Jonathan Evens interviews Spencer Reece
Spencer Reece is an Episcopal priest writing confessionally about his life experiences and spiritual perceptions.
There is a refreshing candour to Reece’s poetry which does not shy away from, as Joe Hoover has noted, addressing ‘disease, discharge, blood, violence, haemorrhoids’, ‘church and body and condoms and sex and Lorca and Vega and the residue of life under the dictator Francisco Franco, who hated Protestants’.
This is, after all, the priest-poet who began his memoir The Secret Gospel of Mark with a description of a teenage act of masturbation. He describes himself as ‘unconventional but always trying to adhere to convention’, while his poems explore faith and family paying attention to the fragility of each.
His first collection, The Clerk’s Tale, won the Bakeless Prize in 2003 when the judge was Louise Glück. His poems have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Scholar, and The New Republic. He served at the Honduran orphanage Our Little Roses, and has worked for the Bishop of Spain for the Reformed Episcopal Church in Madrid. He is currently Vicar of St Paul’s Wickford in Rhode Island.
Acts, his third book of poetry, is the product of both a decade of work and a life acutely lived. In this collection he celebrates the language and literature of Spain and also tracks his tenure at the Spanish Episcopal Church. Acts, he has said, ‘is about love … and all its messiness’.
He has written that ‘A poet, like a priest, works with facts and mysteries: the facts mysterious, the mysteries factual’ and has said that what he is after in poems or prose is ‘telling the truth in the art’. The essential movement in his life and work, in the words of Jonathan Farmer, is that he ‘offers pastoral attention to the wounded and discarded of the world – including, frequently, himself.’ Poems, Reece suggests, are ‘spiritual suitcases’ which provide ‘comfort in the hour of need’.
He is also an artist – painting landscapes with watercolours – and has published a selection in his Poet’s Book of Hours All the Beauty Still Left.
JE: Your memoir The Secret Gospel of Mark ‘describes coming of age as a closeted gay teenager in the 1980s, battling alcoholism and depression, navigating fraught family relationships, and searching for purpose, all while falling in love with poetry’. You’ve written that ‘poetry saved you’. How did that occur?
SR: Yes, poetry saved my life. For young people today, it is challenging for them to understand that in the 1980s in America we did not speak of homosexuality in a public or casual way. We did not say the word ‘gay’ in an affirming way, ever. To be gay was a curse and a pox. To live with such a difference was secrets, subterfuge, innuendo, closets and more closets. A lonely path stretched out ahead for me: it was either get a girlfriend or kill yourself. I got girlfriends, and many became life-long friends and some spilled into romances that added to my life rather than detracted from it. Not an unusual story for an American man my age.
Our cultural attitude to homosexuality changed rapidly, overnight, around 1990 in the height of the AIDS epidemic: AIDS forced us to speak. To be alive and in the world for such a change is like being around for the asteroid that felled the Cretaceous era. Today, as I talk to you, I think most days no one cares much anymore: well-adjusted teenagers are happily gay these days and dream of marriage and children like everyone else. There are few impediments. More oxygen came into the world.
But, then, why poetry? Perhaps it is my heavy Welsh ancestry: what other genetic group is more crazed about poetry besides the Irish? My parents loved to read, and, yes, were both affected by the disease of alcoholism, so from an early age there were not only closets upon closets, but distance and confusion, at other times frivolity and excess, enrichment and deprivation all in one.
There was much joy in my household and in my parents’ marriage, and there was at the same time much yelling, anxiety, and incomprehensible demoralization. I was in need of a private life, and poetry, reading it, and then ultimately writing it, provided solace.
It was all a blessing. Did the environment and the times, make the man I became? In part. My life says loud and clear: art will save us. And these days, to my own amazement and shock, church will save you too. My church life keeps me on track and coaxes me towards decency, altruism, expansion, fun, sharing, giving.
JE: The structure of The Secret Gospel of Mark fell into place when you assigned poets to different periods of your life. The seven poets were Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, James Merrill, Mark Strand, George Herbert, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Why those poets and how did they help?
SR: That book took seventeen years to write. I wouldn’t change a comma or semi-colon now. For a decade I lived in Europe, in Madrid, Spain, and during that time I travelled to England. I was contacted by an editor at Granta magazine in London to write more prose about my relationship with the poet, James Merrill, at the time. The editor’s name was Luke Niema. He turned out to be a genius editor. We met once in Camden Town when I was visiting London to meet with the Archbishop of Canterbury. He encouraged me to write the book in an organic way, so that the poets appear as they had appeared in my life. When he told me this, the structure for that book fell into place in one afternoon. Each poet became a stained-glass window through which I could see the divine, it was a way to filter my story. The whole book is contrapuntal as Bach, the right hand playing the appreciation of the poets, the left telling the story of me and how I fell into the priesthood and how poetry saved me.
Mark Strand appears in the last chapter, as my world is expanding. I met him as he was dying. In his later life he fell in love with an elegant Spanish woman who later became my friend. Strand was a link from the US to Madrid. He was unbelievably kind and charitable to me, a keeper of the art, passing on his encouragement to me.
The last chapter of that book opens out more to include living poets, Richard Blanco and Greg Pardlo, and the description of the wild fantastical festival we pulled off before the pandemic. The last chapter is kind of an explosion, a firecracker, connecting to Jesus, a creative himself, Jesus is the poet who sits on that chapter like a goose laying the golden eggs. The last chapter brings to together the church life with the poetic life. I say in the book I didn’t ‘come out’ so much as ‘come in’. In that last chapter, I come in.
JE: Friendships and readings with other poets have been a feature of your career, particularly with The Unamuno Author Series that you set up while ministering as an Episcopal priest in Madrid. What have your contacts with other poets brought to you?
SR: Friendship is everything. I am working now on a book of prose, a set of letters to poets I have known, much to the tune of Paul’s letters to Timothy. The first one is done and published on-line in The Paris Review and is written to Louise Glück. Friendship in the art leads to support, to better poems probably. Friendship has taken up a fair amount of real estate in my life because I have not been married and much of my life has been spent as a single person. I do not have children. I see now I needed that kind of life for me to make the art I made and am making. Maybe someone else could have had the partner and the kids and the rich artistic life but I’m certain I could not. In such a life that I have led, friendship, the give and take of it, without the pressure of romance or marriage, has played a significant role. I’ve had brief romances, and one relationship that lasted five years. You see the power of friendship with Louise Glück, I think, as well, just look at her beautiful poem, ‘October’ much of it concerning her friendship with Frank Bidart. Louise and I had very similar romantic stamina with relationships.
Friendship helps me in the art of being a priest as well. Getting to know you, travelling to England, I have no doubt will broaden and enrich my life in the church. I mean, look at Jesus, his life depended on his friends. Mine the same.
JE: You spent one full year at Our Little Roses, an orphanage in Honduras, teaching poetry to girls who had lost family due to poverty, violence, and natural disasters. The book of their poetry that resulted from that time led to an award-winning documentary film following the girls as they left the orphanage and began to live independently in challenging circumstances. What did you learn from this experience and what has been shared through the book and film?
SR: San Pedro Sula, Honduras, is a touchstone for my faith. The orphanage is the only all-girl orphanage in a country of 250,000 orphans. The place and the people made me the priest I am now fourteen years later. I am proud of the bilingual anthology of their poems, and I am proud of the film the film crew made. The film is a masterpiece. I learned from the film that there is nothing more rewarding than sharing. I learned about love from the girls. I learned about working as team from the girls and the film crew. I learned about another beautiful culture from living there. I learned about resurrection from the girls: they made faith real. When you see a girl with no teeth and a bloated stomach wobble up to the communion rail and gradually over months and years become a self-respecting little person with dignity then you know and understand the word resurrection. I go back to Honduras now every year and our church is very involved there now with mission and support, it has changed the energy of our church and filled it with possibility and fun. Bringing the life of the girls into a church I have seen magically energizes the place.
JE: Your poetry draws on your own experiences and story, with the most recent collections, The Road to Emmaus and Acts, reflecting on your experiences as a priest. In what ways does creating a poem about a lived experience change and clarify that experience?
SR: Well, very often, I don’t always understand things in real time Perhaps it is very rare for humans to fully comprehend experiences as they are happening. This is the crux of The Road to Emmaus, my favourite Bible story of all. I loved calling my next book Acts because it evokes things happening in real time and all of a priest’s life is one act after the next, intimate acts, being a witness to babies, to marriages, to deaths: what a privilege that has been and continues to be. So long ago, a scared, insecure American, studying at the University of York for a one-year graduate MA on the work of the Metaphysical poets, I stumbled into the life and work of George Herbert and it left a permanent mark on me. He is my hero. A guide. I wanted, and I don’t even really understand why completely, to be him. And here we are, at sixty-two, and I have become both poet and priest in the most secular time ever. I believe in the church, and I believe in poetry and I still feel George Herbert close to me, talking to me.
JE: You’ve written of being ‘a priest in a world where religion is a tough sell and the more I do the less I know’. How have you coped with that challenge and how does it impact afresh or differently in Trump’s America?
SR: This is a time of great division which Jesus warned us about. Part of being human is knowing some kind of division, from Adam and Eve on down. It is perhaps no coincidence the church where I finally landed as a rector, after my long and winding road, is St. Paul’s. I love Paul! He is so human. Scrappy and unconventional and paradoxical and wanting so much for everyone to be one. I relate to his humanity, trying to absorb the life of Christ. I am an American who has been informed by Europe and Central America, having lived deeply in those cultures and learned another language, so that makes me who I am as a priest in America. My perspective is broadened by the humility of living in other cultures. I love other cultures, and I love that that is a part of my biography. What did Henry James say? When I am in America, I feel European, and when I am in Europe, I feel American. America is a land of great opportunity still, it is a young place, I hope it can sustain itself longer than 300 years. But some civilizations don’t last much longer than that, I am thinking of the Incas for example which lasted about 100. I’ve been fortunate to be in America and know it thriving. I do not preach political sermons on the current times to a congregation that is broad and diverse, I take my message straight from Jesus which happens to be social justice and equality for all and radical love and acceptance. We need that now more than ever. I follow Jesus with the heart of Paul. I love the story of the Samaritan woman at the well and how when Jesus listens to her she becomes radicalized and evangelizes. I try to listen very hard to my congregation and my staff, and when I am done listening to them, I listen some more. To lead is to listen. One has to wonder if President Trump is listening. To live in a country where you feel no one is listening to anyone is a place where you need church all the more, listening will save us.
JE: You also paint, primarily vibrant watercolors of the places you have lived and visited. Where does the language of paint take you that can’t be reached by the language of words?
SR: That’s a nice note to end on. I love Winston Churchill and am about to embark on a hefty biography of your leader. You know he loved to paint at Chartwell? I love painting as a sister art to the poetry because I don’t have any of the pressure upon me with the literary world. I am pleased with my paintings and their imperfections. Now with a poem, I can’t say I was ever pleased with an imperfection; I want them to be rockets that reach past this time and place. With the paintings, I practice the art of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘perfect useless concentration’. Watercolors are the realm of mistakes that turn into flourishes for me. I user colours that surprise me. I truly rest. I’d like to take more classes as time goes on. You can pick up techniques in classes: like with poetry and non-fiction, I’ve basically taught myself how to draw and paint. Plath drew too. But I get the sense with her drawings that they carried the same intense level of perfection for which we love in her poems, but the paintings feel too tight to me. With her daughter, Frieda, I see a freer artist at work. I love Hockney, love, love Hockney. Have you seen his Yorkshire landscapes?
Jonathan Evens
Art by Spencer Reece
.