Category Archives: Book Notes

Thoughts on Baptism: Turning to Jesus

Our son, Shane, will be baptized into the Episcopal Church next month, on All Saints’ Day. As preparation, our rector asked us to read Anne E. Kitch’s Taking the Plunge: Baptism and Parenting. I am enjoying this book’s accessible yet profound presentation of the values that I hope to pass on to our son. In the passage below, Kitch interprets the baptismal vow to accept Jesus as our savior. I couldn’t have written a better description of what I believe about Jesus, and how I’ve relied on his love at a deeper level since becoming a parent.

Not everyone feels the need for a personal God, or is able to believe that God would take on human form. But as for me, I keep turning to Jesus because I want to believe that the fundamental structure of the universe is relational, loving, and good. I’ll be audacious, ungrateful some would say, and insist that it’s not enough that the universe is mysterious, complex, and beautiful. For what is most important in human life? What do I most want to give my son, and hope that he will manifest in the world? Love, justice, and truth. Are these qualities anomalies in an impersonal universe, or do they matter outside our little tribe of monkeys? My hoped-for answer to that question is what keeps me in the church, despite my occasional sighing for the simplicity of a life without theological struggles.

Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your savior?

When we turn our backs on Satan, we turn toward Jesus Christ. After all, being a Christian means being a follower of Christ. Who do you turn to? In times of stress and trouble, who do you turn to? Relationships are what give us life. The parenting relationship is what brings you to this baptismal examination. So as a parent, who do you turn to when times are tough? Someone you know will help you no matter what. Someone who doesn’t judge you when you are at your worst. Someone who won’t make you pay for it later. Someone you can trust to see you at the bottom. Someone who has been to the bottom too and knows the way out.

But it’s not only in times of desperation that we turn to others. We also seek out relationships in times of joy. Who do you turn to in times of joy and celebration? Someone who will delight in your gifts. Someone who isn’t envious or competitive. Someone who knows you well enough to understand your joy. Someone who will rejoice with you. Someone who knows what it is to be joyful. Someone who will laugh with you, dance with you, sing with you with abandon.

The point of being a Christian, of believing in Christ, is trusting that Christ is the someone we can turn to. We can turn to Jesus Christ in times of trouble and in times of joy; Christ is the one who will be with us. Christ is the one who has endured human suffering and who can complete our joy. When Jesus sat with his friends around the dinner table, teaching them about God’s promises and love, he said to them, “I have said these things so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete” (John 15:11). Jesus wants us to be filled with joy.

To say, “Yes, I turn to Jesus Christ,” is to say, “Yes, I know that there lies my hope.” We call Jesus our savior. Simply put, a savior is one who saves. Jesus Christ saves us by knowing us better than anyone else. Just as the best of friends saves us in times of trouble by being the person we can turn to, so Christ saves us, in the worst of times and in the best of times. To accept Jesus Christ as our savior is to be willing to believe that Christ knows and loves us and is always standing by us. Whether we know it or not, whether we are willing to accept it or not, Christ holds out loving arms to enfold us in an embrace. To turn to Jesus Christ as our savior is to be willing to consider the possibility that through Christ’s death and resurrection, we are somehow already saved, that nothing the world dishes out can ultimately destroy us. In the here and now, Christ stands with us in the pain and in the joy. Christ is ready for us, waiting for us to turn and say, “Yes!”
(pgs.32-33)

 

Poetry by Mary Elizabeth Parker: “Preservation Hall”


Mary Elizabeth Parker sponsors the Dana Awards, a long-running contest for unpublished poetry and fiction, now accepting entries through October 31. Her poetry collection Cave-Girl will be released this fall by Finishing Line Press. The deadline for the pre-order discount is October 12. Visit their website or email

Fl**********@ao*.com











. She kindly shares this sample poem.

Preservation Hall–bodies jockeying for buttock space on cement benches, blood-cramped knees itching to swing, rattling jazz flung in her face, caught in this tiny stewing room which can’t dissipate the force of flesh. Few are pretty here but all can claim a history closing in as they cry out for more musicmusicmusic stuffed like mufaletta in the mouth. The old stumble-tongue beside her knows it knows it all but he can’t resolve the words to tell her, nineteen, her body sweet, who asks what such noise means: It’s everything; why can’t she smell that when she sniffs the breakdown of these bodies (feels entombed)—why can’t she taste the reason the old neighbor back at home she cooks for, cuts his hair (her job because she can’t yet find her purpose) berates her weekly for the few missed hairs; he shrivels to that impuissance. He used to own a wolf-dog, Princess, and her pups (illegal now), and tucked the howls inside him on nights he did the dishes while the sky burned Borealis. He keeps two dog dogs now, who writhe in scat, re-stink themselves with what they are; he would sneeze now at his wife’s White Gardenia. He wants (this girl understands though he does not think she does) skunk stink, owl stink, motor oil and snow in the air stink, to break the head open to what will suppurate then flow.

40 Years of Book Love: The 1980s in Prose


Continuing my tour through the formative books of my youth, today I’ll talk about the prose writers who guided my middle school and high school years.

Some of these choices may raise some hackles. They certainly did for my teachers. I won’t defend, as an ideal, the horror of weakness that characterizes both Rand and Nietzsche. I didn’t take it uncritically even then. But I also didn’t feel that adults had a lot of credibility to criticize my attempt at psychological survival, if they weren’t going to protect me from the bullying and ostracism that I endured pretty much non-stop from 1st through 10th grade. Smart, lonely, funny-looking teenage girls love Ayn Rand for the same reason that small children are obsessed with superheroes and dinosaurs. Adults who are gratified by innocence, but don’t want to bear the burden of having it themselves, sentimentalize the helplessness of children. But we just want to get out.

Yes, I was mad, and so was my hair.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte
My mother read this to me, and I think I’d read it again on my own by the time I was 11 or 12, and at least twice thereafter, most recently this year. Everything I believe about the dignity of the human soul, the importance of speaking truth to power, and the equality of all people before God, is all in there. Jane is the anti-Dickens heroine. Chaste and modest, but fiercely self-possessed, she doesn’t suffer in silence in hopes of melting the abuser’s heart. She survives because she knows she deserves to, and she would rather brave the world on her own than be dependent on someone who doesn’t respect her. Hooray, Jane!
****

The Collected Dorothy Parker
I remember two things that terrified me in the summer of 1983: the sudden appearance of cellulite on my thighs, signaling my transformation from a pretty little girl to a flabby, awkward adolescent, and Parker’s story “Big Blonde”. The protagonist plays the role of the pretty, lively, “good sport” girl who never imposes her feelings on others, because that’s how she needs to be to catch a husband. Once she gets one, she feels she can relax and have her true feelings, and so she cries all the time. This alienates her lumpish spouse, who leaves her. By then she is no longer young and pretty, so she cries some more and becomes an alcoholic, unsuccessfully attempts suicide and has to pretend to the nurses (once again playing the good sport) that she feels lucky to be alive. I have always lived in dread of becoming this woman. Though drink holds no appeal, I come from a long line of women who drowned in their own tears. I’m only now beginning to unravel the false beliefs that make me afraid of my emotions.
****

The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
You know who else was afraid of emotions and hated being a girl? Ayn Rand! But through rational introspection and artistic excellence, you too can grow up to have hot sex with the guy who fixes your fireplace! Actually that part of the book did nothing for me. The two lessons I took away from Rand’s novel, which were the beginning of my adult strength, were these: (1) It is possible to live mindfully and responsibly, by knowing your values and comparing them to your actions, rather than being at the mercy of unexamined emotions and heedlessly hurting yourself and others. (Since none of the real adults in my life modeled this for me, I had to learn it from a book.) (2) Sometimes people hate you for your strengths, not your weaknesses. You don’t have to internalize their contempt.
****

The Valley of Horses, by Jean M. Auel
Conversation, when I was 11, went something like this:
“Mom, I just read this book and I have a weird tingly feeling.”
“That’s sexual arousal.”
“Oh, so that’s what that feels like! What do I do about it?”
“You can masturbate.”
Seriously, my mom was that cool.
****

Dawn of Day, by Friedrich Nietzsche
Again, I didn’t have much interest in the “Ubermenschen” aspects of Nietzsche’s thought that became disreputable because the Nazis claimed him as an influence. Like Rand, he championed the prophetic, creative, innovative individual against the jealousy of the herd. I also valued his critique of asceticism as a psychological splitting mechanism, where a person denied certain aspects of his life force (e.g. sexuality, aggression, unconscious wishes) and pushed them off onto a scapegoat. My favorite quote from him went something like this: “In every ascetic morality, man worships one part of himself as God and demonizes the rest.”
****

The Book of the Dun Cow, by Walter Wangerin Jr.
And just to counter-program all the others, this Christian allegory of Jesus as a goofy, despised barnyard dog! Wangerin’s storytelling gave me my first personal experience of God’s love in a Christian context.
 

Excerpt From Charles Shaw’s “Exile Nation: Drugs, Prisons, Politics and Spirituality”


This week, the excellent online literary journal The Nervous Breakdown features a chapter from Charles Shaw’s prison memoir, Exile Nation: Drugs, Prisons, Politics and Spirituality, recently released by Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press. I will be ordering copies for myself and my prison pen pals. The book examines what the surveillance state and the prison-industrial complex are doing to the soul of America. Here’s a sample:

All cultures have their own particular concept of “limbo,” purgatory, or some other form of antechamber to paradise. The word “limbo” itself comes from the Latin limbus, meaning an “edge or boundary.” Used as proper nouns, Limbus describes the edge of Hell, and Limbo is a place for the souls of unbaptized infants and patriarchs who died before the coming of Christ, to wait for Christ to be born and pardon them. Once pardoned, they are in effect “saved” and become de facto Christians, and are finally granted access to eternal paradise. But the Messiah doesn’t seem to come around very often, so they sit around like millions of undocumented immigrants, waiting for the next mass amnesty.

Purgatory, by comparison, is like the express line at the US-Mexican Border, the one for people with spotless backgrounds, or diplomatic cover. It’s the waiting room for the already-saved, a kind of hazmat decontamination unit that scrubs off the last few sins and moral entanglements of the true believers, before they can cross the border into freedom and eternal, unencumbered bliss. What all of these places have in common is the theme of detention. Prison is all of these things constrained within the temporal, corporeal plane. The lives of inmates exist in stasis until that time when they are released back into the world. There is absolutely nothing you can do about the outside world, or about the life you may have been living, while you are incarcerated. Everything that you are doing in life stops in its tracks. Vita interrupta. Your rent and bills stop being paid, your mail stops being picked up, your phone is never answered, your email is never downloaded, your refrigerator is never cleaned out, your dog is never walked or fed. Forget about your dreams and ambitions, your plans and goals, because those get put on hold too. If you are lucky to reemerge, you are forever altered by the reality of a conviction record.

Nine times out of ten, no one but your family and closest friends, if you have them, know where you are or what happened to you. Those few people are your lifelines to the outside world, and generally are the only people to do anything for you. You find out very quickly whom you can trust and who will really be there for you. Many inmates find themselves with no one.

Prisons are situated on the fringes of civilization, isolated from most population centers and the general public, hidden away from sight in a gulag network of thousands of municipal, county, state, and federal facilities stretching across the land. Americans not only want to feel that their communities are safe, they really don’t want to have to trouble themselves with thinking about the consequences of locking up millions of people, or the abuses, in all forms, that might be taking place under a system of Prohibition funded by fear, apathy, and taxes. In America, it is simply a matter of out of sight, out of mind.

Because of that, and because of the isolation of the prison experience, the full understanding of what it is like to be forcibly dislocated from society becomes, for many inmates, the key struggle and in the end the key transformative experience of their lives. Jazz musicians talk about “sustained intensity.” Prison life is a frantic Coltrane riff that produces no sound and sucks the life right out of you. It’s a negative-sum game for which there is no recuperative period. No . . . Sleep . . . ’til . . . Parole!

The lack of popular noise produced over our national prison system, and the underlying reasons for the apparent apathy of the public, will keep Americans from ever having a Bastille moment, which was the storming of a Paris prison that sparked the French Revolution. The American public’s pervasive lack of political involvement seems to keep them from storming anything except a Wal-Mart during Christmas shopping season. Plus, since American prisons are so far away from everything else, the proverbial angry mob would have to endure a six-hour bus trip ahead of time before they could commence stormin’.

But prisoners of the drug war aren’t seen by the Mainstream as political prisoners, as victims of tyranny like those held in the Bastille by Louis XVI, even though that’s precisely what they are.

There are reasons for this, and most are attributable to race and class. At its core, the war on drugs is nothing more than the criminalization of lifestyle. In many regards, it is also a war on religious freedom, and on consciousness itself.

The punishment for defying the system and exerting these inherent freedoms (the ones endowed by our Creator and all) is first disability, then disenfranchisement, then imprisonment, and finally, internal exile. Limbo time everybody, how low can you go? When in limbo, one invariably has an entirely new understanding of time.

I would spend 13 days in isolation at the Stateville Northern Reception and Classification center in Joliet, Illinois, before being sent on to my prison facility to serve out the remainder of my sentence. Thirteen endless days in a brand-new, state-of-the-art, hyper-sterile, hyper-industrialized detention facility. It was “only” 13 days, I can tell myself now, four years later. But while it was happening, it was a form of torture that leaves an indelible scar on a person’s soul. That is why they call Stateville “Hotel Hell.”

It is a cold and sterilized form of detention, a little taste of a supermax prison for everyone. Once they process you in, and stuff you into that 6 x 10 cement hole, you don’t come out again. You are on 24-hour-a-day lockdown with your cellmate, if you have one, and nothing else. Nothing to read, nothing to see, nothing to do but wait, wait, wait. And once the waiting begins, things start to go all sorts of ways inside your mind.

Thirteen days was interminable while on lockdown, yet right now I think over the last 13 days of my life and can’t remember half of it. Most people wouldn’t think twice about doing anything for two weeks, until it’s put into the proper context. The Cuban Missile Crisis lasted 13 days. Ask anyone who lived through it to tell you what a hellish eternity it was, teetering, if only briefly, on the edge of nuclear annihilation. Ask anyone on day seven of a two-week master cleanse fast how they feel, or two new lovers separated for two weeks, or the parents of a lost child, or someone waiting two weeks for test results that will tell them whether they live or die.

Likewise, two weeks spent in the cold and dark—half-starved, without anything to occupy your mind, contemplating your past, your life, your crimes literal and spiritual, missing people you love, pondering your future as a convict, stressing about which penitentiary you will be sent to and what you will have to face once you get there, and soon and so forth—is its own particularly menacing brand of torment.

 

40 Years of Book Love: The 1980s in Poetry


My impending 40th birthday has occasioned this look backward through the decades at the books that shaped my identity. The first post in this series can be found here. (Update to that post: Adam read it and bought Gockel, Hinkel and Gackeliah for me for only $36.95 on Alibris. What a guy!)

My book consumption ramped up in my middle-school and teenage years, so I’m going to cover poetry and prose in two separate posts. I was a lonely, precocious young person with a smaller budget and more time to reread books than I have now, so my relationship to those favorite volumes had an intensity that gave this budding writer a good training in close reading. I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about my main influences: Anne Sexton, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden. Below are a few of the lesser-known collections that found their way into my soul, with excerpts.

There are no acceptable photos of me from this period.

Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale, edited by Marya Zaturenska
Teasdale (1886-1933) was an American lyric poet, a contemporary of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I stumbled upon her final chapbook, Strange Victory, in the Stockbridge, MA library when I was about 10 years old, on summer vacation, and was thrilled and stirred by her tragic yet unsentimental voice. She used rhyme and meter in a well-patterned but not rigid way. The darkness in her poems is pregnant with a spiritual presence that will endure while our little lives come and go. It’s a consolation for those sober-minded enough to face it. Perhaps that was the terrifying yet desired presence I sensed just beyond the looming nighttime trees and star-clustered sky of Western Massachusetts, where God seemed a lot closer than in the city. This poem says it all for me.

Return to a Country House

Nothing but darkness enters in this room,
Nothing but darkness and the winter night,
Yet on this bed once years ago a light
Silvered the sheets with an unearthly bloom;
It was the planet Venus in the west
Casting a square of brightness on this bed,
And in that light your dark and lovely head
Lay for a while and seemed to be at rest.
But that the light is gone, and that no more
Even if it were here, would you be here,–
That is one line in a long tragic play
That has been acted many times before,
And acted best when not a single tear
Falls,– when the mind and not the heart holds sway.
****

Rupert Brooke: The Poetical Works, edited by Geoffrey Keynes
Romantic poet who died young in World War I. Plus he was smokin’ hot. What more could a teen girl want? Though the first half of this poem seems a little cliche to me now, the second half still raises goosebumps. That’s the kind of love I always wanted, and have found: a comrade in arms who marches with me, jauntily, into the great unknown that waits for us all. (Adam might not appreciate the implication that he has “scarlet lips”, though.)

The Wayfarers

Is it the hour? We leave this resting-place
  
Made fair by one another for a while.
Now, for a god-speed, one last mad embrace;
  
The long road then, unlit by your faint smile.
Ah! the long road! and you so far away!
  
Oh, I’ll remember! but…each crawling day
Will pale a little your scarlet lips, each mile
  
Dull the dear pain of your remembered face.

…Do you think there’s a far border town, somewhere,
  
The desert’s edge, last of the lands we know,
Some gaunt eventual limit of our light,
  
In which I’ll find you waiting; and we’ll go
Together, hand in hand again, out there,
  Into the waste we know not, into the night?
****
Contemporary Poetry: A Retrospective from the Quarterly Review of Literature, edited by Theodore and Renee Weiss (1974)
Lest you think my tastes ran entirely to Edwardian schmaltz, this anthology was also a close companion of my high school days. It may have been a gift from St. Ann’s School classmate Alissa Quart, or one of the precious freebies I picked up as an intern at the Poetry Society of America, where my tasks included returning improper submissions in SASEs and shelving their burgeoning and disorganized collection of review copies. This book gave me glimpses into modern subcultures and ways of speaking that were new to me, all the more fascinating because I lacked the context to understand them fully. So much of the content looks unfamiliar to me now, that I suspect I focused on a few favorites and reread those while skimming the rest. Some of those old friends were:

Yehuda Amichai, “As for the World”
Edith Sitwell, “Dirge for the New Sunrise”
Richard Wilbur, “The Good Servant”
Charles Tomlinson, “Mad Song” and “Obsession”
W.S. Merwin, “Song With the Eyes Closed”
Raphael Rudnik, “A Letter for Emily”
Howard Nemerov, “Brainstorm”
W.D. Snodgrass, “Inquest”
Richard Hugo, “Keen to Leaky Flowers” and “Bluejays Adjusted”
M.L. Rosenthal, “Liston Cows Patterson and Knocks Him Silly”
Harvey Shapiro, “National Cold Storage Company”
Herbert Morris, “The Neighbor’s Son”
Michael Hamburger, “Friends”
Frederick Feirstein, “The Anti-Life: A Fantasy”
Phyllis Thompson, “The Last Thing”

You can buy this book for one cent on Amazon. And you should.
****

Darker, by Mark Strand
My 9th-grade English teacher introduced me to Strand’s koan-like poem “Reasons for Moving”, after which I snapped up this early collection at the sadly now-defunct Gotham Book Mart. (First published in 1968, the 1985 reissue by Atheneum, which I own, appears to be out of print, so I’ve linked to a Strand compendium that includes it.) This book seemed innovative to me because the weird, horror-movie images were not mere poetic similes, but were actually happening in the narrative of the poems. A more predictable writer might say his neighbor’s face is menacing like a hawk’s, but Strand says this, in the apocalyptic final poem, “The Way It Is”:

…My neighbor marches in his room,
wearing the sleek
mask of a hawk with a large beak.
He stands by the window. A violet plume

rises from his helmet’s dome.
The moon’s light
spills over him like milk and the wind rinses
  the white
glass bowls of his eyes.

His helmet in a shopping bag,
he sits in the park, waving a small American flag…
****

The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir, by Richard Hugo
I’ve always been sensitive to the vibe of a place, and Hugo was a master at putting those intuitions into words. His free verse has a stately, compact quality that feels like formal poetry, an echo of iambic pentameter holding up the poem like the indestructible old girders of the abandoned factories he elegized in “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg”.
****

Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962-1987, by Diane Wakoski
I won the high school poetry award from the Poetry Society of America the same year (1988) that this collection won their William Carlos Williams Award, and we both read at the award ceremony at the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park. What a head rush! Wakoski’s talky, vulnerable, raw, female voice was a good balance for the high-modernist male poets that mainly influenced me during this period. At the ceremony, she read the powerful poem “Joyce Carol Oates Plays the Saturn Piano”. I remember feeling awed and discomfited that a writer so much more famous and old than myself would still be haunted by self-comparison to other writers, and by the feeling that she had let time slip away from her — ironically, because her younger self cared more about external validation than about devoting herself to art. “I promised myself/that if, by 40, I had won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry/I would let myself play the piano again,” she begins, going on to say that when she reached that milestone with no Pulitzer in sight, her hands had forever lost the flexibility to play as she had done at 20. Upon hearing that Oates has taken up piano, the speaker feels:

…Envy?
No. Past that.
A sense of failure?
Perhaps. For I gave up something
I loved/ to attain something
unknown, and now I have neither.

Wakoski was 45 when she wrote that poem. That seemed a lot older to me in 1988!

40 Years of Book Love: The 1970s


Your intrepid blogger turns 40 years old this coming July 13. Books have been part of my identity from the very beginning. Now that I have a baby of my own, I’m starting to re-read the children’s books that I saved from my own youth, remembered as special but unopened for decades. Often I’m surprised by stories I assumed were familiar, thanks to my new adult perspective and the amnesia of time.

Then I look around my office with new eyes, re-encountering titles that were formative during my teens, 20s, and 30s. What did I see in Camille Paglia, George Steiner, Sara Teasdale, Richard Hugo, Rupert Brooke, that makes the spines of those long-unread books stand out like the faces of old friends in a yearbook, whose names you can’t quite place?

In the weeks ahead, I intend to revisit some of those books and blog about what they meant to me and how I view them now. But “let’s start at the very beginning…the very best place to start”: with some of the books that stand out from my childhood memories. I’m passing over well-known classics like Anne of Green Gables and The Chronicles of Narnia. Though I did read these lovingly, many times over, everyone knows about them. Let’s get to the weird stuff.

(1978, age 6: my brief experiment with playing the guitar, which I gave up because I got blisters. Still have the guitar, though. Rock it, Shane.)

Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care
I really have no idea what’s in this book, but the family legend is that I said my first word (“baby”) at 6 months old while pointing to the cover photo.

Stuart Little, by E.B. White
Haven’t you ever felt like a talking mouse inexplicably born to human parents? I know I have. Family legend, again, says this was the first book I read on my own, at one year old. The sad, yearning, open-ended conclusion of this tale frustrated my youthful sense of the way stories ought to work, and yet for that very reason it grabbed hold of me, compelling me to act out alternate endings with my toys.

The Doll’s House, by Rumer Godden
Besides mice, my passions back then were dolls and all things British. This is another slightly dark chapter book for young readers that includes a bereavement, handled in a matter-of-fact (British?) way rather than the therapeutic gooey-ness that one might expect today. It probably resonated more with me because I lost both grandparents by the time I was 6, though I don’t remember drawing that connection at the time. I named my dolls after these characters and subsequently lost one in the park…life imitates art. Wherever you are, Tottie, I hope you had a good life.

The Tale of Gockel, Hinkel and Gackeliah, by Clemens Brentano, illustrated by Maurice Sendak
A weird, intricate, fantastic story about a family and their magical rooster, who has a jewel in his throat and dies and comes to life again. I could never remember the name of this book or where it was shelved in the Jefferson Market Library children’s section, which made each re-discovery a magical quest in itself. Then it vanished completely. I may have to spend the $86 on Amazon to unearth a copy of this out-of-print picture book.

Little Witch, by Anna Elizabeth Bennett
A little girl has no friends because her strict and evil mother, the witch, turns people into flowerpots when they piss her off. But who is that sweet sad woman trapped in the enchanted mirror, and can the girl set her free? A surprisingly accurate picture of my home life. Sorry. Hat tip to Harrison Solow for recognizing my description and helping me find this book again, which I read in my elementary school library.

She Was Nice to Mice, by Alexandra Elizabeth Sheedy
Mice. British. Need I say more? Before Ally Sheedy was a movie star, she was the 13-year-old published author of this quirky book that depicts the doomed romance of Queen Elizabeth I and the Earl of Essex from the perspective of the palace mice. I was inspired by her example as a young writer, but my main interest in this book was the character of Essex, with whom I fell madly in love for quite some time (a fantasy that wisely substituted for dating such men in real life; see also, Phantom of the Opera, 15 years later). My mother identified strongly with QEI — charismatic, fashionable, autocratic, voluntarily single, controversially wedded to her vocation (in her case, parenthood, not ruling England). As a result, I grew up immersed in a sort of tragic feminism: you can aspire to anything but you can’t have it all. The price of power is cutting your boyfriend’s head off when he gets too uppity. Talk about work-life balance.

How Babies Are Made, by Steven Schepp and Andrew Andry
I’ve got to hand it to my mom, she wasn’t a prude. I’m grateful that I could always get age-appropriate information about the human body, without shame or awkwardness. (In later years, she would also accede to my requests for a Chinese erotic art book and a huge Latin dictionary to translate the naughty passages that for some reason were encoded in this language.) First published in 1968, this picture book accurately depicts the process of reproduction in plants, chickens, dogs, and humans, through gently colored and pleasant-looking paper-collage art. Consistent color themes highlight similar functions across species. 

Heidi, by Johanna Spyri
Why did I love this book so much? Non-traditional family? Longing for wide open spaces? All I know is, my mother and I used to act out “Heidi and Clara in the wheelchair” with my kiddie rocking chair. Heidi and her little playmates in the Alps lived in an atmosphere of wholesomeness that was sometimes hard to find among the private-school children of 1970s Manhattan. Even 30+ years ago, modern kids seemed to lack the empathy, maturity, and sweetness I’d unrealistically grown to expect from my steady diet of 19th-century classics. Were kids different then, or simply not portrayed accurately?

Ant and Bee, by Angela Banner
Quaint board books from the 1940s teach kids about colors, shapes, numbers, and letters, through the somewhat surreal adventures of two insect friends. I’ve started reading these delightful books to Shane, though it’s hard to refrain from inappropriate commentary: “Ant went for a ride on Bee’s back, and then they exchanged hats, and were friends forever…and got married in Massachusetts!” Bee does look just like my high school English teacher who came out to us at the end of the semester…

Nancy White: “Your Father, Your Son”


Nancy White directs the prestigious Word Works Washington Prize poetry book series, a contest that she won for her first book, Sun, Moon, Salt, in the early 1990s. She also taught English at my high school, St. Ann’s School, so I have a special affection for her. However, even if we were strangers, I would still have fallen in love with her newest collection, Detour (Tamarack Editions, 2010).

Detour explores the breaking apart and remaking of a woman’s identity in the middle of her life, through a son’s birth and a painful divorce. Subject matter that in a lesser poet’s hands would be merely confessional here takes on a haiku-like precision and open-endedness, intimate yet unbounded by the confines of one person’s experience. This feat is accomplished through White’s use of the second-person voice and the way she narrates major events obliquely, through peripheral details described with quiet beauty.

As a feminist and now the mother of a baby boy, I was particularly moved by the poem she’s permitted me to reprint below. I was concurrently reading the chapter on mothers and sons in Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, which addresses the same theme of trying to teach our children a more wholesome and emotionally well-rounded way of being men despite the pressures of patriarchy.

YOUR FATHER, YOUR SON

He carved the dusk with stories—his trick
to dive with lit cigarette and come up smoking,
or the girl he danced with late, her brothers
interrupting with a gun—but he never much

listened to you, no matter how you guzzled
his gruff heat, the musk of his overalls, the fine foul
language of his big male freedom. Four daughters,
no sons. He was all you had, so he’s still the man

to turn to, saying You took the dog in the boat not us.
You stayed late with the neighbors, called us liars,
didn’t care if we walked in the road. In you now
a bud, a son who will rise like weather,

poured from your genuine, unnamed ore, from his
genuine, unnamed ore. You say this one
won’t taste the blade that separates love
from its genderless shape. You swear it.

Poem by Freddy Niagara Fonseca: “Books”

Freddy Niagara Fonseca is the editor of the anthology This Enduring Gift: A Flowering of Fairfield Poetry, featuring work by 76 talented poets who all happen to live in Fairfield, Iowa. He’s given me permission to share this lovely poem of his from the anthology. It puts into words why I feel such delight and magical connection when I find a well-thumbed book in a thrift store bin. E-books have many advantages, but they can’t do that.


BOOKS

Sometimes, when I think of the vast
wisdom ever contained in books—

countless scriptures of all creeds; scrolls in
indecipherable languages; tomes of science;

the great Library of Alexandria destroyed by
fire centuries ago, priceless knowledge gone;

thousands of books burned by the Third Reich;
books still held secret at the Vatican;

hieroglyphs in Egypt and whatever Atlantis
must have contributed to the written word;

books simply lost and never retrieved;
others molded, fallen apart, discarded,

and all the many books I’ll never be able to read in a
life-time even if I lived a thousand years;

and when I think of all these while browsing
at garage sales, used bookstores—(o, the good

feel of an old book and the sense of care for
books you surmise some previous owner had;

to see his or her name written on the title page,
sometimes with the date of purchase or gift)—

yes, then I tend to hold a book in my hands a little long
sometimes, deliberating whether I’ll buy,

and I read again what’s on the flap; scan a
few more pages; find a keen phrase here and there;

ponder on the title, the design, the author’s
name, weighing it all in my hand . . . And

page after page of long-forgotten lore, myth, and
adventure slowly take shape and mingle with

my own memory of myth in the back of
my mind, passing through my skin, stealing

into my bones, my heart, holding me spellbound
for a life-time it seems, and somehow beneath

my feet the deeper caves and mysteries of the earth
open wide where I glimpse that which

I cannot name but know that it exists;
and I’m feeling so strangely rooted and connected

to all cultures, beliefs, poetry, romance, peace,
wars, and history . . . and I may take the book home,

maybe not—it doesn’t matter, for as I’m
standing here, simply lost in time for a while,

some power is reclaiming everything I thought
was lost to man one time, and I see the

Great Communicator of it all in all these
many chapters, paragraphs, sentences, words

working their way with a purpose, meaning,
and conviction across so many ages,

and suddenly it seems that everything is all here now,
and really never was gone at all, as long as

books have ever existed, and readers found them,
and as I close the book, walking out to get some fresh air,

there’s all the magic in the air as of old still, and
I can live with that, and be an open book to all.

Tupelo Press Poets Talk About Their Faith


The Poetry Foundation website has posted a substantial excerpt from a forthcoming essay collection from Tupelo Press, A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith. This volume, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler, gathers reflections from 19 accomplished poets about spirituality and the craft of writing. Here are a few choice passages to encourage you to read further. The book can be pre-ordered now and will be released in March.

Jericho Brown:
“Hope is the opposite of desperation—it’s not as comfortable as certainty, and it’s much more certain than longing. It is always accompanied by the imagination, the will to see what our physical environment seems to deem impossible. Only the creative mind can make use of hope. Only a creative people can wield it.

“Today I believe that anything one visualizes consistently becomes reality. Isn’t that what prayer is? Maybe that means my beliefs have not changed at all: lift every voice and sing till earth and heaven ring. I am a believer. True believers see their way as the way. That doesn’t mean I can’t stand someone else’s way. It means that I am capable of joyfully getting lost in my own. Spirituality is important to me because I think there is something among us greater than the physical, something we know exists and can address directly. I love God. I love liberty. I shame one if I lose the other. I think of God now as way more patient than I could ever be. I have to believe that God is better than I am, and better than all of us. That’s the only thing that could make God God.”

Kazim Ali:
“Prayer is speaking to someone you know is not going to be able to speak back, so you’re allowed to be the most honest that you can be. In prayer you’re allowed to be as purely selfish as you like. You can ask for something completely irrational. I have written that prayer is a form of panic, because in prayer you don’t really think you’re going to be answered. You’ll either get what you want or you won’t. It feels to me like that, a situation where you’re under the most duress. Often people who are not religious at all, when suddenly something terrible happens, they know they have to pray. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. We all engage with the spiritual at different points. Prayer is not a refuge or shelter so much as it is an opening of arms, an acceptance of whatever storms exist in the world. You don’t really pray for your situation to change, you pray to be able to handle your situation. It’s not the world you want to change; it’s you that you want to change.”

G.C. Waldrep:
“Most Americans, I think, compartmentalize, because it is convenient: we find our modern lives intolerable otherwise. Now I am a teacher. No, now I am a consumer. No, now I am a parent, a man of faith, a poet, an investor in off-shore oil drilling, etc. It tears the soul. Even a serious faith commitment can become simply one more compartment.

“The Anabaptist conception of faith, on the other hand, is encompassing. Whatever one is doing, one should be doing it with a spiritual aim and value, hopefully in some connection with the life of the body, which is the church. It may seem inconvenient, but our lives are united and made complete in Christ, and in the community and fellowship of fellow Christians. Of course I know (non-Christian) poets who feel the same way about their art, about the community of work and feeling that poetry convokes. When I am someplace like the artists’ colonies of Yaddo or MacDowell, I tend to hear quite a bit about this. But for me, poetry inheres within the whole defined by Christ, His Word, and the church.

“Prayer is that which conveys a message to God, who is either known or knowing, more or less by definition. Poetry is that which conveys a message to a stranger.”

Joy Harjo:

“Incantation and chant call something into being. They make a ceremonial field of meaning. Much of world poetry is incantation and chant. The poem that first made me truly want to become a poet was sung and performed by a healer in Southeast Asia. As he sang and performed the poem he became what he was singing/speaking, and even as he sang and spoke, his words healed his client. When I saw that in the early seventies on a television program, the idea of what it meant to be a poet shifted utterly for me.”

Gregory Orr:
“I have faith that when the emotional, imaginative, and spiritual life is activated inside a person, when one becomes fully human, feeling and caring deeply, this represents a resurrection of some kind. This happens for me often when I read poems or hear songs. The feeling of being moved represents a resurrection. Every time meaning or feeling flows into your experience, that’s resurrection. I choose to believe that this has something to do with the beloved. One of the perils of being human, and of lyric poetry, is narcissism, the solipsistic sense that the self is all there is. Likewise, one of the perils of trauma is extreme isolation of the damaged self. To me, the beloved is that figure that exists independent of the self, that figure that calls us into relationship with the world and saves us from what I consider the emotional, spiritual, and psychological error of solipsism and narcissism. The beloved calls us out into connection with the world, into reciprocal relation with the world.”

Jane Hirshfield:
“No one undertakes something as difficult as Zen practice because they already feel the perfection of ‘things as they are.’ We humans turn toward a spiritual practice in part to restore ourselves from some felt form of separation or exile. We feel something is wrong, or missing. This is not my usual vocabulary, but one of my poems, ‘Salt Heart,’ has a passage that may be relevant here: “I begin to believe the only sin is distance, refusal./All others stemming from this.” Separation from others, separation from self, are close to the root of suffering. Christians might say ‘separation from God,’ Sufis might say, ‘separation from the Beloved.’ Jung might call it a failure to recognize all parts of the psyche as parts of one self; that shadow-self, refused, grows perilous. Buddhism proposes that the separation of selfhood itself is a mistake of the mind, an attitude in some way reflected in our English use of the word ‘selfish.’ While Zen is the particular practice that drew me, I certainly don’t believe there’s only one ‘right’ spiritual path—if something is true, it will be findable anywhere, and there are as many spiritual paths as there are people, and probably sparrows and frogs and pebbles as well. Still, for me, this not uncommon sense of being exiled from full presence in the world brought me to both Zen and poetry.”

Cindy Hochman: “Self-Portrait in a Concave Knife”


When the Big C meets the Big D, all you can do is laugh. At least, that’s where poet Cindy Hochman’s survival instinct takes her. Packed with more puns than a Snickers bar has peanuts, her chapbook The Carcinogenic Bride (Thin Air Media Press, 2011) brings energetic wit to bear on those modern monsters, breast cancer and divorce. She kindly shares a sample poem below. To order a copy ($5.00), email Cindy at

po******@ao*.com











. Hat tip to Gently Read Literature for bringing this book to my attention.

Self-Portrait in a Concave Knife

Here comes the carcinogenic bride!
Here comes the survivor-in-chief!
Wanna see my balance sheet?
This will be my Checkers Speech!
There goes my stale mate
We once lived in an altared state
He cleaned my slate, I cleaned his plate
Here is love in fission
body in remission, missionary position
Here is my inner elf,
     
my quirky self, my non-existent wealth,
      in sickness and in health
Here are my hickeys, my hearses, my hoopla,
   my histrionics
Here is my whole hierarchy of hernias
Say some Hail Marys and kenahoras
For tumors come and gone.
Here is the lion’s share, my blonde hair, my thin air,
   my health care.
Ass-kisser, go-getter, phone-dodger, night-
  blogger, flip-flopper, vow-breaker
Here is my Chinese fan
Here is my oil can
Here is my Yes We Can!
Here is my bellyflop, my pet rock, my co-op, my
 writer’s block
     my Last Supper
     my Mea Culpa!
Here are my brittle bones, my mortgage loans
My dulcet tones, my low moans
Here is my picket sign, my witty line, my glass of
  wine (or two . . .)
Here is my income tax, my credit max, my panic attacks
Here is what I’ve held in escrow:
     my pens, my posse, my potbelly
     my strokes and daggers
Here is my handle
Here is my spout
     my gamin face, my apocalyptal pout
    
cranky bitch with perfect pitch
Here is my tea rose, my stuffy nose, my broken
  toes,
my spiritual quest, my daily stress, my scarred
  breast
Here’s to my every OY,
My utter JOY
There’s my life through a poetic prism
(or maybe just my narcissism)