Walter William Melnyk: Selected Poems

Like all poets, my biography begins with my last poem. Each poem is a new birth, not only of a thought, but also of the poet. And the poet's life is read and understood backwards from that moment, for the poem does not so much emerge from the life of the poet as it, in fact, creates that life. The hardest thing about poetry is not finding something about which to write, nor finding the words and structure for expression. The hardest thing about being a poet is knowing when not to write; knowing when silence is the profoundest poem. Not actually knowing, I suppose, but learning. That moment of silence is illusive at best; secret, surely; unknowable to most of us. In the year since the publication of Ice on the Ponds I have been encountering signs of this silent path. Some of this journey has been a rediscovery of old ways in my life, some might be that new birth which arrives in the birthing of the latest poem. This year, the tenth in my permanent exile from the Episcopal Church priesthood, has seen at least one return to an old pathway: oblate membership in a monastic order that I joined many years ago, an order from which, until late, I had been absent for many years. Dedicated to the practice or contemplative, or silent, prayer, this old pathway has been leading me back into a silence I thought I had lost forever: my own silence, the silence of the world, the silence of God. Is it too the silence of the poet which I have mentioned? I do not know. Perhaps I cannot know. Before I might be enfolded in this deep stillness, I though it might be some kind of an idea (good? foolish? poetically arrogant?) to share some of the many, many words have led me to this point. It is a task more likely to be edifying for me than more you, I am afraid. For me it might become an adventure in finding how all those past years have been reborn, recast, newly understood, in the light of these latest lines of poetry. If they are a help to you as well, I am grateful, and glad to have you along.