The Master's Artist

The Bus Barn

This day has been a long time coming. I guess you could say it's been longer than eight years in coming, but the end was nowhere in sight at the beginning. Isn't that the way it goes? When we begin a new adventure, we rarely know (or at least I don't) how it will unfold, where it will take us, and at what point we will realize the road has reached its end.

Well, that point is now, it seems. Which means it's time to tell you a story.

Literature as National Consensus

For years I regularly haunted used bookstores and book sales. I generally looked in the fiction and poetry sections, but for quite some time I bought books of speeches, speech textbooks, and books about rhetoric and oral communication. This has to do with the fact that for a long time, speech writing was a significant part of my career. 

If you visit used bookstores and especially sales of old books, you will inevitably find old textbooks. I found the textbook I had in my senior English class in high school (longer ago than I care to think) and I immediately plunked down a dollar to buy it. 

Another textbook find was the 1940 edition of Prose and Poetry of America, originally published in 1934 and edited by H. Ward McGraw. My find was what two additional editors, Julian Maline and William McGucken, described in the preface as the Catholic edition. They were both Jesuit priests, and found in McGraw’s textbook the basis for creating a version for Catholic schools. From the looks of things, they kept all of what McGraw had included, adding only a few additional writers. (They even commended McGraw for being particularly careful to avoid offenses to Catholic students.) 

The 1100+-page textbook is divided into seven sections: short stories, poetry, essays, orations, drama, a long essay on literature influenced by journalism, and the novel. It may be the Catholic version, but what it includes is telling: it’s the canon of American literature, circa 1940. 

The names are the NAMES of literature. The text includes short stories by Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Twain, O. Hoenry, Kate Chopin and Joel Chandler Harris, among others. Typical of the poets included are Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Poe, Lanier, Whitman, Dickinson, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Vachel Lindsay, Sandburg, Amy Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Frost. The orations include Patrick Henry, George Washington, Lincoln and Henry Woodfin Grady (the Atlanta editor who coined the term “The New South” – I did an independent study project on him in college). The novel included is Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables. Throw in some lesser known Catholic writers (except for Bishop Fulton J. Sheen) and you pretty much know the textbook. 

In high school some 25 years later, I was studying the same authors, the same poets, the same speeches and the same novel. By that time, the canon had grown a bit to include Fitzgerald and Hemingway. But we still read William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” and Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing.” There’s no question that what we studied and read reflected a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant America. And in that sense it was exclusionary (as my Jesuit editors pointed out). 

Even then we understood that literature was far broader than the literary canon, but it did speak to us of what an idea of America was. And the canon with all its warts existed when there was more of a national consensus about the country, its past and future. 

One thing those canonical authors did, however, was to give us a national literature. Many of them are no longer taught in schools (Joel Chandler Harris? Vachel Lindsay? SidneyLanier?). You have to go to used bookstores and book sales to find their works, or access some of the online sources. But they gave us our literature and much of our culture. 

And they are still wonderful authors, writers and poets to read.

Beautiful Things

Lately you may have noticed there are all kinds of people taking all kinds of stands on all kinds of issues, and some of the competing voices get a bit shrill, and the air a bit thick, and honestly, it gets a bit hard to breathe.

Sometimes I want to unplug. To turn it all off and walk away. To silence the angry voices, the accusations, the sarcasm and mockery and name calling. I can't speak to it, because whatever I say, I end up with a label slapped on my forehead, my motives judged, my worth (or lack of it) assessed. I am, after all, a cardboard cut-out. And so are you.

These are my thoughts when my son walks in the room, looks at my face, and asks, "Are you sad?"

I don't even know how to answer, because, yes, this is a heaviness and a sorrow, but am I sad? Can I be, when just this morning I slipped so small into the presence of unapproachable light, and these Words, they met me there, blazing radiant?

From Where We Write...

I started working on Truly again yesterday. It's a writing time. I can always feel them coming. Times like this usually follow a large emotional expenditure. I have a lot of these :)

Oftentimes, writing is like a relief valve. When the pressure gets too high the need to write becomes very intense and somehow it evens things back out. It may be songs or poems or fiction or letters to good friends, but the need is there, palpable and aching. 

I heard a quote once that said "Peace is the potting soil for revelation" and if we believe that writing is a creative, even revelatory work - where ideas flow to us and through us for the purpose of a greater understanding - then peace is an important factor in readying our hearts and minds for what is to come.

 

The Poems of Padraig Daly

In May, I discussed the poems of R.S. Thomas (1913-2000), an Anglican minister in Wales whose poetry reflected his faith, his Welsh nationalism, and his love for rural life. Taking a short trip across the Irish Sea to Dublin, one finds a contemporary Irish poet who has often been compared To Thomas – Padraig Daly (1943- ). 

Daly is an Augustinian priest in the Dublin parish of Ballyhoden. He’s published several poetry collections and translations from poets writing in Irish and the Italian poet Edoardo Sanguineti. In his own poetry, and especially The Last Dreamers: New and Selected Poems, the reader sees the similarities to Thomas, but also sees something that is uniquely Daly’s. 

In these poems, Daly is focused on faith and how it is expressed, in the importance of daily life (be it in Ireland or Italy), in rituals, in loving and comforting, in prayer. The poems are wrapped in simplicity, but they are as deep as they are simple. Consider the poem “Errand:” 

Carrying his knapsack,
He shuffled out in his boots
To where the stars hung burning. 

The winds of space assailed him.
He was a speck
Smaller than a sootflake. 

Dejected by vastness,
He wrapped himself in himself,
Hugging his own warmth; 

Till the immense God,
Waking from his dream,
Brushed time and distances aside. 

Daly paints a picture here, and you think you understand it on the first reading, until you read it again to find the meaning may actually be something different. So who is carrying the knapsack? And what’s in it? Assume it is a man, and the shuffling implies an older man, who moves outside. If he sees the stars, then it must be night. He’s assailed by winds, finds himself a small speck, is dejected, and can o nothing but wrap “himself in himself,” hugging his own inadequate warmth. And then God wakes from a dream, and brushes “time and distances aside.” 

Nothing else is said, but that last line implies something profound has happened. God transcends physical reality, and the man carrying the knapsack is changed. 

All of the poems in The Last Dreamers are like that – deceivingly simple. A particular favorite is “Prayer:” 

We gather at the river’s edge;
One by one in the darkness
We place our flames in the darkness.

We watch them drift,
Fragile, flickering,
Out to the unsleeping ocean. 

We fear at first that they will sink;
But the water carries them past every hazard
As if it loved them. 

It’s a beautiful image to liken prayer to flames, tiny flames in the overwhelming darkness. They are fragile, and they drift almost as if meaningless on the ocean’s surface. But they are carried past the hazards, “as if the water loved them.” And, of course, the water does love them. 

The Last Dreamers is a moving, thought- and soul-provoking collection, inviting us to deepen our understanding and faith.

The Poetry of Personal Loss

The death of any close friend or loved one is a wrenching, dislocating experience. The knowns disappear, replaced by unknowns. Simple things – a regular afternoon visit, the way the dinner table is set, a shared piece of music – suddenly disappear or become painful reminders. For Christians, the loss is tempered by the knowledge and hope of heaven, but the loss and absence is no less great. 

When one loses a parent, a number of transitions begin, some immediately. Some say the loss of a parent is when you truly become an adult. Death sets certain processes in motion – legal processes, family processes, personal processes. If there is a surviving parent, that relationship will change as well. Things can both ravel and unravel, and at the same time. 

It is those ideas underlying the death of a parent that inform After the Ark: Poems by Luke Johnson. Johnson, whose poems have appeared in such publications as The New York Quarterly and Best Young Poets and who’s received awards from the Academy of American Poets and Atlantic Monthly, lost his mother to cancer when she was 54. Both of his parents were ministers, and so faith plays through these poems as well, a faith that simultaneously questions and accepts.

Here’s the opening poem in the collection, “Moving Day:” 

All that was left were the boxes of sermons
collected in her study, thirty years
of readings and reflections, prayers ready
to be gathered and stored away.
I could feel the weight of her words
as I carried the stack of boxes, unsorted,
to my car. With her body of work
tucked into my mid-sized trunk, I returned
for her size-five boots in the crux
of the doorway, dropped them in the backseat.
The breeze stroked the leaves above me,
Their rustling like a flock of small birds
Taking flight, perhaps frightened
By the muffled click of the trunk’s latch. 

It’s a fine introductory poem for the collection, combining professional and personal elements of his mother’s life – the sermons and the size-five boots, the sermons tucked carefully into the trunk and the boots dropped in the backseat. While he recognizes it is the sermons that are the important things, the products of her mind and faith, it is the boots that truly bring home the magnitude of the loss he’s feeling, and he casually drops them in the backseat as if to deny the pain. 

All of these poems are about the changes in relationships – with his father, his brother, even his dead mother, and perhaps most of all with himself. They are moving poems, thoughtful and thought-provoking, questioning but always coming back to a center. And they speak much about the importance of faith in a time of loss.

Can Poetry Help Us Understand Scripture? Part 2

In my May 30 post, I noted that I had attended a poetry workshop taught by poet (and University of Missouri professor) Scott Cairns. Twelve of us spent two days talking about poetry, and talking about poetry in relation to Scripture, and writing poetry, our overnight assignment: pick a difficult passage of Scripture and explicate it – using poetry. In other words, we had to write a poem that might help our understanding of the passage. 

Much of that idea of explicating Scripture underlies Cairns’ Philokalia: New and Selected Poems. Published in 2002, the volume includes both new poems and poems from his previously published collections (he’s also published more since then). The term “philokalia,” or “love of the beautiful,” is taken from the collection of texts written between the fourth and fifteenth centuries by Easter Orthodox theologians. 

Among the new poems in Cairns’ collection are five “Adventures in New Testament Greek,” in which uses the form of poetry the meanings of five words: metanoia (repentance), hairesis (heresy), nous (mind), mysterion (mystery), and apocatastasis (universal redemption – a heresy of Syriac origin). Here’s what he does with metanoia: 

Repentance, to be sure,
but of a species far
less likely to oblige
sheepish repetition. 

Repentance, you’ll observe,
glibly bears the bent
of thought revisited,
and mind’s familiar stamp 

--a quaint, half-hearted
doubleness that couples
all compunction with a pledge
of recurrent screw-up. 

The heart’s metanoia,
on the other hand, turns
without regret, turns not
so much away, as toward, 

as if the slow pilgrim
has been surprised to find
that sin is not so bad
as it is a waste of time. 

Philokalia contains far more than explorations of words; Cairns considers and examines all kinds of themes, divine and human. What the poems have in common is the use of a spiritual lens; these are themes and subjects best understood as subjects of faith, including issues we wrestle with and including the idea of poetry itself. (One poem, “Interval with Erato,” is a sexually charged poem about poetry and its inspiration.) 

I have many favorites in this collection, but the one I found particularly appealing is “The Translation of Raimondo Luz.” It’s a long poem, and Cairns tells us it’s about “the greatest postmodern poet writing in Portuguese.” We learn he’s never left his hometown in Brazil; he’s self-taught, speaking seven modern languages and three ancient ones; he’s known as a radical theologian; he loves American rhythm and blues; and he’s an accomplished chef. And then Cairns tells us he is also a complete fiction. 

That’s Scott Cairns – giving all of this extensive background and then offhandedly mentioned the person isn’t real, and then goes on to write a 10-page poem about him. 

That same sleight of hand (or is it?) can apply to using poetry to explain difficult passages of Scripture. I know. I did it for the workshop.

Annie Dillard, Poet

I think of Annie Dillard, and I think of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, her 1974 work on nature and life that won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction when the author was 29. Or I think of An American Childhood (1987). Or The Writing Life (1989). Or even Holy the Firm (1977), a book Frederick Beuchner loved. In her writing, Dillard spoke for a generation, and beyond. 

What I don’t think of is Tickets for a Prayer Wheel: Poems, published in 1974 but largely overshadowed by Pilgrim. It was republished in 1988, and then again in 2002. Other than those by famous poets, few poetry books continue to be published over a three-decade period. But then, this one is by Annie Dillard.

I have the 2002 edition, published by Wesleyan University Press. I bought it a bookstore; I didn’t know that she had published poetry, and in fact she published this volume of poems before she published anything else. 

She writes about the same things she writes about in her non-fiction: science, nature, eternity, time, seasons, holidays. She brings the same eye, and the same heart, that she brings to her other writing. The poems are simple, often almost stark, words and ideas cut with precision and insight. Here is her poem “Christmas:” 

Trees that have loved
in silence, kiss,
crashing; the Douglas firs lean
low to the brittle embrace
of a lodgepole pine. 

In cities at night
tin canisters eat
their cookies; the bed;
asleep, tossing,
brushes it curtain of bead. 

My wristwatch grow
obscurely, sun-
flower big. Across
America, cameras gaze,
astonished, into the glass. 

This is the hour
God loosens and empties.
Rushing, consciousness comes
unbidden, gasping,
and memory, wisdom, grace. 

Birds come running;
the curtains moan.
Dolls in the hospital
with brains of coral
jerk, breathe and are born. 

“This is the hour,” she writes, “God loosens and empties. / Rushing, consciousness comes / unbidden, gasping, / and memory, wisdom, grace.” What a startling, and perfect, description of Christmas. 

Most of the poems are about this length; the title poem is considerably longer – 12 pages – and concludes the volume. It is a kind of play about prayer, about Jesus and the church fathers, a consideration of and reflection on what prayer means. 

Dillard is not a “Christian poet,” but she is a poet, and a writer, who speaks of spiritual and Christian things.

What's the Point of Nature?

I just started reading this fascinating book Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv. I've made it through Part I, where Louv illustrates the dramatic changes that have happened to nature in America and how the youth of each passing generaton have adapted to our natural surroundings.

Louv makes the case that children today know a lot about the environment—acid rain, recycling, waste, deforestation, endangered species—but never experience it.  Children do not interact with nature freely. Interaction with nature is now highly organized and monitored by adults. Children stay on the trail and within earshot of parents—they don't venture out into the woods on their own anymore.

This is causing a nature-deficit disorder in children. Louv does not consider this a medical diagnosis, but more of a common sense viewpoint. One of the most intriguing symptoms of nature-deficit disorder is that creativity dramatically drops in children who do not engage with the outdoors on a meaningful level. 

Louv recounts an interview he had with a fifth grader who, unlike many of her peers, interacted with nature on a deep level. She told Louv that she wanted to be a poet when she grew up, and that she had a elemental connection with the woods:

I had a place. There was a big waterfall and a creek on one side of it. I'd dug a big hole there, and sometimes I'd take a tent back there, or a blanket , and just lie down in the hole, and look up at the trees and sky. Sometime I'd fall asleep back in there. I just felt free; it was like my place, and I could do what I wanted, with nobody to stop me. I used to go down there almost every day....And then they cut the woods down. It was like they cut down part of me. (14)

Louv noted that the fifth grader saw nature as representing beauty and refuge. Her connection with nature was what connected her to her poetry, her art. There is a long history of nature in American poetry, from Longfellow to Whitman to Frost to Berry and Kooser.

Longfellow captures the point of nature, that it is beauty and refuge, in his poem "My Lost Youth":

I can see the breezy dome of groves,
The shadows of Deering's woods;
And the friendships old and the early loves
Come back with a Sabbath sound, as of doves
In quiet neighbourhoods.

It is in this sentiment that nature becomes the tool of the artist: when nature becomes so near that the memories of nature and of friendship and love are intertwined. Nature is the palette with which artist create, whether a painter like J.M.W. Turner or those from the Hudson River School, poets like those listed above or writers like Annie Dilliard. In nature artists can find the color and phrasing and cadence with which to create just as our Creator made all of nature.

Thomas Turner is the Donor Relations Program Manager at International Justice Mission and the Senior Editor & Publisher of GENERATE Magazine.

Using Poetry to Explicate Scripture

In 2010, I attended a writer’s conference at Laity Lodge, in the Texas Hill Country about 90 minutes or so west of San Antonio. I had signed up for the poetry seminar taught by Scott Cairns, a professor at the University of Missouri, which is about 90 or so minutes west of where I live in St. Louis. I had previously read his A Short Trip to the Edge, an account of his pilgrimages to Mount Athos (Cairns in Greek orthodox), and Compassion of Affection: Poems New and Selected. 

I was looking forward to the seminar; I was not disappointed (and I loved Laity Lodge). Twelve of us spent two days doing something I’d never heard of – using poetry to explicate Scripture. 

That’s the idea, or one of the ideas, behind Recovered Body: Poems, published by Cairns in 2003. Cairns uses poetry to explicate Scripture, and more than that, to explore poetry as a kind of Biblical enterprise. And it’s utterly fascinating. 

The poems are divided into three sections. 

The first, “Deep Below Our Violences,” covers a range topics – a line from a Wallace Stevens poem, the Old Masters’ paintings, archaeology, a rather erotic discussion between the poet and his muse Erato, the death of a father. The poems are characteristically Cairns, and I can hear his deep, slow voice now that I heard in Texas on a windblown patio near the Frio River. And I can hear that characteristic wonder of life. Here’s “Regarding the Body:” 

I too was a decade coming to terms
with how abruptly my father had died.
And I’m still lying about it. His death
was surely as incremental, slow-paced
as any, and certainly as any
I’d witnessed. Still, as we met around him
that last morning—none of us unaware
of what the morning would bring—I was struck
by how quickly he left us. And the room
emptied—comes to me now—far too quickly.
If impiety toward the dead were still
deemed sin, it was that morning our common
trespass, to have imagined too readily
his absence, to have all but denied him
as he lay, simply, present before us.

In the second section, “The Recovered Midrashim of Rabbi Sab,” the reader is given an introductory warning about the rabbi, who has often been accused of “apostasy, blasphemy, manic-depression, drunkenness, bad manners. He has been praised for his compassion, revered—if not much liked—for his eager upbraiding of the pious.” 

Then you read the rabbi’s “commentaries” on the image of God, sin, Lot’s wife, the sacrifice of Isaac, Jacob wrestling with the angel, Joseph thrown into the well and then sold, the death of Moses, Solomon and his Song, Jephthah’s terrible vow, Jonah’s imprisonment, and the exile. Yes, those accusations against the rabbi have validity, but his commentaries force the reader to confront and wrestle with the meanings of the Biblical texts being commented upon. 

And I wonder if I didn’t hear a little of that rabbi down in Texas, too. 

The third section of poems, “Supplications,” is devoted to New Testament themes – Christ in Gethsemane, the thief himself crucified who ridiculed Jesus on the cross, a beautiful poem about Mary Magdalene, and Jesus descending into hell, among others. The poem about Mary Magdalene, entitled “Loves” is simple and strong, and a memory, declaration and hymn all at once. Cairns subtitles it “Magdalene’s Epistle,” and it is written as a kind of deep, thoughtful and profound letter. 

Recovered Body is a strong collection. Many of the poems were previously published by Chariton Review, Image, The Paris Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other publications and two anthologies. The poems, individually and collectively, provide a different way to look at both Scripture and poetry, as text and a way to understand text, and how to apply that text and understanding to life.