Category Archives: Writer and Reader

Image Journal’s Gregory Wolfe on Change and Eternity in Art

The literary journal Image: Art, Faith, Mystery celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, prompting some insightful reflections by founding editor Gregory Wolfe on the magazine’s Good Letters blog. Image publishes poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and contemporary artwork that engage with the great Western religious traditions in fresh and authentic ways. I appreciate how Wolfe harmonizes the aspects of art and religion that in my life have sometimes been at odds: the creative journey into the unknown, versus the safeguarding of revealed truths. He writes:

Art’s method is precisely to search out a new form to help us see the content we already know as if for the first time. Art thrives on shocks of recognition. Some are truly shocking, with an immediate effect. Most are subtle, time-delayed fuses that detonate deep in our subconscious and move something that needs dislodging.

In a sense, every encounter with a great work of art is a conversion experience. Yes, of course, that’s how the world is. I knew that. But I’d forgotten. I will return to the true way, the way I’d strayed from. I won’t forget again.

Artistic styles change when they fail to reveal something new.

A rounded arch speaks of eternity, solidity, and stability. A pointed arch speaks of aspiration, a hunger for light, and matter’s permeation by spirit.

Both arches speak the truth. The newness isn’t necessarily an improvement. The newness is, in part, in the contrast itself, the revelation that there is always more to see. Reality is fractal that way.

In the early church, Jesus was depicted as the Good Shepherd. Then he became the Pantocrator, emperor of the cosmos. Then he was shown on the cross and became the Suffering Servant. In a postmodern context he may perhaps be present by way of his absence; felt rather than seen. Who knows? There are a thousand options.

When religious faith isn’t made new, it becomes ideology, detached from reality. It either becomes toxic or it simply ceases to be credible.

Read the whole essay, subscribe, and donate to their annual appeal.

Writing the Other with Empathy

From the outset of my novel-in-progress about a gay man’s spiritual journey, I have wrestled with the question of my right to represent this character in his own voice. (It doesn’t help that some gay male writers, not exempt from the deformations of patriarchy, occasionally snipe about “middle-aged housewives” who intrude on their literary turf.) How to explain, without reenforcing straight privilege to interpret queer experience, that on some level I feel that my protagonist is me, and that I write not so much as an ally but as an autobiographer of an alternate life? Writers of persona poems and historical fiction face the same challenge of entering another’s perspective with empathy rather than self-centered appropriation.

Karla Kelsey’s latest review at The Constant Critic expresses well the philosophical nuances of literary empathy, which she says is made possible by the multiplicity of the self. Our conscious experience already exceeds the first-person “I”. Discussing Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s new collection, Hello, the Roses, Kelsey writes:

Inhabiting another’s first-person perspective in the same way that he, she, or it, does, not only seems psychologically impossible, but also would efface the very thing that ensures the existence of all that is not-me in the world. As Husserl among others points out, had I the same access to the consciousness of another as I have to my own, that other would cease being another and instead become part of myself.

Thus the bind: one cannot inhabit anyone else’s first-person experience, and it is precisely this limit that makes another other to me. At the same time, we don’t want to say that we have completely no access to another’s first-person perspective. We want to say that what we feel in affective, empathetic moments is not merely a solipsistic self-projection.

While studies on the problem of mind hash these problems out via the discipline of philosophy, worries over the lyric I reflect the way these problems circulate in the language of poetry. As we know, the lyric I is the poster-child for the expression of first-person experience. And while we might grow tired of the limits of this perspective—of the hemming and hawing of these I’s, aching through their embodiments, bemoaning the fleeting nature of relational connection—we balk at lyric expression that “feels into” the first person experience of another. The ethical risks of such attempts at empathy include the effacement of fundamental difference with fantasy—and passing fantasy off as some sort of emotional truth.

But this need not lock us into a Cartesian box, for “Je est un autre” (Rimbaud). Or, if you prefer philosophy, “The other can be evident to me because I am not transparent for myself, and because my subjectivity draws its body in its wake” (Merleau-Ponty). We can open the box from a trap door built into its bottom: there are many ways that we experience ourselves as other to our first-person experience of the world, for we exceed our pronouns. And this first-person experience of excess, of self-as-other is kin to an experience of the otherness of that which is not the self. The otherness of other humans, animals, nature, and objects.

Perhaps we first recognize otherness because it is a fundamental relationship that we have to ourselves. Simply touch your right hand with your left and you are both touching and touched. Catch your image in a mirror unexpectedly and who is that, for a moment, you wonder. Leafing back through old poems—through a poem you wrote yesterday—you have the distinct feeling that you did not write what is on the page. As such, one way to think about empathy is along the self’s subject/object edge, considering the fact of the self as simultaneously occupying a subject and object position and exploring the object-self’s relationship with other objects.

Read the whole essay here.

Poetry by Ruth Hill: “Cast in Bronze” and “Wild Celery”

A loyal subscriber to our Winning Writers website, Canadian poet Ruth Hill has been among our most-awarded poets since she began her career only a few years ago. This year she counts 24 wins and placements in journals (so far), following 36 last year. She kindly shares two recent poems below. “Cast in Bronze” appeared in Rose & Thorn Journal (May 2012) and Silver Bow Publishing (November 2013). “Wild Celery” appears in the debut issue of Perfume River Poetry Review.

Cast in Bronze

Afternoon storms
having opened their black velvet pouches
and thrown down their burden of diamonds
often give way to evenings of magnificent
   bronze
Come out and see the hibiscus brazing
pigeon necklaces burnished with maize
brass bells tinkling off glittering leaves
yellow sequined arches in the village square
Evenings whose warm respites of joy
are made brief by the longitudinal shadow
We are spinning away from the sun
as it appears to be spinning away from us
Newborn bees share our view through
   topaz honey
hive’s hum a kazoo, dripping raindrops
   a xylophone
amber windows everywhere
Rocks and roads and trees all trimmed
   in tortoiseshell
are strewn with chestnuts and chrysoberyl
Citrine evening with soap bubbles in the air
mist of bronze others see as not there
freckles on thrush, blush on the pear

Like well-oiled athletes, golden hills flex
   their muscles
A single robin’s silver flute calls the universe
   to order

****

Wild Celery

…and didn’t God layer it nice, twice,
first in its Spring Fling,
then for this Fall Ball,
with doilies of lace
and dollops of diamonds and pearls,
embroidered popcorn silk,
and braided cord
dripping with tassels of icicle dough,
spiraled peaks of whip cream snow,
with sun to warm and melt,
and sprinkle sparkles to twinkle so,
white under blue for a bride like you.

Someday lay me down to die
under wild celery, heaving its
exploding fireworks into the sky,
toes in the mud, musing,
sweet compost effusing,
second bloom from the tomb,
this glory the story of
what’s already gone by.
 

Poetry by Lynne Constantine: “Confiteor”

Lynne Constantine is on the faculty of the School of Art at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. An interdisciplinary artist and writer, she has, in other moments of her varied career, taught medieval English literature; headed two nonprofits; freelanced as a journalist, speechwriter, ghostwriter and book reviewer; co-authored a book on migraine; and co-founded a communications consulting firm.

I met Lynne earlier this month at the Ollom Art Festival in Northampton, where she gave a lecture on aesthetics that concluded with the wise and funny poem below. In her lecture, Lynne described the shift from classical aesthetics, with its idealized representations and universal theories of beauty, to modern aesthetics, which honors wabi-sabi, “the perfection of imperfection”. With the advent of photography and film, we no longer need art to establish a consensus on how things look or should look. Art can turn inward to express the artist’s psychological response to her environment, without having to hold up that response as the sole correct one.

This lecture reminded me of my own turn towards experience-based theology, and away from the arguments over the one “right” interpretation of doctrine. So it seemed fitting that Lynne ended with this creative reworking of her Catholic upbringing. Rituals and images remain stubbornly embedded in our subconscious despite our conscious rejection of the belief system where they originated. Perhaps this unresolved tension is one of the imperfections that our art must express, accepting that the rift between these parts of ourselves may never heal.

Confiteor
by Lynne Constantine

Confiteor deo omnipotenti
I am here to confess

I do not know how long it has been
Since my last confession
But I’m here now
And I’m hoping for absolution
For whatever can be absolved

I confess
that I am not the person I want to be

I confess
That I have made up statistics
In the heat of an argument
Which have turned out to be true
Because so much of this shit is predictable

I confess
To pretending not to understand
what the homeless vet in the street asks
   me for
and for that I am grievously sorry
and for the fact that he’s in the street I am
   grievously sorry
mea culpa

I confess
To making up sins when I went to confession
   as a teen:
“I laughed and talked in church six times,
I took the Lord’s name in vain two hundred
   times.”
I made them up so I could get absolution for
   all the other sins
That I wasn’t going to be telling the priest,
   that old pervert.
For this one I’m not really sorry
But I probably need forgiveness anyway
For something
Mea culpa

Absolution is a beautiful concept
But I confess
That I am not very forgiving
Especially when forgiveness is not followed
By a sincere effort to amend your life…

…Congress
…the Federal Reserve
…AIG
…Fannie Mae
…banks too big to fail
Are you making a sincere effort to amend
   your lives
After screwing the entire world
And then getting paid?
Do they make a penance for that?

I confess
That as a child I cried for hours
when I found out
that people don’t really turn the other cheek
I am noisy when I am inconsolable
I may cry right now
Mea culpa

I confess
That I want to believe in hell
For racists
I confess that I would like to pick their
   punishment

I confess
That I want to believe in heaven for
   the poor
And for my dogs

I confess that I hate the concept of
   purgatory
It’s a do-over for mean, petty people
Who should have turned the goddamn
   other cheek
And amended their lives
While it could have done somebody
   some good.
But that’s just me.
Mea culpa.

I confess that I am stubborn and proud.
I confess that I cry at stupid capitalist
   manipulative commercials.
Damn you Hallmark.
I confess that I can have a nasty mouth.
I confess that I am not as kind as people think
Nor as generous as I could be
Nor as ready to forgive
As I would like to be forgiven.

And yes, I would like to be forgiven.

For these and all the sins of my past life
And all the sins I will be committing
And repenting
And committing
And repenting
I ask absolution.
I promise to go forth and amend my life.
Amen.

Celebrate Poetry and Dance at Ollom Art Festival Aug. 9-10 in Northampton

This weekend in Northampton, I’m hosting a literary reading as part of the Ollom Art Festival, an interdisciplinary event on the theme of Body, Mind & Heart. Please join us!

Choreographer John Ollom and Ollom Movement Art celebrate the release of his new book, Internal Landscapes, with the Ollom Art Festival on August 9-10 in Northampton, MA. This multimedia event includes the premiere of his show “Prisoner of My Projection” at the Academy of Music Theatre, short films, visual and performance art installations, and a literary reading hosted by Winning Writers.

Come to the Neilson Library Browsing Room at Smith College at 4 PM on August 10 for an hour of poetry and prose by Jendi Reiter, Diana Holdsworth, Ellen LaFleche, Lesléa Newman, Charlie Bondhus, Robert F. Gross, and an excerpt from Internal Landscapes. Proceeds from the festival benefit Diabetes Education. Purchase tickets from the Academy of Music website.

John has been a great influence on my creative process. Inspired by Jungian depth psychology and ancient myths, his work centers on finding one’s inner truth and overcoming shame.

For a glimpse of his teaching style and Internal Landscapes, his original method of “archetypal movement that leads to art creation”, watch this 5-minute video by Emma McCagg, whose work will also be on display at the festival.


Talkback to Sinatra: My Poem “I Wish I Were in Love Again”


My poems “I Wish I Were in Love Again” and “third day” have just been published as contest semifinalists in Issue #7 of OSA Enizagam, the magazine (get it?) of Oakland School for the Arts. “I Wish…” is a critical gloss on Frank Sinatra’s ballad of the same name, which romanticized a violent conflict between lovers. This poem originally appeared in Atlanta Review. (That’s right, OSA E will take previously published work. How cool are they?)

“third day” is a collage poem using phrases from a news story about the desecration of a gay man’s corpse in Senegal. The formatting can’t be reproduced in this blog template, so you’ll just have to go buy this great magazine, which features work by Donna Steiner, Anneliese Schultz, Linda Leedy Schneider, and many other accomplished poets and storytellers.

I Wish I Were in Love Again

When Sinatra sings,
I wish I were in love again,
I imagine Love is the name
of a violent town in Texas
where the one stoplight
took a bullet long ago,
dusting the dry street with ruby glass.

Where the sheriff,
big-bellied as Cupid,
didn’t see the evidence
of the split rope, the double-smudged lipstick,
the blacksnake-cold gun under the belt.

Sinatra’s voice pours the golden
whiskey of nostalgia to shimmer
over the icy rocks, like the foothills
outside Love where nothing
lives but tumbleweeds and chicken thieves.
He misses the spat of cat and cur,
the flying fur, the sparks
that burned down Love’s one church
when the preacher’s daughter
fell asleep smoking.

Lucky in Love
is the man who didn’t miss the train
in or out of town.

Love is a Many-Splendored Thing,
the mayor says,
hoping to attract
a branch of the Houston bank,
a brassworks factory or even a circus
to settle in Love,
create jobs for the men
and scarcer women who lie
in saloon alleys all night clutching
souvenirs of Love to their hearts:
a postcard, a clump of red dirt.
Who wouldn’t want such a loyal workforce?

Love is just around the corner,
if you’ve got a first-class horse.

City-trippers in the mood
for the blackened eyes
Sinatra sighs for
take the spur line to Love
en route to Laredo or Dallas.
Fanning themselves with transfer tickets,
the ladies breathe,
I’ve never been in Love before,
mistaking the crash of plates
for an emphatic whorehouse piano.

The general store hawks banjos
with one string, plasters for the knees
of old folks who fall in Love too easily,
and of course, bullets.
If you break a hip in Love
you know what happens.

Despite the weather,
Love’s no place to retire.
The all-you-can-eat buffet closes at five.
When the moon climbs the sky again
like a drunk husband going upstairs,
the city ladies take their seats
in the second-class carriage,
each with a purple bloom
aching under her blouse, or against her cheek.
It won’t fade for days.
It’s almost like being in Love.


My Poem “Robot Deer Shot 1,000 Times” at New Millennium Writings


I was privileged this spring to receive publication in New Millennium Writings, one of my favorite literary journals. My poem “Robot Deer Shot 1,000 Times” won an honorable mention in their Winter 2011-12 contest. The winners of the shared first prize included my dear friend Ellen LaFleche. Read more poetry from the current issue here. (“Robot Deer” is on page 146 of the issue, page 28 of the PDF.) The current contest, with prizes of $1,000 for poetry, fiction, flash fiction, and essays, is open through June 17; this deadline is typically extended to July 31.

This poem was inspired by one of those “News of the Weird” wire stories about a mechanical deer that cops deployed to trap poachers. The hunter’s backstory, however, simply emerged on its own as soon as I put pencil to page. You never know what your imaginary friends will tell you over a few drinks.

Robot Deer Shot 1,000 Times

Some buckshot-toting boys can’t resist
that hat-rack head lofting into view
in the sweep of the pickup’s dusty headlights,
a come-on like the barmaid’s at the Blue Note
when she slaps your hand but you know she means maybe
by how her tail switches away.
It’s poaching to shoot from the road
at night, one of those rules
on the same page as don’t drink with a married woman
or drive a locked van to Mexico,
even if your brother asks.
Maybe the barmaid can tell a pro tattoo
from the tic-tac-cross your cellie carved with a pen filler.
But you believe the buck is real
and that its brown eyes, glassy
with trust, are the worn-down night’s gift to you,
even when you shoot and shoot but it won’t fall,
clicking its proud head slowly round
like the barmaid’s heels when she glides
her tray of foaming mugs over to the college boys.
Then the Staties roll up with their toy-car lights
joking Bambi sure can take a beating,
and cuffed on the hood you’re forced into a close-up
of the felted frame, pocked with pellets,
and it looks like your brother’s skin after the last radiation.
Tomorrow you’ll be more of a fool
at the Blue Note than you were today,
not because of the deer but the white envelopes
the cops found stuffed in your glove compartment
with poems inked on them, that some joker will shout out
during a lull in the jukebox,
and you’ll think the barmaid, brown eyes soft, is listening.

The Underside of the Tapestry: Reading Christian Books for What’s Missing


Nowadays, more often than not, when I listen to a sermon or read a Christian spiritual guide with friends, a moment will arise when my inner reaction to the text seems contrary to what everyone else is getting out of it. They’re seeing an inspiring picture on the right side of the tapestry, while I’m underneath looking at the loose threads and snarled knots. Like the optical illusion that’s either a vase or two kissing faces, one can at best switch back and forth between these two views, not hold them side by side. Or so I tell myself, those times when I keep my critique under wraps, not wanting to be the death’s-head at the feast who spoils the faith that others need for comfort.

I don’t know that I have less faith that my neighbors in the pews, just faith in different things, and perhaps too little patience with beliefs and attitudes that (in my opinion) distract from our most urgent afflictions and their best cures. Astute readers of this blog will remember that I’ve always been this way, but also notice that my priorities list has been more changeable than my fervor. This awkward mutability gives me another reason to think twice before challenging the group’s consensus.

As far as is consistent with kindness and timeliness, of course, I nonetheless believe every serious engagement with a spiritual text should eventually include the deconstructionist questions, “What is the power position of the author and his/her assumed audience?” and “What perspectives are being left out?”

Advocates of traditional, conservative education (and such a one was I!) have confused deconstructionism with moral relativism. Quite the contrary. The questions above are attempts to bring a consciousness of justice into how we read a text, to take responsibility for our standpoint and our blind spots.

True, in the prideful and competitive culture of academia, these questions have been deployed in bad faith, to dismiss intellectual rivals by labeling them “oppressors”, exactly as their conservative Christian counterparts would exploit the label “heretics”. But the inquiry into power dynamics and incompleteness need not be a bug hunt. It should simply be a nonjudgmental acknowledgment that no text is completely satisfying because the ideal community is always more diverse than one perspective can encompass. This acknowledgment would clarify that members who enter the discussion from an unrepresented standpoint are welcome contributors, not spoilers.

For instance, I belong to a weekly discussion group that’s currently studying the Examen, a daily prayer practice developed by St. Ignatius of Loyola. One of our members, a retired priest, observed that this practice was developed by monastics who had the privilege of contemplation because their daily subsistence needs were met by the community. We have a similar luxury of prayer time as middle-class Americans, if we choose to use it that way, of course. He wondered whether the Examen would be possible or relevant for a desperately poor person such as those he had served in his past congregation–someone whose entire attention was taken up with keeping her kids fed and her house from collapsing.

I found this question uncomfortable in a good way. It added another layer to the repentance and gratitude themes of the Examen by reminding me that my experience was not the center of the universe. It opened the door to other fruitful questions: Is contemplative prayer at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, worth considering only after basic physical security is established? Or is it necessary at every level of survival, so that (as the Buddha would say) we don’t add to our suffering by becoming entangled in fear, anger, and greed? If the latter, how would the Examen best be adapted to be useful and validating to someone living on the margins? To take that question seriously, we would have to work harder to include such people in our discussion group, instead of making guesses about their spiritual needs from our standpoint.

For further reading on these themes, I recommend:
James K.A. Smith, Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church (Baker Academic, 2006)
John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? (Baker Academic, 2007)
Crystal L. Downing, How Postmodernism Serves (My) Faith: Questioning Truth in Language, Philosophy, and Art (IVP Academic, 2006)

My Poem “The Name-Stone” at Utmost Christian Writers

My poem “The Name-Stone” just received an Honorable Mention in this year’s contest for Christian poets at Utmost Christian Writers. This Canadian website has been very supportive of my work over the years. Read all the winners here. (Some are still in the process of being posted as of today, April 18. Check again in a few days if you don’t see a link to the one you want.)

The poem was inspired by a discussion in my church’s adult education group about a verse from the Book of Revelation: “To the one who is victorious, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give that person a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it.” One of our members, a retired Anglican priest, said this could refer to the ancient Near Eastern practice of friends making a keepsake at parting. They would write their names on a stone or lump of clay and break it in half, each one retaining a piece that uniquely fit the other.

The Name-Stone

(Revelation 2:17)

I will give you a stone
with a secret under it.

As children in the Galilee
wrote friendship’s names on both ends
of such a shard, and broke it
and went away, each to his own desert.

Dirt-born,
nothing to give one another
but a ragged edge
that, fit
to its companion, meant love.

Where do the gouged letters lie,
in temple midden or the royal road’s thorns?
What hands crushed the clay?

I will give you a piece
of unmarked earth.

Not the name
your mother pressed onto your lips
to seal the scroll of her sorrows.

Not the name
your father spilled
like an ox-dragged harrow,
a plow with no sower.

They only know the name
that decoy, death,
reared above the spot
where you left this ground.

Granite praises granite,
butchers weep
over the marble lamb,
speak both parts
of the absolving script.

But I will give you a riven rock
to drink from its flood heart,
the rock I broke myself
to fit you.

Monday Random Song: “I Dreamed I Drove the Nails”

Oh, right, I have a blog? Apologies, constant readers, for the infrequent posting. I’ve been keeping my number-one resolution for 2013 to re-start work on the Endless Novel, as well as writing the occasional schmaltzy poem and nurturing the Young Master.

Since traditional children’s music makes me think of murderous clowns, I lean heavily on the Episcopal hymnal and Christian pop songs to entertain us while we are working on our pureed peas. Often, I wind up pondering and/or questioning the theology behind the catchy lyrics. From time to time, I will share these reflections with you, my blog followers. (You’ll have to get your own baby food, though. I recommend Earth’s Best chicken mango risotto.)

Today’s song is the Southern Gospel classic “I Dreamed I Drove the Nails“, performed in this YouTube clip by Greg Treadway and Andy Price. In it, the speaker recounts his vivid dream of crucifying Christ, which brought home to him how great a sacrifice Jesus made for his sins. Episcopalians will be familiar with this theme from the Lenten hymn “O Sacred Head“.

I’ve always struggled with this thought-experiment of identifying with Christ’s killers. I can appreciate the need to reflect on the seriousness of my sins and the magnitude of God’s mercy. This terrible limit case — God would even forgive us for killing Jesus — shows that no sin is beyond repentance. Such a hope can lead us out of self-involved despair and into true transformation.

On the other hand, I grew up in a home where emotional manipulation reigned, where I as a child was blamed for an adult’s depression and psychosomatic illnesses, in order to control my behavior and reinforce my gratitude for her so-called unselfish love. It is hard to feel the difference, sometimes, between “I Dreamed I Drove the Nails” and the stereotypical “guilt trip”. Why does God’s goodness require my self-abasement as contrast?

As I have become more attuned to abuses of power within Christianity, my understanding of Jesus has become more this-worldly and political. Now, songs like the ones above also make me wonder: Shouldn’t we focus on our actual sins and their real victims instead of a thought-experiment about something that never literally happened?

If the “real” wounded party is Christ, and lucky us, he forgives us, we may neglect making amends in the real world. This thought-experiment carries the potential for self-aggrandizing, self-pitying guilt that puts the sinner rather than the victim at the center of the story. Identification with the perpetrator then becomes a dysfunctional way to cement the Christian community’s bonds, like a gang where one has to murder someone to be a member.

Why not imagine one’s self into other roles in the story, like Veronica and Simon who tried to help, or Peter who cut off the soldier’s ear? Or, maybe one hasn’t actually done anything nearly as bad as crucifying Christ. “Sin inflation” creates a false moral equivalence that prevents the church from taking abuse seriously. It instills excessive guilt in people who then can’t speak up about wrongs done to them.

As I remember it, St. Paul exhorts us to imagine ourselves as crucified with Christ, a lot more than he recommends the perspective of the crucifiers. And when he does the latter, it’s because he actually did persecute and kill Christians, and was forgiven by his human victim, Stephen, not only by God.

I would love to hear from my readers about where the “I crucified Christ” trope originated. Is it Biblical? Where do you find support for it in Scripture?