"Alert to Glory": Behind the scenes with Winnipeg poet

It is very hard work to be detached from oneself -- spiritual disciplines such as prayer and meditation attempt to train one in this manner -- but awe, especially ordinary awe, is just sometimes given to us unexpectedly in moments of distraction or abstraction; we suddenly see and are lifted into another realm by the sight.

—Sally Ito, writer

Sally Ito is a poet and fiction writer.  Her book of poetry Alert to Glory is up for two awards at the 2012 Manitoba Book Awards - in the Manuela Dias Book Design of the Year category (cover design by Jamis Paulson, Turnstone Press); and the Mary Scorer Award for Best Book by a Manitoba Publisher.

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In my poem Ordinary Awe in Alert to Glory, I speak of those everyday moments when one can suddenly be struck by awe -- "moments when the mind-bell is struck dumb, and the hollow fills with shuddering sound, agog with itself." 

I think these moments come to everyone, not just poets, although it is the poet who has the propensity and the will to observe these moments in language attenuated to the sensation. 

What came to my mind when I used the word 'mind-bell' were the enormous bronze bells you see in Japanese Buddhist temples.  They are large -- big enough to stand under and be surrounded by if you wanted -- and are rung with a huge wooden mallet.  The sound is deeply resonant.  If you are underneath the bell or even inside it, you can imagine the thunderous sound that would fill the hollow.  It'd be self-obliterating.  

Similarly, when you are struck by awe, you are in a timeless state, completely out of yourself, and there is nothing between you and the thing observed, and it is that sensation of unity that I describe with the words "agog with itself." 

It is very hard work to be detached from oneself -- spiritual disciplines such as prayer and meditation attempt to train one in this manner -- but awe, especially ordinary awe, is just sometimes given to us unexpectedly in moments of distraction or abstraction; we suddenly see and are lifted into another realm by the sight.

Awe and wonder are divine gifts to the soul, and it is perhaps for that reason that I use eucharistic language in addition to the Buddhist imagery to describe the vessel, the mind-bell, as also holding "wine that is wondrous, divine." 

It is from the world of the sacred that I can draw forth the language to describe the state the poet is in when divining meaning from the most visceral and yet transcendent sensations of being human. 

LISTEN to Sally Ito read the title poem from Alert to Glory:



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