Terpstra’s transcendent Mischief

Dictionaries offer many definitions of “mischief.” Some are pejorative, as in Webster’s “a cause of harm, evil or irritation.” Synonyms are even less kind: “misbehaviour, misconduct, disobedience.” “Naughtiness” is the only term perhaps deserving milder punishment than the rest, though firm discipline may be merited regardless.

Which brings us to John Terpstra’s latest slim, yet packed, always engaging, often stirring, collection entitled, of course, Mischief. This miscellany gathers poems dating from 2005, though it’s inspired by a 2001 article from The Hamilton Spectator, which Terpstra quotes verbatim in “Poetry Burns”. It reports a man “who covered his bed with pages of poetry /  before setting it ablaze.” The unnamed man was “charged with arson / and mischief / endangering life.” Mischief indeed. Who knew that poetry might prove fatal?

Humour aside, I immediately think of Isaiah and Jeremiah. Those folks risked much splendid, transcendent mischief, which got them in a peck of trouble some years back. Their shared themes of social engagement to honour God with personal and communal justice highlight evils caused by injustice and heartlessness. Considering their common spiritual pedigrees, it’s not a long stretch to link Terpstra’s eye and muse to those epic poet-prophets; his lifelong, often worshipful practice and chronicling of blessed mischief runs with theirs.

“A Common Thread,” the collection’s longest, was written for a posthumous show of 100 mandalas by Hamilton artist and teacher Robert Vander Plaats, who suffered schizophrenia for decades. He painted them because they were the only thing “that kept the voices at bay.” More than memorializing Vander Plaats, this compassionate tribute first tenderly describes mentally ill street people who somehow manage to survive anyway. Terpstra then limns the suffering of those who hear “the voices / that are no harmonic chorus / to the soundtrack of life / but a mean-spirited, crazy-making cacophony / that doesn’t shut up.” Near the end of this “well-braided” prayer, Terpstra hints that we are all closer kin to such torture than we dare admit, because “This is for learning / what it is like / at the harder edges of being human.” Try reading that without getting a lump in the throat and then interceding for deliverance from such agony.

Lest anyone think poetry and social justice can’t organically mate to produce both a protest and a vibrant hope, “Plight” convinces us otherwise. Here Terpstra dives into 2016’s Syrian refugee crisis, calling attention to “people / far too many people, / are massed at your gate.” Recognizing how easily we over-protected North Americans fear Deuteronomy’s “stranger at the gate,” Terpstra boldly pleads, “Let them in. / Feel overwhelmed, / but let them in. . . . / Yes. Ask / to learn their lost songs of home.”

Whimsical poems also find their way into this decade-plus arc of words and memories. Recalling Saturday mornings’ “heavy artillery of theology” in catechism classes – while other kids frivolously watched cartoons – Terpstra later came to terms with the ascetic demands of Reformed church education: “I should have a stronger opinion / as to whether this was good or bad / and, at one time, I did.” But going into a warm furniture store on the way home, winning an unspecific contest and its accompanying reward “has created the tension that has produced, / if I may say, some of my strongest work”.

That strong work is soberly evident in the spiritual self-examinations that the once-disliked catechism classes sowed and nourished in Terpstra’s fertile soul. In “Sin and Misery” he describes a childhood fight with a former best friend whom he pinned to the ground, “probably” breaking the boy’s glasses. The boy “looks me in the eye and says / in pain, with a slight smile, You like this, don’t you?” That line avenges the boy, provoking the painful, multi-layered realization, “I will be needing glasses myself soon. . . . / I slowly rise, unpinning him and walk away, and that world blurs and fades”.

There you have it – a fair sampling of John Terpstra’s latest honest, introspective offerings. Mischief reveals his deep heart and spirit, is well-worth buying and reading alongside Psalms of repentance and confession. These poems don’t call for groveling in past sins, but offer rigorous, cleansings, yet pleasing paths to moral obedience and absolution—like the best prophets do.