The baker, said Luther, glorifies God in bread.
He was a fat fellow, knew good beer from a bad sermon.
Enough of these piglets in neckcloths
sweating through bare words never meant
to be dragged up from belly to lips.
Inside every man I want, I want
cries like a baby, but ashamed
of bread sopped in milk,
choleric to grab his father’s knife.
The helmsman glorifies God by seeing sharks.
The constipated scholar can afford to toss his ink
at demons in the frost,
his own chamber glass cracking.
But bluff sailors, their red hands freezing to the wheel,
need gloves, not Latin.
Bless the tanner and his scrawny boy
who sleeps in the horse-hay,
wakes to crack the trough’s icy skin
and offer the first bite
of an ordinary apple to the steaming mare.
Let him be too young to dream of whores
like Reason, Luther’s false bride.
She is all painted with vocations
of monk and knight and merchant,
pale halo, priapic spear,
the great ships laden with lemons.
The leper glorifies God by losing
his fingers. Luther counted beads
but could not count his dreams
where his shadow-self barreled through Cockaigne,
poor paradise without bakers
where sugar drops from trees and women
are all thighs and stopped mouths.
The beggar glorifies God by opening his hand
to the butcher and the nailsmith, the fool
by singing his cradle song over stones and pennies
flung round him like stars in the dirt.
This poem won third prize in the 2008 Utmost Christian Writers poetry contest.
Category Archives: Site News
Speak Up for Gay Rights at the United Methodist General Conference
Soulforce, an interfaith organization that advocates for GLBT rights through nonviolent resistance, will be sending volunteers to witness at the United Methodist General Conference, which will be held in Fort Worth, TX on April 23-May 2. The United Methodists are the second-largest US Protestant denomination. According to Soulforce’s newsletter, under current UM policy:
Local UM pastors have the power to deny membership to gay and lesbian Christians.
UM pastors are barred from performing marriage or commitment ceremonies for same-gender couples.
Openly gay and lesbian people are banned from the ministry.
Transgender people face potential exclusion from the ministry.
Gay and lesbian youth are taught that being true to themselves is “incompatible with Christian teaching.”
To sign up to join Soulforce’s nonviolent demonstration on April 25-27, click here. To read more about the debate within the Methodist church, visit the website of Affirmation: United Methodists for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Concerns.
Kyle McDonald’s “The Rose of Ilium” Now on AudioBookRadio
Canadian actor and writer Kyle McDonald won our most recent Winning Writers War Poetry Contest last year with his masterful epic poem “The Rose of Ilium”, a stirring account of a battle between Greeks and Amazons in the Trojan War. His multimedia presentation of his poem is being broadcast this week on the UK’s AudioBookRadio.net (playing time: 23 minutes). You can also watch the video and read the entire poem on our website. Here’s an excerpt:
…Th’alarums sound with direful clarion
And forward races the bright Danàän,
Whose coursers, both bread of immortal stock,
Cause all the lesser steeds therewith to baulk;
Nor Amazon nor Dardan faced the youth,
Fearing an execution too uncouth;
Yet, this did not forestall their bloody fate,
As he with spear sought foes to extirpate:
One caught his javelin beneath the arm;
Another from his blade took mortal harm,
As head from neck was rashly severèd;
His spear recovered, to the fray he sped,
His ruby chariot thundering as he went.
A surly Amazon from life he rent,
Smiting her brains out with his weighty shield,
Her viscid claret plashing red the field.
His prey, like paltry ships upon the sea
Who strive in vain the tempest’s rage to flee,
Or, like the jackdaw flying from the hawk,
Could find no haven from the deadly shock.
Penthesilea cuts herself a path,
Voracious to expunge Achilles’ wrath,
Whereon he sees his adversary fume
And smiles grimly at the chance of doom.
Automedon his master’s manner knows,
And from a solemn nod, begins to close;
Likewise the Amazon her driver guides,
Who o’er the corpses of the fallen rides.
As this redoubtable twain prepared to meet,
The gathered armies stopped t’adhere the feat,
As though the Gods themselves strove on the plain,
Who to exchange life reaving blows were fain.
First she her javelin pitches through the broil
Expecting her fair quarry’s looks to spoil:
A rav’nous hawk could not so swiftly speed
As her sharp spear, careening with blood greed.
But lo! That mordant prong, so oft unerring,
Was thwarted by his shield, not even tearing
The third bronze layer; now his stout reply,
Which her broad scutcheon cannot stultify,
But from her supple arm is wrenched away,
Transpiercéd by his javelin’s assay.
The Queen now marvels at his martial might
Whilst he propels another dart in flight:
Screaming, the pointed tip cuts through the air,
And would have rent her flesh all smooth and fair
But for the valour of her charioteer,
Who placed herself within the point’s career.
The savage blow her eyes enclosed in night,
And in the earth both point and soldier pight.
Penthesilea seized the vacant reins
And sought to vindicate her comrade’s pains
By drawing out her ringing, bronze-cast blade,
Vengeance to visit as she hoarsely bayed.
Achilles from this conflict did not shy,
But towards the Queen he bade his driver fly.
As two contestant rams in wrath will rush,
So those two champions plied the brutal crush;
Towards his chariot she tilts her course,
Meaning to capsize his war-car perforce.
He swings his weighty sword and she evades:
Unto the sullied earth the troop cascades,
As battlecar with battlecar collides;
Automedon rolls clear and battle chides,
Whilst Queen and Prince rejoin the seething fray,
Their scalpels flashing in warlike display.
…
Uncertainty and Christian Writing
The new literary journal Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression continues a trend begun by Image and Rock & Sling, providing a home for creative writing that takes Christian faith seriously without sacrificing literary and moral complexity. My novel excerpt “Bride of Christ”, about a young woman torn between loyalty to her gay brother and her evangelical family, will be published in Relief later this year.
In this interview on their website, guest editor Jill Noel Kandel shares some perceptive advice about what separates Christian literature from doctrinal or inspirational writing:
Relief: A number of our nonfiction submissions are more like articles or even sermons and not what we at Relief think of as creative nonfiction. How can writers be sure their work is appropriate for Relief before they submit?
Jill: Christian writing has many avenues. Doctrinal, devotional, and magazine article writing seem to be prominent. I would say that Relief wants to publish fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that is out of the Christian mainstream. If a piece is something I could read in Guideposts or Christianity Today for example than it probably isn’t right for Relief. I think that what I am looking for is of a more literary quality.
Relief is trying to do something different. I love the definition given by the Relief staff:
Relief- An architectural term referring to a raised projection of figures on a flat surface. It is an image of a reality caught halfway between 2D and 3D.
This is precisely the type of writing that I will be looking for. Writing that reflects the reality and honesty of the world we live in tempered by the hope given to us as believers. Leave the cotton candy at the fairgrounds….
****
Relief: What is it that makes a piece of writing absolutely Christian?
Jill: As a writer I am still trying to learn how to write faith. As Christians we walk by faith and not by sight. To write faith is not to write sight. What I mean is that as Christian writers we tend to want to write the end of the story, heaven, and angels wings. Throw in a little victory celebration. But as human beings living here on this earth we are often like Joseph sitting in Pharaoh’s prison. He didn’t know the ending of his own story. I try to write what I know today to be true.
I think I’m going to post that last sentence over my writing desk, with an emphasis on “today”. How do I know what is true? Try something and see what happens. Sufficient unto the day is the writer’s block thereof.
Jendi Reiter’s Chapbook “Hound of Heaven” Forthcoming from Southern Hum Press
My poetry chapbook Hound of Heaven was a runner-up for the inaugural Women of Words Award from Southern Hum Press and will be published this fall. Thanks, Southern Hum! I’ll include a purchasing link on this site when the book is out. Below, a sample:
Hound of Heaven
for Fran
It had been raining days when the voice
asked me to pull over by the river.
Not a voice to be heard but simply a must:
the arm moves with the thought, no word says Move.
The branches cocked like muskets, spearing the sky,
were soaked black, clouds wind-whipped dogs
cringing like cavemen placating
the weather of doom they thought was God.
Is that all I am, that bared animal neck?
I had let the pearls roll from my hands like water,
thinking anything precious could save itself.
I was silently wed to the clever,
dazzled by small explanations.
Still I turned the car, slowed, stood under the fall
of cold silver needles like a sick child praying
be good and it’ll soon be over.
There were the reed-clotted banks and the fists of trees
and in the river only a projected world
no gentler, no more likely to change.
Till a soft wind, someone, ruffled the waters
and the trees cracked apart, lovely as first tears after a death.
****
Dendrobatidae
Most deadly, most delicate, the jewel-toned frog
like a crown behind museum glass
tempts a perverse grab. Once name it rare,
monkey-mind will do anything for more.
The tiny scarlet body barely breathes,
on limbs like sapphire mined from colonies
to mount in a tourist-dazzling diadem.
Is power in the plough and jungles hacked
and spill of oil like pavement on the sea –
or clinging softly underneath a leaf
as our murky water, crowded air,
flows through the tree frog’s bright defensive skin?
Beauty-mad, how could we not lick and stroke
and die? Soft as a fruit and berry-red,
it tempts us to devour what we love,
to steal the crown of knowing everything.
first published in The New Pantagruel (2005)
Support Soulforce “Right to Marry” Campaign in New York
Roses fade and chocolates disappear (especially around my house), but certain Valentine’s Day gifts can make a lasting impact. This month, young adult volunteers from the progressive interfaith organization Soulforce will return to New York State to ask business and community leaders to support full marriage equality for same-sex couples. Last year, Gov. Eliot Spitzer introduced a gay-marriage bill that was passed by the state Assembly in June, but the Republican-controlled Senate did not let it come to a vote. To donate to the Soulforce Right to Marry Campaign, click here.
Also, because we love Hugo and chinchillas are cute, click here.
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.”
MassEquality Unveils “Equality Agenda”
If you’ve ever heard right-wing commentators denouncing the “gay agenda” and wondered “What’s that? Why didn’t I get the memo?”, worry no more. MassEquality, the grass-roots activist group that helped secure equal marriage rights for gays and lesbians in Massachusetts, has just announced its “Equality Agenda“. These policy initiatives represent the next steps toward full equality for people of every sexual orientation and gender identity.
Proposals include: Add gender identity and gender expression as protected categories under the state’s nondiscrimination laws. Increase funding for “safe schools” (anti-bullying) programs. Pass the MassHealth Equality Bill, which would give married same-sex couples the same Medicaid benefits as straight married couples. Increase funding for HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention, and for domestic-violence prevention services that address the special needs of GLBT couples.
In a separate initiative, MassEquality will be partnering with Gay & Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) to organize for equal marriage rights in Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, Maine and New Hampshire.
If you think this is a good idea, click here. If you think the end of the world is at hand, click here.
Poemeleon Prose-Poem Issue Now Online
Online literary journal Poemeleon has just released its latest issue, which is devoted to the prose-poem. In addition to poetry by Jimmy Santiago Baca, Christina Lovin, Eve Rivkah, Cecilia Woloch, yours truly, and many others, Ann E. Michael contributes a thought-provoking essay about typography as a conveyor of meaning.
With prose poetry, perhaps even more than with free verse, because the formal structure is not on the surface, traditionalist detractors may assume that the form is a thoughtless free-for-all. Prose poetry removes the familiar cues of rhyme, meter and line breaks that tell us “this is a poem”. Like abstract painting, this can foreground other aspects of the artist’s materials that we formerly overlooked. Though it risks becoming gimmicky (a flaw I find in much “concrete poetry”), creative typography can illuminate the significance of the visual choices we make when writing and reading.
Aficionados of the prose poem can read more examples and essays on the subject in the journal Double Room.
Poetry has been represented through the typographic art for several centuries; but until recently, few poets have spent much time considering how typography affects the form of the poem. After all, the printed page seems “merely” physical, inanimate, without the breath, rhythm and music that vivify the poem in performance (even if the reader performs it silently, while reading). The printed page has traditionally been the realm of the editor or designer, not the poet who is more accustomed, perhaps, to confrontations with the blank page. But now that we can, essentially, typeset our work as we compose, poets are becoming more aware of how margins, line spaces, and tabular settings can be indicators in the work and alter the form in which the poem is presented—can animate it further. I think prose poets, in particular, could discover in typography a tool with which to push this flexible form in interesting directions.
In verse, a good poem is more effective with its line breaks intact. Even lacking line breaks, the form will peek out from the justified margins because the rhythm, the rhyme, the breath is imbedded. A verse-poem’s line operates on rhythm (and, when read aloud, breath) foremost, with phrasal pacing as a sort of minor premise. With prose, semantic pacing, and the sentence as a unit, have the upper hand. Pacing and rhythm are dependent upon syllabic stress, word choice, sentence length, punctuation, and line breaks, which act as visual cues. In prose poems, the writer/editor’s choice of margins on the page may also be used as visual cues.
With prose poetry, perhaps even more than with free verse, because the formal structure is not on the surface, traditionalist detractors may assume that the form is a thoughtless free-for-all. Prose poetry removes the familiar cues of rhyme, meter and line breaks that tell us “this is a poem”. Like abstract painting, this can foreground other aspects of the artist’s materials that we formerly overlooked. Though it risks becoming gimmicky (a flaw I find in much “concrete poetry”), creative typography can illuminate the significance of the visual choices we make when writing and reading.
Aficionados of the prose poem can read more examples and essays on the subject in the journal Double Room.
Recent Publications: Juked, Fulcrum and Others
A roundup of my recent publications news:
I just learned that I won an honorable mention in the 2007 Juked Fiction and Poetry Prize for my poems “Confession” and “The Opposite of Pittsburgh”. (Partial credit for the latter poem goes to “Ada Porter”, the character in my novel who actually wrote it. I just do whatever the voices in my head tell me.)
In other news, my poem “Zeal” was accepted for the 2008 issue of FULCRUM: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics, an exciting journal edited by my old Harvard classmate Philip Nikolayev and his wife Katia Kapovich. (But as George W. Bush said when he went to Yale, I got in solely based on merit.) Philip’s latest book is Letters from Aldenderry.
Another poem, “Delivered”, will appear in the prose-poem issue of Poemeleon next month. I’ll link to it here when the issue comes out.
Finally, the University of Texas School of Law has made available online some poems I had published in the 2004 collection Off the Record: An Anthology of Poetry by Lawyers, a special issue of the journal Legal Studies Forum. I also have a prose-poem, “Goodbye Capistrano”, forthcoming in their 2008 anthology.