The Master's Artist

Poetry from the Pulpit?

Here’s a project:

1) Read Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount or Peter’s sermon in Acts chapter 2.
2) Read a famous sermon from a saint, like St. John Chrysostom’s Easter sermon or a sermon by Leo the Great.
3) Read a sermon by a current big time pastor (don’t want to ruffle any feathers here, so take your pick: you know who they are).
4) Compare.

Chances are the sermon you read by that big time pastor today read and felt a lot different than the sermons of old. Part of this is cultural. But part of this gets at the heart of what it means to give a sermon. M. Craig Barnes, a seminary professor, has made a case for pastors to recover the poetic in his book The Pastor as Minor Poet: Texts and Subtexts in the Ministerial Life. Using the typical week in a pastor’s life as an illustration of art mimicking life, Barnes explores how Eliot’s poetic criticism of the poet’s voice should influence pastors as they preach. This is a movement from knowledge about something to beholding and knowing. Basically, Barnes is saying that many churches are confusing knowledge with worship. But there is a big difference, as Barnes explains:

Anyone who has been to Florence to see Michelangelo’s David knows the qualitatively different experiences of beholding beauty and hearing about it. I had studied Renaissance art at some length, and I assumed I knew a great deal about this masterpiece before I laid eyes on it. But when I finally had the opportunity to stand before it, I wanted never to leave. When preachers think of their sermon less as polemics and more as art, they are allowing the congregation to behold Jesus. Even though few minor poets would want to compare themselves to Renaissance artists, we can still master the craft of creating sermons that beckon those in the pew to behold. (127)

For many of us, we aren’t pastors. We don’t usually preach. But artists do often learn new techniques or teach fellow artists or apprentices, and I think that what Barnes is saying about preaching applies to teaching and learning as well. There is a place for practical application and knowledge―everyone needs a foundation to build on―but eventually there should be a place where the student can enter into a state of beholding.

When we come to a new book or new design or new painting, are we just using the artifact to find new techniques and tips to help us out? Or are we standing in awe of the artifact and letting it wash over us, beholding it and letting it speak to us? Pushing this further, when we are creating art are we doing it so that we can teach or perform or illicit a specific response? Or are we creating so that our creation will be a beholden artifact?

I think we often stay in the comfort zone of the former (from above) because it is easier to control that way. When we have specific applications or ideas it is easier for us to point our art toward a desired outcome, like a preacher wants to present specific facts to lead to specific knowledge. But if we look to the older ways of preaching, the way Jesus and many of the early saints preached, we can find a push toward creating something that beckons others. And isn’t that what we desire deep down for art to do?

The Most Influential Poem of the 20th Century

In Woody Allen’s movie “Midnight in Paris,” writer Gil Pender (played by Owen Wilson) desperately wants to live in Paris of the 1920s, the city and time of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Cole Porter and Josephine Baker. And he gets his wish, if only for a few hours each night at midnight. In one scene, he climbs into a taxi and finds T.S. Eliot, and he says that “Prufrock” is like his mantra, but where he comes from in Hollywood, people measure out their lives in coke spoons, not coffee spoons. 

If you don’t know the poem, you miss the reference. In the poem, Eliot wrote, “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.” 

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was published in Poetry Magazine in 1915, when Eliot was all of 27, and it is still considered by many critics and scholars to be the most influential poem of the 20^th century. It’s difficult to imagine any poem today having the kind of impact that “Prufrock” did. Published by Poetry with the urging of Ezra Pound, the poem played a major role in shaping and defining Modernism in poetry and literature generally. 

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table… 

The poem is longish, unfolding a series of scenes that seem unrelated. Scholars still argue about the subject and meaning of the poem, but it is clearly a poem about the disconnectedness of modern society and man’s disconnected place within that society. In that sense, it is as contemporary today as it was in 1915. 

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains… 

Eliot uses a combination of rhyme, free verse and repetition. The reader happens upon the rhyme but is soon swept away from it, only to return suddenly to it. There’s nothing predictable here, no planet in its orbit or star in its galaxy. But there are delightful lines, including some of the most famous in 20^th century poetry: 

   In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

When I was in high school, Eliot’s poetry always posed a problem – should it be taught in American literature (junior year) or English literature (senior year)? My school solved the problem by teaching Eliot in both years. In American literature, we learned “The Hollow Men” – This is the way the world ends, / Not with a bang but a whimper. In senior year, it was “Prufrock” and the poems published as Four Quartets. (I still have the paperback edition of Four Quartets published for 95 cents in 1968; underlined in many places with margin notes in my own handwriting.) 

“Prufrock” was written more than two decades before Eliot embraced the Christian faith. And yet the sense of a broken world and broken people permeate it. In an odd way, to read it now is to see the poem anticipating the intellectual and spiritual frame of mind of the poet that would eventually lead the poet to faith. 

Eliot might smile at that. Despite all of the scholarly hubbub about the themes and meanings of his poems, all he himself said was that he simply wanted people to read his poetry. 

   I grow old...I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

   Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each...

There are various recordings of Eliot reading the poem, and you can find these at YouTube, but one of the best I’ve come across is the reading by Spoken Verse, which allows you to follow the words as they are read.

  

Related Resources: 

Eliot’s biography at The Poetry Foundation. 

The text of the poem at Poets.org. 

Background on the poem from Wikipedia.

Your Heart Must Not Be Troubled

In the midst of my best friend's deepest grief, I was out of the country. My phone didn't work, I didn't have a laptop with me. I wanted to be unplugged.

I cheated. 

Maybe it was intuition, maybe the Holy Spirit IS intuition. I logged on to Facebook to find a message telling me my best friend's sister had died.

And I was out of the country. Then I had my very first art show and was flying directly to it, do not pass Go. Not going home first.

When I finally got home, the death had occurred four days previous. With wine and the cool of the evening air, my friend and I sat outside and she poured her heart out.

Both sisters had been coming to my Visual Prayer workshops for months. Both had been painting and creating because I'd invited them to join me. 

Then one of them was gone and there was such a hole in our lives.

She loved dragonflies. She loved Visual Prayer. My friend showed me the prayer her sister had started with get well cards and notes of encouragement from loved ones, but it wasn't finished.  After consoling my friend, I drove home at four in the morning and on the way decided I needed to do a Visual Prayer instead of sending flowers. I knew it was right.

I opened a Bible that was given to my ex-husband and I as a wedding gift, not appropriate to display in my home with Phil, my husband of seventeen years now, but how does one get rid of a Bible? Instead, it's now used for God's glory.  Open before me was the book of John and this passage:

Your heart must not be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in Me. In My Father's house are many dwelling places; if not, I would have told you. I am going away to prepare a place for you. If I go away and prepare a place for you, I will come back and receive you to Myself, so that where I am you may be also. You know the way where I am going."

"Lord," Thomas said, "we don't know where You're going. How can we know the way?"

Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.

"If you know Me, you will also know My Father. From now on you do know Him and have seen Him."

"Lord," said Philip, "show us the Father, and that's enough for us."

That is the verse I highlighted in the painting. Instead of sleeping, I painted. When it was complete, it was time to shower and dress and leave for the visitation and funeral. It was placed among beautiful floral arrangements near her coffin and people talked about it.

When the pastor stepped in front of the podium to deliver the ulogy, he spoke wonderful words, he read two poems written by a cousin, he made us laugh and cry. 

And then he spoke God's Word, "Your heart must not be troubled."

Yes, indeed: Ecclesiastes 3:14: I know that all God does will last forever; there is no adding to it or taking from it. God works so that people will be in awe of Him.

* * *

Michelle Pendergrass is in a constant state of awe watching God move Visual Prayer into the hearts and lives of people around her.  She's trying especially hard to make her fear go away over the Creative Soul: Worship Outside the Lines retreat.

The beauty of fractured glass

His name on my phone's display was a pleasant surprise.

"Hey, what's going on?" he asked.

"Not much," I said. "Right now I'm mostly just trying to figure out why you would be calling me."

He laughed. His mom and I have been friends since we were teens, and I've known him all his life, but I don't think he's ever called me just to chat.

"Actually," he said, "I have a request." And then it all spilled out, how he knew it was short notice, but his band could fly me to Nashville and put me up in a hotel, and our story would be a perfect fit for this project, and all the filming would be done in one day, and was there any way I could do it?

He named the date -- Monday, July 18 -- and I told him we had a family event in Ohio the previous weekend, but we'd be driving back to Texas that day. A glance at the map showed our route passed right through Nashville. I asked George, and he didn't see why not, so Yes, I said, I could come, and they wouldn't even have to fly me there. I'd already be in the neighborhood.

Happy coincidence, some would say. Serendipity. If you wrote this sort of thing in a novel, it might be criticized as a contrivance, but have you noticed how often it happens in real life?

The word he used was providential, and we shared the wonder.

Beringer Words in a Black Box Story

"A true poet does not say 'azure,' a true poet says 'blue.'"
- Else Lasker-Schüler

Writers love words. They are our raw material--our mahogany or clay or musical notes. We thrill over "fabulation" or "sybaritic" or "quodlibet." We roll such words around in our mouth, swishing and savoring them like a fine wine.

Sometimes, though, those words just won't do. Sometimes, we have to use "blue," though azure satisfies our idyllic sensibility. For what does voyeuristic have to do with an Army private or theurgy with a used car salesman?

Or, as Oscar Hammerstein II (son of the great Hammerstein) put it, "What is a character like Nellie Forbush [from South Pacific], a self-professed "corny as Kansas in August" girl doing singing 'I'm bromidic and bright'?"

Art in the First Degree

Some art should be criminal. It's so bad it should be put on trial and condemned. Like murder in the first degree, it is so bad, misguided, cliched or pastiche that it is Art in the first degree.

But this is not a debate about the merits of Lady Gaga or Britney Spears or paint by numbers or cheesy greeting card couplet poetry.

It's about me. It's about my past.

There you stand radiant beautiful flower
and in your midst do I cower
...............................................
Rain taps window pains
Thunder claps lightning balls flame
...............................................
I make it, I break it
This world on my shoulders. 

Those are excerpts from some of the first lines of real poetry I started writing, when I was a senior in high school. Since then, I have progressed immensely.

And that's part of committing art in the first degree. It's necessary. Criminal, but necessary.

This fits right into what Malcolm Gladwell hypothesizes in Outliers as the 10,000 hour rule. You become a master at poetry or fiction or sculpture or painting once you have done that task for 10,000 hours.

What is never really discussed is what to do with all the non-expert, pre-10,000 hour art. Is it bad? Is it not expert? Not worthy? Is it guilty of being art in the first degree?

At first glance, my first attempts at poetry are guilty as charged. Yet there are some surprising diamonds in the rough, some that stand the test of time. But maybe 1 out of 100. Now, ten years later, I think it's more like 1 out of 10. So I'm getting better. I am committing crimes against art less often than in the past.

I might never be an expert in poetry. Fortunately, I can look back over the arc of my writing history and see the glimpses and flashings and traces of my poetic style starting to form when I was just seventeen. Part of what is lost in the quest to become "the Poet" or "the Novelist" or "the Artist" is the journey. It's easy to look at our inferior work and label it rubbish and crumple it up, put it in the shredder or throw it into the fireplace. It's not our cream of the crop, our best, our 10,000 hour pinnacle of artistic success. So we are inclined to throw it away or be embarassed of it.

I was not exactly willing to share some of those lines above. They are awful. I don't like to recollect that I actually sat pen in hand and wrote them.

But what kind of artist would I be without them? I learned from them, like a toddler who learns to stand on two feet after falling on their backside over and over and over ad infinitum.

So in the end I'll commute the sentence. It's not art in the first degree. It exists as the stepping stones on an artistic journey that is never satiated. I'll try not to condemn my own work. I'll try to enjoy the bad art with the good, and see the bad as having an important part in the long suffering process of fine tuning my own art.

When Writing a Poem Could Get You Arrested

In free nations, we usually take our freedoms for granted. We don’t think about getting government approval to rent an apartment, buy a car or move to another city. We would likely be outraged if someone told us we had to do that.

What if writing a poem could get you arrested? Would you still write? Would you share your poems with friends? Would you take huge personal risks to keep writing your words?

Elena Shvarts (1948-2010) began writing at 13, during the so-called but short-lived “Khrushchev Thaw” in the Soviet Union, the same short period in the early 1960s when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in the Russian literary magazine Novy Mir. It’s hard to imagine the impact on Russian literary imaginations when an account of the Stalinist prison camps was published in an approved Soviet publication. For a short period, it must have seemed something was breaking free.

It didn’t last.

And, so, celebrate the meager light,
Curse not the twilight.
If Christ is to visit us
It will be on such pitiful days as these.
--from “A Gray Day” by Elena Shvarts, translated by Stephanie Sandler

Shvarts continued writing poetry, but none of it was published for the next 27 years, until the Soviet Union itself collapsed. She was 40.

Yet her poetry had found an audience – the samizdat audience, the people who secretly shared writing of all kinds – poetry, fiction, non-fiction – that could not be published in the Soviet Union. Possession of samizdat documents meant arrest. Documents with your name on them meant arrest if they were discovered.

I love fire so
That I kiss it,
Reach out towards it
Wash my face in it,
Since the gentle spirits
Inhabit it, like a bud,
And a band of magic
Thinly rings it.
--from “Candle at a Wake” by Elena Shvarts, translated by Sasha Dugdale

Shvarts published 16 books of poetry and prose, plus a four-volume collected works during her lifetime. That 13-year-old girl became a major figure in the Leningrad underground and widely known and translated after the fall of the Soviet Union.

She wrote about many things in her poetry; her obituary in the Independent said she explored themes of “marginality, poverty and authenticity,” while the one in the Guardian said, “In Shvarts's poetry, the world about her is transformed into a unique and mystical landscape, half real, half Bruegelesque fantasy.” But so many of her readers – the ones who read her in samizdat and the ones who read her published works – knew her as a poet who also wrote about doubt, faith and God.

We are birds in migration from this world to that.
(That sounds coarse, like the German Tod.)
And when our hour is announced‚
When our season nears its end‚
A true compass awakens inside us
And shows the world’s fifth point.
Invisible wings flutter nervously
And the inner gaze slowly turns
In bitter longing‚ as if prophetic‚
Toward the garden it knows: it
Sees miracles‚ and longing
Lengthens‚ doubled‚ as
The caravans fly off.
--“We are birds in migration” by Elena Shvarts, translated by Stephanie Sandler

Born in what was then called Leningrad under Soviet rule, Shvarts died in her beloved St. Petersburg in March, 2010. She was a poet who had written poetry when it was a potential crime against the state, and written it in spite of the state. She lived long enough to see her poetry published freely in her own country and published openly in other countries.

Discipline or Orchestration?

After reading Heather's The Art of Rest and Thomas's Artistic Discipline for the Undisciplined Times of Life, the thought hit me:  am I disciplined? And I laughed. Out loud, I think.

Because I feel like there is very little discipline in my life other than the part where I 

                Tumble outta bed and I stumble to the kitchen 
                Pour myself a cup of ambition 
                Yawnin', stretchin', try to come to life 

Canvas Child

Imagine you're strolling down familiar streets in a familiar city, but then you turn a corner, and suddenly you find yourself face to face with the perfect little shop. How could you not have known about it before? This shop contains what you love best. Maybe it's old books. Musical instruments. Pottery or paintings or glassworks by local artists. Coffee or pastries or fine wine. Maybe there's a poetry reading or an impromptu concert or all of the above, but the point is what you feel -- the joy, the delight, the sense of wonder -- when you walk through the door. It's like finding buried treasure. 

It's like coming home.

Sometimes I'm wandering among familiar blogs, and a trusted friend provides a link. When I click it, I turn the corner and find myself face to face with a kindred. Has this beautiful soul been here all along and I never knew it?

That's how I felt the first time I crossed the threshhold into Emily Wierenga's world.

On Raveling and Unraveling

Last week, I picked up an abandoned knitting project. It's a lace wrap I began a year ago. Then my sister got pregnant, and I got pregnant, and I got to work on maternity clothes and baby projects--sweaters, blankets, hats--and a big sister gift for my niece. Then Christmas came around. Etcetera, etcetera. You know the drill.

After finishing a few baby toys, I figured Keegan was well stocked, and I could return to more selfish projects, like my lace wrap.

First order of business: figuring out which row I had left off on.

Which I figured wrong. This meant I had to undo stitches (following the pattern backwards to make sure I undid them correctly) and reknit. Then, probably because I was watching TV while knitting, I lost count, messed up, and had to undo half a row and reknit. Then I messed up a third time, which I didn't discover until the end of the row, when the counting didn't come out right.