notes also the ‘odd dictions’ and ‘leaps in scale’ – something I note, too (I have a tin ear, so much of the sound of Margaret’s work is lost on me except in its seamless union with the content and meaning of the words.) Perusing the poems of volume two of Always Now, I jot down the many ‘word-events’ she has concocted around the word ‘sun.’ There are of course, the two titles of her books – Winter Sun and sunblue – but there are many other ‘sun’ words like ‘oils of sun,’ ‘sun’s butterfat,’ ‘the sun uncaring,’ or ‘sunward,’ ‘sunsplash’, ‘sun-striped,’ ‘sun blue’, ‘sun buttery,’ ‘sun-wash.’ These are the odd dictions, the word-events, that arise in the exact rendering of things perceived in heightened moments.

Always Now, the title of Avison’s collected works, is itself a paradoxical word-event. Published in successive volumes in 2003-2005, Always Now is a good title for a collected work of poetry. As Barb Nickel notes of Margaret’s poem “The Fixed in a Flux,” the poet speaks of a ‘now that is nontheless not quite here’ – the ‘nowness’ that one might perceive in a moment’s observation to be recollected later in words in time. I did not know at first that Always Now was a three volume collection of Margaret’s work and took out only the first volume in my foray to the public library. Later in the week when my eleven year old son had the day off school, he begged me to take him to the library in the afternoon like I used to when he was a pre-schooler. Remember, Mommy? You used to take me and we would read books together and afterwards we’d have a snack you made for me? We went to the library in this ‘always now’ moment of parent-child intimacy, and while he read Calvin and Hobbes, I got out the other two volumes of Always Now and read “The Fixed in a Flux” with the lovely opening line “From the back seat, barley fields and sky ... “