As research for my novel (what a good excuse that is), I’ve begun watching the fashion-industry reality shows on Bravo. I’m sporadically following “Project Runway”, since I haven’t warmed up to this year’s contestants, but my real addiction is the ultimate bitch-fest “Make Me a Supermodel“. I could do without the manufactured interpersonal drama, especially this week when they all ganged up on Katy because she was eating carbs. Honestly, I’m just interested in the clothes. (I was pulling for Holly a couple of weeks ago because her Christian principles made her uncomfortable doing a soft-core photo shoot, but since then, she’s been just as catty as everyone else.)
For maximum cognitive dissonance, I’m currently reading Gregory Boyd’s Repenting of Religion: Turning from Judgment to the Love of God. Boyd argues that Christians should be characterized by nonjudgmental love, rather than by willingness to make moral pronouncements. Only an omniscient God can truly understand all the factors that go into another’s virtuous or sinful behavior, and only God can pass judgment unbiased by ego-defenses. Since the Fall, we compulsively divide people into “good” and “evil”, but these judgments are always in reference to our own psychological needs, not the truth. We set ourselves up at the center of creation, where only God belongs.
Boyd recognizes that there is a need to hold sinners accountable, for their own good and that of the community. However, he says that the church should not be in the business of listing categories of sinners who are excluded from fellowship (he singles out Christians’ mistreatment of homosexuals here). Instead, accountability should occur within loving personal relationships, such as a small group within a church, where the message and remedy can be tailored to the individual’s needs.
So what does this have to do with Katy and Holly? “Supermodel” may be an extreme example, but the everyday business of life is all about judging. We choose one book over another, one type of car, one career, one job applicant, one church. And when we put our own creations out there, be they sermons or shoes, we know that someone else will be approving, rejecting, or misunderstanding the value of what we do. How do you function, how do you stay motivated to strive for excellence, unless you judge? But how do you love yourself and others unless you suspend judgment?
It’s awful that Katy’s housemates make fun of her for snacking. On the other hand, leaving aside the unrealistic weight standards of today’s fashion industry, if she wants to be beautiful, she needs to stay in shape. “Fine,” a serious spiritually minded person might say, “this just proves that the fashion industry is stupid and evil.” Well, let me tell you, the poetry world is no less competitive, it’s just that the stakes are so low that the whole thing seems kind of cute, unless you’re a poet. Should I stop writing poetry because in order to improve, I must evaluate my own work harshly and compare it to the greats?
I like Boyd’s preference for interpersonal, individualized accountability. As he observes, moral abstractions distance us from one another, subverting the primary command to love. However, the church also has a social role, which is complicated in a fallen world. Must accountability be confined to the private, individual level so that we can live wholly in grace? Where is the dimension of social justice? As an institution in the world, the church cannot be neutral between good and evil. That would be like hoarding grace for ourselves, preserving the nonjudgmental purity of our interactions within the church at the expense of speaking up for those outside.
Moreover, because sin still exists, we need to have some categories of “sin” and “not-sin” or else accountability has nowhere to begin. This is where Boyd’s approach to homosexuality, though an improvement over the evangelical mainstream, still falls short.
It’s magnanimous of him to say that we should extend fellowship without discrimination to gays and transvestites along with obese people, greedy people, racists, prostitutes and murderers. (Just as an aside, why are “prostitutes” always named as the sinners in that transaction rather than the pimps and johns who enslave them?) But if he’d added blacks to that list, we’d all be offended, even though it’s equally true that churches should avoid racial discrimination.
There’s a crucial difference between flaws that we graciously overlook and neutral characteristics. The former, we separate out from the person in order to maintain our relationship with him. The latter is part of who he is. In practice, a solitary gay person may not notice the difference, but it’ll soon become clear that his spouse and adopted children aren’t accepted on equal terms as the other men’s wives and families. Being gay is not something you only do in private. (Then again, in this great land of reality television, what is?)
That’s why I’m rooting for Ronnie.
Category Archives: Book Reviews
Jill Alexander Essbaum: “Wednesday, Ash”
Nothing of me will survive.
This body that I wear will die
and my mouth–nevermind its loveliness–
is set to shut itself into a sorrow the size
of restlessness and lack.
The lips go too. They slack
at the corners crying no, no
but still they go. They do not talk back.
And then for every finger I have counted on–
so many times–there is a going, and a gone.
They leave to rest in pieces with once sad and
pretty hands of grief
waiting for an Easter dawn
(which no one hears approaching when they’re
buried underneath the ground).
And my feet cannot quit thinking quickstep,
swing, the sound
of toe taps or a waltz. Hush. No dancing for the dead.
The ball is done. The slipper? Nowhere to be found.
And my belly, full or no is quiet.
Then it will feast as a ghost feasts–on nothing, a diet
of sediment, sleep, a lily or two.
I shall not fuss, I shall not make riot
or rivalry any, any more. The eyes are vacant, tenantless,
for they have been plucked out. Relentless
death, you have withered shut my heart
like an old rose closing, pungent and motionless
in the closet of the rats and of the bones. Everything
I am is dust,
or shadows of it, clay unkissed.
Having died in the desert, I do not come back.
Having died in the desert, it is the drought I miss.
How can that be? Nothing, nothing of us survives.
Every inch of us will die,
and not a thing that God can do will stop it.
Even Christ, the very self of God was crucified
and dead three days, entombed.
Angels wept as little children, women loomed
about His bloody, broken body swaddled in a shroud.
And then–He rose. Like Lazarus or bread, or any
bright moon
which lifts as thunder over mountaintops and homes.
Like that, my God–save me, save me from the groan
and creak of a coffin’s rusty hinge
and resurrect us all, one by one–
all the bodies that no longer breathe or move,
and every soul that reaches but cannot grasp the
thing it loves.
Save us to a grace we cannot ever hope to understand,
such that in our dyings–behold–somehow?–we live.
***
from Heaven (Middlebury College Press, 1999)
Back from AWP: Preliminary Report
My husband and I returned yesterday from three action-packed days at the AWP literary conference in New York City, the largest annual event for poetry publishers, literary journals and university presses. We handed out hundreds – maybe thousands! – of Winning Writers contest flyers, hung around with editors from our favorite magazines, and picked up numerous books that I’ll be blogging about over the next few weeks. (Especially if I give up computer solitaire for Lent.) Some highlights:
Rebecca Wolff from the experimental poetry publisher Fence Books plied us with fortune cookies containing fabulous prizes (I won a free subscription to their journal), but their handsomely designed books needed nothing to sweeten the deal. After picking up Ariana Reines’ The Cow, winner of their 2006 Alberta Prize, I went back to Rebecca the next day and said, “I just want to stand here and tell everyone to buy this book, it redefines what poetry should do!” I mean, check this out:
from “Knocker”
Acres of wishes inside her. Any liver. To harden the gut. Boys rinse their arms in what falls from my carotid. My body is the opposite of my body when they hang me up by my hind legs. I mean the opposite thing. Not a wall with windows in it and flaglets of laundry waving or being so easy to mouth his so-thick. Sloes and divorcing her miserable eyes from the rumor they stir up in me. Everything on the planet is diverted.
Worse is less bloody pussies to lick. Everything good’s an animal.
…
Meanwhile, the Ayn Rand Institute had deployed two young, cheerful people in nice suits to advertise their very lucrative essay contests for high school and college students. I commended them for establishing a beachhead in what had to be an unfriendly environment, populated as it was by thousands of liberal academic types who were cranky from long restroom lines and inferior tuna sandwiches. I bought The Art of Fiction, a compilation of Rand’s lectures on writing techniques, which will either clear away my plot problems like Howard Roark blowing up an ugly building, or crush me with guilt because my process is so irrational.
As research for the aforementioned novel, I attended three different panels on gay literature, where I got to hear Reginald Shepherd say “buttfucking” and met the sublime Carl Phillips, who expressed a refreshing impatience with the constraints of identity politics. On a more serious note, Shepherd’s recent autobiographical essay in Poets & Writers resonated so deeply with me that I purchased his latest nonfiction collection, Orpheus in the Bronx.
Other writers whose work I intend to explore as a result of this conference are Brian Teare, Marcia Slatkin, Jeffrey Harrison, and Gregg Shapiro. I picked up the latter’s book Protection at the Gival Press table, where I was also directed to the literary journal Bloom: Queer Fiction, Art, Poetry and More.
The biggest idea I took away from AWP was “permission to speak”. This concept came up several times during a panel honoring feminist poet-theologian Alicia Ostriker. The panelists were talking about how Ostriker recovered women’s voices in the Bible and led the way for women poets to write about our own experience. For me this week, the permission I needed was to write outside my experience, to take on the voices of characters outside my own gender, sexuality, values and personality, without feeling afraid that I was appropriating someone else’s culture or being “inaccurate”. Even on panels defined by that old PC trilogy of race, class and gender, it seemed that the defensive fiefdoms of the 1990s had given way to a celebration of cross-pollination and role-playing.
Paradoxically, another benefit of this experience was a new permission to be myself, as in not comparing my writing to anyone else’s. I came away with a notion of “talent” capacious enough to include Reines’ furious, scatological, disintegrating prose-poems, Phillips’ finely crafted, melancholy lyrics, and Rand’s rationalist polemics and potboiler plots.
Just remember the cautionary words of Ed Ochester: “There are many mansions in the world of poetry, but some of them are McMansions.”
Book Notes: Get the Rollax Replicas You Watned, Vermin
The uniquely contemporary art form known as “spam poetry” — amusing, occasionally creepy “found poems” assembled from phrases in junk emails — has spawned numerous fan sites such as the Spam Poetry Institute, Spam-Poetry.com, and the Anthology of Spam Poetry (notable for the fake bios of the poems’ “authors”). I find this art form so fascinating because it captures the absurdity of the competing messages hurled at us by mass communication, a random data stream of tragedies and trivia in which all information has equal (and therefore no) significance.
As someone who has tried in vain to appreciate some of today’s more experimental poets, I also appreciate the questions spam poetry raises about language and meaning. Can a poem be enjoyable even if it has no “meaning”, no narrative thread or logical connection leading from one phrase to another? If so, what characteristics distinguish interesting nonsense from inanity? Good spam poetry, I think, does more than joke about Viagra; it teases us with the ghost of meaning, triggering our minds’ compulsion to “make sense” of any string of words we encounter.
So I was excited to discover an entire chapbook of spam poetry, E.V. Noechel’s Get the Rollax Replicas You Watned, Vermin: Poems, Directly Marketed (Assume Nothing Press, 2007). A quick and entertaining read, these poems also have a sinister tone, like secret communications overheard by the wrong person, or dream conversations that seem terribly important yet impossible to retain. Perhaps spam poetry taps into the paranoia of the Internet age, where information is plentiful yet unreliable, and our privacy can be violated without us ever knowing.
Below, samples from the chapbook:
Drugs Advised for Rape Victims
I decide to tender you, perfectly fresh.
What would happen
To your family if you died?
Please don’t think it’s an easy question, wastrel.
Nude angelfish, buttercup, Libya,
Breathtaking image: no place like home.
No place like home.
Soap and water, best germ-fighters.
Should the Government be Involved?
Woven ketosis, Polaroid convoy
The squeaking wheel doesn’t always get
The grease. Sometimes it gets replaced.
My friend, you are in trouble. You
Have nothing to lose.
I think this will intrigue you, mournful
I hope you are doing okay. Are you hurting?
I’ve been depressed with my magnitude
Lately. What and you.
first published in Blotter magazine
****
Don’t Forget Your Superman Pill
Major Loophole,
Do you want your dick to be wallpaper for a computer?
Surely you only dream of it, delight in
Wartime sorbet
Charisma, violent
Pop quiz hardship,
Orthopedics,
Orchard grass
bamboozle, good-tempered
Masquerade.
My oh my,
Anastigmatic, I’m
Feeling thin,
Vomit news.
It’s heroic to be mammoth,
As clean as beef?
Increase your testosterone
with this new Caucasian.
Why didn’t you
Refuel?
Those college chicks don’t know anything.
Vyaghra.
(Tiger in Sanskrit)
You have a pretty house,
Sleep soundly and awake rested.
****
Visit Noechel’s website at www.evnoechel.com . Read her Honorable Mention poem from the 2006 Wergle Flomp Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers here; Jim Neill’s second-prize poem is another fine example of spam poetry.
Book Notes: Letters to a Skeptic
Letters to a Skeptic: A Son Wrestles with His Father’s Questions about Christianity is a solid little book of Christian apologetics by Dr. Gregory A. Boyd, an evangelical theologian, and his father, Edward K. Boyd. It reproduces their correspondence over a three-year period, during which the elder Boyd asked his son nearly all of the basic questions that potential believers face (e.g., why would a good God permit suffering? how do I know the Bible is true? how can Jesus’ death atone for anyone’s sins?). At the end of the process, his father became a Christian.
Though lacking some of the personality of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, still the gold standard for popular apologetics in my opinion, Letters to a Skeptic covers an enormous amount of ground in less than 200 pages, and its conversational tone makes it a quick read. I would definitely give this book to anyone who is interested in following Christ but stymied by intellectual objections.
The Boyds’ dialogue starts with questions about God, particularly the problem of evil, then moves on to reasons for believing the gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and significance, explores the issue of Biblical authority, and ends with a discussion of Christian moral ideals and how grace works to transform the believer throughout his life. I particularly liked Dr. Boyd’s statement that he trusts the Bible because he first trusted Jesus, and not the other way around. His relationship with Christ led him to take seriously the Scriptures that Jesus found authoritative. This is in contrast to some Christian writers I have known, who emphasize submission to Biblical authority so early in the discussion that one would think the Bible was the standard against which the reality of God should be measured, and not vice versa. The Bible is not the fourth person of the Trinity.
Dr. Boyd has reportedly caught some flack in evangelical circles for advocating “open theism,” the view that God chooses to leave some aspects of the future undetermined, so that humans can have free will and be partners in His creative activity. This does not undermine God’s sovereignty, he contends, because God could have chosen to predestine and foresee all earthly events, but instead freely chose to limit Himself for our benefit. I find this view convincing, and in line with Scripture (which often depicts God expressing surprise at our misbehavior!), as well as our simple moral intuition that a micromanaging God ought to prevent more of life’s tragedies. I’m looking forward to reading Boyd’s God of the Possible, where he explores this idea at length.
The only missing vitamin in this book, I felt, was an emotional, experiential sense of why one should consider becoming a Christian. True to his evangelical roots, Boyd lays heavy emphasis on choosing the location of one’s eternal real estate. But since he holds the inclusivist position (which I share) that Christ may save those who, through no fault of their own, did not explicitly accept the Christian faith, that seems like a lot of effort to go through just to increase your odds. I’d like him to say more about how that faith makes sense of life here on earth. Thus, I think the best audience for this book is someone who is already motivated by other circumstances to become a believer, and just needs help overcoming popular misconceptions about Christianity.
Satan Says “What’s the Point?”
I am afflicted with a sort of spiritual far-sightedness. I see the end of things more clearly than their present reality. My inner life is a constant battle between the hunger for joy and the awareness of its transience.
This temperament kept me sober and chaste in adolescence, and probably will help me again during my midlife crisis, but it’s not enough to build a life upon. Even asceticism, to avoid becoming a perverse form of self-gratification, has to treat renunciation as a means to an end, a clearing away of distractions in search of the greater pleasure of God’s presence. The man in the parable sells the field in order to gain the pearl of great price, not because he’s bored with the view.
Kafka’s story “A Hunger Artist” speaks to this dilemma. The title character made his living as a sideshow attraction, impressing and horrifying spectators with his willpower to abstain from food for weeks or months. Finally, fallen out of fashion, he remains in his sideshow cage, starving to death unnoticed, till a circus official discovers him:
“Are you still fasting?” the supervisor asked. “When are you finally going to stop?” “Forgive me everything,” whispered the hunger artist. Only the supervisor, who was pressing his ear up against the cage, understood him. “Certainly,” said the supervisor, tapping his forehead with his finger in order to indicate to the spectators the state the hunger artist was in, “we forgive you.” “I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the hunger artist. “But we do admire it,” said the supervisor obligingly. “But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist. “Well then, we don’t admire it,” said the supervisor, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?” “Because I had to fast. I can’t do anything else,” said the hunger artist. “Just look at you,” said the supervisor, “why can’t you do anything else?” “Because,” said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and, with his lips pursed as if for a kiss, speaking right into the supervisor’s ear so that he wouldn’t miss anything, “because I couldn’t find a food which I enjoyed. If had found that, believe me, I would not have made a spectacle of myself and would have eaten to my heart’s content, like you and everyone else.” Those were his last words, but in his failing eyes there was the firm, if no longer proud, conviction that he was continuing to fast.An extreme case, perhaps, but deep inside my heart sits a little man like this, who can’t keep the dial set on Temperance but has to turn it all the way up to Disgust. Once I start looking at pleasure through his cost-benefit lens, I can’t look away. Designer handbags, pornography, hot fudge sundaes, preaching the gospel, obnoxious letters to the newspaper, conjugal love, long walks in the woods, writing my novel, attending church, all fall into the Total Perspective Vortex.
I take some comfort in Canticle 12 from The Daily Office:
Invocation
Glorify the Lord, all you works of the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
In the firmament of his power, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
I The Cosmic Order
Glorify the Lord, you angels and all powers of the Lord, *
O heavens and all waters above the heavens.
Sun and moon and stars of the sky, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
Glorify the Lord, every shower of rain and fall of dew, *
all winds and fire and heat.
Winter and Summer, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
Glorify the Lord, O chill and cold, *
drops of dew and flakes of snow.
Frost and cold, ice and sleet, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
Glorify the Lord, O nights and days, *
O shining light and enfolding dark.
Storm clouds and thunderbolts, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
II The Earth and its Creatures
Let the earth glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
Glorify the Lord, O mountains and hills,
and all that grows upon the earth, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
Glorify the Lord, O springs of water, seas, and streams, *
O whales and all that move in the waters.
All birds of the air, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
Glorify the Lord, O beasts of the wild, *
and all you flocks and herds.
O men and women everywhere, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
III The People of God
Let the people of God glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
Glorify the Lord, O priests and servants of the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
Glorify the Lord, O spirits and souls of the righteous, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
You that are holy and humble of heart, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
Doxology
Let us glorify the Lord: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
In the firmament of his power, glorify the Lord, *
praise him and highly exalt him for ever.
***
What could be more transient than a drop of dew or a flake of snow? Yet we’re told that each and every one of these is able to glorify the Lord.
This canticle is subtitled “A Song of Creation”. My little man’s perpetual refrain “What’s the point?” correlates with my resistance to being created. To me, it seems arbitrary that I am myself and not another. Therefore, every choice I could make seems meaningless, because I can’t see the larger pattern to confirm that it made a difference in the right direction. It’s like writing a novel without knowing what it’s about (which is, in fact, what I am doing). This scene might be fun, but does it advance the plot? What is the plot?
When I get tangled up in these thoughts, I often think back to James K.A. Smith’s The Fall of Interpretation, which I reviewed on this blog last spring. Smith argues that we conflate finitude and fallenness, forgetting that God made us creatures limited to a particular space-time location even before the Fall. In fact, one could say that the seizing of the apple of knowledge was the first of many miserable attempts to judge our own lives from the God’s-eye view. The Total Perspective Vortex crushes us not because we are truly insignificant, but because we are not supposed to ask the question.
As a further refresher course in how to enjoy the present moment, I reread C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra trilogy this month. The first two books, taking place in Edenic worlds on Mars and Venus, deserve a place among the classics of Christian mysticism. (The final book, a social satire on the totalitarian implications of “progressive” political views, has always seemed the weakest to me, marred by cringe-worthy caricatures of lesbianism and feminism.) Lewis’ genuine testimonies of joy lend Christianity more credibility in my eyes than a hundred pages of apologetics. Almost like Buddhists, the denizens of these worlds fully enjoy the pleasures that come to them, but do not cling to them when it is time for them to give way to a new experience, because they completely trust God’s will.
(Such perfect acceptance, I fear, may be unattainable in a fallen world, where one must maintain a certain willingness to resist present conditions, lest evil triumph through inaction. One way this manifests itself is the need to distinguish between natural hierarchies and unjust inequalities; Lewis’ romanticization of the Great Chain of Being blinds him to the necessity of feminism–until he marries Joy Gresham and writes Till We Have Faces. But I digress.)
At the end of the second book, Voyage to Venus, our hero, the space-traveling philology professor Ransom, has saved the “Eve” of Venus from making the same mistake her earthly counterpart did. To the Venusian Adam and Eve, this is the dawn of a new era in the cosmos, in which an unfallen people may at last grow into the full stature that God had planned for all His creatures. But Ransom plunges into his own “What’s the point” mood. What event is the true crux of history? (“Tor” below is the Adam figure, and “Maleldil” is their name for God. “Eldils” are angels.)
“I see no more than beginnings in the history of the Low Worlds,” said Tor the King. “And in yours a failure to begin. You talk of evenings before the day had dawned. I set forth even now on ten thousand years of preparation–I, the first of my race, my race, the first of races, to begin. I tell you that when the last of my children has ripened and ripeness has spread from them to all the Low Worlds, it will be whispered that the morning is at hand.”
“I am full of doubts and ignorance,” said Ransom. “In our world those who know Maleldil at all believe that His coming down to us and being a man is the central happening of all that happens. If you take that from me, Father, whither will you lead me? Surely not into the enemy’s talk which thrusts my world and my race into a remote corner and gives me a universe with no centre at all, but millions of worlds that lead nowhere or (what is worse) to more and more worlds forever, and comes over me with numbers and empty spaces and repetitions and asks me to bow down before bigness….Is the enemy easily answered when He says that all is without plan or meaning? As soon as we think we see one it melts away into nothing, or into some other plan that we never dreamed of, and what was the centre becomes the rim, till we doubt if any shape or pattern was ever more than a trick of our own eyes, cheated with hope, or tired with too much looking. To what is it all driving? What is the morning you speak of? What is it the beginning of?”
“The beginning of the Great Game, of the Great Dance,” said Tor.
In poetic incantations, the angels then take turns telling Ransom that the center of creation is everywhere. Each beast, flower, speck of interstellar dust, or uninhabited galaxy exists for its own sake, because God, the ultimate giver of meaning, chose to make it. It doesn’t need any other justification. The angels say:
“Where Maleldil is, there is the centre. He is in every place. Not some of Him in one place and some in another, but in each place the whole Maleldil, even in the smallness beyond thought. There is no way out of the centre save into the Bent Will which casts itself into the Nowhere. Blessed be He!”
“Each thing was made for Him. He is the centre. Because we are with Him, each of us is at the centre. It is not as in a city of the Darkened World where they say that each must live for all. In His city all things are made for each. When He died in the Wounded World He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less. Each thing, from the single grain of Dust to the strongest eldil, is the end and final cause of creation and the mirror in which the beam of His brightness comes to rest and so returns to Him. Blessed be He!”
“In the plan of the Great Dance plans without number interlock, and each movement becomes in its season the breaking into flower of the whole design to which all else had been directed. Thus each is equally at the centre and none are there by being equals, but some by giving place and some by receiving it, the small things by their smallness and the great by their greatness, and all the patterns linked and looped together by the unions of a kneeling with a sceptred love. Blessed be He!”
“He has immeasurable use for each thing that is made, that His love and splendour may flow forth like a strong river which has need of a great watercourse and fills alike the deep pools and the little crannies, that are filled equally and remain unequal; and when it has filled them brim full it flows over and makes new channels. We also have need beyond measure of all that He has made. Love me, my brothers, for I am infinitely necessary to you and for your delight I was made. Blessed be He!”
“He has no need at all of anything that is made. An eldil is not more needful to Him than a grain of the Dust: a peopled world no more needful than a world that is empty: but all needless alike, and what all add to Him is nothing. We also have no need of anything that is made. Love me, my brothers, for I am infinitely superfluous, and your love shall be like His, born neither of your need nor of my deserving, but a plain bounty. Blessed be He!”
And that’s the point.
Poetry Roundup: Huntington, Luddy, Hecht
Some poetry collections that have recently come across my desk:
Cynthia Huntington’s The Radiant has been on my must-read list ever since a poem from this collection, “The Rapture”, made the rounds on my poetry listserv. (It’s reproduced on the website of Four Way Books, which awarded Huntington their Levis Poetry Prize in 2003.) The book is well-named because a sublime light pierces through her treatment of even the darkest subjects, as in “The Rapture”, describing the seizure that heralded the onset of her multiple sclerosis:
I remember standing in the kitchen, stirring bones for soup,
and in that moment, I became another person.
It was an early spring evening, the air California mild.
Outside, the eucalyptus was bowing compulsively
over the neighbor’s motor home parked in the driveway.
The street was quiet for once, and all the windows were open.
Then my right arm tingled, a flutter started under the skin.
Fire charged down the nerve of my leg; my scalp exploded
in pricks of light. I shuddered and felt like laughing;
it was exhilarating as an earthquake. A city on fire
after an earthquake.
…
A lover’s betrayal is another of the book’s main storylines. Here, she is equally at ease flinging visceral curses at the other woman (“I want to throw stones at her mother’s corpse,/send her children to name-change foster homes”) and depicting the austere beauty of the Cape Cod coastline where she goes to face down her solitude. The latter theme connects the luminous poems in the first section, “On the Atlantic”, where pain and peace somehow coexist in concise verses whose every word feels bought at a great price. From “Vale”:
This vale of tears, this world…
As in: the valley of the shadow
of death, the cloud, the fall,
the unknowing. As when he said
“I’ve had another life”
and his face was lit with escape.
This world is where we die:
place of gardens and fires,
water carried up from streams.
Water carves itself a home
in the lowest place. Can only rest
when there is nowhere to fall.
…
There is no easy hope here, and yet The Radiant is anything but despairing. Though stylistically more accessible, it reminded me of Katie Ford’s Deposition, one of my favorite poetry books, which is similarly haunted by an ineffable God who is sensed through absence and obedient suffering. In “Hades”, Huntington writes that God made the dog “Stunned by desire,/mistaking the vastness /of his hunger for a taste/of the eternal”:
It’s always the same,
so awkwardly sad,
how they stare at you
when you’re making dinner
or having tea and reach
for a biscuit–how they’re
transfixed with wanting.
“It’s not the real God,”
you tell them, “not the food
of this earth.”
But they don’t believe you,
and are not saved,
and that is why a dog
is set to snatch and growl
at shades, starving forever
before the dismal gates.
My only criticism of Huntington is that she sometimes falls too much in love with her own best lines, repeating them more than once in the same poem. Some writers like to do this to give free verse more structure, but I find that it usually dilutes the effect of the line in question, making it seem like a clever prepared remark rather than a spontaneous outcry compelled by the emotions of the poem. The illusion of unguardedness is important to maintain, however much we know that poems this good are the product of careful craft.
****
Wolf Heart is North Carolina author Karon Luddy’s first poetry collection. By turns sassy, nostalgic, heartbreaking and wise, these poems cover some of the same territory as her hilarious and moving young-adult novel Spelldown, about an irrepressible adolescent girl whose love of learning provides an escape from small-town poverty and her father’s alcoholism. As a writer who works in both genres, I found it instructive to see how new facets of the same events were revealed, depending on whether the narrator was the young girl, masking her vulnerability in sarcastic down-home prose, or the mature woman poet, able to assemble the fragments of memory into a clear-sighted yet compassionate picture of a troubled family.
Luddy’s poetic style is simple and straightforward, but she has a gift for apt phrases, folksy yet with a sting. For instance, in “What They Didn’t Cure”, about her father’s hospitalization for pneumonia, she selects a few key details to expose both personal and class-based tensions:
…Has he been crazy like that before? the doctor asked.
No, but he drinks an awful lot, Mama said,
then hung her head
like a little girl who’d been
caught killing a kitten.
Delirium tremens–the doctor pronounced
as if he’d solved the riddle of the Sphinx.
A week later, pneumonia cured,
they discharged my father, his eyes shining like
black marbles he’d won from the Devil.
****
I really wanted to love Jennifer Michael Hecht’s new poetry collection, Funny. Her first collection, The Next Ancient World, came out from Tupelo Press around the time of the 9/11 attacks, and brilliantly anticipated the disorientation of a late-stage empire waking up to the news that its historical moment would pass away like all others before it. For Hecht, a historian and philosopher, humor is always connected to its cognate, humility. As she explains in Funny‘s concluding theoretical essay (which is worth the cover price all by itself), comedy generally arises from someone else’s lack of self-knowledge. Something is funny because we, the outsiders, see the absurdity of a situation that the participants are dead serious about.
In this sense, humor can be a leveling political force, similar to the study of history. To show that ideas have a history, as Nietzsche did in The Genealogy of Morals, is to make formerly self-evident truths appear contingent, and thereby open up space for other ideologies. Hecht’s most recent nonfiction book, The Happiness Myth, applies this genial skepticism to various conceptions of the good life from ancient times to the present. (This book is so well-written that she nearly persuaded me to get high and march in the Greenwich Village Halloween parade, which suggests that the Athenians had a point about the dangers of philosophy.)
Funny is a high-concept book that unfortunately didn’t animate its theoretical skeleton to my satisfaction. I loved the premise: each poem is an extended riff on a somewhat corny joke, imagining back-stories for the characters and exploring what their predicament reveals about human alienation and mortality. I bought the book on the strength of “Hat Trick”, one of the best in the collection, which I read on The Cortlandt Review website. Other favorites in this book were “A Little Mumba” and “Chicken Pig”. Too many of the poems, though, were not as tightly written, feeling more like scattered notes for a philosophy lecture, without an emotional investment in the characters.
I wonder whether Hecht has fallen prey to a type of spiritual exhaustion that I’ve seen in writers who look too long at death without forging a connection to the transcendent. It’s the same mood that darkens absurdist-philosophical comedies like Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life or Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide series, as well as the later works of poets Stephen Dobyns and Mark Strand. Perhaps “life as cosmic joke” falls flat by Hecht’s own standards because a godless universe has no outside vantage point from which we can laugh at our own short-sightedness on earth. There’s no possibility of getting outside, no larger context to shrink our agonies down to scale. Without the Divine, perhaps there can be no Comedy.
Book Notes: Openly Gay Openly Christian
Rev. Samuel Kader’s Openly Gay Openly Christian: How the Bible Really is Gay Friendly bridges the gap between serious Bible-believing Christians and those who want to affirm gay and lesbian relationships. The latter group includes liberal churches and theologians whose relationship to the Bible is vague, superficial or outright antagonistic, which has tended to confirm conservatives’ fears that gay-friendly theology waters down the faith. Many evangelicals have never heard a solid Scriptural case for GLBT inclusion.
Kader’s scholarly analysis of “clobber passages” in Genesis, Leviticus and the Epistles makes that much-needed case, though in other chapters he repeats familiar pro-gay readings of the Bible that I think are strained and potentially distracting. Hunting for examples of same-sex pairings in the Bible (David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi) unnecessarily sexualizes all intimate bonds, a reductionism to which our culture has been prone since Freud. Moreover, while it’s true that Christians are free from all of the ritual prescriptions of Leviticus, Kader sometimes slips into trivializing the holiness code, arguing that Christians who eat shrimp or wear blended fabrics have no right to criticize gays. But these are minor problems with what is nonetheless a very valuable book.
Kader analyzes the key words in Hebrew and Greek that he says have been mistranslated as forbidding all same-sex intercourse. Using Strong’s Concordance to track where these words recur in the Bible, he recontextualizes the clobber passages and demonstrates that none of them describe a committed, monogamous relationship between two men or two women. For instance, the acts actually being prohibited in Leviticus 18 and 20 are the fertility rituals of neighboring pagan nations, which involved temple prostitutes, and also possibly the practice of soldiers raping a defeated enemy king or military leader.
What gives this book credibility, besides the rigorous textual analysis, is that Kader sounds like a genuinely orthodox, evangelical Protestant. Rather than appeal to modern secular ideals of tolerance or a generalized Christian ethic of compassion, he emphasizes that the issue is legalism versus salvation by grace. Welcoming gays into full Christian fellowship is exactly the same kind of scandalous, progressive leap as welcoming Gentiles was for the Jewish Christians in the early church (see the story of Peter and Cornelius in Acts 10). And it is justified by exactly the same evidence: the empirical evidence of the workings of the Holy Spirit in the lives of those once considered beyond the pale.
Poetry Roundup: Teicher, Rodriguez, Rose
In the course of researching winners of major contests for the next Winning Writers newsletter, I came across some exceptional poems online that I wanted to share with readers of this blog. One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2008 will be to get caught up on my review copies because there are so many exciting new books being published. Here, samples of three very different authors:
Jennifer Rose’s second book, Hometown for an Hour, has won several prizes including the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award. Structured as a series of postcards from cities ranging from Gettysburg to Mostar, the book explores experiences of rootlessness and belonging. For instance, in “Provincetown Postcard“, she writes:
The street’s deserted,
as if a villain and the sheriff were
about to shoot it out, though nobody
peers from behind these shutters
except the endless pairs of sunglasses
staring toward June. Eight o’clock.
A church bell and one foghorn sing an aria
so poignant I want to cry. The marina
swizzles its lights into the harbor.
It’s Tuesday. I must be the last tourist
in P-town. How paradoxical “home” is–
you must get sick of it to earn the right
to have to stay in spite of that. I’ve never been
able to take any place for granted
like these year-rounders I see scratching
their lottery tickets at the Governor Bradford.
Where would they go with their winnings?
How do we know where we belong?
…
Read more poems from this book at her website.
Chicano author and activist Luis J. Rodriguez has written several acclaimed volumes of poetry as well as a memoir about growing up in the gangs of East L.A. He is now an advocate for disadvantaged youth, and the founder of Tia Chucha Press in Chicago. Read excerpts from his work at the Academy of American Poets website. In the title poem from his collection The Concrete River, he depicts barrio youth getting high on inhalants to escape from their bleak urban landscape into a beautiful, dangerous hallucination:
…We aim spray into paper bags.
Suckle them. Take deep breaths.
An echo of steel-sounds grates the sky.
Home for now. Along an urban-spawned
Stream of muck, we gargle in
The technicolor synthesized madness.
This river, this concrete river,
Becomes a steaming, bubbling
Snake of water, pouring over
Nightmares of wakefulness;
Pouring out a rush of birds;
A flow of clear liquid
On a cloudless day.
Not like the black oil stains we lie in,
Not like the factory air engulfing us;
Not this plastic death in a can.
Sun rays dance on the surface.
Gray fish fidget below the sheen.
And us looking like Huckleberry Finns/
Tom Sawyers, with stick fishing poles,
As dew drips off low branches
As if it were earth’s breast milk.
Oh, we should be novas of our born days.
We should be scraping wet dirt
with callused toes.
We should be flowering petals
playing ball.
Soon water/fish/dew wane into
A pulsating whiteness.
I enter a tunnel of circles,
Swimming to a glare of lights.
Family and friends beckon me.
I want to be there,
In perpetual dreaming;
In the din of exquisite screams.
I want to know this mother-comfort
Surging through me.
…
Read the whole poem here.
Craig Morgan Teicher’s collection Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems won this year’s Colorado Prize for Poetry. In this poem, “Ten Movies and Books”, first published in La Petite Zine, disjointed capsule summaries of unnamed classic movies and books turn out to be more about the reader’s bewilderment and longing than about the books themselves. Excerpt:
9
The twist is that, the whole time,
while he’s been trying to help
the boy, who is plagued
by his ability to see and speak with the dead,
Bruce Willis is dead. I’m sorry.
I’ve ruined another movie. But someone else
probably told you already. It’s still good, even if
it’s ruined for you.
*
Poems are meant
to be read
in private, in bed, when
no one else is in the bed
with you.
Never speak about poems.
Never tell anyone that you
have heard
of them. Every poem
that someone discusses
with someone
else disappears or breaks.
In fact, even reading a poem
to yourself
hurts what little chance it has.
10
Holden Caufield
is pissed about everything.
He goes on and on.
Everyone just wants to make him better,
but he is too beautiful
for the world. Maybe everyone is
until they turn sixteen
or seventeen. After that,
maybe only some are too beautiful.
…
****
I will break Teicher’s rule #9 by directing you to read the whole poem here.
Book Notes: The Gift of Being Yourself
Christian psychologist and spiritual director David G. Benner has written an intriguing but too-brief inspirational volume, The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery, whose premise is that knowing God is inseparable from knowing yourself.
This might sound like New Age self-deification, but Benner’s orthodoxy is solid. Relationships require authenticity. If we are afraid to be our true selves, he says, we are also afraid to encounter God in prayer. This observation rang true for me because fear of myself has been a major obstacle to my prayer life. Sometimes it’s that I don’t want to know my own sins; other times, I’m afraid that I couldn’t process the intense emotions of prayer without losing my mental balance. Then the people whose affection I want to retain will reject me, saying, “Who is this depressing person who cries all the time even though her life is so fortunate? Obviously, whatever she believes, it doesn’t work.”
And then there’s the Psalmist’s question, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?” I look at my weakness, the mundane concerns that so easily overwhelm me, and imagine that God must see me as, well, a schmoe.
Some strains of thought in Protestant theology are less than helpful for this problem. I do believe that Christ died for my sins. However, some ways of talking about substitutionary atonement and human depravity make the transaction appear formalistic, almost false: I am actually loathsome, to the extent that I am myself, but God accepts the legal fiction that He is looking at Christ when He looks at me. This sets up a dynamic of God in opposition to the self, which can perpetuate the feelings of shame and self-avoidance that I always thought the gospel was meant to cure.
Becoming aware of my inability to cope with my sinful nature was the prelude to my conversion, but it was not conversion itself. Conversion was the realization that my deepest self was separate from that sin, cherished by God and somehow protected from ultimate worthlessness, but not through my own efforts.
Hence Benner’s well-chosen title. We are meant to be ourselves, but our personhood is a gift, not an achievement. Moreover, the unique talents and inclinations we discover in ourselves are clues to our God-given vocation. (This insight also reassured me, as I’ve found it hard to root out the Kantian anxiety that God will prevent me from finishing my novel because my enjoyment of it is idolatrous.)
Much of the book is spent discussing ways we construct a false self. In language reminiscent of the Buddhist doctrine of “non-self”, Benner suggests that we become overly attached to particular personality traits and preferences, which we adopted out of habit, or because they were pleasurable, or helped us manipulate others. We assume that these traits are our fixed “self” when perhaps they are things we do in order to protect our egos, and could be changed.
Whenever we act as if it’s our responsibility to create a unique personality for ourselves, we end up shoring up the false self and hiding from our flaws. By contrast, accepting that our uniqueness is given to us by God, and that our primary identity is being a person loved by God, frees us to discover who God meant us to be.
This worldview is appealing enough that I wished Benner had included narrative examples of what a person’s life might look like before and after giving up the false self. He briefly outlines the Enneagram, a list of nine personality types and their characteristic sins, but doesn’t give specific guidelines for working with it, nor explain why Christians should take it as authoritative. The book is the first in a series that includes Surrender to Love and Desiring God’s Will. I will continue to explore his works in search of more practical advice.
Whenever we act as if it’s our responsibility to create a unique personality for ourselves, we end up shoring up the false self and hiding from our flaws. By contrast, accepting that our uniqueness is given to us by God, and that our primary identity is being a person loved by God, frees us to discover who God meant us to be.
This worldview is appealing enough that I wished Benner had included narrative examples of what a person’s life might look like before and after giving up the false self. He briefly outlines the Enneagram, a list of nine personality types and their characteristic sins, but doesn’t give specific guidelines for working with it, nor explain why Christians should take it as authoritative. The book is the first in a series that includes Surrender to Love and Desiring God’s Will. I will continue to explore his works in search of more practical advice.