Radiotherapy–Jake Adam York (Poem)

December 20, 2012 By in poetry Tags: , 2 Comments

Radiotherapy

Because they lived near the signal tower,
voltage purring like a church
before the preacher starts,
or because she’s talking
in the very middle of the noise,
the doctor says to pray,
to radiate The Word of God into the boy
and recall each fallen cell
to the righteous body, but all he hears
is grandma’s story, how at night,
if you hold your radio close
you can hear the dead whispering through.
She explains how her sisters
wired their mom’s old Silvertone
after she had passed away,
braiding her hair in the speaker’s leads.
She says that if he listens
he can hear her sisters arguing
over every static’s peak, her mother
saying Time to go to bed.
She starts again.
In the distance someone’s asking
why it won’t stop hurting,
and the church is working like a round,
everyone trying to start
something new,
but all anyone can say
is what they’ve said before,
old stories, old prayers
all that’s breaking through.

Advice for Writers

December 17, 2012 By in poetry Tags: , 1 Comment

Poet Jake Adam York died unexpectedly on Sunday. He was 40. He taught at the University of Colorado. He was an undergraduate at Auburn. I was never his teacher at Auburn, at least, not exactly: he was in no class of mine. But we spent a lot of time together and many of his friends were students of mine. And we all talked a lot about poetry and about writing and about living. It is strange to think of him no longer out there (waving westward), writing. –Memory eternal!

Lord, Have Mercy!

December 16, 2012 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

rachel icon

“In Ramah there was a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and she would not be comforted, because they were not.” Jeremiah 31:15; Matthew 2:18-20.

Trials, Thomas and Tree

December 12, 2012 By in meta-blog, Thomas Aquinas, Thomism Leave a comment

I am currently trying to get some writing done–or, more strictly and honestly, I have been trying to get myself to try to get some writing done. It’s been a while since I have felt more distant from the beginning of productive writing. Part of it is the lingering fatigue of the term, I guess; but part of it is a recently settled conviction of emptiness, of having nothing to say, or of not having powers adequate to saying whatever it is I have to say (read this last as a comment on the worthlessness of my powers, not the worthiness of whatever it is I have to say). Oh, well; I’ll get over it. Perhaps the best bet is to just get over the fatigue, and then to see how I need to address the conviction, if I still do.

In the meantime, I have been reading books on St. Thomas and watching Hallmark Christmas movies, usually doing both at once. I hope to teach a course, Concepts and Judgments in Thomism, next fall, and I am trying to get some of the initial blocking-out of ideas done, so that my understanding can ripen over the spring and summer. Here’s a particularly nice line from St. Thomas: “The good of the intellect and its natural end is knowledge of the truth. False judgments in the acts of the intellect are as monsters in nature, which are not according to nature but accidental to the nature.” Monsters! –As for the Hallmark movies, they’ve been mostly light and entertaining and holidaydreamy. Enough, I reckon, to stir the water of the mind without muddying it.

Thanks to my wife and my daughter, our Christmas tree is up and deserving of contemplation. The stockings are hung, and my wife has located both her kerchief and my cap. I enjoy the holiday.

Now for a series of long winter’s naps. Talk to you again in ’13.

Reading Poetry Out? A Question

December 9, 2012 By in poetry 6 Comments

I’m scheduled to read some of my poetry–in public–next month. Since I have never done so before, and since I have attended relatively few poetry readings, I’m curious about what would be the best approach. My current plan, the one that feels natural to me right now, anyway, is just to stand up, thank the folks for letting me share some poems, read some poems, and then sit down. I’ve also thought about perhaps reading a poem or two by other writers between some of mine. But I don’t know. I wonder too about how to read the poems out. I don’t want to read like Pound, but I also do not want to be glacial or monotonic. Thoughts?

Christmas in the Wilderness (Poem)

December 4, 2012 By in poetry 2 Comments

1.  It was Christmas in the wilderness

The men between grey sea and grey sky
Sat forward on the ship talking low
A faint tinge of orange warmed the grey
As the sun set

The ship somewhere between
The Admiralty Islands and the Phillipines,
1946

One of the men began to sing–to sing
the songs of men in their position

And it was Christmas in the wilderness

2.  Mother, son and daughter gather around the tree
And sing the songs of families in their position

The tree smells of pine, the air of father’s pipe
And the tree lights tinge the grey dawn
Somewhere in Alabama,
1999

It was Christmas in the wilderness

3.  Virgin, father and Son bed down in a cave,
And God enters the grey world small
His cries tinge the sounds of the animals
Stirring in the shelter around Him
And no one has ever been in their position,
Kings approach,
It is the year of the Lord.

And it was Christmas in the wilderness

((1) based on a passage from Henry Bugbee’s Inward Morning.)

No Massing of Men with God–A Thought on MacDonald and Kierkegaard

December 3, 2012 By in Kierkegaard, religion Tags: , , , , 3 Comments

Here’s an important reminder from George MacDonald:

There is no massing of men with God.  When he speaks of gathered men, it is as a spiritual body, not a mass.

I have Orthodox friends who attack Kierkegaard’s individualism.  Perhaps there is something to attack there, perhaps not, but all too often their attack is that Kierkegaard’s overemphasis on the individual obscures our ties to one another and makes nonsense of Christian ecclesiology.  But I say, briefly, bearing MacDonald in mind, that Kierkegaard is not making nonsense of ecclesiology, but rather preparing the way for it, by making sure that we understand that there is no massing of men with God–and that the church is not a mass, but a spiritual body:  a qualitatively different thing.

The deep similarities between MacDonald and Kierkegaard deserve study.

Out of the Past (Poem)

November 30, 2012 By in poetry Leave a comment

Out of the Past

1.  Jane Greer looks frankly into the camera
Wearing a black negligee, 1946
Laced about with smoke
From her cigarette

Looking from out of the past

And you wonder where you come from
Even though you know
And you wonder where you come from
Everywhere you go

Robert Mitchum in a raincoat
In a darkened city
Enshadowed by longing
And all his regret

Longing from out of the past

And you wonder where you come from
How can the days all be the same?
And you wonder where you come from
And why your name’s your name.

2.  Build my gallows high, babe
Dangle me from an ebon tree
I hang from all I’ve done
Or I hang for all I’ve done

No one is righteous, no

Not once have I sat
In a South American cantina
Wrapped in a brown study
Waiting for a woman,

For Jane Greer,
Who would have been worth it all,
Even the bullet in the gut,
Even the car crash at the end

But I want to make a break
To pass on the past

“What has history to do with me?
Mine is the first and only world.”

3.  Because the past is not always
A mode of access to what’s real
And the things you felt in childhood
Need not thematize what you feel

Running from, running out of the past

Looking, longing, running
And you wonder where you came from

Plotinus on the One (or, the Supreme) as translated by Stephen MacKenna

November 28, 2012 By in mysticism, religion, writing 5 Comments

Thus the Supreme as containing no otherness is ever present with us; we with it when we put otherness away.  It is not that the Supreme reaches out to us seeking our communion:  we reach towards the Supreme; it is we that become present.  We are always before it:  but we do not always look:  thus a choir, singing set in due order about the conductor, may turn away from that centre to which all should attend; let it but face aright and it sings with beauty, present effectively.  We are ever before the Supreme–cut off is utter dissolution; we can no longer be–but we do not always attend:  when we look, our Term is attained; this is rest; this is the end of singing ill; effectively before Him, we lift a choral song full of God.