Preface to "The Minaret."

Preface

The present poem dates back to the months following the end of my protracted undergraduate education. During this time I had lived with Eric Brooks, and we had quickly become spiritual fell0w-travelers in the way young people will always become fellow-travelers. We also struggled together to find the means to constitute a brilliant new literary movement, and meanwhile had many adventures I would not have credited before the fact.

In the hope of somehow launching a program to build a literature, the terrible task we had set ourselves, I wrote The Minaret over about four years. For some time prior to this period I had been powerfully impressed by the passage of life in time and of the episodes in the world's and my own daylong life, and the possible meanings of all this as against my own and the world's hopes, visions, divisions and attachments. In beginning this poem I hoped to wed these stirrings and impressions with my own growing desire to unfold an ambitious new work that would serve for my own quizzical words to the world, even if I failed to produce anything else afterward. Beyond this smaller desire, though, I hoped to also produce something that would advance the "cause" and jostle itself into the current epoch of letters like a new and strangely formed animal. At that time I already had a rough idea of how the thing would go, but in the succeeding seasons and years I only infrequently returned to The Minaret with new ideas for a passage or a whole "canto." Of the nine pieces with their Roman numerals that make up the poem, the first two are older than the next two by more time than I'm happy to say, and so on to number IX. I made difficult progress, insisting I'd carry through this work while doubting I'd ever have the ideas that would move it along.

The image of the minaret first arose from my memory of a structure built by the Liechtenstein family on one of their former estates in the present-day Czech Republic. At the time I was studying field archaeology in Moravia. This "minaret" is a central feature of the sprawling castle gardens at Lednice. Of course it is not a "working" minaret, and was never part of the religious life of any community. Having set down this testimony I would like to also clarify that while the tower in my poem points heavenward, I do not intend for the image of this minaret to sally forth and establish an apologetic or polemical position. There is in this poem no discussion of the differences between the world's great religions, or of questions of religious experience or practice, of the ill-used "way(s) to God," or of the destiny of social and civilisational history, and nor do I express here my own views on the vexed questions that have come down to us. I have likely kept all this too far out of mind while slowly adding to the poem in recent years.

We read that we are each to work out our own salvation with "fear and trembling," and my present poem is largely about the "fear and trembling" that precede the fear and trembling of this verse. It is also at pains to make sense in verse of a number of personal impressions and memories, with reference to some favorite haunts in my own reading. Naturally these "cantos" found their own themes and preoccupations, their own diction and imagery, over time, so that I'm about to back off from the labyrinth-in-an-otherworld that grew up around the poem, and can only hope that something true and real catches your eye in its windings.

-Sean (Patrick) Kater