Dispatch from Rome: You Can Check Out Any Time You Like…
Confessions of a Reluctant Catholic (Bookended by Two Popes)
This month our dispatch comes from award-winning poet and translator, Moira Egan in Rome. It’s a Jubilee Year and after the death of Pope Francis, Pope Leo XIV is the first North American to hold the highest title in the Catholic Church. I first met Moira when she came to Canberra, Australia as the International Festival Poet for Poetry on the Move in 2018. She had just won The New Criterion Poetry Prize for her book Synæsthesium, an extraordinary work of ekphrastic poetry. The first half of the book, “Olfactorium,” is inspired by perfume and we bonded over our love of the perfume, Poison. In this dispatch she asks: “What is it, after all, that we do as poets?”
—Cassandra Atherton, Dispatches Editor
Damiano and I were coming back to Rome from a cool, breezy, quiet weekend in Umbria. Our arrival hit me in the face like a squishy humid pillow of stink and chaos. We needed to stop for a cool drink. One Campari spritz and a small blond beer later, we re-deployed the rolling suitcase and backpacks, and headed toward via Merulana. But wait! Clearly that road — the direct route between the major pilgrimage churches of San Giovanni and Santa Maria Maggiore — was blocked off. Yellow police tape, carabinieri cars, and lots of people lining the sidewalks. We moved closer, hoping to be able to cross the street to get home. Nuns in various shades of gray and blue, veils akimbo in the excitement. American tourists in shorts and flip-flops and bright colors. Priests in their requisite black, their priestly collars primly in place. “Oh my god!” I squealed, all too appropriately, to Damiano, slightly behind me because he was rolling the rolly suitcase. “Oh my god, I think it’s the Pope!”
I’d never seen the famous Popemobile outside of Vatican City, but there it was, rolling up the hill to Santa Maria Maggiore, Pope Leo XIV waving to all and sundry, the nuns in their gray, the priests in their black, the Americans in their Lily Pulitzer summer brights. I heard my countrypeople shouting in joy. “Pope Leo!” “Go Sox!” “Go Chicago!” How weird that it was probably our very own American voices that registered most immediately with him.
In his introductory speech as Pope, the former Robert Francis Prevost of Chicago immediately identified himself as an Augustinian: “Sono un figlio di Sant’Agostino. Agostiniano.” When I heard him say that, I breathed a semi-satisfied sigh of relief. We had watched Conclave before all of this papal drama, and were terrified at just how wrong it could conceivably go: with this Augustinian Pope, we felt hope. At least we haven’t fallen off the path begun by Bergoglio!
**
I grew up in a house full of symbols. Crosses and crucifixes in every room. The huge one, a scarily anatomical Christ on dark wood, which hung over Grandmother’s bed. It had a secret compartment in the back to hold the candle, a flask of Holy Water, an even smaller flask of oil. The Celtic crosses that Grandfather carved out of exotic woods: ebony, mahogany, rosewood. The pungent scent of fish frying, permeating the house, every single Friday. Mass cards, funeral cards, strewn across the crocheted doilies on the bureau. In the hallway, that ubiquitous, whitewashed portrait of handsome Jesus, eyes cast upward.
These things of my childhood weren’t simply the furnishings of our Irish Catholic household. I understood, even as a child, that these were outward manifestations of something else, something important, something deeply meaningful. Of course, there are many paths to a life in poetry, but I would argue that it’s not a very big leap from the imaginarium of a Catholic childhood to the sensibilities that lead one to become a poet.
What is it, after all, that we do as poets? We take our inner thoughts and feelings and embody them in images, symbols. What is a sacrament, after all? “An outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace,” according to the theologian Augustine of Hippo, spiritual father to our current Pope. We may not always be dealing with “grace” in poems, but I would say that, almost always, the work of our poems is to embody abstract concepts in concrete, “visible” terms. Archibald Macleish turns love into “the leaning grasses and two lights above the sea.” Tennyson portrays the struggles of the natural world as “red in tooth and claw.” Wilfred Owen suffocates us in the horrors of war: “Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, / As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.”
I mean no blasphemy here, but are we not transubstantiating — changing in substance — these abstract concepts into visceral, bodily felt images? Images. Imagine. Imagination. Magic. Think of the Magi, bringing gifts. Think of poetry as gift and sacrament. Think of a poem, from the Greek, ποίημα — poiima — a made thing, a thing made of stuff. We make our poems out of, well, such stuff as dreams are made on. We translate these dreams into metaphors and symbols, into meaning-making machines that convey what we want to say to our readers. Translate, after all, comes from the Latin: basically, to carry over. Metaphor comes from the Greek: basically, to transfer, to carry over.
***
“To carry over.” “To transport.” Let us hobble back to May of 2023. Long story, but I fell and broke my knee. A lovely crack, right down the right patella. Luckily I did not need surgery, but I had to stay in a brace and not walk at all for three weeks. Poor Damiano, loyal husband, helping me to the bathroom, bringing me food, listening to my pissed-off whingeing about this truly sucky situation.
It was particularly sucky because I had been invited to participate in a conference in Rome. When I told my friends and colleagues the name of this conference, they either laughed nervously or stared at me incredulously: “You?” Yep. Me. It was “The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination.” Catholic writers and artists from all over the world. Professors from Georgetown, Villanova, Loyola — all those Catholic universities. Special Guest: Martin Scorsese. Really Special Guest: Pope Francis.
Damiano and I debated. The wheelchair. The taxis. The roadworks just outside our apartment, already a hot mess, literally and figuratively, but compounded by the Roman wall they found right under our windows. Archaeologists were called in. The job was delayed. Could we manage?
But friends and colleagues would be there. And Martin Scorsese. And the Pope! In a most husbandly act of generosity, Damiano said yes, let’s give it a go.
The conference was held at the Villa Malta, a gorgeous old place off the Via Veneto, that swank neighborhood made famous from the time of La Dolce Vita. Goethe had stayed there. It was accessible! we were assured. Sure, if your wheelchair fits in the lift. Which it didn’t. It’s too complicated to describe the method we devised, involving two chairs (one in lift, one at destination), crutches, much heaving and hauling, a fair amount of fear, and occasional (oops! the floor was wet! bad step, ouch!) pain. Not so accessible, after all.
But the talks were interesting and the people were lovely. I got to see old friends and meet new ones. Even Damiano agreed, it was a good thing we were managing to be there.
And then all of us went to the Vatican to meet Pope Francis. He was very enthusiastic about our conference and had agreed to give us a private audience. I’ve been in those Vatican rooms before (sssh, secret, nighttime tours) so that part was less exciting to me than the fact that not only one but two wheelchairs could fit in the lift! Just an easy glide in, up, and out.
Pope Francis gave a beautiful talk, about literature and art and the imagination. Among other moving and lovely things, he said this: “Artists are those who with their eyes both see and dream. They see in greater depth, they prophesy, they show us a different way of seeing and understanding what is before our eyes. Indeed, poetry does not speak about reality beginning with abstract principles, but by first listening to reality: work, love, death and all the little big things that fill our lives.” Yes, as I was saying before: embodying. Listening to reality. Tasting, touching, seeing, even sniffing our reality. Francis was a little weak that day (he had had a bad cold) but his words were spoken with conviction and passion.
Then each of us got to meet him and say a few words. The well-dressed Vatican guards noticed poor little me, the lady in the wheelchair. Ah, bring her over, they gestured. So Damiano pushed me Pope-wards. I even got to jump the queue in front of the Jesuits. I looked up at Francis from my wheelchair. He took my hand. A little tongue-tied, I just said, “Grazie, Sua Santità.” He nodded. Then Damiano, from behind, told the Pope, “Lei è poetessa.” Then the Pope just beamed. “Ah, poetessa,” he said, nodding and smiling. That very moment is captured in a photo, taken not by the official photographer of the day (in my wheelchair, I was facing the wrong way), but by our friend the priest, Antonio Spadaro.
Everyone asks, “Ha ha, so you didn’t magically rise from the wheelchair when he touched your hand?” Well, no, that took a couple of months and some intense physical therapy. But that photo. The expression on my face is something I’d never seen before, and haven’t seen since. Something rather like an outward and physical sign of an inward and invisible—grace?
Moira Egan
