Fools and Crows by Terri Witek

First published: Alexandria, Va.: Orchises Press, 2003

Genre(s): Poetry

Subgenre(s): Lyric poetry; meditation and contemplation

Core issue(s): Beauty; the Bible; marriage; nature; self-control

Overview

Terri Witek was born in 1952 and became a professor at Stetson University in Florida. She is at heart a formal poet, although at times, as in “All Together Now,” she uses unrhymed free-verse couplets. More often, however, she uses traditional forms such as sonnets (though the sonnets of the “Courting Couples” sequence are unrhymed), sestinas (as in “The Docent Discusses the Massacre of the Innocents”), and villanelles (as in “Launch ” and “Mating Crows”). Witek’s poems are either extended descriptions of an image, whether drawn from the natural world or from an artwork, or small, anecdotal stories that serve as parables or meditations. Witek does not wrap up her poems neatly in an overly moralistic way. She often leaves her endings open to the reader, sounding a deliberately ambivalent note that permits the audience to make up their own minds about what has happened in the poem.

Fools and Crows begins with the section “Courting Couples.” That the first of these couples is Adam and Eve demonstrates the biblical orientation of Witek’s sensibility; in this section, love is discussed as a vehicle of spiritual unfolding and a means of human affirmation. However, Witek’s paradigmatic courting couple is Joseph and Mary, and in this she assays the paradox of Christianity in its encounter with human love.

The second section of the book, “Master Knife,” deals with the twin themes of pain and art in human experience; the master knife is used to craft a woodblock, but this delight is counterpoised by the hurt and violence often associated with knives. In “Guest Room with Snow Dome” Witek pictures not an explicitly named painting but an evocative scene. She compares two deep-sea divers with Jesus and Mary: The divers, in the ocean, are out of their natural element, just as, eventually, Jesus and Mary feel themselves to be on earth. The emphasis on Marian devotion and the demands it makes on conventional ideas of life are further explored in the book’s third section, “Fatima Poems.”

In the fourth section, “Launch,” the titular theme of fools and crows receives ample exploration. The image of the holy fool has been a constant in Christian storytelling, whereas the crow has often been associated with darkness and aggressive energy (as in Ted Hughes’s famous poems about crows). Fools and crows are both outsiders to conventional modes of perception, and both are thus seen by Witek as potential messengers of the sacred, despite their superficially unpromising exteriors. Drawing on the allegories of the late medieval Dutch writer Sebastian Brant in his Das Narrenschiff (1494; The Ship of Fools, 1509), Witek notes that Brant describes the raven as having a cry that sounds like cras, the Latin word for “tomorrow.” Witek draws an analogy between the cry of the crow and that of the fool, who hopes for tomorrow. In a sense, however, all humans with hopes for a better future, on earth or in the afterlife, are fools, and the foolishness of belief in a happy outcome becomes a foolishness of hope well worth succoring. “Fools” and “crows,” both monosyllabic words with five letters ending with s, are paired often in contrast and analogy in this last section. There are poems in the fourth part of Fools and Crows with quite a different focus, however: on Christopher Columbus’s voyages to America and how they affected the great explorer’s relationship with his wife, on a rocket launch from Cape Canaveral, on the actress Jenny Agutter’s role in the 1971 Nicolas Roeg film Walkabout, and (somewhat surprisingly given the Christian focus of most of the volume) on classical themes. These include an ekphrastic poem (a poem that is a verbal expression of an actual artwork) on Giovanni Bellini’s painting Feast of the Gods in which an unbridled celebration of pagan hedonism still leads to an affirmation of eternal love.

Christian Themes

There is something dynamic and catalytic about Witek’s exposition of Christian themes in her poetry. She juxtaposes artworks and daily life, mystical experience with alert observation, in an original and contemporary way that pulsates with spiritual force.

In “The Docent Discusses the Massacre of the Innocents,” for example, she pictures a museum guide discussing the Italian High Renaissance artist Raphael’s rendition of the massacre of the Holy Innocents, the children murdered by King Herod in his quest to counter the prophecy that a newborn baby would take his kingship. However, it is actually not Raphael’s rendition on which the docent remarks but the engraving made in imitative emulation of it by Marcantonio Raimondi, a less-well-known High Renaissance Italian artist. The docent discusses the painting, which hangs in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., pointing out that Raphael himself could never have supplied the authoritative small touches lent by the more obscure artist. In other words, even the most famous or talented artist needs help; no person can create anything truly meaningful on his or her own.

Witek evokes the craft, power, and taut draftsmanship of Marcantonio’s engraving yet shows that Raphael represented the scene inadequately or incompletely in putting the imagery of the Italy of his own day into a scene that represented a distant time and place, and also in needing another’s hand. Witek also points out the essential paradox of representing innocence through the medium of human art, itself tainted by sin, inadequacy, and the inherent limitations of its materiality. Art can, therefore, never be fully innocent.

Although Witek writes ekphrastic poems, she is not shy of criticizing the artworks that form her poems’ subjects. In “The Dormition,” she points out how in Flemish Renaissance artist Hugo van der Goes’s rendition of the Dormition (earthly death) of Mary is overly fanciful and pretty yet still permeated with the grave dignity of the depicted event. This poem sets the tone of the evocation of art in Witek’s poetry: knowledgeable, empathetic, but always layered with the knowledge of art’s inability to encompass spiritual meaning fully. Conversely, however, Witek also testifies to the ability of humble artifacts to disclose revelatory moments. The three “holy card” poems are based on the funeral prayer cards of a young man named Eugenio DiMichele who died at seventeen. Like Jesus himself, Eugenio would not live to old age; the different threads of Eugenio’s, Jesus’, and the poet’s own lives all combine to illustrate time, change, and persistence. The most arresting passage in these poems concerns a green stone pictured near Jesus in one of the cards, which the poet surmises might be a turtle, a being that can live some two hundred years—a natural endurance far beyond what both Jesus and Eugenio experienced on the mortal plane of existence.

Another important sequence is the Fatima poems, based on the vision of the Virgin Mary experienced by three young children in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917. Writing on the immediate occasion of the pilgrimage to Fatima by the late Pope John Paul II in 2000, Witek anatomizes some of the unearthliness of the Fatima visitation, not using ordinary language and diction to evoke what is fundamentally a rationally incomprehensible event. Witek pays particular attention to Sister Lucia, who survived her two cousins, Francisco and Jacinta, by eighty-five years, dying only in 2005 (after Witek wrote the poem, so she was still alive when it was composed). Lucia’s long life, as depicted by Witek, allows her much time for contemplation of the unusual events of her childhood, as the essential mystery of her experience remains unresolved.

Sources for Further Study

Sagan, Miriam. Review of Fools and Crows. Women’s Review of Books, May, 2004. Short review of Witek’s book in the context of other books of poetry by American women poets.

Witek, Terri. “’He’s Hell When He’s Well’: Cormac McCarthy’s Rhyming Dictions.” Shenandoah 41 (Fall, 1991): 51-66. Witek’s dissection of the redemption glimpsed even by McCarthy’s often isolated and despairing characters counterpoints the more overtly hopeful themes of her own poetry.

Witek, Terri. “Reeds and Hides: Cormac McCarthy’s Domestic Spaces.” Southern Review 30 (Winter, 1994): 136-142. In reviewing the American novelist, Witek discloses some of her own thoughts on spiritual desolation and abandonment.

Witek, Terri. Robert Lowell and Life Studies: Revising the Self. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. Witek’s scholarly study of Robert Lowell, a onetime Catholic convert who also wrote powerful religious poems, is a tacit manifesto of her own stance as a Christian poet.