Nick Ripatrazone writes in his new book about Jessica Powers, an American nun and mystical Catholic poet.
‘I should like to go to New York.” Jessica Powers (1905-88) spent the decade following her mother’s death in 1925 as a homemaker, tending to the family farmhouse in Mauston, Wisconsin, to support her brothers. With the marriage of her second brother, she was fin- ally free to pursue her dream: moving to the centre of contemporary poetry in America.
Despite the demanding nature of her dom- estic work, Powers had published more than 50 poems, including work in Spirit, the maga- zine of the Catholic Poetry Society. Establish- ed in 1931, the society’s purpose was the “fos- tering and developing of further strength in the body of Catholic culture and literature throughout the nation”. It included Jesuit priests, poet Aline Kilmer (wife of famed Catholic poet Joyce Kilmer) and Sister Mary Madeleva Wolff, a university president.
Powers finally moved to New York City in 1937. She stayed at the Leo House, a Catholic guesthouse in Chelsea run by the Sisters of St Agnes, and began attending meetings of the Catholic Poetry Society. Regular attendees at these meetings included John Brunini, editor of Spirit, Clifford Laube, suburban editor of the New York Times, and Eileen Surles, whose work in publishing would later be traded in for life as a Cenacle Sister. Powers’s life, it seems, was suffused with women who would choose to devote their lives to the church.
Although Powers spoke about moving to New York City for religious reasons – “I wanted to lead a more spiritual life,” she would say, “I wanted to get closer to spiritual sources” – the city had also become a bit of a Catholic literary hub in recent years. In 1933 alone, the publisher Sheed & Ward had opened an office in the city, and the Catholic Worker newspaper debuted. When Powers left the city proper to live in Tuckahoe in Westchester County, NY, she remained under its literary influence. She took care of the children of Jessie Pegis, a fellow member of the Catholic Poetry Society, and Anton Charles Pegis, a Fordham University philosophy professor who examined the religious elements of Powers’s poems.
Borrowing from their extensive home library, Powers read Gerard Manley Hopkins and GK Chesterton, and her childcare duties resulted in a blessing: time to write. Her first book, The Lantern Burns, was published in 1939, and garnered glowing praise in Ameri- ca, the Jesuit weekly, which said Powers was in “the front rank of living Catholic poets”.
Powers was a rising Catholic writer at a time when Catholics were acutely aware of their tenuous intellectual status in America. Her literary life and her ultimate decision to leave the secular literary world for a life as a cloistered nun encapsulates the tensions and aspirations of mid-century nun-poets.
For the past few years I have been writing about something of a minor literary renaiss-ance. In mid-century America, nuns and sist- ers were writing poems, and publishing them in the nation’s finest publications. In my book The Habit of Poetry, I feature Jessica Powers and other talented women, in particular, Sist-ers Mary Madeleva Wolff, Mary Bernetta Quinn, Mary Gilbert (Madeline DeFrees), Maura Eichner and Mary Francis. All wrote moving poetry and deft prose. All of them garnered secular accolades.
Powers, in particular, is a fascinating case study of the Catholic literary experience. Despite the literary community afforded to her in New York City, Wisconsin remained on her mind. It was the only place, she would say, to which she “could apply both the adjectives rich and desolate”. In her poem “Escape” she writes: “I think: if I would lift this window now / and pause to listen, leaning on this sill, I might hear, for my heart’s full consolation / the whip-poor-wills on some Wisconsin hill.”
That land compelled her back in myst-erious ways. Wisconsin had shaped Powers’s poetic vision, had made her a poet-mystic, and from her distant, urban vantage point, that mysticism called to her. Powers attended a retreat led by a Jesuit and, probably fueled by the swells of devotion that follow guided prayer and reflection, she announced her desire to become a Carmelite nun. She would say that she needed strong structure in her life “lest I dream myself away”.
The priest told her to pursue her vocation, although she soon discovered that all convents in Brooklyn and the Bronx were full. One new Carmelite monastery, though, was open to new sisters: in Milwaukee. It seemed like a divine message, an opportunity for Powers the poet and Powers the mystic to become one. She became Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit, although she would always publish under her birth name.
Through poetry and her cloistered life Powers embraced a God-shaped beauty. As first a longtime homemaker and later a mem-ber of a burgeoning literary community, she experienced the domestic and secular world, before turning to an ascetic existence shaped by her pastoral mysticism. She considers her Carmelite existence in “Enclosure”, a poem written within her first decade as a nun.
Calling herself a “Gypsy by nature”, she wonders how she might “endure” the “small strict space” of the convent with its “meager patch of sky”. The first half of the poem is largely marked by a series of questions; an anxious narrator worried that she has made a mistake. She fears that “madness” has “poss- essed” her to come to this place, fearing that she might “deed it to myself until I die”. She even intones Teresa of Ávila, the 16th-cent- ury Carmelite mystic, unsure how the vision- ary might “approve” of a life character- ised by “wailing, barring, minimis-ing, shrinking”. Yet the narrator, and probably Powers, discovers the walled constraints are edify-ing because they force the action of imagination. In mind, heart and poem, she found a way to travel without end: “Its trails outrun the most adept explorer, outweigh the gypsy’s most inordinate need. / Its heights cry out to mystic and adorer. / Oh, here are space and distances indeed.”
Although Powers worried that “when self intrudes on the art, prayer is lost”, her collected poetry is a mystic’s search for divine beauty: a search that brought her from Wisconsin to New York City, and then back home, to an enclosure that sustained rather than stifled a rangy mind.
Adapted from The Habit of Poetry: The Literary Lives of Nuns in Mid-Century America (Fortress Press, May 2023).
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