The Art of Prophecy: A How–To Guide from Beyond the Grave by Amos, a Major Minor Prophet

Review by Wally Swist

It is apt that one of the several quotes from a variety of notable authors prefacing David Breeden’s The Art of Prophecy: A How–To Guide from Beyond the Grave by Amos, a Major Minor Prophet would include the French philosopher Alain Badiou, a colleague of Gilles Deleuze and Michael Foucault, who writes about such concepts as truth not being either postmodern or a simple repetition of the concept of modernity, and whose philosophy just may be expressed succinctly by the quote used here, “Justice does not exist, which is why we must create it.”  A minor prophet from the Bible, Amos was an eight century BCE shepherd and dresser of sycamore trees, who was discerning enough to point up the differences of the ruling elite and take issue with it.

It is Amos whom Breeden gives voice in poems that are reminiscent of William Carlos Williams, written in American idiom, as well as epistolary prose poems that conjure the work of Russell Edson.  However, David Breeden’s poetry is refreshingly his own, as in these lines from the poem “A Resume from the Other End of the Spectrum” in which Amos concretizes his criticism of the upper class, “Thataway, where the fattest parasites/ themselves.  Where the high/ ‘n mighty sat, attached, sucking// our blood.  Thataway where a new/ Pharaoh always sits, looking to lion/ us all up like so many lamed// sheep.”  Lines such as these are also evocative of Edward Dorn’s persona poems in his book Gunslinger, considered to be one of the best long poems of the 1960s.

And as Breeden has Amos himself quoting Foucault, we as readers sit up straighter so we can best listen to the depths of truth found in these poems, “Truth is a thing of this world, produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint.”  But as Breeden may know Badiou and Foucault, he knows his own soul and the soul of man when he writes so eloquently of the spiritual rigors of silence, “As I said, the one thing you learn in the desert night is silence. You develop one of those intimate relationships with silence. Roaring, deafening silence. Makes some tell stories. Makes some sing songs. Makes some hear things.”

Breeden, who has also adapted Laozi’s Daodejing (Lamar University Press, 2015), includes Verse 23 from this Eastern classic in this book, and offers much wisdom here in these lines, “When we make The Way our study/ Those attempting to practice it/ Agree with us, and those attempting/ To pursue it agree with us, &/ Even those failing to attempt it// Agree with us.// But when we stop/ Our own attempts/ All others lose faith in us.”  What Breeden is illustrating through Laozi is the spiritual law that we are not only all connected, and ostensibly all One, but not unlike the concept of Antahkarana, developed by Elizabeth Claire Prophet, which is essentially “the web of life” or specifically “the net of  light spanning Spirit and Matter connecting and sensitizing the whole of creation within itself and to the heart of God.”  What Breeden posits is that it us on us and within us—all our acts and thoughts and how we focus our will is our largest asset and our most formidable strength, that everything counts, and as the prolific Native American poet Carroll Arnett, or Gogisgi, once Chief of the Overhill Band of the Cherokee Nations, once wrote, “Everything counts/ and nothing happens fast.”

Breeden also makes use of a kind of dialect that made the Pogo comic strip popular and vivid, as in the eponymous character’s well-known phrase, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”  This kind of American patois works to portray Joan of Arc and make her contemporary, “Ask Sister Joan D’Arc, speaking of par examples & the peasantry & all. She’ll tell you: Getting to the place of speaking truth is a costly little process. Your whole darn dirt–poor domestic ser-vant gene pool is going to add up to the truth you tell. & when you’re comin’ from there, ain’t nobody gonna listen. You’re gonna get yer bum fried.”

Another example of this use of dialect, which appears throughout the book, is when Amos is speaking lyrically about truth, both then and now, since these are notes to us from the other side, and Breeden’s poetry is poignant, even unfortunately timeless:

“Sycamore pruner.”

Makes me sound like I was out

in somebody’s garden trimming

trees for an extra buck.

No. Out in the hedgerows

cutting the damnedest

poorest excuse for a fig–like

something that there is.

Just to sell something to

poor folks so that they feel

like they’ve eaten something

like the rich folks, who buy

figs as an afterthought.”

Also, Confessions of a Minor Prophet is not without virtuoso imagistic turns, such as the following example, from “Thanks for Asking (a rant-ette),” with Amos once again soliloquizing: “That I was all kinds of ersatz and cardboard back in my carbon–based days. Admit it. That’s what you think . . . . A shadow play in a cardboard factory.”

Actually, Breeden develops what can be termed a doxological lyricism in this book-length poem that is also dialectical and intrinsic to an ontological phenomenology in which he constructs a language that is both poetical metaphysical at once, and perhaps in doing so paying homage to both Martin Heidegger and Gaston Bachelard, as in these lines from “The Primate Paradox,” which are some of the best lines in the book:

“Any word contains

other words in its

meaning & is

only part of

a system of words.

For every action

there is the choice;

there is the action;

then there is

the interpretation.

Every emotion has

a story, a history.

Human beings cannot act

outside of human nature—

all human actions

are human nature.”

There is also a palpable echo of D. A. Levy, whom Gary Snyder fashioned an entire essay about in his book, The Old Ways (New Directions, 1977).  The essay regarding this little known Cleveland poet who flourished in the mid-1960s is entitled “The Dharma Eye of D. A. Levy,” and Breeden exercises his own “dharma eye” in a poem such as “I See You,” which additionally reveals one of the richer veins in a work that is significant to look at both as a whole and in part due to its containing a number of sparkling gems—as did the oeuvre of D. A. Levy as is indicated by Gary Snyder in his essay.

“Look, the days are coming, YHWH says,

when the plowman shall overtake the reaper,

& the treader of grapes the sower;

& the mountains will drop sweet wine,

& all the hills will melt.

& I will bring my people of Israel out of captivity,

& they will rebuild the wasted cities & inhabit them;

& they will plant vineyards,

& drink the wine from them;

they shall also make gardens,

& eat the fruit from them.

I shall plant them upon their land,

& they shall be pulled up no more

out of their land

which I have given them,

YHWH says so.”

David Breeden makes his book-length persona poem about Amos a work of visionary and prophetic beneficence—perhaps worthy of the announcement of a newly amended New Testament.

The Art of Prophecy: A How–To Guide from Beyond the Grave by Amos, a Major Minor Prophet
David Breeden
Wipf and Stock/Cascade