“Afoot and light hearted, I take to the open road.” So begins Whitman’s long poem “Song of the Open Road,” a delightful, meandering meditation on what it means to be human. A theme that Whitman hammers into this poem, without a hint of subtlety, is the familiar “the journey is the destination,” a trope that has had countless iterations over time. Frank LaRue Owen’s new book, The Temple of Warm Harmony, follows in the same vein as Whitman, Homer, and Kerouac, yet he finds inspiration in the Eastern traditions of Zen and Pure Land Buddhism. It’s hard to classify which genre to place Temple: it could be shelved with poetry or with metaphysical studies or Zen meditation. But tacking The Temple of Warm Harmony down into a tidy category is antithetical to the book’s very purpose. Rather than telling us to be something, Owen’s poems invite us to simply be, whatever and wherever we are.
The book is arranged like a classical comedy. Poems at the beginning of the book show the speaker’s struggle with strife, loneliness, and feeling spiritually lost, having lost the tao, or the path, upon which he wishes to tread. In the end, though, we gain hope. “Sometimes the inner and outer/ move along like birds/ gliding in different directions,” Owen tells us in “Teaching of the Seasons.” Even though these “birds” of body and soul are moving in opposite directions, there is a peace to this split. They are “gliding,” unobstructed, to their various ends. Sometimes—often —the physical and spiritual are at opposing ends to each other, yet Owen doesn’t require that our currents be parallel for us to find contentment.
There are times when a reader’s defensiveness might make one look at Owen’s high-minded contentment as arrogance, but nothing could be farther from the truth. “Who is this guy, and why does he claim to have it all figured out,” one might ask. Well, he doesn’t know it all, and this is the source of the book’s wisdom. Part metaphysical self-help guide, part image-driven poetry, part Zen meditative koan collection, The Temple of Warm Harmony offers quiet in a time we desperately need it. When the barrage of news and tweets and noise (literal and otherwise) send us into an overwhelmed, bloated fatigue, Frank LaRue Owen offers us simplicity.
Frank LaRue Owen will be at Lemuria on Wednesday, November 20, at 5:00 p.m. to sign and discuss The Temple of Warm Harmony. He will also be at Lemuria on Saturday, December 21, at 2:00 p.m. in a joint event with Beth Kander, author of Born in Syn.
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