David Craig's Blogosphere

2011-12-19T09:30:00.000-08:00

I can understand why people (Catholics) who don't read much literature like Chesterton, but why do people who do? Intellectual content. Yes, there's good stuff there; maybe they feel he's the best they can hope for and still be Catholic. But there is Hopkins and Merton, and it's such fun to pick through the great morass of contemporary religious work. Endo's DEEP RIVER--very Catholic, but slightly suspect. I guess folks just want to feel at home, dance there.

Hollywood, of course, has no excuse, and it will eventually die; the lie of it.

Had a great moment coming out of St. Pete's after Adoration. I have this thing with photographed faces: covering each side of the person's face to see the other. It's often and public/private deat, the private being the one is more shadow. You can see all the pain, all the courage: stuff you miss if you look at the whole. (Linda is always encouraging me to do this, to tell her what I see.) Anyway, I'm coming past a statue of the Sacred Heart, and I see real pain on the face of Jesus, on my right side of his face (his left). So I tough it, want to assuage it (the way I often do with the face of JP II in a photo at school near the Theology Dept. But the weirdest thing happened this time. The face of Jesus changed somehow. There was gratitude in his face. The great King of the universe felt comforted by me! Anyone who knows me will tell you that I'm somewhat of a spiritual bumbler, like most of us are, I suppose.

I was shocked, really. It made me want to ease His pain more. (Chesterton's wonderful words about obedience in his play would be a great place to start!)

But I'd never felt how personal a moment could be with Him before. I hope I grow in that!

2011-12-18T18:52:00.001-08:00

Just saw Chesterton's THE SURPRISE on EWTN, and I'm trying to figure out if it's the orthodox version Hollywood's HUGO. Both surely sucked. Man I really don't like Chesterton. He's a very smart guy who just can't stop whacking you over the head with the flying pan of truth. (My wife left the room screaming.)

Did Chesterton write anything worthwhile? Well, I remember some journalistic stuff I liked. His bio of Francis I never liked--it's not about Francis. It's about Chesterton talking about St. Francis.

One should be charitable. Different strokes and all that.

Last spring several students read Chesterton's poem on King Alfred in the Medieval class. (I was covering for a colleague.) That poem was horrible, or rather suitable for 14 year old males. Not adults.

The funniest thing about the play on EWTN is how the President of the Chesterton Society reveled in his glee at the end of the play, as if he'd hit the mother load of literary wisdom.

Hopefully I'll feel more charitable tomorrow. But that was a bad, bad play. Are Catholic's so insecure that they have to make sure of the content before they can see or read anything.

I don't get it. (And if I ever get into heaven, will Chesterton hit me?)

2011-12-18T06:22:00.000-08:00

Went to see HUGO with my eldest son. His two wonderful quotes: "You cannot make a tribute to yourself. It just doesn't work"; and "Get out of your own way." I'll get back to those in a day or so. Suffice it to say Hollywood equals buffoonery. How come no one ever calls these people on this crap. All I ever heard this season was that HUGO was the only thing really worth seeing. Obviously, it's all Oprah's fault.

2011-11-27T18:12:00.000-08:00

Students had to read MARY'S HOUSE, do a paper on it. (Doesn't shame me--anything I have to teach them is in that.) And there are always nice revelations when I do that: the good--what the poetry does, but also the complacency in some of the poems (though I'd hoped I'd gotten that out). No deal. In any case, I ask for help and will try to correct that as Debra Murphy (the editor and I) work through the next edition.

But what's weird here, too, is how Catholics always seem upset if their poets aren't saints. (I always get that vibe. . . . Priest, too, sometimes, early on, object that anyone else would preach the Gospel; though they get over that soon enough, delight in the fact.) It's why so many are suspicious of Merton. He wasn't a saint. No sh-t, Sherlock, as they used to say. But he's wonderful. Flat out. It's weird though, that expectation. Who weirds out if a priest isn't a saint? Or a plumber?

2011-11-17T07:59:00.000-08:00

We finished reading John Hodgen, the last 8 poems in GRACE. Very funny, excellent stuff, though we noted in class that the last poem about slaves had perhaps the small undercurrent of New England moral superiority that only manumission can give them (at least until the great liberal abortionist--which made him an honorary New Englander--, Bill Clinton, declared his war on cigarettes).

It was a fine poem, and finally I don't think it fails on any level. I loved Hodgen's work very much, heartily recommend it. However, the Holy Spirit works in strange ways--because the next book we picked up was Levertov's THIS GREAT UNKNOWING. There the moral high ground routine reaches fitting proportions. (Great Northwest version . . . The Holy Spirit, It would have us know, swings with ease from coast to coast, from one false high ground to the next.)

But before that let me say that I found the poem "Patience" a work of genius. Brilliant use of metaphor, stunning, surprising, and deep as the earth itself. But the first seven poems fail for the same reason that her poem about hand-holding around a nuclear power plant in an earlier volume fails: a real lack of humility. Gnosis rules here: those who know just a little better, those who can only be so because of their large and very generous green hearts. Now I love plants as much as anyone; heck I used to talk to trees as a kid. But they are not as valuable as people. They cannot think or love. Her perspective made me grieve. She is a brilliant poet, but a fool.

Are we all fools? Yes, and that's largely the point. Jesus alone is good, is God; we cannot claim any higher ground. We can only claim Him, what He has given, who He is. Hodgen doesn't fall into that trap in GRACE, at least as far as I can remember. (And I think he's a pretty liberal guy--don't know him.)

*

We were reading Frost this morning in my Poetic Forms class. (The above were in Contemporary Christian Poetry.) And boy, is he a great poet. Such a wit, a comedian, but darker too. He can turn on a dime as far as tone goes, and you don't mind because you so trust the voice. (You go, man.) A master, no question. In "Birches" he break in with obtrusive metaphor, colloquial asides, metaphysical concerns, meta-poetry, absolutely stunning imagery, and yet the thing has such unity, that comic mastery.

Poetry! A place where you can breathe.

2011-11-14T06:16:00.000-08:00

We've been reading Murray's BIPLANE HOUSES: a disapointment. He's writing poems because he's a poet, and this is what they do. To fill a book, to make some dough, to satisfy readers. It's a great question, how much poetry is too much? How much should an older poet write? (CONSCIOUS AND VERBAL was very powerful.)

We've been supplementing with John Hodgen's GRACE, a fun, good read.

On the brighter side, we had Mark Adderley and Elisabeth Kramp read this weak. Both were hugely attended. I've known Elisabeth for awhile, so I knew it would be great, a fine evening. And it was. But Mark knocked me over too. His heroic epic prose is like a clear mountain stream--an apt metaphor because he teaches at Wyoming Catholic. But it was fun too, because he's a real scholar, and I love the OE and ME periods. (Nice to get him to ramble there!) Anyone who did a diss on PIERS PLOWMAN has to be good, no?

Unpretentious, affable--those are the words that come to mind. Plus he was kind enough to introduce me to some of his home brew: Newcastle Nut Brown Ale.

Anyone who did a diss on PIERS PLOWMAN has to be good, no? . . . And it was great to see so many students there, with so much enthusiasm, good questions.

Thanks to both, their writing comes highly recommended.

2011-11-07T09:37:00.000-08:00

Lots of fun doing Contemporary Christian poetry again. We loved them all Merton, Berrigan, Karr, Wright, Gioia, and now Murray, plus some side paths. Merton always hits for me, except maybe his very young stuff when the bad guy was out there somewhere. He's always got this huge infusion of monastery grace in the background, or so it seems. Loves Jesus, Mary, the Eucharist, the Church. What's not to like Berrigan was great, a Jesuit, much more of the world than Merton--a little denser. He only teeters a bit when he enters his hippy phase. Then it's he and his boys against the man.

Karr and Wright are a lot alike. Both gritty scrapers of the bottom, where the residue is pure. You can't argue with the voice because of that (usually), and so they are great truth-speakers, though Franz is always alone while Karr is after at least some sense of community. Both great reads.

Gioia is always Gatsby for me, though his bitterness is pure in INTERROGATIONS. Some poems seems to work a little better than others, but he's great. We start Murray today. He's got the gravel guts going too, though I miss more than I might were I to know more about his homeland. (Tennis: Rod Lavar, Newcombe; Australian rules football. . . . Did get to go to Sydney once, though.)

Mariani, Hodgen, Levertov coming up. Will try to sneak in Daniels, Everson, Sasanov, others--though the days dwindle. . .

2011-09-30T04:45:00.000-07:00

Been really frustrated lately about my painfully slow spiritual growth. I figured if I just had humility I would not sin. So I had this dream: me playing baseball. I'm in left field, and I mess up every play, embarrass myself and my team to the point that the manager has to come out and make a switch. I get sent to first base, where the results are even worse. After the game, I give him my uniform. In my life, the above scenario would play itself out by my losing my job, family, that small thing I call a career, and basically end up being a street person. I could see that that was/is humility: the cross; the real time death one, or as close as we can come to it.

And so it will be, for all Christians. Even the saints get pulled as close as possible, as much as they can take. The trouble is, for me, I also pray for success with my work, the work of my hands; besides, I wouldn't want to leave my kids with that.

So I guess God knows what He's doing. I get as much humility as I can take, given the life I'm in. So instead of praying for all humility, I'll pray for the amount he knows I can take.

I hope the MacArthur foundation is listening.

2011-09-12T05:55:00.000-07:00

Just picked up Les Murray's new book, glanced at it quickly--the demands of classes and writing! He's marvelous as ever, but after reading Merton in Contemp. Christian Poetry I can't help but wish that other Catholic (and Protestant) poets were more keen in lifting up the name of Jesus.

I got an e-mail from a fine fiction writer not too long ago, and I asked her for titles for the Fiction version of the above class this spring. She said she doesn't write Catholic fiction anymore. That kind of thing always amazes me. How could one stop? The saints knew and know how to look at the world. Oprah Winfrey does not, nor do her minions. What are people thinking? (And how do we want to live?) Who wants to go to the next world saying they chose not to write about that uncomfortable (and unprofitable) Christian stuff--Jesus?

We must be suffused with joy--and the true pathos of suffering; not confine ourselves to the chorus of gargle-ers.

This life is about Jesus.

2011-08-21T10:25:00.001-07:00

Have read several blurbs lately about us all growing in the only important possible Christian way, as community--more of the "in the company of poets" nonsense. Perhaps this perspective accounts for so much of the lame Christian poetry being written. Salvation is a one at a time thing. Our first job is to work to save our souls. I don't know, maybe this community thing comes out of early American congregationalism. It's false. In some things it's just us and the saints (Church). Growth is an intensely personal thing. I grow (or don't). You grow (or don't). The company of poets has absolutely nothing to do with that. We need to beg for humility, wisdom, to proceed in our clumsy way and hope that He continues to sacramentally "pluckest us out."

Don't buy that nonsense, writers. I sometimes suspect it's largely due to people who are afraid of alienating anyone should they try to live the Truth. People won't like you if you move against what is PC. Any sex outside of marriage is against the Truth. Most of us have fallen, but that doesn't make the truth less true. We have all sinned (except Jesus by nature and Mary by grace). But let us man our little outposts--badly, yes, but with an intense sporadic earnestness.

As a Confessor used to say, "Hey, He can fix that!"

2011-07-10T03:49:00.000-07:00

Figured I might as well name the extraordinary women poets I'm talking about. First is Catherine Sasanov, who's given us ALL THE BLOOD TETHERS, a great book. I can't think of another contemporary poet from whom I've learned more. Catherine never lets her first person singular narrator off the hook, no special pleading. Her Gemma poems are great (and dense), anything by her.

Elizabeth Beasley. We've just done a chapbook by her; it's called "Quickenings." Exciting talent and execution there. Pretty "new Christian" in that there's so much joy, less suffering. But who's writing better Christian poetry? I can't think of anybody. Great work.

Mary Dixon. She did "Eucharist, the Way" for us. Very dense and beautiful poetry, with as much closure as openness. Distilled! Again, great poetry. She came and read for us: super teacher as well as wonderful poet. Lovely person.

Sophia M. Starns. We're going to do a chapbook from her this year if we can get together. Again, great and distilled work. She's won so many awards and contests--and justifiably so. It takes me a lot of time to wait for myself to catch up to what she seems to be doing in so many of her poems. But waiting never did anyone any harm.

All are so good, though I must confess that Yeats and Eliot seem so much easier to latch onto--maybe because I've had more practice there! (Reminds me of a Bob Dylan quote when somebody asked him who could sit through three hours of RENALDO AND CLARA. He said something along the lines of, well, nobody has THAT much to do.)

2011-07-09T15:23:00.000-07:00

I've been reading some extraordinary women Christian poets of late, but I wonder if contemporary poetry has to be so obscure? Since I'll be doing Yeats in the fall, I've started reading his COLLECTED, and though CROSSWAYS is maybe too romantic in its longing and sorrow, still, it's great poetry and it's clear! Great writing it seems to me. The phenomenon reminds me of a quote by Frost. He said having been a teacher, he had to make himself understood . . . and that put him among poets who wanted to be understood!

The poets I'm talking about are excellent, but I can't help wondering what's behind the opaqueness. A desire for excellence, yes (and achieved!); but maybe some Puritan proof as well? I remember reading somewhere that Yeats said some slack lines were absolutely necessary. In any case, I want his sacramental depth, but revelations of humility and wisdom too. With God all things are possible!

Also, some good news. Debra Murphy is going to do a second edition of MARY'S HOUSE with Idylls, an e-book, which I'm excited about. It's easier to reach more people that way, so may God bless it. I've redone the "Some Kind of Pilgrim" section, turned to poems into rhyme and meter, plus I've added the best versions of "Prothalamion" and "Peter Maurin" I could come up with, another poem in the first and last section; but the big addition will be @ 50 new pp. of FIORETTI poems. (Now that I don't have them in front of me I'm very excited. I think they are quite good.)

2011-06-22T06:30:00.000-07:00

Can great poetry be written in this postmodern period. Probably, but if so I suspect it will happen far removed from any writing program. Boland's "company of poets" has done poetry in. Everywhere you look, there's great technique without an informing vision. How else can one fit in, be recognized, find publication? It's sad. A buddy of mine gave me some fiction to look at, a Richard Russo book. Great writing, but you can hear the Carver in the background--and is it just me, or is this typical in PWP (post writing program) fictional work? Seems to be.

I've said it before: the most interesting contemporary Christian poetry I've read is Fr. David May's. Not because of its technical virtuosity, but because it's valuable poetry. It's as if you're sniffing the trail of someone who is on the road to sainthood: the contextualized suffering (of suffering rightly endured), the accurate sense of the narrator self, the emphasis on what matters. As I said when introducing him, this is the direction that poetry has to go.

I don't know if we'll see the likes of Yeats and Stevens, Eliot and Frost again; but think of how unique each was. I once heard a Jeffrey Pearl argue that fascism helped make great poetry, and that democracy undid it. Certainly a strong sense of self, away from the main, is necessary. But most importantly here we should see that it's the heart of Life, the heart of Jesus who will do more to create lasting poetry than any lesser thing. The great modernists are worth reading because each is greater than the often terrible errors which blotch the work. Each is a testimony to the greatness of God who only creates individuals (Malamud!), who never created a "company" of anything. That's Ford.

2011-06-20T14:32:00.001-07:00

20) Art subverts--too easy notions of truth.

2011-06-20T06:36:00.000-07:00

Came up with another creative writing maxim:

19) Art ALWAYS sets itself up against the status quo. So if you live in an environment which purports to be beautifully lockstep Christian, one without deep inherent flaws (brokenness), your best work will inevitably move TOWARD those flaws. Successful businesses need public relations, Christian businesses included; but art (as much as authentic Christian living) only happen in a state of perpetual alienation.

2011-06-10T03:29:00.000-07:00

Been working on creative writing maxims. Here's what I have so far:

1) “Love is always a descent,” Pope Benedict, XVI. So it is with character and self. In both fiction and poetry, students need to drop down. Let the words follow the broken truth of the person.

2) If you have a reputation, get rid of it.

3) It’s the writer’s job to “purify the dialect of the tribe.” T. S. Eliot

4) Frost said he was after “fresh talk, brought into books.”

5) “Learn your ax, then forget all that shit and play.” Anonymous

6) You will encounter brilliant prose writing teachers, but if you bring “writerliness” into a creative writing class you are dead.

7) Eliot said that poetry was simply regular speech at pitched emotional times.

8) Pound said that poetry should be as well written as good prose.

9) To make something truly personal is to make it original.

10) Never write as if God’s mercy is mostly for other people.

11) Pray to become more aware of your brokenness. That will help you; veneer will not. There are no good Christian women and men when it comes to creative writing. We are all sinners in a pitched battle, and though our victory may be written elsewhere, it does not always feel assured to us. (Nor do we possess virtue, at least to any marked degree.)

12) We are not in this for us. And Jesus does not need PR. If you want to parade your faith, hire a band. (In real life, it takes very good preaching to win a choir.)

13) MODY DICK is a great book. It is also a botch.

14) All good literature involves personal risk. If the student is a young Catholic writer, the most difficult and necessary thing for him or her to learn is to have faith enough to put his notion of what it means to be a Catholic behind him each time he confronts a blank sheet of paper. He will have to leave behind what he thinks he knows so that he can get to what he is just learning he knew. (If this ever proves not to be true in his career as a writer, he will find himself dead in the water.)

15) Great literature is about questions, not answers—nor does it involve sentimental piety. Philosophy and theology are about how we ought to live, after all, literature is about how we do live. And that is always a little messy. So the student should remember that suffering is not necessarily the result of some spiritual misalignment. Good creative writing is probably going to include both pain and sin, tough questions somewhere along the line. As Tolkien says, “There are no stories without he Fall.”

16) If the student wants to emphasize God’s mercy--the only real subject for any Christian writer--then he must fill out the rest of the equation: our intense need for that.

17) Learn to cut yourself emotionally off from you work when it’s under discussion. Write down every suggestion as if you were a stenographer; and then, a few days later, look at them.

18) Always be prepared to blow up your text. When you revise, you will need to do more than to change a word here or there. You will need to re-see, invent again. Get creative, outrageous even. And don’t fret. Every writer has to do this! Have fun with it. (Since it does take time to do good work, you can relax. Remember, there are no bad poems or stories, just unfinished ones. The question becomes, do you want to take your time here?)

2011-06-01T04:37:00.000-07:00

Big fun in the Cleveland sports world, Tressel's out and OSU and LeBron begins to close in on his dream. Jim Tressel was done in by two things. (I doubt his transgression would have been enough by itself.) The first was the incredible venom spit forth by the media. The last time I saw such concerted nastiness was when Sarah Palin ran for office. I remember certain members of the media even criticizing her for having her fifth child, Trig. (He has Down's.) It's amazing, really, to the depths the media will go. Human decency has simply ceased to matter. (I keep seeing the ESPN hip police, shiny suits, in my dreams!) It's an ugly world.

The second thing that brought him down were his books. That kind of "I'm a totally new man since I've been saved" perspective is dangerous because, as a colleague of mine has put it, it has all the nutritional value of fast food religion. The emphasis is on "me," not on the One who makes all things new. Someone once said that the only two things we can claim are our fallen wills and our sins. We are good, yes, but disordered. It's literally a mercy that any growth happens. When Tressel embraced the above, he left himself open for the season. Had he, like St. Paul, claimed his weakness instead, he might have endured. (The two problems are connected, of course. The media is simply a secular version of this Puritan mindset.)

As far as Lebron goes, God bless him. I won't be able to celebrate with him when he wins, but he's worked hard, endured much, as everyone who's even gotten to lift the trophy has. I actually find myself rooting for him a bit--as I did for Manny and Thome after they left. A bit of Cleveland goes with them.

2011-04-09T06:47:00.000-07:00

One other note on prosody, the attendant culture. All this, for the Catholic, must be about Jesus, first and last. Whatever each one of us wants, whatever we want our world to be like, all that is secondary to the One-Who-Must-Be-Lifted-Up. As poets, writers, that is Who we must keep in mind.

2011-04-09T03:46:00.001-07:00

We were blessed the presence of James Matthew Wilson yesterday to the U., he of FOUR VERSE LETTERS--our latest chapbook in the Christian series. I liked his work very much, though it did bring the old free verse vs. formalism specter to mind. I brought up Whitman after the reading, asked him about what has been called "gentrification," about how the choice of forms so often seems to break down along economic lines? He kind of went off. Personally I have no answers, and I know that any discussions here will involve a lot of ridiculous generalizations; but I know, too, that the fault line does seem to show up, a perhaps disturbing fact, given our Catholic concern for the poor.

Some elitism reared its head, and I was disappointed by that. But perhaps I was too pointed for my part too. I like formalism myself, have written a lot of well-received sonnets and more recently some Francis "Fioretti" poems which, I think, when they are finished, will last. And I do like James' work. It reminds me of Dana's in that it saves the "New Formalism" from the tepidity and flatness of people like Nemerov and the rest of that first wave through a personal investment; that is, it is confessional to some extent. Very nice poetry, and I felt happy to be included in the audience.

Just as an aside, I've always disliked "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter." It's insistence on stoicism seems inhuman to me. A little girl is dead. If you do not cave inside (at least to some degree), are you alive?

As for myself, I feel torn. I like the free verse that comes through in my Francis "Three Companion" poems and in the in-your-face Liguori death poems. but the more confessional stuff really irritates. They are anti-poetic and Beat, yes, but I rankle at the line/form struggles. The major advantage to formal verse is, of course, that you know what's required: iambic, rhyme or no. Everything follows, but with free verse all bets are off; and unless you write with the free verse ease of someone like Janet McCann, the hills slide. In the case of those poems, they're all flat, narrative, prosaic in some insufferable way. It's probably all neurosis on my part, but though I keep the poems, I don't like them all that much.

What's the deal with the fault line? I don't know for sure, but I suspect it might have something to do with the herd mentality and the halo effect. Conservative Catholics especially seem to want to move toward the polished mahogany of old European money, and with money comes refinement, behavior. An agglutination occurs, all the issues start binding together. The blue-collar person feels like Whitman at the Eucharistic gates.

Of course none of it (the -isms) matters. What will always matter, as Eliot said late in life when he praised Frost, is the poetry. I like James's poetry, though his attempt to "answer" Eliot is a reach. In a way it's like trying to answer Shakespeare. Eliot had the depth and passion of a great artist, whatever his pose; James, like the rest of us, has to prove that he has the same.

2011-03-31T05:26:00.000-07:00

We've gotten into the romances in Middle English: "King Horn," "Sir Orfeo," "Ywain and Gawain." They make you appreciate Monty Python. All the great pathos of the Anglo-Saxon works is gone, now it's all silly French mincing. (I've just xeroxed some Marie de France, want to see how the French really do it!)

A good line about "Horn": if it weren't a romance, it would be a great parody of one. ("We're knights of the round table,/quite indefatigable . . .")

Richard Rolle was fun, and we get to Piers soon. So I'm looking forward to a big finish: the Green Knight, a little Chaucer, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe. Much tension, though. I'm not John Holmes. Still, Jesus has been very generous in his leading.

2011-03-19T04:56:00.000-07:00

Here's the second half. Any comments, please e-mail me at dcragi@franciscan.edu. Thanks.

Chapter V:
Where the Mountains Made Us
’82-‘84

Colorado State turned out to be fun, but trying, like everything I suppose. Miriam Bluebird, one of my teachers, earned grant money, publication by translating South and Central American women’s poetry. I enjoyed her classroom dips into Surrealism, starting with the French: Lautreamont, Jarry, Breton, moving through Vallejo, Neruda, Mistral, Paz, Parra, Asturias, others.

(I’ve met Christian academics who dismiss Neruda—I think because he was a pink-o. But I’ve never met a poet who didn’t like him.)

Our other teacher was Bull Ranchero, a larger than life character who’d studied at U. Mass. He loved Bly, deep image stuff, Basho, good 80s poets: Levine, Rich, Hugo, Williams, Dubie. At the time, in fact, all those poets seemed extraordinary, most of them anyway. The funny thing is, though, all that changed for me twenty some years later when I went back to some of those same names for a class I was teaching. The second time around so much of their poetry just seemed dated.

It was like reading Longfellow or any of his three-named buddies around the Fireside. A kind of good old boy (and girl) club—with pretty much that same sensibility, or one those DWMs would easily recognize: secularized white-bread. And while I guess I had always known this to be so as far as vision went, what really amazed me was that is was also very true on a technical level.

I made the discovery while foraging around for a Poetic Forms text. I settled on Dacey’s STRONG MEASURES. A nice book, but the poetry inside was just, as my students might say, so 80s!

I was taken aback; I mean who ever heard of such a thing? What makes great poetry great, after all, is that it does not become dated.

But there it was.

What’s here today will more than likely be nowhere tomorrow. And while I guess we all knew and know that, still, to see it up close can be really freeing, especially if Harold Bloom hasn’t discovered you yet. It’s like Mary Karr’s said about the 50s cheese, Robert Lowell--who reads him today?

Anyway, that’s made me rethink writing programs, see them more than ever as, at best, merely starting points.

One of the good students poets whom I met when I was at Colorado State, James Falcon, told me a story which nicely illustrates the problem. He got to know a woman poet who was teaching at Iowa, let’s call her Sandra, and she encouraged him to apply. But when he got around to doing so a year or two later, she looked at his work, felt disappointed: “Oh, we’re not doing that anymore.”

Who the heck was/is “we”? (E. Boland’s “company of poets?”)

So even though I went through two programs (one twice), I just don’t recommend them strongly to anyone anymore, unless the student insists, has the wherewithal and ability to separate the wheat from the suffocating deluge of PC content chaff.

Ranchero was a good guy, if a little heavy on solipsism. He could look at you like God: with lots of love and acceptance, though I was not a favorite, maybe because we got off on the wrong foot. I did my first paper excoriating Charles Olson for his blowfish ego.

Turns out teacher had studied with him. (It’s why I talk the way I do, foot like chaw in mouth.)

Probably the three best student poets during my time there were, along with Falcon--a deep-image guy who said he had to separate himself from “clock-time” to write, George the Greek, a hale fellow who went for a kind of deep-image Buddhist poetry; Bill Rhine, whose goal seemed to be to raise being a smart ass into art--surprise, he was my favorite; and lastly Bam Bradley, who has since been drawn to the Church. All still are nice poets, and good folks, too, but the place itself, like so much on the front range suffered from terminal hipness.
The place seemed too aware of its mountainous surroundings. One of the women in the program, for example, was in Ripley’s BELIEVE IT OR NOT for having caught the largest swordfish on record. She became a type for the new woman; another, a really bad writer, lets call her Babs, managed to get tons of state grant money just because she was a militant lesbian. “Take back the night” was her spiel. She used to say that women should never allow themselves to be alone with men on elevators--even if they had to walk up 80 flights. In one of her plays, she actually had a scene where a woman in a car at a railroad crossing is surrounded by sixteen men who are trying to break into her vehicle, rape her. The driver finally has no choice but to ram into the passing train.

The staging would have been interesting.

But what really got me was the fact that it was all men’s violent fault—whatever was at issue. She was for pure segregation.

Then one day, she showed up at workshop with a black eye.

Turned out her lesbian lover had punched her.

No one else thought it was funny. They were all pretty squishy, though, no doubt had a heart for her pain. (That violence had probably initially come from men anyway.)

There’s a great quote of St. Therese’s: “Never allow your kindness descend into weakness.” Though we love lesbians (never feigning to be one), gay people (though given the media’s refusal to call us “pro-life,” I sometimes think we should call them “sorrowing people”: thou attesteth too much), and abortionists (and all loving and folksy Radcliff-type banjo-playing social engineers: the soft tyrants), we can’t compromise when it comes to the Truth.
JP II once said that the end of secular humanism is totalitarianism.

We would become like them if we were to capitulate: RAINBOW FISH, swimming among the shoals of relativism! If you’ve ever read that kid’s book, it really sums up the hard left. The gifted fish denies his talents because he doesn’t want anyone else to feel bad. That’s what the Marxist feminists in politics are up to, I think. They want America to neurotically deny, abase itself. Then she won’t abuse anyone ever again! We will be as poor as everyone.

But America is a gift to the world, as much as the runners from Kenya or the pot heads from Colombia.

And while I have to doubt that Jesus wants the Bush rich to share much more generously than they have up to this point--something more than a trickle--that must come out of grateful hearts, not out of big-brother (Lewis’s ‘bent nails’) strong-arm death-culture tactics.

I was, no surprise, way out of step with the comp powers that still are--there--and so I had no hope of securing a TA. (Or maybe they were perspicacious enough tell that I wasn’t ready, or both.) In either of those three cases, I had to find work, which included driving taxi, working 3rd shift at a developmental-challenged facility, and reading literary works into a tape recorder for a blind Saudi English literature student. (I was amazed, driving cab, at how often new Mid-Eastern Moslem students immediately wanted to stop at the porno shop--though I had and have my own sins, many no doubt greater than theirs.) The last job was pretty weird. Imagine trying to read Beckett’s WATT into a tape recorder. Would anyone know or care where I stopped?

So I did.

Cab driving was nicely fluid. You never knew what the day would bring. It was a natural in many ways. I could be alone but outside, could kick back in the fine Colorado weather and meet all kinds of new people in the process, serve. Many of the rides were keepies. The “pickle man” was this short likeable little Mexican guy who’d worked in a pickle factory for forty years. He couldn’t speak a word of English, lived in a run down shack on the north side of town. We couldn’t understand each other’s language--but smiles while I helped him carry in groceries went a long way! Another regular was Lillian, who used to ask for me. She was an older women who liked to go to bars, talk with everyone. Like most elderly folks, she didn’t tip much.

I did meet one guy once who said he’d come into Remington money. He offered to buy me a car on the spot. To this day I don’t know why said no.

I must confess I had one terrible and spiritually troubling experience at the Developmental Center where, for some reason that only God knows, I fell victim to abuse. The people all seemed nice enough, and so I had no way to see the thing coming.

One night I’d come in for my third shift to a half-staffed environment. Two women and 32 residents. The women were toast. And in one of the rooms, an old lady, who had a reputation for self-abuse, was in the process of yelling, beating herself up with her fists, nobody doing anything. As I said, the women were completely spent, so I couldn’t really blame them.
Since I was fresher, I went into the room, and sure enough, the old woman was hitting herself in the face, yelling, carrying on. I had to try and calm her, stop her; so I gently grabbed her wrists as I spoke, trying to shift her attention from herself. It didn’t really work. She started snapping at my hands; so the next thing I had to do was, as calmly as I could manage, roll her jaw to the side with my the bottom of my forearm, apply some pressure to her cheek, still trying to talk her down.

That worked for a bit, but she started up again before I left the room. As a result I had to try again, clasped her wrists a second time, kept talking. She pulled her hands close to her throat. I thought she might try to bite me again, but she didn’t. Still, he was so caught up in her own psycho-drama that I had to distract her. In an attempt to do so, I applied a little, quick pressure high on her chest, still holding her hands. (Something like a shock might do, but not too hard.)

That quick pressure made her grunt a little. It worked! She calmed, and I got on with my third shift business.

It probably sounded like I’d hit her, which I did not do. There was no distance between my hand and her chest. In any case I thought that was the end of it, but when I got to work the next day, a sorrowing woman superior—a nice lady—asked me to follow her out the front door where we sat on the stone steps. I was shocked by the accusation and complained vigorously to the owner who wanted to speak to me over the phone.

He finally settled things by telling me they’d have to let me go for not having washed the wheel chairs at night---I was probably busy reading literary texts into a tape recorder!

Either that or watching Jimmy Swaggert.

I was a little lazy.

What really got me, though, were the two second shift women workers. One was an Protestant evangelical I’d spent some unsuccessful time trysting after (I wasn’t sunny enough—granted) and the other, who ran the shift, was a secular woman who was frankly put off that I hadn’t made a pass at her. (I’d run into that before from female superiors--as many men do.)

Why had God allowed this, I wondered?

I felt shamed, abused.

He has control over everything, doesn’t He? So what was up?

I have no idea.

Colorado State, being a front range-y place, was in the large, as I say, a habitat for habitual hipness: giant Andy Warhol-signed Tomato Soup Cans graced the lawn by the art building, my roomie played keyboards to Falcon’s poetry in performance, Ranchero did an elaborate reading at the town arts center which included a giant slide show of his trip to NYC behind him as he did Tai Chi and read poems.

But as I say there were keepies there too: Rita, a lovely Quaker woman who died in her second year, away in Africa on a humanitarian trip: motorcycle. And there was Kim, the painter. I really messed that “relationship” up—big time. But there was another profound disappointment as well.

In that second instance, I was sitting in my basement apartment bedroom on Overland Trail, my housemate in the next room. And as I was reading or writing, I don’t remember which, for no apparent reason, the Holy Spirit simply just overpowered me—like He had at the Milosz reading. For some reason, it became absolutely clear to me that Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg were driving up on 25 from Boulder, Naropa probably, to see me. (I’d long been a fan of the former and had some respect for the latter for the good he’d done the language in HOWL.)
The Spirit was powerful, and I had no doubts at all about it.

They were coming.

At first I prayed for humility. I mean these guys were largely responsible for my being where I was. I’d been a big Dylan fan for about fifteen years, though I admit that some of his lyrics can be self-serving. But I was and am okay with that; everyone is flawed.

However, as the time grew closer and closer, the certainty of the whole thing strongly upon me, I finally decided that I just would not be able to handle the visit. (I might come apart—acid flashback nerves.) So I earnestly begged God to send them away.

He finally did, and—drat—there went my opportunity to meet them!

So Bob, if you’re out there and are ever in the neighborhood, come on over. We can have a beer, talk it over. The Ginsberg side of it will have to wait a little longer: he’s moved on!

(See “Jokerman.”)

Things like this happen every once in awhile to every Christian, I’d bet on it. Though for me, as I’ve gotten older, revelations usually happen now in dream form—though that’s always been a rich subconscious field: Merton came to me twice, once in answer to the how-to-be-a-man question—that was at the Studite monastery where I first stayed back in Steubenville.
He just looked at me, his expression bringing one of his quips to mind. Be yourself, after all, “you have very little chance in being anyone else.” I saw Catherine Doherty, my spiritual director, a few others; so at one point I was feeling pretty cocky.

Whom else did I want to see?

Padre Pio!

Now that would be cool.

So I prayed, asked, and he did come the next night, briefly--but he was p.o.ed. He had better things to do!

Years later, when I was grading freshman papers on Ridge Rd. in Steubenville--it was the weirdest thing--the sprit of Milton just walked into my room; literally walked in. How did I know it was Milton? How did I know he was walking? I have no idea, but I did. Different people perceive differently; something a student said in class to me a few years ago relays that fact. He was a pre-theologate kind of guy, was taking philosophy and creative writing; he claimed that the difference between the two is that the philosopher establishes steps and reasons his way through to come up with answers that the poet just somehow “gets.”
That can make poets and artists seem left-handed. Mystical, and I think it must be so; but I love talking to the philosophers at school (not to be confused with actually taking any of those courses). The ones I know are extraordinary people, and they speak in completely polished paragraphs. I mean who does that? The prose as it comes out is lacquered, a rich mahogany.

Richard Wilbur once said that poets are just people who have a certain anxiety about being verbally adequate to the world. I like that. A good paragraph takes me a long time to get right, or at least good enough.

On Ridge Ave., after Uncle Miltie made his stop I went into the kitchen to tell my wife about it. But what the heck do you do with that? Milton was a great Arian genius, and loved Jesus, but I still don’t know what to make of that: a great Protestant dropping in to say hey--especially since our processes and gifts are so different.

Maybe that’s why.

A purgatorial Yeats once appeared to me in a dream as well. I just saw the top of his head, and it was dark, but I knew it was him. My spiritual director agreed, was fine with me praying for him for two years in daily adoration. And what a poet! He has become the master for me. (Many poets say you need one.) Yeats has a sacramental sense second to none—probably because he was trying to invent Irish culture: a mixture of Protestant good breeding and the fine dark spiritual humus of Catholicism.

The deep Catholic sacramental sense seems alien to America: none of our great poets seem to have it, except maybe late Wallace Stevens, Dickinson, some Frost. Janet McCann once gave me the copy of a letter by the St. Bridget priest who’d baptized Wally, recounting how as he was dying of stomach cancer he finally said, “Well, I guess it’s time to get me into the fold.”
I once did a course on Stevens and Williams, and I found I could actually trace Wally’s movement toward the Church in his poetry--though I wish I had kept a journal.
At any rate, no summer is now complete for me without a nice and casual reading of Yeats.
But other saints have visited too. Of course our Lord Jesus and his mother, St. Therese; and St. Francis once walked into a room while I was praying with Susan and Sr. Helen. But the real surprise recently was St. Anthony, who walked right past me once while I was in prayer recently in adoration.

How did I know it was him? My eyes were closed. Again, no idea. But he had a great evangelical zeal, purity. But the thing that surprised me was that he felt hirsute!

Jesus is so wonderfully wacky sometimes.

Other things have happened, as, again, I’m sure they do to most Christians; though the Church, in her inspired wisdom, often reminds us that the subjective stuff doesn’t matter: dreams or Garabandal.

My dear friend, from Madonna House, their Director of Priests, Fr. David May, once said to me that he just didn’t care about any of that stuff because it doesn’t matter. You still have to live today and love.

A great response.

Fr. David, as I said earlier, spent so much time in the woods with St. Francis that he could tell you which sound the robin was making. “Now listen, another call always comes!”

In my poems, flora is either “trees” or “flowers”; I’ve never learned to distinguish, though my love has always been deep. When I was a little boy, my parents were worried for awhile because I talked to trees, in earnest. (I’d hug them, long before that became a political statement. . . . Of course I also once walked into the corner of a garage too.)

But the Dylan thing does bug me upon occasion. That, along with missing the candlelight processional hymns at Lourdes, are among my biggest neurotic mistakes.

The first experience at Colorado State, though, was even more unhappy: my biggest romantic screw-up--with Kim, the painter. She was much younger than I, actually sat on the floor next to me before the first day in our “Surrealism in Art and Literature” class because she’d decided she wanted to meet me. I asked her not to do that, and so she sat in an actual chair; we had some “coffee” later. She was a lovely young Jewish woman from Chicago, and we got on great, became closer than we should have. The good part was that it was great to have someone with that kind of openness, artistic sensibility close by.

But when she had a showing of her work, I said I’d go and didn’t—maybe because of the almost “event” status it took on. But the fact was I both absolutely humiliated her in public and walked on her artistic efforts, my chance to see her soul for no good reason. (We had been something of an item, between departments.)

She ended the us of it, and who could blame her?

But the Lord went further.

For the remaining time there at CSU and for the whole time at BGSU, I never again managed another relationship. (Though it is an equally amazing fact that I ever managed one before as well.)

Anyway, she was a lovely woman, and I repent for the damage.

There is so much to repent for in life, and later, when I started actually begging for humility--which I’ve never really gotten, at least to the extent that it provided its first fruits: obedience (St. Benedict))--I was graced with a few dreamland “moments of conscience.” At first I was sickened by what I saw: the layered pustules on my warped soul, no clean breathing space anywhere.

As the hours passed after each of these episodes, though—there were two--I slowly began to see the dreams for the blessing they were. It’s a GREAT mercy to know who you are, however vile, and so to know your immense need for Jesus.

May I learn humility, true repentance, and obedience, and simplicity, and wisdom, and purity. As I always tell my students: our need for mercy is not small.

There were good times in Ft. Collins, left-handed arm wrestling and folk music at Linden’s. And there was prodigious Ron. A non-program Husker Du bowler and writer, with a gift for mockery, rant—at the program and Marvin Bell mostly. (Something the former, at least, deserved.) The guy was a real Whitmaniac, a worthy Poundian friend to be had in the hoisting: 12 oz. curls. In a past life he had run a mountain newspaper, would later turned to nursing; though he has settled down, now has three kids.

Most female pals, as I say, went the way of all flesh back then, on a bus I’d learned to recognize early in Ft. Collins: the “You swine who would persecute women by owning their uteruses!” cruiser.

Oh hepness, here is thy sting.

It’s always amazed me. I’d be having a light lunch with a nice woman and the conversation would be going well—until it came up: abortion. But our different reactions made so little sense. For me, it was the taking of an innocent life, whatever the knowledge factor on the part of the beleaguered mother. It was a grotesque brutality. But for my short-lived companion—the “sin” had to do with denying someone her “rights.” On any scale, a right-thinking person would agree that the first sin is much greater.

But you would’ve never guessed that by the responses. On more than one occasion, the woman in question just got up and left the table.

Truth does that to people.

My wife Linda came up with a jewel of a response just recently after we’d seen the Obama circus masquerading as a press conference on tv. He said he wanted to compromise or find common ground with pro-lifers on the issue.

“Yeah, we could just reach in and hurt them. Maybe give them a good pinch.”

Great wit—and rage!

Those poor innocent babies--their only sin is that they are alive. We need to make sure that they stay in the discussion. They have no voices yet.

Colorado State was tough in many ways. I was the only Christian in the MA Creative Writing program. One fellow student once actually asked me: “Now let me get this straight. You believe in an anthropomorphic God?”

“Why yes, I do. . . . He had teeth, and armpits, everything” (though I didn’t say the part after the ellipsis).

Feminism, first generation, was still big then, so Jesus as you might imagine, was public enemy number two, just behind God the Father. It all got to be a little too much. As all liberals tend to do, my peers couldn’t help but over-simplify. To them I was Jim or Tammy Bay Fakker, which got to be extremely irritating—tiresome really.

My dissertation (written much later)—TOWARD A CATHOLIC VISION IN COMTEMPORARY POETRY—takes a close look at how both secular critics and secular poets fall into the Puritan perspective they claim to hate. They’re always dismissing Christianity without understanding it. For them either one is among the damned: religious Puritans, or among the elect: secular Puritans like themselves.

But there is the older orthodox alternative, one which sacramentally embraces the good, disordered world.

It just got to be so old: my peers’ Mickey Mouse categorizations. Finally I suggested that we all go up in the mountains and do some peyote.

They bit. 1984--my last drug trip.

(I add that just in case any future President or VP of Academics reads this. Four years before I got on to FUS . . . if you’re counting.)

Actually, parts of the trip were kind of pleasant because I prayed continuously for all 12 hours, though I certainly would not recommend it to anyone. I still had to come down, and that is always horrible physically. A Jewish buddy of mine years before used to sport a button: “Drugs are for sick people.” Of course I had some fun razzing him about that: self-advertisement.
But I was no stranger to that road either.

Though I’ve done more than my share, I would certainly be mortified were my children to do drugs of any sort. Something has to be very wrong for a person to indulge there—personally or with his world. Things have to be so unbearable that he needs to negate himself or it, to get permanently away.

It is gift, this world: fallen, yes, but good; and we all have work to do.

Most of the program people there were nice, if in an alarmingly liberal kind of way. Big hearts, but not much sense, and no inclination to think anything through, to make life cohere. They just knew what they were against: them Christian fundamentalists—most from the South, and those storied Papists.

My undergrad mentor, Linda and my poetic mother, now in the beyond, was pretty much the same way.

All the folks in Colorado weren’t like that, of course. I saw that driving cab: I met all kinds of people there. My next door neighbor, second year, was in some ways more typical of the town folk. She was a bit more conservative, open to Jesus, but like so many limping through our culture, she was quite wounded as well.

God, for his own reasons, moved her to turn this way.

The closest I got to teaching at the second CSU was to serve as an intern in Ranchero’s Creative Writing class. Probably profound good sense on the comp dept’s part. So I drove cab, read and wrote. Dylan Thomas would be my major figure.

I once picked up a real-life Mensa guy in my cab. (He was sure to let me know.) A young guy, a computer whiz; very taken with himself—and who wouldn’t be? But as we talked it became apparent that he’d missed all the important questions, so I did him effective service.
That was always the nice thing about driving cab. You could talk about anything because you’d probably never see the person again. But for me, at that time, things were relatively simple, at least as far as poetry went. I was still so happy just to know joy, wanted to express that.
Surrealism, as I mentioned earlier, helped there.

Joy, light, matters so much, though sometimes it can be confused with shallowness in poetry. Bob Lietz, whom I would meet at Bowling Green, claimed as much, finally pointing me in the direction of faithful depth, a more oblique darkness.

So it wasn’t long before I wrote my Therese poems, with an eye on delivering that. (See MARY’S HOUSE.)

But if I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s not to apologize—to anyone!

And don’t kiss better-known butt.

And never run with scissors.

Chapter VI:
Bowling Greens
’84-’86 & ‘96

The folks in Bowling Green’s program turned out to be more down home than they had been at Colorado State, more quietly Christian when they were so; maybe because the place had no reason to pose--at least geographically. The area was flat, had been a bog. But that situation worked out better for me, maybe because I was an older student and the folks I would hang out with where older too. There was my mentor, Howard McCord—an ex-Catholic Worker guy, a 50s something student named Carl Thayler, a substitute prof and Catholic, Bob Lietz, and a poet husband of a women who taught Finance: the (since) reputable Bob Cooperman. The two students who meant the most to me there were Mo Kilwein (since even more reputable—he added Geuvara) and Alan Johnson, though Vanessa Furse (Jackson—now in the lights as well) was friendly, has been since. Everybody was fun, at least at acceptable turns.

Howard McCord has turned out to be a valued mentor and friend. Rumor had it that he’d been with the CIA in Burma in the early 60s, and the place and time were listed in his bio. Who knew? Like Carl, he was delightfully intransigent: a gun-toting libertarian; he once told me a story of how he had to pull an eight inch knife out of his sock to protect his wife and friends at a biker bar—though Harley guys seem to really like him.

He’s an Objectivist, after Enslin, Dorn, Zukovsky, Oppen, Rakosi, Neidecker, Davenport, Kelley, Shapiro, Williams, Spicer, W. S. Graham, those kind o’ guys, though it took me awhile to find that out. I think one of the real great things about Howard is that he has always been quiet enough to really listen, absorb.

He’s walked Iceland, Mexico, his west Texas, has quietly stood on ground no one else in the programs I’ve been privy to seemed to: his own. I’ve always called him Rabbi—mostly because in one photo he looks like a cross between Jeb Stuart and a Hassid.

His mind is almost military in its precision, but there’s a grace to him as well.

Dead Carl is gone, wasn’t always. (I just saw MUPPET TREASURE ISLAND again.) Carl was a genuine piece of work, a unique and valued friend. We disliked each other intensely when we first met as we both struggled with arrogance, neither successfully.

We’d both come to be validated, after all, not to learn--like the occasional present-day student—though he certainly had more claim to position than I did.

An Objectivist himself, he was a good poet, had lived an amazing life. He’d actually played Robert Ford in the Robert Wagner movie about Jesse James. He’d had fights on set with Barbara Stanwyck—I don’t remember the project; he’d actually gone out with Loretta Young for awhile.

I was in love with her when I was a kid.

She was lovely Catholic, had her own show, around the time of QUEEN FOR A DAY and THE MILLIONAIRE, when tv was . . . what?

Carl also grew up next to Carlos Casteneda in California, knew James Dean in NYC! (How cool was that!) And he wasn’t making any of this up. In fact a recently graduated women actually put together a Carl Thayler film festival over her house out in the bluegrass country.
Carl was fun. He loathed feminists--and so they kept him from a part-time teaching post after he’d graduated. He later got into trouble in Madison over his attitudes and was made to do some actual PC jail rehabilitation time. (How long before the rest of us get lassoed into that pen?) Or they’d tried to get him to do that. I don’t remember the whole story, though that was where he died, still maligning poets like Sharon Olds.

It was typical Carl in some way. I mean what libertarian conservative gun-toting poet would choose to live in Madison, Wisconsin? Maybe Mass. was full up. Perhaps the location allowed him proximity to his daughter; again, the details are fuzzy. At any rate we took some great walks around the campus, him stopping to pop his glycerin tablets as he’d just had a quadruple bypass.

He seemed to like some of my work at least, so we were good.

The woman who’d put on the Thayler film festival was interesting in her way too; went on to teach at Findlay. She told me just after I’d arrived that she had to meet me because my GRE analogy scores were off the charts. (I had prayed, asked Jesus to bless the results.) She was disappointed finally, as many are. But though I can’t blame her, I’m always amazed at how others see me. I suppose we all are. Just this last semester I had one student inform me that TITUS ANDRONICUS was a play by Shakespeare; another was kind enough to gloss “flotsam” in a paper.

Funny.

My “Drugs are for sick people” Jewish Iowa Writer’s Workshop friend back at Cleveland State once told me that people never thought I was as smart as I am because I don’t take pains to sound that way.

This subject keeps coming up is because it has always seemed to me that much of my own denomination’s constrictively hyper-conservative world has somehow, in the words of Robert Frost, tried to disallow me. I should not have been born. They like their poets to be old money, Europe. Great books. I run into that a lot.

The bunker mentality prevails among so many Catholics. You can see it in what passes for their journals, and they need their poetry to be the same. But he who is free is free indeed.
How can any joyful Christian be afraid of literature?

But so many of them seem to be, and that’s why they lavish such inordinate praise on the wrong people (for the wrong things). Take Chesterton--please. Kidding! He’s great at what he does well: a Catholic Lewis, an apologist, he’s a pretty good fiction writer, too, at least by all accounts. But neither he nor Lewis (who mostly serves as satirist) is much of a poet.

Good poetry always offers something new; it asks questions, doesn’t just provide answers. (I’m going to try and get that passed out nationally during Confirmations.)

New forms will always happen, and that’s a good, as is the fact that those will never replace the old—at least what’s lasting. As Tolkein says through Gandolf: “The old that is strong does not wither, /Deep roots are not reached by the frost.”

Let Jesus’s name be lifted up, as faithfully as Crashaw managed to do it. (I don’t know if he’s in Eliot’s room, but I do think that his “Hymn to the Venerable St. Theresa” is the best mystical poem in our language.)

Do contemporary Catholic poets do the same? Many of them seem so tepid in their faith. Is
that because they need to keep in touch with the truly transitory: the literary world as it currently offers expression--and publication?

Fr. Flanagan (SOLT) says always assume the best: even if you have to swallow your tongue to do so.

Let us pause for a moment of auu-ggg-uug.

At any rate, I had a great time drinking imported beers, eating pizza, and playing basketball at BGSU with our one-year replacement for Michael Mott (who’d written a bio. of Merton), Bob Lietz. Bob Cooperman was a big b-ball fan and player, too (plus he was actually shorter than I), as was Alan Johnson, a taller young student from North Carolina.

Alan’s big goal was to dress up like a big time rassler—and he was big—to stand up on his desk and teach his Freshman Comp students, all in a southern fundamentalist preacherly voice.
He once relayed this story about his grandma. She’d never quite gotten the hang of seeing so many black people on tv. Her attendant complaint was that though she’d started off calling those neighbors “colored people,” she always had to be changing. Next it was “Afro-American,” then “Black,” and then “People of Color.”

Heck, she said, that was what she started with!

Lietz is still a big Syracuse bb (do-wap) guy; he writes like Stevens, beautifully, though it’s sometimes hard to latch on to. We’ve had our ups and downs—usually my fault—but I still count him as friend.

But, alas, there were no Christian dames with which to have commerce. (One mustn’t end with a preposition. As Churchill said: “That is a proposition up with which I shall not put.”) Newman Centers were notoriously PC everywhere, still are as far as I can tell.
The odd thing about non-religious folks, like Cooperman and McCord, Mo, is that I’ve found they can often make better companions than conservative Catholics. You can loosen up, have a real beer with them because they’re not busy protecting some narrow turf or trying to project a “saved/respectable” demeanor, even if they don’t buy the first part (or the first round).

First time through, I couldn’t get a TA at BG either, and so I had to find other work. The strange thing about that was, I had to leave after one semester because of money problems. And so when I’d straightened that out and came back a year later, they offered me a more prestigious teaching fellowship--TF.

After all, I already had an MA!

(“Go on, take the money and run.”)

The first time around, though, as I say I had to find work: did so watching old folks, third shift. The weird thing about the experience is, again, the humiliating hassles at work. In this town I would be counted a Catholic thief—an old Christian woman found out my “Whore of Babylon” faith and so constructed some kind of likely scenario.

I’m no paragon of virtue, but did we really have to go there?

Guess I can never run for President.

I wrote a poem about the experience, eventually coming to an ending which expressed a new observation. If you read a lot of first person postmodern poetry what you inevitably find is that the speaker is subtly recommending him or herself: “I really a pretty nice guy.” So I’ve tried very hard to move away from that.

In Catholic poetry I call it the “tie it up with a Catholic ribbon” happy ending. Robert Cording’s AGAINST CONSOLATION helped there. Catherine Sasanov’s work even more so. She kind of reminds me of O’Connor because she never lets her personae off the hook. The difference is that Catherine’s personae are her.

I left one semester in, as I mentioned, after a sad workshop experience with Mott, who was a stiffly British liberal to my mind (and one who seemed to think he was a very important poet—perhaps he was in his circle). On the other hand, he could be quite kind and would have the whole workshop over his house. Now that I think of it, I think he knew where I came down on the hum-a-sexual “question.” We had a gay (or “sorrowing”) man named Ken in the program--though I got along just fine with him. Critically, Ken was the most acute guy in the class, at least if you cut him off after a few minutes. If you didn’t he’d soon begin to equivocate--until you were left with very little!

My only difficulty with Ken, in fact, was that he seemed to feel so guilty over being alive: AIDS was big, always fatal then. On some level he wanted to catch it. I’m not sure, but I think I heard later that he did contract and die of the disease. It’s seemed a waste, inverted heroism to chase it down like that.

God rest his soul.

Anyway, I’d only had money enough for one credit hour of Mott’s workshop—nice enough of him to let me in. But he wouldn’t let me talk much as I had only paid a third! It was like I had to time myself or something.

Very strange.

Anyway, my orthodox Christianity, I think, seemed to put him off--kind of weird for a guy who’d just done a Merton bio. (Though come to think of it, most literary people don’t really seem to get Tommy. Fr. Louis loved and worshipped the Eucharist: our Lord and absolute God; he understood that sin was more than crossing a PC line in the sand.)

I didn’t leave much behind.

I hitched back to Ft. Collins late in the fall, arrived there after a time in Denver with two bucks in my pocket. As always, it was just me and Jesus. So I told Him it looked like either I’d get a third shift cab job and a place to flop on the Ft. Collins Yellow Cab office couch—showers at the community center in the mornings, or I’d have to hitch on up into the mountains, get to whatever He had waiting for me next.

John, the owner, liked me as a driver, so mercifully I got the flop.

There’s work to be done for all of us—mostly on us.

All in all, much of my time in BG was fun, but dark: lonely too. I lived in a kind of spiritual night, with just my sinful soul for fruitful company; no place to go except to Jesus, the Eucharist, to St. Aloysius parish for Mass and Confession.

And beer.

I lived in a one room place, the smallest room in a big old house. A nice local MFA woman, Susan Saywer, once told me that the place had long been known as a “get your shit together house.” Nice to know I was keeping up the tradition! But the smallness, the darkness served me well. It’s who we are, a metaphor for our skin, with all the attendant temptations.
My situation, as I say, was complicated by a gorgeous slattern who lived across the hall.

I never partook.

Wish I could say chastity was my guide back then, but I felt mostly frustrated in my half-home condition.

God is patient.

My best friend at BG, student-wise, was Mo Kilwein, a guy who later added Guevara to Hispanize his name, turned from fiction to poetry, and went on to become the President of the Association of Writing Programs. He was from Pittsburgh, me Cleveland, so a friendship was inevitable. Like most writers he was well into his own direction, great to drink beer with. He liked to talk Kafka, listen for accents behind us while we ate at diner booths--which didn’t say much for the elan vital of my conversation.

I remember when he got married the first time; his wife left the ceremony in a different car. I saw him waiting, forlornly for a ride in a Pittsburgh-area parking lot. Not a happy symbol.
His next wedding went much better, was a new age-y kind of thing in a park in Milwaukee. But Janet, his second wife, was certainly worth the wait. The value of revision! He got it right--even though she gave him the questionable title for one of his (successful) books of poetry: POEMS OF THE RIVER SPIRIT.

I was riding with the two of them in the back of their van, asked him about it, the title from hell.

Janet said: “Hey, I came up with that!”

Some quick verbal tap dancing helped me to dodge the fatal bullet, but I think the good will that still remains between our families is mostly due to her generosity.

(Good squishy.)

Mo was fun to carouse with at BG. He was no longer Catholic—though his mom loved St. Francis. A solid friend, still is, despite that awfully convenient “success” thing.

Chapter VII:
The Catholic Capitol
’88-‘10

I’ve tried mightily to get out of Steubenville, often, tried to get back up to Linda’s and my home place: Cleveland. (The need to leave has been so intense in fact that once we even tried for a job up near Fargo.) Universities, junior colleges, a high school, all in Cleveland. No soap. I actually contemplated driving taxi again, just so I could smell the lake, talk Tribe with old bar buds, play bb ball with grade school, college friends. But Jesus wants me here, and it has been a singular grace, a blessing which has made me grow--quite against my will--in a hundred ways. If I get to heaven, and I have every hope that I eventually will, it’ll largely be due to both the students and my gracious Christian colleagues at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. (My wife, of course, is doing the yeo-woman’s work there.) Elsewhere, I surely would’ve reverted to cafeteria religion, excess drink, to some form of “creative” self-destruction.

I caught my initial glimpse of Steubenville while up at Madonna House during my first stay there, late ’75, early ’76. We saw an old 8 mm job on the Charismatic conferences. I was moved, and having just been baptized in the Holy Spirit myself and gotten the go-ahead from my spiritual director, I decided to go there and complete my education. (Ha!)

So after what would be the first of my biannual two month stays in Canada, I went back to Cleveland, found a job, saved what money I could. Then it was the old duffle-bag-off-a-Greyhound routine, but this time I knocked blind on rectory doors, looking for some Jesus-inspired hospitality.

A nice priest pointed me to a Studite monastery, where the monks took me in--having confused me with some guy who was supposed to be coming, and who never did!
And so there I was, ready to lay in until the spring semester when I’d re-start college. The monks were great, and I almost joined several times. As Merton points out, monks and poets are both marginal men; so I certainly qualified there.

The monastery itself was on North Street, nuns a street over. Fr. George, Brothers Philaret and Andreas. As I say, I got on okay. They could be acerbic, but were generous, interested and interesting.

I would be Didacus were I to take that step.

But I didn’t like all the praying to be honest. It went on for hours. I’ve always been ADHD—like my dear and slightly maniacal daughter!

A Jesuit scholastic in high school asked me once, “You can’t sit still, can you?”

“Huh?”

I liked the college initially, needed just 30 hours to graduate. So things looked good. I drove taxi to make ends meet. More crazy and fun folk.

I soon met Susan (late 70s), who regularly got locutions. A really pretty woman, she walked into the monastery printing shop wearing a mink coat. (A weird aside: once I was working on photography/printing there—this was long ago—and got called away. Now I knew I’d printed the first few letters of my name, but when I got back and checked the thing, my whole first name was printed, the last three letters increasingly more faint. I’m sure I hadn’t done the whole thing. So what does that mean?)

Anyway, she was five years slightly older—something that bothered me; we met and were soon spending too much time alone. She had two young girls, so I got my first go at proxy-parenting. Like me she was trying in her way to be faithful, but we weren’t succeeding. And because of that fact, in one of her praying sessions she got an image of God throwing a net over me, leading me away.

Was it legit, this perhaps self-serving prayer?

As it turned out, I’d have to say yes, because too soon the college experience had begun to go south. The profs loved me coming in, but the more papers I wrote, the less they seemed to approve. I think they eventually got on to the fact that while I could initially dazzle linguistically, I was so new to the trade that I didn’t exactly have access to the scholarly theological deposit.

It’s always something.

So soon enough, I was off to Northern California to abbey-sit in Redwood Valley.

It took me forever to get this sex thing right—when I do. (“No,” was the word I was looking for.)

Finally, I would come back here to teach: an answer to a prayer really. While on campus that first time I told Jesus: “If I ever teach, this would be a great place!” (He listens! Or as my wife says, “He’s always interrupting you with the answer.”)

I came back once or twice, and we were always on or off. Finally Susan married some guy ten years younger.

As I began to teach, part time in the late 80s, I found there was always something crazy going on in those days, students on one jag or another. And in a smaller way, it’s still like that, of course. Students get onto some clearer vision, and then we’re all dead.

Sister Helen, who had actually been part of that earlier monastery for a time, had eventually split with them and later began a firehouse back-to-the-land-community-of-one initiative.
During that time I lived behind her in an old abandoned shoe shop, the firehouse art center across the street in front of her. She loved art and prayer, was a dear, though stability was hard for her too. (When I was back at the Studite place on North Street, she used to get me up at 6 to do yoga with her.)

As far as Susan went, she was part of that Sr. Helen thing too for awhile (before the firehouse?), and I guess for a time I kind a loved her—though that’s only a piece to the matrimonial puzzle as anyone over 16 should know!

She did have a deep desert ascetic spirituality. Alien for me, immense.

I was just a frog on a pad in some ways.

There were others as well, later. One woman, a hippy kind of gal, brilliant, eventually married a guy 15 years younger; another, very young, an attractive mall shopper kind of gal went to Ca. where she’s doing the single mother thing.

It’s always been one form of madness or another.

My advice to those considering that leap: always make sure you see the worst of the person. Then, if you can and are willing to sacramentally handle that, say yes, God will work that to move you toward holiness.

The other Steubenville joyful disaster during the early years was Lita, a ex-lesbian woman I actually proposed to—three times. (She accepted each time.) After I’d come back from northern California—or sometime soon after, the Susan thing went into the tank. But God is good, and this other wonderful person showed up, just in time for me to add a little range to the abstract expressionistic mess that was my life.

I had nothing to give really, except a ton of self-hatred; and she had her own problems. “Every woman adores a fascist.” She in some way wanted me to put her rudely in her place. Too weird for me.

But she was smart, too; I mean, she knew I could not lead.

She is a lovely woman, with Caribbean rhythms, steel drums in her soul. She had and has a great heart. I still hear from her now and again—as she moves toward sainthood.

She and her husband’s only child, a son, died in his bedroom during a home visit. He was only 21.

Who on earth could bear that?

When I got hired as a part-time creative writing teacher at FUS, I was delighted, had hoped to find community, something that would keep me on track. But I never could. The Charismatic community back then (in ’88) were all nice folks. But I could never belong. They were all so normal—with a vengeance--and both they and I were keenly aware that I was not; nor did I want to be, especially if that involved a check-list country club respectability.
But I’ve never gotten on with groups: secular order Franciscans, Carmelites.
SOLT I liked—I went to give a reading at their college in south Texas and would’ve joined in a heartbeat. (They reminded me of Madonna House.) They liked me, too, but had no money to offer. I’d actually met their founder, Fr. Flanagan, some years before while hitching through the heartlands. Guys from the community picked me up in KC and took me to their home: they were helping Viet Namese refugees get settled.

That meeting was an answer to a prayer. I’d met Catherine de Hueck Doherty, knew about Dorothy Day and Mother Theresa; but where were the men? I asked God as much. And soon enough I met Fr. F; he like Catherine, could read souls--specifically.

Lots of holy people can do it generally. Your sins are no secret to the attentive. But Catherine and Fr. Flanagan made certain gestures which let me know that not only could they see the general sin, but that they could see even closer than that: the particular angle or emphasis of my inane proclivities.

Crazy, but good.

The Charismatic community back then invited those of us who were interested to a class where we had to hear what they were, get scoped in the process. There was an excessive rightness to them by my lights. (Later they ran afoul of the Bishop.) But even had they been spot on, I probably would’ve only seen that as proof that they certainly didn’t need me!

So it was just me and Jesus again.

My first house this time around was downtown on third, across from the library. (Like the abuse/thievery episodes, here’s something I could never quite understand: three out of the first four places I lived at here in Steubenville burned down almost immediately after I’d moved out!)

That first summer was a very tough one. The temperature seemed to hover around ninety most of the time. I didn’t know anyone—my second story back porch had long ago rotted off. And there was absolutely nothing to do. I mean how much can you pray on a hot afternoon.
Third Street was live. The projects were just a block over, and one weekend when I went to visit Mo in Pittsburgh, the guy next door got into a tussle with my landlord, broke his arm.

Eventually I settled into my job of, now, 23 years. My students and the administration have been long-suffering, though I know too that I am a gifted reader of literature and can love as well as most people.

Plus Jesus is the center of my life--though too often, not directly in the center. I was still not ready for family initially. My depressions were too intense, my obedience too sporadic. I prayed, went to Mass, played basketball with the old guys. And I improved as a teacher I think, though Elsie Luke, a good and holy woman, my first chair, prodded by the Dean no doubt, asked me to get my Ph. D. some time down the road.

Soon she retired, though, and I probably could’ve gotten off with not doing it since I did have a terminal degree. But I had promised. And so (weary of just teaching) I eventually went back, trying Kent State, driving down sometimes with a great colleague, the now-Dr. Sunyoger, before settling back into BGSU and a sabbatical to complete the job.

I had to finish up BG across the state while Linda was pregnant with our third. And that entailed at 4 ½ hour trip one way and sleeping on a good Christian family, the Plummer’s, couch for two days a week. God was generous though. I got to listen to tapes, prep for my comps as I drove back and forth across Ohio.

At one point during the Kent go, I had to hitch up to get my softball glove and plates off my abandoned car. It was a Vega; my mechanic telling me--too late: “You know this was the worst car ever made.”

There was a rightness to that.

The loneliness during the first four or so years here drove me to tour the area’s back county roads. Some of the stagnant pools, dead trees might’ve supplied Al Nobel Gore with early ammunition. (What has happened to that prize anyway? Maybe they’re still trying to make up for Kipling and “the white man’s burden,” or for giving one to Golding and not Greene.)

In any case the mall got old very quickly. I mean, I didn’t know anyone that well. I had next to no money and just needed something to keep me busy. Perhaps I could have made some extra dough on the side, but I couldn’t do much besides grade, teach, run a cash register.
One of my favorite quotes from Flannery O’Connor is from one of her characters: “I have noticed that the more learned a person becomes, the less he can actually do.”

But that first fall came, and many after it. I’ve improved as a teacher and am always on some publisher’s trail. Friends and women came and went, but the mad buzz in my brain remained. (I was not a happy guy, really, good with myself until I got married.)

And it wasn’t long before my thirties followed my twenties down the stairs and out the noisy door. Death comes up and hits you with a two by four when you turn 40. At that point, as they say, you know that it is really going to happen--and to you. Your name is in the shuffling hat, if you like the attendant music or not. It’s good to think about it. So Jesuitical. We will be going elsewhere, and we haven’t done all that well here.

God is great, Mercy itself.

And that’s a good thing. We need Him more than water.

So with His help (and the help of a lot of confessors), I’ve persevered.

Anyone who loves the orthodox Catholic Church in America knows about Steubenville. And that is an amazing thing. Fr. Scanlon built it up in the Spirit of God, and Fr. Terry has kept it going. Fr. Mike, I know, got a few complaints early on regarding my teaching approaches, proclivities. I once used the F word in a story. (The character was a truck driver, what could I do?) Little did I know that one of my students was the daughter of a Board member.

But Fr. Mike never said anything to me, either that time or later.

When I first started teaching at FUS in ’88, and when I first was a student here in @ ‘78, the blessing and the problems with the place both had to do with the Charismatic renewal. At its worst, it involved hyper-individualized locutions, odd directions, puffery--not to mention the good old gospel of prosperity.

For example, the last time I saw my room mate from Francis hall, the guy had a tank hat on, goggles, said he was just going to hitch south, go where the Lord lead him. (A familiar scenario!) And later when I started teaching, I had one young woman student who wept at the prospect of reading Ginsberg, (“I came here to get away from this stuff”), another, a male, who balked at reading Whitman.

The latter wrote a paper with the word “lust” in it seventeen times, claiming that the poet had designs on his readers. I told him that if someone had a problem with lust, it may not have been Wally. (He agreed that he would talk to his spiritual director about it.)

In the last 7 to 10 years on the other hand, things have swung radically in a more old school direction. Latin Mass is the greater good. Everyone needs to read more Aristotle. That sort of thing.

And in the end I have no complaint with that method of education. Any system will be flawed, and great books, an emphasis on philosophy, are perfectly legitimate ways to proceed. Not the only way to go, but certainly a good one. Problems arise, though, when the siege mentality eclipses and seeks to create a narrower way.

Besides, a fortress (versus a merely conservative) mentality simply cannot produce real art. It is by nature reactionary.

Some of these folks go so far as to insist that Shakespeare should be properly read as a Catholic man producing Catholic plays.

That’s unfortunate.

One of the great things about English literature is that we can learn so much from texts which weren’t written by Christians. Who loved the poor more than William Carlos Williams? All the great moderns offered so much. Whitman and Dickinson are great poets, as is Baudelaire, Bradstreet. We’re still waiting for that kind of womanly (or manly for that matter) humility to show itself again in American literature.

“Before the Birth of One of Her Children” is, for me, one of the true classics of American literature.

And even if you do manage to read just Catholic writers, other problems arise. Shusako Endo is a great Christian writer; I like to do DEEP RIVER. But how orthodox is that? Most would probably agree that it edges toward monism. And then there’s J. F. Powers. Great short story writer. But if you try to teach his novel WHEAT THAT SPRINGETH GREEN, you quickly run into problems. Chapter two or three in that book. One of those chapters is blatantly pornographic.

I love the short stories of Spark, O’Connor, but you can’t just teach them, and things only get worse with poetry. Mariani is a Christian, but not all his poems are overtly so. Sasanov is very good, and I like her very much as a writer and a person; but I doubt her notion of the church and Franciscan’s would line up perfectly. And what about Tate, Lowell, Wright, Gioia, Levertov, Serpas, Walker, and Karr? To what extent are they Catholic? What does that mean to them?

Now we’ve got fodder for teaching! (It’s always fun to teach Contemporary Christian literature.)

The Catholic Church is always under siege, yes, so I can understand the anxiety. But we shouldn’t give in to fear. He who is free is free indeed. Artists have to go where the spirit leads, and that is most always somewhere new! How did Wordsworth put it: you have to invent the taste by which you will be enjoyed.

On the other hand, some people have tried to put together Christian MFA program out west. The problem there is that they tend to flip Mother Teresa. It now reads: “Success, not faithfulness.”

So where do we go?

Jesus.

Chapter VIII:
Family
’51-‘11

For all of us, so much comes back to family. In my case, especially, my father. He was a vet, had contracted polio when we were very small. I remember the newspaper photo: my mom, left with eight kids (all of us in pj’s she had sewn together out of curtains), a different picture in the same paper: my dad, horizontal, one tooth missing, in an iron lung.

I remember wanting to stay with my mom when I was a kid, play in the kitchen, underneath the table; but my dear brother Tim picked up on that, and she couldn’t have a crowd. So it was “Play outside,” something I can never tell my kids! But they were everything, my parents. I needed to please them, even when it became very clear to me--early--that they didn’t know what they were doing in raising us. (They had no center, no faith.)

My sister Mick once told me that my parents simply stopped telling me what to do by the time I was ten. I remember they used to come to me sometimes to solve problems: “Was that women on tv justified in changing key as she sang?”

Like I’d know.

Every squirrel finds a nut though. I did come up with one good one. It had to do with sharing. When it’s a piece of cake and mom has to split it between you and your older brother, the bickering can get intense (especially if you’re in a big family—you’ve come so far already!).
Millimeters become crucial.

So, Solomon, I came up with this: let one guy cut, the other choose. The wisdom amazed us all!

Dad had wanted to be a baseball player, and when it became clear that I had the gift, my mission became clear. Make it, son. Make it. But he was generous, too, when he came to my games later on. He always tried to help me relax.

Two of my brothers followed him into battle. Pat didn’t because he’d joined the Navy. (He ended up at the South Pole.) But my eldest brother, Tom, and the third, Tim, just a year older than me, both signed up for the Army, Nam. (My father had been in both branches.) My infantry brothers eventually became DIs, just like dad. Both made it back--though my stepfather’s son, I would later learn, had not.

Tom had to eventually see a shrink as he had ordered a mortar attack on his own men—not uncommon in jungle warfare. But as the oldest boy, he landed pretty much on his feet, found a way to deal, move on (at least until very recently). Tim, a year older than I, was a very different kettle of fish. Growing up, Tim was as contrary as could be. He’d swear at neighborhood adults from their front sidewalks if he felt they needed an adjustment—usually about some kid, hiding behind his mom’s skirt.

(It was a strange time. I remember this weird lady on Puritas, just up the street: a WW II concentration camp victim; she used to stand on her front stoop and swear at the top of her voice, all in the early morning. Pretty cool for a kid to see that!)

Tim once freaked out my parents by running away. Gone for three days. They panicked, though he was only camping out back in a friend’s backyard tent. My parents were always trying to get me to run away—because it was such a good reality check. The kid has nowhere to go, no food, no prospects. I’d refuse, though, the only one of the boys to do so.

They had to support me until I was eighteen.

Tim, on the other hand, was a real tornado, got the contrariness from dad. But as my wife would later point out, he was a sincere person. He had heart, would become my best man.
But the self-destruct was heavy on him, just like it had been on dad. Tim, like all of us, was a dutiful son in his way. I loved him, still do, but he took no prisoners in his headlong descent to death. I think we each found some facet of dad’s unspoken injunctions to play out, went with the part that moved us. Does everyone I wonder?

It’s Mercy that has taken them.

I praise God for that.

My fourth brother, Larry, was and is the closest to me—a year younger than I. Along with Pix, we were part of “the three little ones,” a less important subset (in our minds) who had to sit at a small folding table during big family doins--though there was great freedom to be had there too. Larry was just beneath me in the pecking order, and in our family that meant pain, administered by the proximate year older sibling.

But we got on well. I don’t think I hit him much. (The back, incidentally, was the best place to deliver kid blows if you’re interested: no marks.)

He’s a funny guy, Larry, played out Harold Bloom’s notion of the literary son having to find his space. But he did so in a decidedly non-literary context. A more social animal than his year older brother (me), he has, along with our older brother Pat, always been a natural Franciscan: loving, humble—if crazed. (He always gets a little protective when I come over his house, around his garage buddies I mean. . . . He’s always hung out with people who would rob him the moment his back was turned.) Anyway, last year, when a roving University book buyer offered me free tickets, we did a Browns game. We got on okay, though I think part of my family thinks I’m gay.

Funny, and though I admit I had flirted with the idea when I was a younger poet—I thought it was a career option, I never engaged.

The last third of the “three little ones” triumvirate was Pix. A Christian herself, she has long been a refuge for me. She was always glad to talk it over, always quick to offer some floor if I needed it. When I first went to Denver, it was her husband I worked for, and even after I came to Steubenville to teach, she would be my first stop when I visited Cleveland.

Pix is amazing, even though she never seemed so growing up. She was as a youth never interested in making a splash of any sort. (I don’t really remember what her dreams were.) But she seemed to look up to me when we were in high school, maybe because I went to a high end Jesuit school or because her girlfriends thought I was “cude.”

Extreme neuroses can be hard to spot for the worldly.

She has been a great gift to me, and we can often talk faith as she seems to move in and out of my mother’s Assembly of God camp. In fact, too much of my family is fed on cultural nonsense: watered-down Freud, the gospel of prosperity, the glories of everything new and superfluous.
But they are all family, and we have all suffered the same fate in many ways. But differently in others. Pix had to endure the murder of her second son. What could be worse, and one of the most intense memories I have is of her at the funeral. Mick and I and Larry were clumsily trying to talk to her, empathize. But she could not bear to speak, look at anyone.

Finally she just turned to face the corner.

Your family has your heart. They fill us out, don’t they? They are different parts of us, different responses, but part of the cohesive emotional fabric. In one way, they are closer to us that our spouses, being blood. But if we do get to heaven, it’s our spouses who will have done most of the heavy lifting. (And that goes for them too!)

Linda is the Arnold in our family, long-suffering--as I’m something of an emotional eunuch. Plus she’s just naturally more positive than I, mostly because she’s an Unger: a hero. Her dad was a fire chief, her one brother is a lieutenant on that same force (and a former high school tamer of bullies), a nephew does the same elsewhere. They are all drawn to the good, to do whatever that is in any given circumstance. And while that can occasionally cause problems, as a rule they delight in learning, always, always onto the new gadget or perspective. And they have a very large love of humor as well--any kind, of any quality.

Any attempt is laudable!

Our union has been a blessing for both of us. One of the nicest parts of it is that my kids didn’t end up being little me’s—comic Eyores of a sort: simmering, crooning, running around cities or the heartland, ramming their heads into walls.

Everybody saw how well we were matched well before we did (after her conversion), even though we’d been friends for sixteen years. She has a great wit and a decidedly artistic sensibility. (We’re both INFPs: from a test—she had us take!) But she’s much different too: here she sits at our table, every evening, wholly other.

This is life-giving in the extreme.

If not for her I probably would have shrunken into a ball many years ago.

We are both as neurotic as the day is long, and that can create problems, but it is cause for humor too. Does Jesus really know—we ask--what He’s doing, having made us parents?

(We also agree, incidentally, that Alan Schreck, a Theology prof at the U. here, really is the nicest person in the world.)

God has given us good fruit: children—and such children! Linda is the center of our home. Her depth, wit, and artistic spiritual heart really accounts for how much the kids are getting. Schools aren’t of much help there, but we try to live the gospel. And all Christ needs is one person trying.

As for me, I never really got the gospels to the depth I would have liked to until I set out to write a long series of sonnets on Matthew. I was completely blown away, though I’d been a Christian for about 25 years at the point in time. Meditating on small bits, writing and waiting for the Divine to reveal Himself through the words. I had no idea. I was repeatedly knocked off my pins by the incredible Power that chose those words, fashioned them. It’s amazing what God can do with simple terms: Jesus actually builds heaven, its ante-room using words like “water” and “bread” and “wheat.”

Truly, no one has ever spoken like this.

He’s built the scaffold, a portico of heaven using words we all know. I mean how many multisyllabic words are in there? It became clearly evident that heaven is where He is. His is the Word who fashions us.

People who disagree or who dismiss Him merely as a great man have never truly listened, sat with the words awhile.

A few of the University Christian wives really liked the sonnet I did about Linda, so I knew I was on to something. But I don’t want to sound giddy. I wish I were a better husband, parent. I deal with real emotional troughs, and so does my wife. Our only substantial hope, in fact, is that unlike our childhood homes, Jesus the King is spoken in our living room, is prayed there. We go to Eucharist, Confession, try to say the rosary.

Jesus will not let us down--despite the fact that original sin will not be the only unfortunate thing our babes will have gotten from us. They get good habits, too, I know. But those aren’t the bequeathings that bother us.

How will they ever make it through the world?

The good part is that they were made for this time.

As I say, our kids are the good fruit. Something wonderful has been, is happening in our home. Jesus has been happening. If you don’t believe me--look at our flawed and beautiful children.

Despite so much questionable water having gone under my bridge, still going, my need has drawn Him, will continue to do so for as long as I ask. There have been so many great and gone friends, people I’ll probably never see again. There have been so many friendly local Christians too of course.

Every step has made us more human, and all of it leads us home.

As I say, we have three kids—but only because we started late! I apologize. I apologize to the entire Catholic community, from my heart! Linda and I’ve often spoken of how great it would be if we had more. Given how wonderful the three are, why wouldn’t we want more? (We tell them as much.)

David, Jude, and Bridget.

Bridget, our ADHD tornado, certainly has a great heart for all living things, spikes out because she is so tender, hears creation groan. But she is also 14, a very tough age--though she’s always been so: when she was a baby, she both chipped Linda’s front tooth and broke her nose, whipping her head back as her mom held her, facing out. It would be a strong lasso, to tie her in.

But first things first: David.

At 18, he is a dear, with some of Asperger’s syndrome. He’s got the mask going, the tremendous focus, the lack of tact, a touch of paranoia even; but he is only very gifted intellectually, has a great heart. The syndrome has caused me some sorrow because what father does not want to know the joys and travails that go on in his son’s life? But because he’s so closed off, it’s tough to get the news.

But no doubt it’s much harder for him. He said recently that it feels like his DNA is broken. He misunderstands directions at university—and it costs him. (His accum. is only 3.72.) Also is afraid of failing with girls, areal problem at any age! But we tell him he’s a gift in so many ways. He’s brilliant, witty, good looking, still with a natural innocence. (The girls will catch on; besides he’s only 18 and already finishing up his sophomore year.)

Everything is so intense of kids, no? They’re in the soup.

We try to make a love they can come home to.

We’ve set David up with Linda’s psychologist, someone he can talk Aspy with.
My grief is in not knowing how I’m failing him. Plus prying is never welcome.

Some years ago, after he’d gotten concussed in his first week of public high school—we decided he would not let himself be bullied, even though he had no self-defense skills and was small, two years young, we had him see a counselor.

After each session, driving home, I’d gently ply him: what had they talked about? I had no idea how deeply sensitive and perceptive he was! Now it’s always a question of how to get back.

Virgin territory there.

(If I had a golden pick.)

I think if I occasionally bring up the “girls” word, we can talk!

Jude, the next in line, is 15. He has Down’s and functions largely as the family’s social director and spiritual lightning rod. The Down’s thing has created some problems: the helpful medical establishment (ugh), good Christian friends who congratulated us on having another after him (very slight ugh).

There’s a good story on how he got his name. He was due on the feast of Simon and Jude, and as I prayed it seemed to me that the Lord wanted the name Jude. But all the Christians we knew or talked to in the vicinity wondered about that. Who names a boy Jude? (Since that time others around here have.)

That made me question my answer, so I went back to the Lord asked Him for some confirmation, some sign that that was the name he wanted. On that very day, Linda had a sonogram and we both discovered that he had Down’s.

Jude is the patron saint of impossible cases. (Father.)

He’s a short, strong guy who took karate until David quit. He never got a kata right, but his instructor, Mr. Rine, helped him up to his blue belt. He was very proud of that. (I still tell me sometimes that he’d wide am Gimli and as tall as St. Francis.)

Just the other day, though, he said he hates having Down’s Syndrome. We were amazed because he’d been in denial for so long. It’s really hard for him, not to be able to driver (though I encouraged him to take the test is he wanted to), not to have real friends (though everyone knows him at school). Still his friends are David’s.

Can he get married? Yes, we say, but he has no girl friends. He wants to die. We need to take him to some dances. Everywhere he looks he sees limitations.

But I tell him the angels will bow when he comes to heaven. (We try to boost him at every opportunity.) He endures physical pain better than any of us, and he’s always gotten the most to bear. When he got chicken pox you couldn’t see any skin.

Three major operations before he was two, including a pulmonary-banding and the creation of a fourth valve. I still usually get up with his Tweety, Bugs, Sylverter, and Taz dolls to tell him (Star Trek) stories most nights where he or his alter ego, Poister Baggins, is the hero. Linda does programs with him, and it always a joy to hear the laughing.

He’s in line for counselling, too.

He needs to be seen as older, grown up; so much depends on that. And since regimen is also very important, he marks out his days. We go to Adoration early Friday mornings, and then there’s the library on Saturdays . . . and what’s for lunch today, tomorrow. As a family we do movie nights, Star Trek get togethers, plus he’s positively in on any activity, is the first one to want to go sled-riding, hiking, or to play basketball.

On a good day I can distract him, still get him to hold my hand as we cross the street. I praise him all the time, like I do the others because they deserve that, are wonderful.

Bridget, our youngest—already so tall at 14! (No fair. It seems like I missed too many of those baby days. I want them back!) She’s a railroad car of sheer destruction, too fast to keep up with, a young woman on the grow: her mother’s daughter. Like her oldest brother, she does not suffer fools gladly, and so she keeps me on my toes.

We love her to death, of course, but she is a wilder seed than her brothers, the source of many late night parentals. “I have no idea. . . . What do you think?” Some summer mornings we’ll hear her scootering over the living room wooden floors. She punches me hard and can swear like a sailor, but she and Linda are very close. Linda will spend hours helping her with everything: homework, piano, chores.

(I once helped David with his math homework. It was the only time he got an f. I still claim it was a language problem. Mathematicians and scientists are appallingly bad with language.)

As Auden once said, “Homework is never finished, it’s just given up on.”

I want to end with the feminine--I’ve been a poet long enough to know the crucial place of intuition, to letting the Spirit lead. The feminine is so important in every man’s life. And that leads me, at end, to my mother--and to my wife. As I mentioned earlier, my mother was largely absent emotionally during those first years. So then this last Friday morning, as I turned toward the Eucharistic starburst monstrance in adoration, this idea came to me:
She held me in an embrace that was not an answer—and she knew that.

That was her burden.

We who have been stamped with love, have been stamped with sorrow. Men find this out through women (priests through Mary), women through men.

Is that is the only real way to God?

2011-03-17T11:51:00.000-07:00

Here's the first half of a memoir I've been working on, not too long. Please get back with me. Tell me what you think!

DC

David Craig
3532 Brightway
Weirton, WV 26062
Ph.: 304-748-0423
Email: dcraig@franciscan.edu

Confessions of a Beat(ific) Catholic

By
David Craig

For Jack Kerouac, for Linda, David, Jude, and Bridget; also Fr. Robert Pelton and the Servant of God, Catherine Doherty. And finally to John Alvin Soat and Angela O’Donnell, both of whom suggested I write this on the same day.

Chapter 1:
Jesus as Father
’60-‘72

Mercy comes early.

Baseball was my father’s heaven-dream, and so for many years mine. And since that grand old idyll has long been valued for its metaphorical potential, it’s an ideal place to start. Of course the same is also true for the rest of our lives as well—Puritans and Catholics have always known as much. Everything we do, everything we go through tells us something about who God is, what He wants from us. So it’s really just a matter of learning to read the Braille—or the third base coach.

I started out as a small boy.

When I was eight: tiny, big-headed, and skinny enough to worry people, I remember standing out in our front lawn for pictures in my Geiger’s Mens’ and Boys’ Shop polyester shirt, the numbers sticking to my bare skin. Was this THE answer I was looking at, feeling ready to take on the world, my authentic Vic Power first baseman’s glove nearly as big as I was?
So much of my life suggested otherwise. Distant parents, a bitter loneliness.

But maybe! Who knew? My dad seemed to think so.

In those days they were forced to let every squirt bat, but if you looked really pathetic, you had to wait. So finally, I got my turn—though I was late for the game too as I remember, my incredibly deep jean pockets stuffed with peanuts, collected from some throw-down-the-goods-and-let-the-kids-scramble-to accumulate-wealth-and-their-place-in-the-Ferengi-Alliance deal.

(Had I been in California, I might suspect Reagan.)

Anyway, everyone in the field sees this midget stroll up to the plate, dragging his war club behind him—most of us were Indian fans. They yawn, move closer. As it happened, though, things worked out, or seemed to. I pop one over everybody’s head, eventually jubilantly wend my way to a distant second base. (I was small, don’t forget, and the Frodo journey far.) But the real pay-off comes next. The following batter walks, and because I don’t know the rules, I got tagged out as I begin to advance my way to third base.

This was not heaven.

Emily Dickinson once said, “We all have the skill of life”—a pre-1862 breakdown comment no doubt. But in my case it has never been so. I’ve never had a clue, though, surprisingly, that fact has served me pretty well: even when I didn’t know Jesus or when I denied Him; on some level, as it turned out, I still had to rely on Him for everything that mattered. Baptism, Confirmation, and Catholic grade school run deep. Ask James Joyce—or Kerouac.

The second experience was stranger, but pure trope as well.

I get put in right field because I am a midget. And of course, what should happen but a guy hits this fly just over my head. I back peddle, or what passed for that, trying to track the sucker. As it turns out, a piece of wood, sticking up out of the dirt for some before-you-were-born-I-knit-you-in-your-mother’s-womb cosmic reason, and catches my heel as I trip, fall flat backwards.

By the weirdest coincidence, the ball lands right in my mitt.

Honestly.

The next game I’m playing center field!

Jesus is like that too: things have a way of working out.

Life can be confetti in Christ, yes, but it’s also a disappointment, a veil of tears; things seldom come out right, at least by our lights. No place is home, neither with our families or at work. Only in the duty of the moment, in God’s will or the wait for that.

Right after college, by some strange wrinkling in the fabric of God, after I’d published a few books, you think I’d turn up aces, at least for awhile. But that didn’t happen: in the blink of an eye I went from being an under-achiever to being an over-achiever. But the weird part about it was that I was never informed. I missed the transition. At one point I (truly) was a lazy lout, and then at the next, I was (truly enough again) a blue-collar upstart—an unworthy Keats, without the talent.

Oh the harshness of life!

I was never given the privilege of basking in the rightness of that fleeting moment--that page, that sentence, that servile comma. I never got a chance to experience that moment where what I did and what I was sang with the great DA of T. S. Eliot’s FOUR QUARTETS universe.

That can’t be right.

No life matters inordinately, of course, but all of them do count.

My template was my dad, a WW II vet, a blue-collar factory kind of guy--with definite edges—one who, like so many of those GIs, was jig-happy just to get a shot at an actual life after the war.

He wanted a big family, and got one, in spades.

There were eight of us, all a year or so apart. I was number six. Joy found its way into our home, as it does in most, but great sorrow did too, as through the years my father slowly began to become unglued. My emotionally distant mother did what she could to keep herself and family together, but without a foundation neither could build a house.

Still, we did get much good from both of them!

From my father: an Irish lilt, a joy in living, a contrariness too. Once as a union rep for General Motors he advised the non-union shop in southern Ohio to stay that way. They had it good.
His superiors were not pleased.

From my mother, we got the skirted, artistic spin of a gypsy. Hungarian dance, a dose of prim German will.

It was difficult for them, holding up against madnesses that were both personal and national: the post-war American we-won materialism. Robert Lowell was not far off when he said that everyone had “two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,/and is a ‘young Republican.’” (So when I hear conservative Catholics berate the 60s, I like to remind them of what gave rise to that difficult and scarlet decade: the Eisenhower “military-industrial complex” 50s.)

I honor my parents. They did the best they could. I’m grateful for the suffering and loneliness that came out of their union too. Jesus made the Craigs a wonder. All that pain has, through Christ, taught our family a deep empathy.

By the time I was eight, Mass, however, a Christian perspective had become background music in our home, what we should be doing. (The rosary, along with copying pages out of the encyclopedia had become a punishment.) So we boys ended up cutting church to pitch pennies and learn how to smoke--Salems in my case.

But that whole horrible 50s world of my childhood was bent enough to sink anyone. Brimming with thousands of great Protestants, the country hadn’t stayed in that camp. It had somehow (perhaps inevitably) watered the gospel down, become a vestige, a superficial image of its former self, had become a world based on obsessing over behavior and disembodied intellect (a world, to be honest, that Catholic England had given rise to—see THE CANTERBURY TALES).
And though I couldn’t have articulated as much back then, I sure the heck could feel the strangeness in the air. It was an inhumane environment: the MICKEY MOUSE CLUB in macrocosm, a farcical lie, obvious to anyone who paid attention. I mean, who were those kids, and who talked like that—so why did they? What did they want from the rest of us umbilical-ed to the tv? (They were the brain police for children. Where was the pay-off, anyway: maybe you got to walk around like that, become a Mason. You could grow up and join the chamber of commerce.)

After fourth grade we moved to Kent, OH and then, the next year, back to Cleveland. Money was always an issue, so I ended up doing time--three years in the crew cut public school system. We had prayer in the schools back them, but it had value only as symbol. Besides the Our Father had a different ending, confirmed my alien status. By junior high, I was a solid C student—and sinking. I just couldn’t stomach the local dog and pony show with its idiotic notions of progress, its center-less gloss, what I later came to see as its slippery slope.

Even then I knew I needed something more.

I needed the sound of beads as I walked in single file.

I needed nuns.

My brothers thought I was completely whacked when I bolted back to Catholic school at the first opportunity—eighth grade. But I did so mostly because I missed what the sisters had, whatever the attendant weirdness. I loved the fact that they were motivated by something deeper, that they cared, that their world cohered.

I could feel that.

And though some of their methods may have been a little draconian—what could one expect as they had to try and make up for all the damage Dr. Spock and post-war America had done to our parents: a testimony to the imbecility of higher education.

During that last year as a committed Catholic, I was blessed to be one of Sister Mary Allen’s charges. She was a six-foot tall storm trooper: I really liked her because she was willing to talk unblinkingly about real moral issues. MAD MAGAZINE, she’d decided after inspection, was a near occasion of sin. We should avoid it. (My peers scoffed after class; but having initiated the topic, I knew better. She was right on the money. All those buxom women in fetching cartoon clothing and us in the mid-60s. . . . I had deliberately backed her into the corner of that discussion, knew that she’d pay in the eyes of the students if she went against the world to that degree. But she had the guts to do so. I was impressed—she was a kind of spiritual John Wayne!)

Old-school in every way that mattered, she once made the students face front as she threw some short kid around in the lockers behind us. He had dyed his hair. I loved it. The kid was a secularized, self-glamorizing fool.

2 for 2!

One of the major problems growing up is that nobody else was doing that. And of course, it would only get worse.

I finally chose the world because I had never tried it. It seemed bigger, and Catholicism back then seemed all mortification, a votive darkness, filled with whispered prayers, whiskered old women.

Nobody seemed to relay any real daylight, joy. That came later! (Decades down the road, JP II would write, asking that priests live out the joy of their vocations. And so many have!)
There was an extended moment back then when I thought of taking the collar after my pro baseball career—not such a happy metaphor considering what would happen to my batting skills! In any case, I certainly could’ve avoided a lot of trouble had I chosen to remain faithful. My whole generation might have, in fact, had we someone to help us through sex, someone to articulate that larger Christian vision, someone to show us how it all worked together, how the holy mystery of life became like Mozart’s music if properly understood.

As I say, I still believed on some level even after I left the faith. But on the surface, I’d checked out by the time I turned fourteen, just before entering a Jesuit high school.

Dear Father Wysocki had told me in the Confessional that I should see breasts as bumps.

It took me ten years to get back what I lost that day.

In his own way my dad taught me to value truth and to know that there is always a cost when one does. I lived on Puritas Avenue during sixth and seventh grade. It was a main road. Since we were a large secular Catholic family, we lived in the old farmhouse, while the secular Protestant neighborhood behind us lived in newer, smaller post-WWII Cape Cod two kids per homes on the perpendicular W. 191st side street.

More metaphor.

My brothers and sisters say I was protected from so much of the madness of those days: thrown babies, late night drunkenness, but I never felt so. Little kids miss nothing, and so my childhood was horrible for the most part. I felt altogether alone--with too few resources: no sense of why I was alive, really, no sense of direction, a kind of me against the world. And it was unremitting. Mom and dad were far away, as were my brothers and sisters, each on his or her own island. It didn’t seem fair, either when I was small with just the sound of wind, or later. I was put back a half year because I was so quiet, remember once when we lived on the projects on Rocky River Drive: I was late for school. And because I couldn’t bear the thought of walking into the room late, I hid behind a bush for eight hours until the kids walked back.

Crazy. As you might imagine, it was hard physically to do that for a third grader. But we all survived, as do most, and I managed to find my awkward niche growing up. My parents divorced when I was in eighth grade, and though I threw my arm out trying to pick someone off first base, I still played baseball and prospered. It was a fictional place to escape to, like literature I suppose still is to some extent, a place to find some fun.

We never move beyond family baggage, no matter how much inner healing we experience, and that is God’s way. If we didn’t have to carry that, ourselves: the product of so much of those years, we would never learn to love. And if that means occasional depressions, well, what can we do but help to push the larger wagon? Our way-back family comes home because we help—like Adam. There’s really no sense in complaining. Heaven comes slowly, but it does come.

(The good part is that, even if you’re just sitting, you’re helping.)

I still saw my father occasionally. Once in high school at a neighborhood drugstore I met him, and he asked me if I was still a virgin. I bristled, wanted to know if the church was for that now—since he’d ostensibly raised us at Catholic. He hemmed, hawed, had no adequate answer.
But I did like him, a quarrelsome union man when he worked. At this point he was on disability. That last time I talked to my father was when I was 21; he was in a minimum security mental ward of a VA hospital ward, I sitting on rolled wall padding. His conversation was paranoid as he moved from Nixon to the CIA to a tryout he had with the St. Louis Browns, any point in between. But even there good revealed itself.

He needed justice.

He died a few nights later, having stolen a car and run into the back of a gasoline truck on the interstate. Maybe be wanted a grand exit, I don’t know. But I do remember his second wife carrying on at the funeral: “Where’d he get the car? Where did he get that car?”
I had to finally tell her that he was dead, had been our father.

She quieted--if only for awhile.

But family runs deep. It’s crucial to who we are; it’s the baggage we bear, usually not too well. (If twenty plus years of teaching creative writing and literature to good Christian students at Franciscan has taught me anything, it’s that!) But Christ is risen here too—my father and then some. As I say, we all get a chance to break the generational circles of bad habit, sin, to complete what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ Jesus. To love.

Besides, how can we ever give back the good we’ve gotten from them, from our siblings, parents?

Dad, I bless and thank you. You too mom.

My spiritual director once told me that my real problem was with my mom, not with my dad. I was angry at him, but I felt nothing toward her. And in truth she’d always seemed so far away, the price she had to pay to survive probably.

She was good, in a white American kind of way. I say that because while living in Kent I spent a lot of time with a black family—the mom there even offered to take me into her family at one time. (I didn’t do it because it would’ve hurt my mom’s feelings.) But there was something special about that woman’s love, a black mother’s love. It enveloped. It was warm, a womb place for a child to grow, to gather his strength. Maybe it was different because her body was part of her love. It was sensual, but not sexual. Her love was all of her in some way. She held you, supported you, in a way that my mom could never do.

Was that due to the anti-sacramental WASP world white people had made and inhabited.

Maybe. I wonder how Chaucer’s mom was?

But I must say that my wife Linda’s love for the children does contain that sacramental depth, whatever her flaws; and they are blessed because of it.

I’m not sure when childhood ends. For many American men it doesn’t seem to. They can look twelve at fifty (see Bob Costas); much different that the youths of the forties you can find in the St. Peters Steubenville basement. In those sport team pictures from the 40’s, those basketball and football players look forty at twelve! Maybe they weren’t so protected back then, or maybe they were that way because food and survival were not guaranteed.

So maybe it’s when we really experience death. For myself, I never really got childhood in the same way that I never have really gotten the adult thing. I was always just this person in here: two eyes behind the bars, me shaking them, making my monkey noises. But King David on his deathbed told Solomon to play the man. One learns what is required, and he does that. For me, that would be a long way in the future. But however manhood officially begins, it in some way started for me with my father’s death.

My siblings have had their own crosses, of course—bigger ones in most cases. My younger brother Larry a year or two later had to deal with the grisly murder of his girlfriend. His has always been a violent world in some way, as he chose, not reclusive literature, father-pleasing sports as I did, but the other side of life in our neighborhood: its rowdy camaraderie, borderline criminality.

She was young, Linda, his girlfriend, twenty or so.

Maybe that murder ended his childhood. I don’t know. But more craziness, deaths were certainly forthcoming--though Jesus would be there, too, even before I knew it, working not only outside of time but in it as well.

He calls us out, culls us through family, first and last, always.

Chapter II:
The Bourbon at the Bottom
’66-‘76

It didn’t take long for my fourteen year old choice to usher in its wormwood and gall. High school is tough for everyone, even the faithful. I’ve always believed that those years are a success if you don’t jump off a bridge. And if you add the fact I was ADHD before it had a name, massively depressed, a-jump in my Jesuit High
School suit, you start to get the picture. I couldn’t study to save my life, got suspended every year, averaging 32 demerits per. Me and Mr. Grdina, our Assistant Principal, almost got to be pals. My sole aim, in fact, during the last two hive-infested years was simply NOT to get thrown out. No small task since I had to keep busy--with anything except studying: I started the institution’s first food fight, played sports, faked seizures in algebra class, and tried to dress like Little Richard (when I could get away with it).

On the home front, if possible, things were (necessarily) just as bad. My parents had gotten a divorce and girls presented a huge obstacle. They were a bane in a way, a measure of just how far I hadn’t come. Many found me cute, but that only underscored how geeked up I was. I mean, why try with some of them, the neuroses would have to come out, wouldn’t they? I hated who I was—but there was no way out of my skin.

I was strung up so tight that one night I almost pushed mom out of a room. We were talking in our small little living room on Denison Ave. and 94th. She mentioned, as a way to build me up, how handsome I was. The girls must swarm.

Although I was sixteen or seventeen, I wept.

She didn’t know quite what to do, how to handle the situation, and so eventually she just had to leave. And then, days later, or around that time anyway, a girl I didn’t know—with a slightly shady neighborhood reputation--actually began beating on my front window as I sat on the couch, watching tv. “He’s so beautiful,” she said repeatedly, banging on the glass.

Finally, I had to leave the room.

I suppose it’s genetic: the leaving, I mean. I certainly would master the move in the future.

In any case, when I turned eighteen I took to beer (and its happy after-effects).
Faith was alive underneath in some way, though, because I signed my high school yearbook picture: “Don’t keep the faith, spread it.” Where the heck did that come from? I don’t know. I found a way to miss every retreat in high school. One of my teachers, I forget whom, told me as my graduation neared that I was the kind of kid the Jebbies didn’t want to take on in the future.

Charming.

Reminds me of my sixth grade teacher who sat me next to my best friend because he had character and I didn’t. Some of it might rub off.

Forget the part about her being right.

How do any of us survive school—how will my kids?

My baseball dream—to God’s glory--certainly didn’t. In college it crumbled along with the integrity of my personality. Without a foundation, what could endure? Those years were not pretty. While on the university baseball team, in fact, my psychological uptightness reached epic proportions, became so pronounced that I soon even couldn’t play catch with Gary Pillar, a teammate from Benedictine. Ever the trend-setter, I’d developed the Steve Sax disease before he gave it its name! I simply could no longer freely direct the ball to the other person. I became agoraphobic, and within a year or two, it had literally become a torture for me to walk through a large student lounge. I would go to the bathroom after the first half of the trek to gather myself in the stall, to work my breath for the return.

And then drugs climbed into an empty seat in my ‘57 Chevy of the spirit.

(The top did not come down.)

But all that was to the good in a way, too. Descents are the only route for many of us, because misery always offers a choice: is it going to be this way forever, does it have to be so, or do I need to find another?

I took to doing acid, Window Pane mostly, some mushrooms, started paying attention in lit classes. I got interested in song writers: Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, Don Maclean, Pete Sinfield during his King Krimson days and after; I read Ginsberg’s VERBATIM--a large paranoid social ramble, ON THE ROAD, tried DIET FOR A SMALL PLANET: the sprout kingdom, poured over the Gita, depth psychology, Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, BE HERE NOW, participated in Group therapy, learned c, g, and d on the guitar, how to play kitchen pots, fake the harmonica.

Springsteen hit, Tom Waits. Songwriters have always been a great comfort for me--back then because I was moving toward poetry. And since I’d come from a blue collar home, one with no cultural bent--outside of my father’s one recording of Caruso, his love for Mahalia Jackson, it was nice to get access to something from Mr. Rogers’s kindred Beat neighborhood.

College had been no great help at first because I had no way into the prevailing learned room. The echoes of once-Protestant discourse, the professors’ and poets’ sensibilities were circuses worth watching, sure, but it was like the whole thing went down in a foreign language.
The Beats were earthy, regular, not academics, and I was happy for that.

But I knew, too, that this new angle wasn’t enough to get me through John Lennon’s night. I still couldn’t relate to people, at least very well—though beer helped. So I stepped on my life as I lived it, spat on it in a thousand ways.

(I couldn’t scrape it off of Mick Jagger’s shoes.)

Like Berryman’s Henry, I had no inner resources, not enough strength. So that was always a worry. Would I make it . . . and to what?

The future grinned—should I sleep with my trousers rolled? (Prufrock hounded me, because like a lot of young people back then—and now no doubt, I was paranoid him.)

God, however, has his ways.

Jesus freaks (and Krishnas) were really big back then, in airports, at colleges, downtown. And that was where I first met the former: around Cleveland State, walking to and from the Terminal Tower. Here were people who claimed to have answers to the questions that mattered. I needed to know if there was anything to what they claimed: anything.
Later Buddhist literary types would say that acid was an avatar, a way for God to enter.
Maybe in some way they were right.

In any case, I would argue with Jesus people for hours at the University. Sometimes we drew crowds.

I’d also met a few more orthodox young Catholic women at CSU: Terry Krowka, Barb Reiner, Joy Allie, and they intrigued me. They seemed to believe and to have a comfort level with a wacky world—without denying its absurdity. (Of course the fact that they were attractive didn’t hurt either.) So I took to spending time at the Newman Center. And it was during one of these visits that I got up the nerve to ask a priest where I could find a nice Christian farm community.
Actually, I was looking for a nice cultic place like the Moses David folks might provide--where I could slow down, get laid basically. But to my infinite good fortune, the hippified priest told me about Madonna House in Ontario.

My options were waning rapidly, so it wasn’t long until I felt like I had no choice. I uprooted, went there, stayed for two months. The place just blew me away. I saw people living authentically hidden Christian lives! And that began to change me--though as everyone knows, it is and isn’t that simple: getting out of the muck, on track. The baggage I’d been carrying, family habits, personal sin, I still carry—if in lighter (and, regrettably, often more stylish) luggage.

But maybe it just feels like that because I don’t carry it alone.

In either case, Jesus does not relieve us of it.

Madonna House was a grace. It offered Christ, who saved my life. But I really hadn’t known what to expect going in. (Fr.) Lee had been happy to help, but when he did, after all, he did offer a caveat: it was kind of conservative.

But there were other happy factors, too, in my heading north, factors I didn’t know about then. When I was a child, for example, I once asked my other New Philly grandmother (the other one) to pray to the lady in the large holy picture by her door for me. It was obvious even then—I must’ve been 6 or so-- that I was in real trouble and would need help.
She said she would.

The picture was of St. Therese, the Little Flower, who has been my “little mother” for many years now. She’s been behind so much: I reconnected with the friend who would be my wife on Oct. 1—sixteen years down that later road! That was the day I got Linda’s letter, the one where she told me she’d become a Catholic. Therese would come to her in dreams before we married, tell her that I was ok. Also, Oct. 1st is my spiritual director’s birthday.

Are there any accidents, coincidences for the believer? I don’t think so—though of course there are always limits to what we see.

My birthday is Dec. 10th, and so I have no problem milking that cow either. It’s Emily Dickinson’s birthday—a fact I hold dear. It’s also the day Thomas Merton both entered and left the monastery. It’s also the day the Franciscan University of Steubenville opened its doors. And it’s the day JP II said his first mass, and finally, it’s also the feast of Our Lady of Loretto (Mary’s house), at least on some years—another name perhaps for Madonna House: Nazareth.
I would trace out that extraordinary community farm experience, but in fact I’ve already done so. (See THE CHEESE STANDS ALONE: chapter 2.)

I would certainly recommend the place to anyone. I made a ton of friends, all of whom I’ve lost touch with. Lovely folks, though, each with something to give, to help you through your life. Jim Guinan, a staff worker saved my life with his “It’s a great life, Dave, if you just keep plugging and doing the best you can.” Tom Egan, a guy named Jim, another staff worker, who wanted so badly to become a priest; and then when he did, he crashed in some way. I never got all the details.

Not to mention the monster herself, Catherine Doherty. A crusty old saint who irritated everyone because she didn’t care about anything by God’s will. I remember her sitting next to Elsie Luke one time (a woman who would later be my chair at FUS). “What are you doing here,” she asked her. “You should be in the Yukon.”

Maybe I heard the tale, but it was pure Catherine. She was cool.

All these years later, though I’ve lost track of all those guest friends, Fr. David May and Fr. Robert Pelton are still very dear to me. Fr. Bob is my spiritual director, and though I never see him much anymore, we are bound. When last I did get a chance to visit, about six years ago with my family, I felt like St. John when we talked, my head on his spiritual chest. At that time he told me about his family problems, which was a huge gift—because I had been feeling hemmed in by PR Catholicism: the “I’m good—cruise.” Complete nonsense, but necessary I suppose (or seemingly so) when Catholics are trying to sell their colleges or tv networks.

I opened my mouth when he spoke; that helped me to take it all in.

Odd.

Fr. David, who we’d published in our chapbook series, came up to FUS to read a few years ago, and he was a major blessing. He wept some at BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEEE, a movie we showed him. I real heart for the poor. And when we walked around our neighborhood, he was so attentive to the wildlife. We heard a bird, whistle. He said: “A robin. . . Now listen, another will follow.” And it did. His poetry is the best I’d heard of the new Christian stuff because it was so clear in the listening that his life was “a living sacrifice of praise” in some way--in a way that no other poet’s I’ve read seems to be.

I bless the place, could have stayed now that I’d been baptized in the Spirit, but I was finally too restless for that life. Besides, we all choose the hardest routes, and I’d never been a success in the world.

Chapter III:
Cleveland
’76-‘88

I had Jesus, yes, but I still had to find out how to get on in the world. And though I suppose most of us never do completely, still God does move us along, is gracious enough to allow us eventually to see the value of humility. It is sanity. Things are just that simple. You get your little place, praise God, and you do your little work. And if you don’t make too much useless noise in the process, there’s a good chance you just might make it out of here alive.

I struggled mightily when I got back, though, and indeed kept coming back to Cleveland, between flights to Steubenville, points west, NYC, Puerto Rico, Ontario, Texas. For me, the two central questions I’ve always had to deal with, before and after my conversion, have been what work will I do and will I have the perseverance to do it? Jesus was there, yes, is here.

But as I say, unfortunately, so am I.

I loved Cleveland, still do: something about poets and their home places. And it has been one of the real crosses in my life that I’ve not been able to go back, to walk across the Cuyahoga River. I’d like to rub elbows with those loons again, touch base, play basketball with childhood friends, have a beer with the Madden’s Irish Village crowd.

I played softball with the latter group for about eight years. They were a crazed group of men and women, alive, most having been lit majors at CSU and subsequently mailmen. So wit was a valued commodity.

When somebody would hit a pop fly during a game and call, “I’ve got it,” at least one person from the bench would offer clarification: “We’ll see.”

Our manager’s recurring bit of batterly advice--“Hit like an adult.”

Great guys to drink beers with, though few of them were Christians in any discernible way—including me, too often. But they had not been deadened by convention, either, and none of them wanted IBM. The glue was literature, books really. CSU, after all, had a great English Dept back then.: mostly Ivy league profs—though two of the worst were from Harvard. Two of the most impressive scholars I ran into were Glending Olson and Barton Friedman. Barty was from Wisconsin, Glending, the University of Mars. (I kid--Otis Sistrunk.) Actually both were great teachers, as were so many others: Alberta Turner, John Gerlach, Earl Anderson, Donald Miller.

CSU was also the place where I met my wife, Linda. We worked on the lit magazine together, sixteen years before we tied the umbilicals.

The faculty was wonderful, alive to students, eccentricities. And there were plenty of those. Another thing I liked about the place was that nobody was driving daddy’s car; just lots of smart blue-collar kids, just enough wackiness in the air, left over from the 60’s to make it all worth the time.

I once made the mistake of taking a Milton class Saturday morning. The first day I showed up: a ghost, had to excuse myself several times to hug the institutional bowl. Not surprisingly, I was not a sterling student during my undergrad years. Leonard Trawick would later call my tracks “spotty” in a letter of recommendation. But I tried not to let my failures get in the way of the literary experience. My favorite I-don’t –know-this-answer answer came in an 18th century test when I was asked to identify the author of a quote, Addison or Steele, somebody like that.

“A drunk in the territorial prison.”

I had to drop the class. (Out, out, brief spot!)

Most everyone on the team loved Joyce, Yeats, anything Irish, but especially the newer burn-outs, anything Bukowski-like: Donlevy, Brautigan. There’d be late nights, Irish blues on the banjo—that particular “musician” later boating down the Amazon; runs after Chinese food; yelling my way down the dark streets, tipsy, climbing the nearest barbed-wire fence or generally chasing women. Several of the guys founded a stand-up comedy group named “Spud and Tatters”; then their were burlesque bars and egg salad; lasses, beer, pot, acid, and softball.
I remember one guy slept on a slanted bed--the short Amazonian fellow. The first time I every saw him: Mike, and Joe: the guy who would “manage” our softball team--also the star of potato comedy, they were boxing each other in CSU’s geodesic dome. Marquis of Queensbury, gloves and all. These two short little guys, wacking away.

In one of my own rentals, on E. 27th, the burlap on the inner walls actually waved in the winter wind. It all added up to an early kind of Tom Waits existence. It would have been perfect had I found some solid (and fun) Catholics, but so often that seems to be an oxymoron. Liberalism had already nestled its heart-thorn just about everywhere in the churches I knew. So squishy city Catholics paled graphically when compared to these guys and gals. But on the other hand, parish liturgy committees everywhere probably blossomed.

Who could stomach that?

I lived in all kind of places. Perhaps the weirdest was during my employment at the Boy’s Club on Pershing Ave. I shared a house with the manager, and during the blizzard-y year of ’77 (or was in ’79?), we both survived in an unheated house. I’ve never been able to fix anything, and I think he thought I was kidding—or else he was trying to goad me into learning how to light the furnace pilot light or something—but I never did figure out what I had to do. So I slept on the third floor, in my shoes, watching my breath as I moved toward golden slumbers (with icicles).

Silly.

I showered at CSU.

But where would I be able to find an orthodox community anyway? Certainly nowhere around any college. (And one stays so busy, being addictive.)

Virtue was always the fuzzy goal, but how was I going to be able to swing that? I couldn’t walk down the street and rub my stomach at the same time.

But Jesus is merciful, and I would need that. It has taken me many years to begin to settle in.

Of course, life wasn’t always hi-jinx, Junie and beer. (Too bad in a way.) There was also the matter of rent, foodstuffs, finding direction—or a sniff of same, enough to calm the beast. I still had to find a job I didn’t like, suck it up for the pellet. And then I had to show up until the next goal became clear—all the while trying to learn courtesy of a sort: since other people were part of this Christian business.

But self-absorption is a big fat ape who sits in the middle of your living room collecting navel lint, at least when he’s not rattling through the refrigerator, helping himself to your Hamm’s.

My problem was that I had always hoped that I could find a good monk-like job, so I could write: roofing, Braille and Talking Books at the library, the Boy’s Club, consumer research, assisting a tailor, dock work at the steel mill, working with developmentally or socially-challenged populations, secretarial, clerking, spray painting mining equipment, various mindless grey factory jobs, warehouse and department store and gas station and junkyard work; not to mention selling guns and cameras and housewares, driving cab. What reason was there for my hope? It amazes me, now that I look back.

Jesus.

But there’s a natural hope here as well, something given me by my parents. Whatever the difficulties, Mr. and Mrs. Craig have given me some sense of worth. So I kept at my life back then, hoping that some new vista might reveal itself, that I could settle down into a physical “yes”!

But that never happened, couldn’t because I was not settled in myself.

What did happen was the wage rut. I didn’t like any of it, though the people I met always offered some consolation, if I knew their names or not.

Times were light, times were dark. We get it all, don’t we? But it’s the joy, He who is joy who makes it all cohere. Poetry alone can’t do that. Nor can we. And what’s surprising is that He’s always sneaking out in one way or another around the edges, always revealing Himself no matter the weather. There a comic cast to so much of what I do, have done. My laughter has become richer, had to, because Christian humor is always about Him in some way, isn’t it? It’s testimony.

Working with the developmentally-challenged seemed like a good way to go for awhile; I could serve, work as I wrote. It seemed like a good chance to grow in something that at least resembled virtue, and I did enjoy it, for a time—always for a time. With those kinds of jobs there’s always the burn-out factor, unless you are St. Anthony of the Desert. (Maybe if I hadn’t accepted the checks!) And that was true of everyone who worked at those places, everyone who was not in administration.

(Insert your own quip here.)

I worked at two retarded places in the Cleveland area: The Green Road Developmental Center and at a similar place on Euclid Ave. in East Cleveland: Parents Association for Retarded Children and Adults, for about nine months each time. I always got strong evaluations, especially so when it came to intervention. This skill proved crucial as many of the residents had serious psychological problems as well as developmental ones. Occasionally they would go off, but that was only part of the problem. There was also the heightening tension that lead up to the explosion, a slope of increasingly unruly behavior. And then when the challenged resident hit the fan, one had to find a way to sit on him gently—to find a physical strategy that came down to that.

The guys were fun for the most part, but the behaviors ended up being pretty cyclic. You might feel like you’ve been doing some good until you got into a PIP meeting. Then the shrink population would straighten you out! That could get anyone into a funk: how much am I doing here? Do I matter?

(The question is answered just before you ask.)

But no matter how dark the general funk, no matter how solitary the walk, humor was always there.

It’s what people often don’t get about Flannery O’Connor: the salvific humor.

It’s always the people who make things worthwhile. And it was so in those places. Glenn, a black teenager for example, was fierce, but jovial too. He liked to laugh. Such combinations could make the work difficult, demanded a delicacy as one had to calibrate the responses, work toward some cast of normalcy. I remember one guy, Leon, a diagnosed schizophrenic who used to tell me upon occasion, “I’m going to carve your guts out with a spoon.”

No hard feelings, though, he said that to everybody.

He just wanted to be left alone, so he could grind his teeth in peace.

He was not one of my guys, though, and there were times when he’d calm off to the side, smoke his cigarettes—until he caught your glance. Then he’d turn away, start mumbling. (I suppose I do the same often enough in my own way.) There were other live wires, too: big Marie, who would clump into the cottage after work, draining her cigarette, keen on verbally assessing and commenting on who had romantically quit whom.

Roger and Emil, two of my guys, were big, absolutely hated to take showers; but they did love Wendy’s. So of course we linked those things. “To tell you the truth, Dave,” Roger used to growl, huge flakes of dried forehead skin wafting in the air conditioning breeze. “I just don’t worry about it.”

Martha was this wonderful pie-eyed, tall woman, quick with an embarrassed laugh, disfigured hands covering her face. She was a joy. The story was that when she was younger, kids would see her in a third story attic window on their way to school. She’d be smiling, waving!

She needed to be rescued.

Many of the stories were sad. There was one guy from another cottage who used to walk up the driveway every night at about 4:30, wait for twenty minutes or so, then walk back. As I later found out, his parents had told him years before that they’d be back to pick him up! And a little, chubby woman, Joanie, with thinning hair who used to stutter: word was she’d been found in a room with a hanged parent.

Who could invent this stuff?

I once had some good fun with Emil (of Emil and Roger), playfully trying to see if he knew that those little men in the tv weren’t really that small. He enjoyed the humor: the fact that I really knew that he knew, and he playfully got all that, at least for while.

Finally I had to massage his shoulders, tell him how good a guy he was. (And he was.) They were all likeable, really, the ones who let you close. But things could be crazy too. Emil was big compared to most of the residents and could be a bully—once or twice I really did have to sit on him!

A week after I left for Colorado, in fact, one resident in a different college stabbed another to death.

(One always wonders: did I have anything to do with that—seeds sown, that kind of thing.)

Glenn was, as I say, a delight, usually only potentially dangerous. But one did have to pay attention. How tough it must’ve been for him, for all of them! It struck me one time while at work that they are there for us, for our growth. How else would we learn to love?

I have a Downs’ son now, Jude, and he really wrestles with all those things: how to deal with the public, his school peers, how to be “big.” When he was just a toddler, I used to hold him over my shoulder at Mass. Sometimes when I’d pull him back, look at his face, I could see that he was catching every look from the people behind. Nothing was lost on him. That grieves.
The good part was that it was the only life he knew, so though people put him off, he wasn’t aware of other possibilities.

The problem now is that he gets the possibilities thing. His brother and sister get to do things he doesn’t. Plus some of his relatives are less likely to want to spend time with him than they are with the other two. This is where it gets tough. I just keep reminding him how valued he is here, how blessed we are to have him in our presence—plus I buy him sodas, take him on dad and son outings.

Still, his life has always been hard.

(I remember when the two of us went to Garabandal and Lourdes on pilgrimage—someone had paid our way. A priest who had a brother with Down’s was slightly offended. “That’s not a sickness.” And while I’m sure he loved his brother, apparently he was not paying close attention to the grief engendered in the lad. Jerk.)

Probably because of Jude’s vulnerability, I found (not) early (enough) that spanking just didn’t do the trick. He would just go off, get uncontrollable, cry like a little baby—never a problem with the other children.

So now it’s all bartering. “If you want to go to the library on Saturday, you must do this chore now.” “If you don’t do this you can’t go to Adoration with me on Friday morning.” Adam Smith would’ve been proud: pure self-interest—though Jude is the most naturally charitable member in our family. When he smiles completely, as he did this morning, I am bothered a little by the fact that I can’t do anything with that beauty but soil it.

So I tell myself to accept that gift, move on, just be me for him. That will have to do.

Those kind of jobs could be high tension; though any of them can be if you have the gift! So, like most males in North America, I need to get away, occasionally feed my tendency to lose myself--to a bunch of human growth hormones in a local color scheme. In Cleveland, during the fall (of our demise), that would still be the Browns, or something like them. Like all the other teams in Cleveland, they have stunk since Adam’s bite in the rotten apple—which, incidentally, happened on Dec. 29th, 1957.

Detroit is an evil place. (Pittsburgh too, of course.)

It’s how God deals with us, the city: compare Cleveland to Pittsburgh since 1971! They get the resurrection, we get the crucifixion. “Thank You, Jesus,” says the local spiritual marine sports fan, taking the flagellant: “May I have another!” Occasionally, shiny Manny Ramirez (LeBron/LeQuit) moments have come—sporadic illusory epiphanies; but like all things transitory, gratefully they subside, and we are left with just ourselves again, in the only game that counts.

Without viable community, I can still find ways to even turn that mostly harmless past time (if you don’t count the attendant testosterone fan thuggery) into an exercise in bad judgment.

Depression is not all sparkle and glee you know.

Perhaps the fact that I have been something of a victim will help me after death—St. Perry Mason--but probably not, at least to any significant extent. And that will be as it should. So that might be me next to you, brother, shoveling afterlife coal into the furnaces of my becoming, trying to free up the rusted hinges of my heart so I can get all the way home.

(I once asked my spiritual director: do Protestants have to go to Purgatory since they don’t believe in it?)

Mortification is a great way out of that selfishness—but that hurts!

The next thing you know it will be all pain, and I’ll be like Mother Theresa, blinking into years of darkness.

I’m going to have to live a very long life.

Sometimes I think self-hatred will be the last sin to die—though I know St. Francis de Sales says it’s pride: fifteen minutes after we do. But perhaps they’re not so different. Self-hatred comes out of childhood shame, and vanity follows like a puppy: a kind of lower case version of Milton’s sin and death, one birthing the other, though in my instance the offspring comes with a whimper, no food.

At any rate, here’s to penance: the Browns!

Christ is always there, of course, in some way: in the banter, the divine comedy, in the gift. (I’d like to say that accounts for Dante’s peaceful death mask, but he looks like he had some bad beans just before he got the bill.)

Jesus is in us all, creatively. He’s inventive, too, finds all kinds of ways to make his points, to teach us how to love. He actually found a way to publicly embarrass (and humble) St. Therese, the Little Flower, even though she was living behind cloistered walls. Somehow a scam artist had gotten hold of her picture, used it to help him take people to the cleaners. She found out about it.

Funny, really.

And that creative impulse finds all sorts of ways to reveal itself. Later, at Colorado State, I would study surrealism: a nice “gift of tongues” way to praise God using language itself.
The comic, joyful dance has been with me since my baptism in the Holy Spirit at Madonna House. So after I first got back to Cleveland, I spent those early years writing dithyrambs to try and give Him the glory. I wanted to express the joy I could find nowhere in contemporary verse—or before for that matter. It seemed like something I could do: joy in the lived moment. Hopkins and Crashaw do some of that, but it’s usually abstracted from the minute particulars of their lived lives, from the guy in his size 11s, chewing on a stalk of Welsh or Italian grass.
I don’t think we ever know freedom until we know the Gift. And once that gift opens us, anything is possible; connections reveal themselves. We get a sense of how God works all things to the good. Nothing else comes close to that delight, though even after becoming a Christian, I have chased enough imitations to get my own wing in the stupidity ward.

Big ward.

The real beauty of the Holy Spirit is that He reveals Himself anywhere, while we’re doing anything. Pitching hay or respectable woo.

He is heaven, so His felt presence is always a call to dance.

Eventually, I allowed the more distant critical meditative faculty to control the poems. I turned to sonnets and confessional poems, moved in a more discursive direction. But it wasn’t time for that yet—if we can believe God orders all things; and why wouldn’t I?

I enrolled in the Ph.d. school at Case Western: still with too many women on the brain! It was a typically weird time: me alone in a third floor Stillman St. walk-up, trying to be a faithful Catholic. I liked the name of the street: a gift, a reminder. A huge church, St. Ann’s, perched on Coventry Rd., not a hundred yards away.

There were never lines for Confession.

So you can imagine the gripping sermons!

(I think of Fr. Mitch Pacwa, of EWTN, who pointed out that liberal religious types do not reproduce. Why would they bother?)

Anyway, while there I got a letter from Mensa asking me to join. (I have no idea what that was about! On some days I couldn’t even count to 200—unless we were doing beers on the wall.) But Jesus is always affirming me in one way or another.

It was a great place to walk, what with the nice old homes. I’ve always liked to walk, maybe because it allows you time to both think and exercise, gives anti-social/poetic types a sense of connectedness. It’s nice to stretch it out in any case. Besides, it is an Olympic sport--as legitimate as our favorite purported Nazi sympathizer Avery Brundage doing ribboned gymnastics.

(The Olympics can have that feel, can’t they? Superior human beings. . . . thank God for the “surf’s up” X-games infusion.)

You can really grind when you walk, so maybe it’s a philosopher’s version of sport. In any case I especially love doing so in the winter, that most contemplative, most poetic of seasons. There are so few distractions.

Unfettered, you can enjoy God’s presence.

I was writing dithyrambs in ’77 or so, in winter while serving as an associate editor of THE DARK TOWER at CSU (with my eventual wife) when we got a letter from Kenneth Rexroth. He was put off by the fact that we’d only taken two of the oriental poems he’d sent, but he had to grudgingly admit that they were the best of the lot. . . .and I had chosen them.

So for a day in that office I was a small room hero.

These things come for all of us, I’m sure: moments of affirmative grace. There were others: one time while at CSU, listening to the Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz read in a 250 seat auditorium, The Spirit of God came upon me so surprisingly, so powerfully and for such a length of time that people around me actually began to recoil.

I actually felt embarrassed by it.

What does one do with that?

I don’t know what any of that means—I still haven’t heard from Sweden--outside of the fact that Jesus is with us, loves us, and has a place for all of us, both in this world and in the next.

And the women!

Chastity had occasionally checked in, always for too short of a time--though a friend of mine at Colorado State once pointed out that it always became a good goal, odd coincidence, when one wasn’t keeping specific company. (I’ll assume, though, that grace was at work here--too!) It was tough, in any case, trying to be faithful.

“Ain’t nobody like to be alone.”

I would’ve done better had I committed myself to an actual prayer life, acquired some virtue. “No” is an acquired habit, just like anything else. Had I grown more, humility might’ve actually expressed itself in obedience.

But hey, I’m not dead yet!

Someone on the net once reviewed my poems on the net, said that she loved the epiphany one night, but found themselves completely perplexed the following morning. What did the poem mean? That’s the danger with short poems, short joyful/surreal ones especially. They require so much to align.

Those early poems were mountain toppers. They give you the joy on the summit, but because you don’t often get the rest of the mountain, they can be tough slopes on which to stand. That’s what led me to write more confessional poems: to deliver the C. K. Williams’ “rest of the story.”

I took to his poetry for that reason and for another. The man dealt in juxtaposing situations as much as in setting off imagery. Williams wrote long lines—pushing them hard toward prose, using happenstance the way Dylan Thomas used surreal detail: that is, he would rub one occurrence against its another, creating a third—an epiphany. As a Christian poet, I like the way that process reveals how Jesus acts in this world.

But as often as I found good moments in Cleveland, they were never enough. A young man needs a career, a mate. The problem with the first is that you need to be trained, and that is tough to do if there’s no other reason to stay in one place. The other reason would be a woman, but what potential nest maker is going to hang for too long with a guy who can’t hold a job.

Jesus had his work to do!

Chapter IV:
On the (Catholic) Road
’72-‘86

I was forever taking to the hills, too little gold in my pocket, looking for some work that could last, for a Leprechaun’s life in Christ. Hitching mostly. But I wasn’t settled in myself, so how could I ever stop and stay anywhere—or know the thing when I found it. I should’ve gone into advertising! Jesus was certainly there, and over there too, of course, through both the real nights and the false dawns. (Once 60 extra bucks miraculously appeared in my middle drawer to help me on my hitching way.)

I don’t think I served Him so well, probably badly, as ever. But most times I kind of liked sitting on the side of the road, just me and Him, my duffle—if it didn’t go on too long. I liked meeting the drivers, getting their stories. And I liked being in new places, trying something new—since the old, whatever that was, clearly was not working.

We all want heaven, and until we’re at the place of fitting service, we go hard after it. And as I look back from the now, from that place, I see the only thing that has finally taken me to fixed serving place has been Divine intransigence. He knew what He wanted when I started teaching at FUS, and my take or happy feet have been of little consequence since then.

I’ve never liked living in this depressed Ohio Valley to be honest. All it has is high school football and its memories—and the Stillers—though surely any place would have not done just as well! (I would’ve found something amiss in Cleveland before too long. I had every other time.)

During the 60s black flakes of pollution used to descend with the snow around here. But the students at the university, my colleagues, the intense Christian atmosphere at Franciscan: they all are marvelous, as the local Ohio Valley neighbors have been--John Phillips, Jack Swaim and Bill down the street with his two Ph.D. daughters.

Jack is my WV neighbor. When I first moved here from across the river, I had to dug up the slag, put in a back yard: dirt and turf; and he couldn’t do enough, offered his truck, found me the soil: “The keys are always in it.”

My wife marvels, too, says there is a different angel in West Virginia. Hospitality seems more central to them than it is to Ohioans. Maybe that’s because they see themselves as part of the south. I don’t know

Still, it’s never been home.

Part of me has always needed Cleveland like a fix. (What is more powerful than the fictional
home we almost remember?)

Jesus, though, Lord, simply has never wanted to hear that. (Won’t now.) He just kept (keeps) saying no. “Stay. . . . The Cross. . . . Roll over. . . .The Cross. . . . Play dead.”

Arf.

My roaming started early: in ’72, even before I became a Christian. I left Cleveland State initially because the baseball dream was hacking up fur balls, and I needed to find as Paul Brown called it, my real work. At first I thought about psychology—helping others; but that plan dissolved when I discovered I had every malady covered in my Abnormal Psych textbook.
I’d never been to California, anywhere really. So I bought myself a plane ticket, went out to visit an old high school wrestling buddy. Once on board I put the earphones on upside down, the cord hanging down from above my head. . . . What?!

(A most excellent metaphor.)

I roamed because I was lost; that’s what people do, even when they are at “home.” And the Lord allowed it to continue even through grad school, fifteen off-and-on years later.
That first trip, shuffling down through Southern California without direction or sense of who I was, thoroughly exposed me, which was good. Without Jesus, no people skills, I had squat. The weight of the emptiness just flattened me.

(Just before deciding to head down to LA, in fact, I seriously considered committing myself.)

“It never rains in California. But girl, don’t they warn you . . . ”

It’s a sad state of affairs when your life becomes a bad pop song.

As I ran out of money, though, I ran out of illusions, many of them anyway. And that’s always a good. (I also became so thin, 135 lbs., vital, that I felt as if I could leap buildings.)

I found work in a furniture store, dusting mostly, lived in a cheap hotel. I think the owner felt sorry for me.

Which is more than I could say about the Scientologists.

They wanted me to join, give them my last 45 bucks to do so. (I would be completely renewed, so all money in the world would be mine.) I actually considered doing as much until I noticed one of the pictures on their wall: L. Ron Hubbard playing two pianos at once. At first I thought that was nice, until it struck me: how well could the guy play one? I didn’t remember his name being discussed in my jazz class. No one I knew had ever said, “Hey, forget Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson. Check out the L. train.”

Jerk.

Things got a little tight.

On one of my trips to McDonald’s I began to envy the pigeons some guy was feeding fries to.
It was time to get back, milk my family until I could get back on my feet.

During one trip in the late 70s, I hitched all the way back from a monastery in Redwood Valley, California to Steubenville—thanks in large part to a Mormon guy who drove me 200 miles out of the way through the Rockies, let me sleep in his car. (All I had on was a jacket in April.) Of course the putz was trying to convert me in the process: “You’re from the tribe of Joseph. I can just tell.”

“Thank you”--I guess.

A nice fellow, all in all.

Back in Steubenville, I eventually managed to come up with a fiancée--talk about an optimist--both of us. During another later trek I hitched out to Kansas—cherche-ing a different femme. Neither paid off, at least in any expected way. But I was still taking air, so that was good.

Plus I got to sleep under bridges once I got past St. Louis on that first trip: fun, at any time of year. You wake up, feel like the tin man--cold, jammed joints needing oil.

By the late 70s I still had no degree, nor my foot in any career-door. I think during the Kansas trip I went out hoping to find work as a farm laborer or as a school bus driver. I hoped to find what I was looking for in a woman I’d met at Madonna House.

When I hitched, I got rides from all sorts. Once I had the misfortune of being picked up by a resident doctor from NYC. He called the emergency room wounded there LLPSs: “low life pieces of shit.” Charming. That discussion went more in the direction of Woody Allen as I remember: how only New Yorkers could really get him. Another time while hitching up to the UP in Michigan, I got picked up by a Detroit plain-clothes cop. He told me about some black gangs in Destroy who demanded initiates kill a white person. Needless to say, I took a wider loop on the way back.

On one ride to Colorado, I had to take turns with the driver, holding his troublesome three-speed floor shifter in place for alternating 50 mile turns. He took me from to Toledo to Denver, so I was happy to do so. And I got to meet his two aunts along the way as well. One was old school Baptist: “Lord ain’t going to ‘low much more of this!” She’d rock on her front porch rocker, castigating tv preachers, the government. The two of us drank beer on the tongue and grooves, nodded as she spoke. Her husband was fun, though. Later that night he tried to convince me a cow could jump a six foot fence. (I’d seen agitated cows up in Combermere: surprisingly agile, powerful creatures.)

When talking about a farmer down the road, he told: “That guy couldn’t raise an umbrella.”
The guy’s other aunt was a White Sox fan: A Gov. Lamb kind of gal, all with a smile and hale how you go. The old should just die, get the heck out of the way. Abortion was good, freed women up. She was in furniture sales, expansive, friendly; cooked us steaks as we watched a coifed-haired Tony LaRussa try to manage the game. She actually offered me employment--if Denver didn’t work out: gave me her sprinkle-edged card.

The disturbing thing was that I actually kind of liked her. (Would I have played mumbly-peg with Goebbels I wondered, back-slapped and had a beer with Chairman Mao?)

Over those years, I took a pack of very slow Greyhounds. Always deeply unpleasant: they stopped at every breath of a town. I remember once outside of Sacramento, some guy with big feet, over the chair in front of him. Created quite a stir. (On that trip I’d said the Jesus Prayer for three days straight! Water off a duck’s back—or so it seemed to me.)

On another trip I almost fell into adultery between garages during a lay-over somewhere in Wisconsin.

That was all that fire needed, another rotten log.

Hitching to Kansas, I actually managed not to sleep with the woman in question. So sometimes I actually did do the right thing! It’s funny, I always expected to find something around the next bend. Why? What road, berm could possibly be different there?

But maybe it was the expecting that mattered.

Wasn’t that one of Descartes arguments for God?

(I actually thought of two or three of his four proofs during the semester right before I took that philosophy course. Maybe I missed my calling—I should have been a mathematician.)

I liked the people I met in Kansas, at least to the extent that I could meaningfully meet or interact with anyone. And that was always a problem. So much of me was under (rightful) suspicion. I was Groucho, not wanting to belong to any club that would have me for a member.
Plus, there was simply no physical place for me, nowhere that felt like one. Even after becoming a Christian. But Jesus did offer hope—else I would’ve stopped seeking. That makes me think of Michael Mott’s biography of Merton. (I’d meet him later at BGSU.) I don’t know if he was aware of what he’d done in the writing, but there is a beautiful and generous arc to Br. Louis’s life, including the sin. God gave him everything he needed to work out all of his natural and good impulses. Who Merton was found complete expression in the path God had allowed him to take.

I’d be willing to bet that the same is true for all of us.

No section on my expressive, expansive path--“floundering”--would be accurate without including Combermere. But it would take more than the human eye to make sense of it. As Catherine was fond of saying: “God writes straight with crooked lines.”

I went up there five or six times, usually for about two months each time. And even though I was never stable enough to stay and try to make a vocation or to know where to go, still I did meet many, many extraordinary people. Early on, I tried to keep up with them, some already mentioned: Daoud from Lebanon, Miles from Vermont, Mike and Steve from western Canada, Tom from Cleveland, Jean-Michel from Quebec, but as the trips mounted, that became less of an issue. I met so few of them later.

I found the place other; it brought me a joy that has stayed with me. All from people living the gospel without show or gain. They loved. A dear staffer, now gone, Tom Egan once told me: “There’s no glamour in the gospel.”

There were irritants as well of course. Some of the women held a kind of feminism dear, maybe because their founder was a woman. “Paint like a woman,” one once told me. Wouldn’t have helped. Besides, I was lazy.

But beyond that I was not one, so why should I?

Catherine Doherty, along with Fr. Flanagan, founder of SOLT (Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity), were the only canonizable saints I’ve ever met. Both were pure instruments. Their wills were not their own--entirely. (I met him once while hitching through Kansas City.)
How could I tell the will thing?

Well, what can I say? I just could tell. Having a very good intuition has its advantages.

I got a few poems while abbey-sitting for monks in Redwood Valley, but the odd part about that was when some years ago, after I’d volunteered to do a witness for The Steubenville Christian Businessmen’s Association, as I labored with the memories, some arresting stuff came flooding back.

I was 26 when I took that first right at Santa Rosa, staying for three or so weeks. The monks, who knew I was a monastic lean, had asked me to come--since were going on pilgrimage to Europe and Israel and needed someone to watch the joint.

So when the time neared for them to return, I was faced with a decision. Would I join? Sure, I had learned to do a lot of fun and useful things in their absence: how to lead sheep back to their pens in the evening using Twinkies as bait; how to slop hogs; how to negotiate revivals on an Indian reservation with an older woman, Rose; but those things did not constitute vocation.
Rose was an Indian princess (daughter of a chief) who had been a heroin addict, a prostitute, a Hell’s Angel.

She had a big scar across one of her biceps. When I asked she told me the story: she’d been arguing with a biker from another gang. The guy told her that her heart was hard. “That’s right,” she said. “It’s a diamond. Ain’t never been chipped!”

So the fine fellow pulls a knife and tries to cut it out, slicing her arm in the process.
Her boyfriend, the leader of the Angels around there, however, saved the day—sort of. He shot the guy in the back, killed him on the spot. That same beau later got busted when the cops dug up graves on his land farther north in California. (Usually she said they’d dump people in the Bay. The water was so cold they never came up. . . . )

Once she told me they ran a Highway patrol car, the officer was hassling them, off a cliff.
But the most useful thing I learned there was how to say the office—as I’d promised to do in their absence.

I had to really think about what I was going to do next.

The second thing I thought about was baseball, the miracle it would take to make that happen. As things stood, I was now one year too old for pitching—at least according to the Pirate scout who’d given me a lift back to downtown Cleveland a year before. (I’d been having one last go at it.) Now that would be something to shout from the rooftops: God making what was not possible happen. But while doing some (sorry) sprints, it hit me. No, no. Give it up. I had neither the will nor the stamina to make that happen. It was time to move on.

Ok, but then where could I go? I had no degree, no prospects.

I’d never been able to hold a job for more than nine months in my life. (I’m a teacher now. So God had obviously configured the stars to work that out!) At the time, however, I had to admit to myself that because I could not hold a job, I certainly could never expect to marry, have any kind of life.

Fr. Bonifacio, when he came back, though, helped clarify things. He suggested I become a monk, since it was pretty clear I could never make it in the world.
What could I do? Knuckle under, make a career of whimpering? ( . . . Wait!?)

Anyway, I felt like I had to dive back in.

So I turned, again, toward the impossible: me making it in the world--just as I had at Madonna House years before when Fr. Wild suggested to me that all pilgrims take the hardest way. . . . He was thinking priesthood. But without the tools or training, with the nothing provided, the hardest road for me has always been the widest—the world.

So I prayed: “Take my life, Lord. It’s beyond me. Make a place where there is none.”

I hadn’t remembered that prayer until I had to prepare for that luncheon. And in the years that have followed, He slowly, surely, has given me one. He has worked in time, provided me with a final job--in good humor because, as I say, the teaching year is nine months long, plus there are breaks in and between semesters!

It’s still a struggle, of course, because I am not a very stable person.

But even while I don’t provide natural PR fodder for the University, I have been here for 23 years, have had hundreds of good students; and I also have a great wife and three delightful correctives: children.

Jesus made it all happen, manipulating the world He owns. I certainly could never have done any of that on my own.

I roamed in every direction, but never too far. I was too neurotic for that. I could never, for example, do Brazil or Istanbul, though I thought about working steamers. In an easterly direction, I got as far as New York. For three or so years, I would get off at the Port Authority, visit my good ex-high school friend Jack and his wife Marian near Colombia. She worked as an emergency nurse; he was an MFA student, then a writer. (Their kids are now adults!) I always loved the place, NY, the energy, and Jack has always been great company. He’s an odd and welcome mixture of sincerity and hipness. I mean, how often do you see those things together?
He’s still a great friend.

We’d go to the Angler Bar, seats Kerouac and Burroughs and Ginsberg had warmed for us, or watch great films--they don’t show movies in NY. There was jazz in the parks, Dave Van Ronk at the Village, the museum of art—they had a painting of William Blake’s, or was it a painted engraving?

A wonderful place, filled like everywhere with the Spirit of the One who holds it all together.

After I’d finally managed to get my 10-year b.a. degree—tectonic fault lines fused, the Indians finished in the first division--I found work with my brother-in-law in Denver, construction. Goon work mostly, but it was nice and physical: moving holes, jack-hammering basements, talking Jimmy Morrison and the doors of perception with my acid cousin who was also on the crew.

It was all John Denver’s fault. Great high country--he was right: blue, dry, Kerouac’s west. And the people were fun.

I was the only real Christian on the crew, or nearly so, since two of the guys (cousin included) were born of college Jesuits: Regis University. But as ever I had no way to meet orthodox women.

There were no convents to hang outside of—to wait for faithful women to get the boot.
I’ve always regretted that fact that Madonna House does not have a Third Order! The larger church was so new age-y back then in the early 80s. That was before EWTN made itself felt. And while I’ll freely admit the Beat part of me can get put off from their old Europe shtick, I’m happy too that they have had a great and lasting effect on Catholicism in this country! Before they hit their stride, it was hard to get to a good Mass in a big city without hearing something offensive.

Since then, it’s been easier, more common to get a faithful priest.

That is not a coincidence.

But even when the mass was badly celebrated—and it wasn’t always--Mass was Mass and fed me in front of those mountains. And in between beers and learning how to drink Scotch with my cousin—one of the Regis guys—I had the good fortune of meeting a nice slightly older woman, living something of the life out there: white water rafting, flea markets, bad jazz, The Grateful Dead, “Amie, what you gonna do . . .,” film societies, Leadville bars, beer, backyard/poolside construction barbeques, cool and dry mountain summer nights.

Life, when it wasn’t too hard, was good.

I tried to make a life for myself, but I had my baggage to carry. All the answers my family hadn’t provided, the jag in my step. And there were new stickers on the suitcases by now as well. I’d spent several intervals in Steubenville, and so that place followed me thence, in the specter of my ex-fiancée who’d fled the University for Puerto Rico. (She would later join the army.)

I still felt like I loved her, but it was clear too that neither one of us were stable enough to make anything work. We’d kept meeting on our way to Mass at the University. It was almost as if God had brought us together--repeatedly. All I had to give her, though, in the end was nothing; and she, an ex-lesbian, didn’t have much more at her disposal.

I tried to coax her out west, where the work was demanding, the rewards maybe good. We could start a real life together, or so my line of thinking went. My brother-in-law had made overtures: I could take more of a leadership role in his company.

It wouldn’t have worked, though, as I certainly would’ve waned in the business world. So maybe she was a smart woman to go the road she went.

Given my present life, I’d say so. But it certainly didn’t feel like a good thing then.

Eventually, as I worked through what felt like the shards of a life, I met the slightly older woman mentioned above. She lived right next to my cousin’s and my apartment building on 25th off Federal. She was a liberal, with a good and sensitive squishy liberal heart, could empathize with God, and that (plus her look) made her very likeable. We had a lot of good times together. But in the end I wasn’t ready to settle for less than everything. I had way too much jump in my legs—couldn’t stay until I met a Catholic woman gifted enough to block the sun, until God put up a wall, would make me stay rooted, serve.

Personally I was still treading water, badly, even as a believer. It was clear to me that I could not live like a monk without a monastery I didn’t want—and I was not made to be a blue-collar laborer. Christ was (and is, of course) risen, offered His presence, but I needed more: a physical life. I needed the intellectual energy of other people.

I had no choice but to go back to school. There were graduate writing schools everywhere. Maybe I could get famous in one of them, teach if I had to. (There were plenty of faithful Christians, after all, and not many poets to answer that need.)

As I looked around back then, Boulder seemed a bit much: terminally hip in some way. I would
have to try the Fort, got pre-emptive, applied and went up to meet a few of the profs. Pompous in the extreme, I told the fiction teacher, Wayne Coyote, that since I’d published my first book with Cleveland State several years before, what I really needed next was directions to Norton.
He was offended by me. (Go figure.)

But the other guy I met proved more kindred: Loy Banks. He was not a full-time contributing member of the program, but liked to write, edited a little magazine. And he was a Christian, a gentle and encouraging Protestant. I wish I had kept up with him, but for some reason I didn’t. (I hope that lapse had nothing to do with my new-found status as a writing program student.)
We should all spend our lives on our faces--before our coffins, begging for humility.

Chapter V:
Where the Mountains Made Us
’82-‘84

Colorado State turned out to be fun, but trying, like everything I suppose. Miriam Bluebird, one of my teachers, earned grant money, publication by translating South and Central American women’s poetry. I enjoyed her classroom dips into Surrealism, starting with the French: Lautreamont, Jarry, Breton, moving through Vallejo, Neruda, Mistral, Paz, Parra, Asturias, others.

(I’ve met Christian academics who dismiss Neruda—I think because he was a pink-o. But I’ve never met a poet who didn’t like him.)

Our other teacher was Bull Ranchero, a larger than life character who’d studied at U. Mass. He loved Bly, deep image stuff, Basho, good 80s poets: Levine, Rich, Hugo, Williams, Dubie. At the time, in fact, all those poets seemed extraordinary, most of them anyway. The funny thing is, though, all that changed for me twenty some years later when I went back to some of those same poets for a class I was teaching. The second time around so much of their poetry just seemed dated.

It was like reading Longfellow or any of his three-named buddies around the Fireside. A kind of good old boy (and girl) club—with pretty much that same sensibility, or one those DWMs would easily recognize: secularized white-bread. And while I guess I had always known this to be so as far as vision went, what really amazed me was that is was also very true on a technical level.

I made the discovery while foraging around for a Poetic Forms text. I settled on Dacey’s STRONG MEASURES. A nice book, but the poetry inside was just, as my students might say, so 80s!

I was taken aback; I mean who ever heard of such a thing. What makes great poetry great, after all, is that it does not become dated.

But there it was.

What’s here today will more than likely be nowhere tomorrow. And while I guess we all knew and know that, still, to see it up close can be really freeing, especially if Harold Bloom hasn’t discovered you yet. It’s like Mary Karr’s said about the 50s cheese, Robert Lowell--who reads him today?

Anyway, that’s made me rethink writing programs, see them more than ever as merely starting points.

One of the good students poets whom I met when I was at Colorado State, James Falcon, told me a story which nicely illustrates the problem. He got to know a woman poet who was teaching at Iowa, let’s call her Sandra, and she encouraged him to apply. But when he did a year or two later, she looked at his work, profoundly disappointed: “Oh, we’re not doing that anymore.”

Who the heck was/is “we”? (E. Boland’s “company of poets?”)

So even though I went through two programs (one twice), I just don’t recommend them strongly to anyone anymore, unless the student insists, has the wherewithal and ability to separate the wheat from the suffocating deluge of PC content chaff.

Ranchero was a good guy, if a little heavy on solipsism. He could look at you like God: with lots of love and acceptance, though I was not a favorite, maybe because we got off on the wrong foot. I did my first paper excoriating Charles Olson for his blowfish ego.

Turns out teacher had studied with him. (It’s why I talk the way I do, foot in mouth.)

Probably the three best student poets during my time there were, along with Falcon--a deep-image guy who said he had to separate himself from “clock-time” to write; George the Greek, a hale fellow who went for a kind of deep-image Buddhist poetry; Bill Rhine, who raised being a smart ass into art--surprise, he was my favorite; and lastly Bam Bradley, who has since been drawn to the Church. All still are nice poets, and good folks, too, but the place itself, like so much on the front range suffered from terminal hipness.

The place seemed too aware of its mountainous surroundings. One of the women in the program, for example, was in Ripley’s BELIEVE IT OR NOT for having caught the largest swordfish on record. She became a type for the new woman; another, a really bad writer, lets call her Babs, managed to get tons of state grant money just because she was a militant lesbian. “Take back the night” was her spiel. She used to say that women should never allow themselves to be alone with men on elevators--even if they had to walk up 80 flights. In one of her plays, she actually had a scene where a woman in a car at a railroad crossing is surrounded by sixteen men who are trying to break into her vehicle, rape her. The driver finally has no choice but to ram into the passing train.

The staging would have been interesting.

But what really got me was the fact that it was all men’s violent fault—whatever was at issue. She was for pure segregation.

Then one day, she showed up at workshop with a black eye.

Turned out her lesbian lover had punched her.

No one else thought it was funny. They were all pretty squishy, though, no doubt had a heart for her pain. (That violence had probably initially come from men anyway.)

There’s a great quote of St. Therese’s: “Never allow your kindness descend into weakness.” Though we love lesbians (never feigning to be one), gay people (though given the media’s refusal to call us “pro-life,” I sometimes think we should call them “sorrowing people”: thou attesteth too much), and abortionists (and all loving and folksy Radcliff-type banjo-playing social engineers: the soft tyrants), we can’t compromise when it comes to the Truth.
JP II once said that the end of secular humanism is totalitarianism.

We would become like them if we were to capitulate: RAINBOW FISH, swimming among the shoals of relativism! If you’ve ever read that kid’s book, it really sums up the hard left. The gifted fish denies his talents because he doesn’t want anyone else to feel bad. That’s what the Marxist feminists in politics are up to, I think. They want America to neurotically deny, abase itself. Then she won’t abuse anyone ever again! We will be as poor as everyone.

But America is a gift to the world, as much as the runners from Kenya or the pot heads from Colombia.

And while I have to doubt that Jesus wants the Bush rich to share much more generously than they have up to this point--something more than a trickle--that must come out of grateful hearts, not out of big-brother strong-arm death-culture tactics: Lewis’ “bent nails”-men with all the right ideas!

I was, no surprise, way out of step with the comp powers that still are--there--and so I had no hope of securing a TA. (Or maybe they were perspicacious enough tell that I wasn’t ready, or both.) In either of those three cases, I had to find work, which included driving taxi, working 3rd shift at a developmental-challenged facility, and reading literary works into a tape recorder for a blind Saudi English literature student. (I was amazed, driving cab, at how often new Mid-Eastern Moslem students immediately wanted to stop at the porno shop--though I had and have my own sins, many no doubt greater than theirs.) The last job was pretty weird. Imagine trying to read Beckett’s WATT into a tape recorder. Would anyone know or care where I stopped?

So I did.

Cab driving was nicely fluid. You never knew what the day would bring. It was a natural in many ways. I could be alone but outside, could kick back in the fine Colorado weather and meet all kinds of new people in the process, serve. Many of the rides were keepies. The “pickle man” was this short likeable little Mexican guy who’d worked in a pickle factory for forty years. He couldn’t speak a word of English, lived in a run down shack on the north side of town. We couldn’t understand each other’s language--but smiles while I helped him carry in groceries went a long way! Another regular was Lillian, who used to ask for me. She was an older women who liked to go to bars, talk with everyone. Like most elderly folks, she didn’t tip much.
I did meet one guy once who said he’d come into Remington money. He offered to buy me a car on the spot. To this day I don’t know why said no.

I must confess I had one terrible and spiritually troubling experience at the Developmental Center where, for some reason that only God knows, I fell victim to abuse. The people all seemed nice enough, and so I had no way to see the thing coming.

One night I’d come in for my third shift to a half-staffed environment. Two women and 32 residents. The women were toast. And in one of the rooms, an old lady, who had a reputation for self-abuse, was in the process of yelling, beating herself up with her fists, nobody doing anything. As I said, the women were completely spent, so I couldn’t really blame them.
Since I was fresher, I went into the room, and sure enough, the old woman was hitting herself in the face, yelling, carrying on. I had to try and calm her, stop her; so I gently grabbed her wrists as I spoke, trying to shift her attention from herself. It didn’t really work. She started snapping at my hands; so the next thing I had to do was, as calmly as I could manage, roll her jaw to the side with my the bottom of my forearm, apply some pressure to her cheek, still trying to talk her down.

That worked for a bit, but she started up again before I left the room. As a result I had to try again, clasped her wrists a second time, kept talking. She pulled her hands close to her throat. I thought she might try to bite me again, but she didn’t. Still, he was so caught up in her own psycho-drama that I had to distract her. In an attempt to do so, I applied a little, quick pressure high on her chest, still holding her hands. (Something like a shock might do, but not too hard.)
That quick pressure made her grunt a little. It worked! She calmed, and I got on with my third shift business.

It probably sounded like I’d hit her, which I did not do. There was no distance between my hand and her chest. In any case I thought that was the end of it, but when I got to work the next day, a sorrowing woman superior—a nice lady—asked me to follow her out the front door where we sat on the stone steps. I was shocked by the accusation and complained vigorously to the owner who wanted to speak to me over the phone.

He finally settled things by telling me they’d have to let me go for not having washed the wheel
chairs at night---I was probably busy reading literary texts into a tape recorder!
Either that or watching Jimmy Swaggert.

I was a little lazy.

What really got me, though, were the two second shift women workers. One was an Protestant evangelical I’d spent some unsuccessful time trysting after (I wasn’t sunny enough—granted) and the other, who ran the shift, was a secular woman who was frankly put off that I hadn’t made a pass at her. (I’d run into that before from female superiors--as many men do.)

Why had God allowed this, I wondered?

I felt shamed, abused.

He has control over everything, doesn’t He? So what was up?

I have no idea.

Colorado State, being a front range-y place, was in the large, as I say, a habitat for habitual hipness: giant Andy Warhol-signed Tomato Soup Cans graced the lawn by the art building, my roomie played keyboards to Falcon’s poetry in performance, Ranchero did an elaborate reading at the town arts center which included a giant slide show of his trip to NYC behind him as he did Tai Chi and read poems.

But as I say there were keepies there too: Rita, a lovely Quaker woman who died in her second year, away in Africa on a humanitarian trip: motorcycle. And there was Kim, the painter. I really messed that “relationship” up—big time. But there was another profound disappointment as well.

In that second instance, I was sitting in my basement apartment bedroom on Overland Trail, my housemate in the next room. And as I was reading or writing, I don’t remember which, for no apparent reason, the Holy Spirit simply just overpowered me—like He had at the Milosz reading. For some reason, it became absolutely clear to me that Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg were driving up on 25 from Boulder, Naropa probably, to see me. (I’d long been a fan of the former and had some respect for the latter for the good he’d done the language in HOWL.)
The Spirit was powerful, and I had no doubts at all about it.

They were coming.

At first I prayed for humility. I mean these guys were largely responsible for my being where I was. I’d been a big Dylan fan for about fifteen years, though I admit that some of his lyrics can be self-serving. But I was and am okay with that; everyone is flawed.

However, as the time grew closer and closer, the certainty of the whole thing strongly upon me, I finally decided that I just would not be able to handle the visit. (I might come apart—acid flashback nerves.) So I earnestly begged God to send them away.

He finally did, and—drat—there went my opportunity to meet them!

So Bob, if you’re out there and are ever in the neighborhood, come on over. We can have a beer, talk it over. The Ginsberg side of it will have to wait a little longer: he’s moved on!

(See “Jokerman.”)

Things like this happen every once in awhile to every Christian, I’d bet on it. Though for me, as I’ve gotten older, revelations usually happen now in dream form—though that’s always been a rich subconscious field: Merton came to me twice, once in answer to the how-to-be-a-man question—that was at the Studite monastery where I first stayed back in Steubenville.
He just looked at me, his expression bringing one of his quips to mind. Be yourself, after all, “you have very little chance in being anyone else.” I saw Catherine Doherty, my spiritual director, a few others; so at one point I was feeling pretty cocky.

Whom else did I want to see?

Padre Pio!

Now that would be cool.

So I prayed, asked, and he did come the next night, briefly--but he was p.o.ed. He had better things to do!

Years later, when I was grading freshman papers on Ridge Rd. in Steubenville--it was the weirdest thing--the sprit of Milton just walked into my room; literally walked in. How did I know it was Milton? How did I know he was walking? I have no idea, but I did. Different people perceive differently; something a student said in class to me a few years ago relays that fact. He was a pre-theologate kind of guy, was taking philosophy and creative writing; he claimed that the difference between the two is that the philosopher establishes steps and reasons his way through to come up with answers that the poet just somehow “gets.”

That can make poets and artists seem left-handed. Mystical, and I think it must be so; but I love talking to the philosophers at school (not to be confused with actually taking any of those courses). The ones I know are extraordinary people, and they speak in completely polished paragraphs. I mean who does that? The prose as it comes out is lacquered, a rich mahogany.
Richard Wilbur once said that poets are just people who have a certain anxiety about being verbally adequate to the world. I like that! A good paragraph takes me a long time to get right, or at least good enough.

On Ridge Ave., after Uncle Miltie made his stop I went into the kitchen to tell my wife about it. But what the heck do you do with that? Milton was a great Arian genius, and loved Jesus, but I still don’t know what to make of that: a great Protestant dropping in to say hey--especially since our processes and gifts are so different.

Maybe that’s why.

A purgatorial Yeats once appeared to me in a dream as well. I just saw the top of his head, and it was dark, but I knew it was him. My spiritual director agreed, was fine with me praying for him for two years in daily adoration. And what a poet! He has become the master for me. (Many poets say you need one.) Yeats has a sacramental sense second to none—probably because he was trying to invent Irish culture: a mixture of Protestant good breeding and the fine dark spiritual humus of Catholicism.

The deep Catholic sacramental sense seems alien to America: none of our great poets seem to have it, except maybe late Wallace Stevens, Dickinson, some Frost. Janet McCann once gave me the copy of a letter by the St. Bridget priest who’d baptized Wally, recounting how as he was dying of stomach cancer he finally said, “Well, I guess it’s time to get me into the fold.”
I once did a course on Stevens and Williams, and I found I could actually trace Wally’s movement toward the Church in his poetry--though I wish I had kept a journal.
At any rate, no summer is now complete for me without a nice and casual reading of Yeats.
But other saints have visited too. Of course our Lord Jesus and his mother, St. Therese; and St. Francis once walked into a room while I was praying with Susan and Sr. Helen. But the real surprise recently was St. Anthony, who walked right past me once while I was in prayer recently in adoration.

How did I know it was him? My eyes were closed. Again, no idea. But he had a great evangelical zeal, purity. But the thing that surprised me was that he felt hirsute!

Jesus is so wonderfully wacky sometimes.

Other things have happened, as, again, I’m sure they do to most Christians; though the Church, in her inspired wisdom, often reminds us that the subjective stuff doesn’t matter: dreams or Garabandal.

My dear priest friend, from Madonna House, their Director of Priests, Fr. David May, once said to me that he just didn’t care about any of that stuff because it doesn’t matter. You still have to live today and love.

A great response.

Fr. David, as I said earlier, spent so much time in the woods with St. Francis that he could tell you which sound the robin was making. “Now listen, another call always comes!”
In my poems, flora is either “trees” or “flowers”; I’ve never learned to distinguish, though my love has always been deep. When I was a little boy, my parents were worried for awhile because I talked to trees, in earnest. (I’d hug them, long before that became a political statement. . . . Of course I also once walked into the corner of a garage too.)

But the Dylan thing does bug me upon occasion. That, along with missing the candlelight processional hymns at Lourdes, are among my biggest neurotic mistakes.
The first experience at Colorado State, though, was even more unhappy: my biggest romantic screw-up--with Kim, the painter. She was much younger than I, actually sat on the floor next to me before the first day in our “Surrealism in Art and Literature” class because she’d decided she wanted to meet me. I asked her not to do that, and so she sat in an actual chair; we had some “coffee” later. She was a lovely young Jewish woman from Chicago, and we got on great, became closer than we should have. The good part was that it was great to have someone with that kind of openness, artistic sensibility close by.

But when she had a showing of her work, I said I’d go and didn’t—maybe because of the almost “event” status it took on. But the fact was I both absolutely humiliated her in public and walked on her artistic efforts, my chance to see her soul for no good reason. (We had been something of an item, between departments.)

She ended the us of it, and who could blame her?

But the Lord in His anger went further.

For the remaining time there at CSU and for the whole time at BGSU, I never again managed another relationship. (Though it is an equally amazing fact that I ever managed one before as well.)

Anyway, she was a lovely woman, and I repent for the damage.

There is so much to repent for in life, and later, when I started actually begging for
humility--which I’ve never really gotten, at least to the extent that it provided its first fruits: obedience (St. Benedict))--I was graced with a few dreamland “moments of conscience.” At first I was sickened by what I saw: the layered pustules on my warped soul, no clean breathing space anywhere.

As the hours passed after each of these first episodes, though—there were two--I slowly began to see the dreams for the blessing they were. It’s a GREAT mercy to know who you are, however vile, and so to know your immense need for Jesus.

May I learn humility, true repentance, and obedience, and simplicity, and wisdom, and purity. As I always tell my students: our need for mercy is not small.

There were good times in Ft. Collins, left-handed arm wrestling and folk music at Linden’s. And there was prodigious Ron. A non-program Husker Du bowler and writer, with a gift for mockery, rant—at the program and Marvin Bell mostly. (Something the former, at least, deserved.) The guy was a real Whitmaniac, a worthy Poundian friend to be had in the hoisting: 12 oz. curls. In a past life he had run a mountain newspaper, would later turned to nursing; though he has settled down, now has three kids.

Most female pals, as I say, went the way of all flesh back then, on a bus I’d learned to recognize early in Ft. Collins: the “You swine who would persecute women by owning their uteruses!” cruiser.

Oh hepness, here is thy sting.

It’s always amazed me. I’d be having a light lunch with a nice woman and the conversation would be going well—until it came up: abortion. But our different reactions made so little sense. For me, it was the taking of an innocent life, whatever the knowledge factor on the part of the beleaguered mother. It was a grotesque brutality. But for my short-lived companion—the “sin” had to do with denying someone her “rights.” On any scale, a right-thinking person would agree that the first sin is much greater.

But you would’ve never guessed that by the responses. On more than one occasion, the woman in question just got up and left the table.

Truth does that to people.

My wife Linda came up with a jewel of a response just recently after we’d seen the Obama circus masquerading as a press conference on tv. He said he wanted to compromise or find common ground with pro-lifers on the issue.

“Yeah, we could just reach in and hurt them. Maybe give them a good pinch.”

Great wit—and rage!

Those poor innocent babies--their only sin is that they are alive. We need to make sure that they stay in the discussion. They have no voices yet.

Colorado State was tough in many ways. I was the only Christian in the MA Creative Writing program. One fellow student once actually asked me: “Now let me get this straight. You believe in an anthropomorphic God?”

“Why yes, I do. . . . He had teeth, and armpits, everything” (though I didn’t say the part after the ellipsis).

Feminism, first generation, was still big then, so Jesus as you might imagine, was public enemy number two, just behind God the Father. It all got to be a little too much. As all liberals tend to do, my peers couldn’t help but over-simplify. To them I was Jim or Tammy Bay Fakker, which got to be extremely irritating—tiresome really.

My dissertation—TOWARD A CATHOLIC VISION IN COMTEMPORARY POETRY—takes a close look at how both secular critics and secular poets fall into the Puritan perspective they claim to hate. They’re always dismissing Christianity without understanding it. For them either one is among the damned: religious Puritans, or among the elect: secular Puritans like themselves.

But there is the older orthodox alternative, one which sacramentally embraces the good, disordered world.

It just got to be so old: my peers’ Mickey Mouse categorizations. Finally I suggested that we all go up in the mountains and do some peyote.
They bit. 1984--my last drug trip.
(I add that just in case any future President or VP of Academics reads this. Four years before I got on to FUS . . . if you’re counting.)
Actually, parts of the trip were kind of pleasant because I prayed continuously for all 12 hours, though I certainly would not recommend it to anyone. I still had to come down, and that is always horrible physically. A Jewish buddy of mine years before used to sport a button: “Drugs are for sick people.” Of course I had some fun razzing him about that: self-advertisement.
But I was no stranger to that road either.

Though I’ve done more than my share, I would certainly be mortified were my children to do drugs of any sort. Something has to be very wrong for a person to indulge there—personally or with his world. Things have to be so unbearable that he needs to negate himself or it, to get permanently away.

It is gift, this world: fallen, yes, but good; and we all have work to do.

Most of the program people there were nice, if in an alarmingly liberal kind of way. Big hearts, but not much sense, and no inclination to think anything through, to make life cohere. They just knew what they were against: them Christian fundamentalists—most from the South, and those storied Papists.

My undergrad mentor, now in the beyond, was pretty much the same way.

All the folks in Colorado weren’t like that, of course. I saw that driving cab: I met all kinds of people there. My next door neighbor, second year, was in some ways more typical of the town folk. She was a bit more conservative, open to Jesus, but like so many limping through our culture, she was quite wounded as well.

God, for his own reasons, moved her to turn this way.

The closest I got to teaching at the second CSU was to serve as an intern in Ranchero’s Creative Writing class. Probably profound good sense on the comp dept’s part. So I drove cab, read and wrote. Dylan Thomas would be my major figure.

I once picked up a real-life Mensa guy in my cab. (He was sure to let me know.) A young guy, a computer whiz; very taken with himself—and who wouldn’t be? But as we talked it became apparent that he’d missed all the important questions, so I did him effective service.
That was always the nice thing about driving cab. You could talk about anything because you’d probably never see the person again. But for me, at that time, things were relatively simple, at least as far as poetry went. I was still so happy just to know joy, wanted to express that.
Surrealism, as I mentioned earlier, helped there.

Joy, light, matters so much, though sometimes it can be confused with shallowness in poetry. Bob Lietz, whom I would meet at Bowling Green, claimed as much, finally pointing me in the direction of faithful depth, a more oblique darkness.

So it wasn’t long before I wrote my Therese poems, with an eye on delivering that. (See MARY’S HOUSE.)

But if I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s not to apologize—to anyone!

And don’t kiss better-known butt.

And never run with scissors.

2011-02-22T06:47:00.000-08:00

Just occurred to me this mornings: Protestantism is beautiful, but shallow. (We watched BABETTE'S FEAST in Creative Writing yesterday.) Not entirely human, but more faithful than most of us. I guess when God looks at us "it's always something"!

2011-02-21T05:24:00.000-08:00

Went to Texas A & M this last week. What a delight. The students were great, the reading went very well, and I got to spend some time with Chuck Taylor, Janet McCann, and Bedford Clark. And what a blessings, to be able to talk about Jesus and humility at a big secular place--no venal concerns for church/state stuff. Just another open forum, which is what university life is supposed to be about.

The other big thing was a dear priest friend got convicted of some kind of imposition. My wife caught some of it on the local news: a history of drinking problems. I didn't see it, but it sounded like the usual media job. The priest said it was a cultural misunderstanding in a letter. (He's African.) I really don't know about any of it, but loved the guy as a priest and intellectual. So if you think about it, keep both him and the poor girl in your prayers.

As an old girl friend once put it to me: "Well, your track record isn't so good." I didn't get married until I was forty, so though I never got involved with anyone anywhere near the age of the girl in question, I did lots of stupid. Too often. (Once would be so.) I tell my kids and students: do things God's way.

Young people are squeezed for all sides on the sexual matters. The media tries to whisper "gay" in their ears; sex as commodity is everywhere. (A student of mine--and my son--just turned me on to FIREFLY. Well-written sci-fi, but it clearly pushes "sex-workers.") I'm glad I'm not young these days. We all have enough to repent of.

Pray, pray, pray.

2011-02-08T06:20:00.000-08:00

Just did "The Dream of the Rood" in class yesterday. A great poem: unvarnished mercy, and need. I really like the Anglo-Saon stuff so far. "The Wanderer" "The Seafarer," "Wulf and Eadwacer," no attendant nonsense. Nothing about "hard view of life," just the goods, brother. Contemporary Christian poetry is so afraid of need and mercy and answer: what would they look like, on the ground like that? So they jazz with language, too often anyway. Give me a sword (and a bigger body), and I'm hacking on the North Sea.

2011-01-29T10:00:00.000-08:00

Just saw some Coen brothers, recommended. Loved RAISING ARIZONA and FARGO, but found NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN less interesting. The antagonist could not sustain the metaphorical weight given him, became too much "the symbol."

Reading early Yeats and Pound again for tehe start of Modern Poetry. You have to find ways to talk about early Yeats: the place of the imagination in all our lives. But he's always a treat for me. As for the first 33 pp of Pounds SELECTED, a big task. First couple pretty weak, but I see "Altaforte" and "The Seafarer" coming up, which are always great to do--the hope of finding nuggets.

Saw a sign on Sr. Paruch's door: "To teach is to learn again." Yea--but now how do I find time to write as well? Praise God who orders our days.

P.S. Doing Medieval Lit for John Holmes who's off on sabbat. Major fun. The above "S.": the original, and "The Wanderer." Great poems! Those folks are great because they weren't so full of manure as are the poets who come after. Oprah did not exist yet, or any (many?) of her forebears. "A dark view of life"? Na, right on baby. Obedience, heroic virtue, how to love and Mr. D. Face your death, Op. It's your only chance.

La-la. They make me happy.

2011-01-24T09:43:00.001-08:00

Well, sabbatical is done. I thought I'd have a lot of time to blog, but I didn't. Here's what I've been up to. A second go at THE LITTLE FLOWERS OF ST. FRANCIS. I think this is very good, and have gotten good feedback. Just need a taker.

FRANCIS

by David Craig

Lyrics Based on THE FIORETTI

I
In this book are contained certain Little Flowers, namely, miracles and devout examples of St. Francis and some of his holy companions

St. Francis, this king of woodsy nuptials,
the upland murmurs—a man so broken he
could not walk upright—he’s outlasted kings, Versailles.
So what roses, earth-red thorns then sprouted like trees?

He was what he lacked, though someone had to be
that too: a divided heart—on his sleeve, God’s good
out walking; no difference between him and the birds:
his skin on the rocks, the trees from where he stood.

He had his wrong John, from Capella, like a dog
or its tail: strewn ganglia, nerve endings; the fool stored
what he needed to give, finally hanging himself:
his life for ballast, a weight no man can afford.

Another, Brother Giles, he wandered his way
up the steps of heaven, bare feet slapping the clay
and marble of sun-baked hills; his only song:
the life he’d found on the ground—an insect’s day.

Another, Filippo Longo, who took the world
to his lips like Isaias-- and so walked with a curious gait;
a Silvester who spoke with God through the bush of this world,
saw him wherever he went; still he kept this fate

to himself, except on days when the sky would wide
open and mouth its icy blue vowel, a wight
whose robe would steam a little in rain; and a fifth,
on the wings of a pure spent soul, he flew up in bent Light,

so like It that only God could tell them apart;
and Bernard, who explained one scripture with the speech
of another: the trees; or the Brother who, because
the world was too much, kept running away—past its reach.

There is nothing here but the standing water, a spring
to no one. Even the birds can’t hear it sing.

II
Of Brother Bernard, first companion of St. Francis

A cape into penitential fields or the moon’s
scowl standing in water: both offered nothing but loss;
through two of heaven’s years he’d bided the time
that took him, made him a wilderness and a cross.

Though once he’d learned he’d never arrive, this saint,
bituminous in the burning, drew a man
with the least to give in all of Assisi, Bernard,
who invited him over for polished talk--a stand

of trees in money’s rooms; God asking His waif
again to endure the empty walls of his life,
a linen bed, to sit with the alien
he’d become: his branches and the winds of strife.

Out of place in any place, this unkempt fool
was a novice—liar who had to fake his sleep
to pray. But Bernard, as quick as watchful wealth,
did likewise--each beaver soon sawing away in his deep.

“My God, my God,” was all he said that night.
A lone warrior so far from home, into
his answer that he made the night seem lost.
It was call and lullaby. It was something new.

St. Francis had to give all that he could not:
the poorest side of Christ, with no home outside
of the boney remains on the forest floor, so he pitched
in the wind, his need—until the morning’s tide.

And as for Bernard, he loathed this world’s false face.
So he asked his Lord to play a different part.
St. Francis agreed, though this life was, again, too much
for the breadth of his hands, the spider in his heart,

so they walked: the flower and the butterfly,
to mass and prayer--until terce broke all the stained
small windows with its light, the market’s noise. . . .
Bernard felt new again, gave up the reign

of his toys, those golden forms: his tapestries
and cloth, his amulets and vacant chairs
to the sick, who would surely not be helped by them;
to prophetic widows who walk our winding stair;

his coins to orphans, whose greatest need was a hand
along their backs; to thieves, who’d earned the grace
of smaller cells, whose only horde had been
bad choices; to monasteries—most good at face

and soul; to hospices who could use the seats
to help convey others through the race of time;
to brother pilgrims, who were so to get away
from the whisper of such things; and to the rhymes

of this Fr. Silvester, a most despondent ear,
nearly deaf from sacrament, from women and men,
no closer to home for all his boxed-in pleas.
His was a rampart in a mortal fen

of swollen feet and gout, the abscess of sin. . . .
And he should have gotten better return for those stones
he’d lugged to St. Damiano, so they could fix
the church, time itself no doubt! . . . More coins for his home,

a sack to widen his floor! He could say goodbye
to every ripped and lousy chair, his slate
grey table, his single folklore carving, to rooms
one cubit too small since this world began—its bait.

But that night he dreamed: all he owned, stacked up in a field;
the birds in song, and Francis giving his hands,
cupped water. So Silvester, too, gave his nothing away,
his small pile: his life as it was, a heavenly van

of revisions, his worn floor. . . . As a friar, they’d later tell
how he’d speak to Christ as if giving Him a shave.
And Bernard, he became so holy—other, he seemed
a second founder, since he knew so well the grave.

III
How St. Francis, on account of an uncharitable thought which he had concerning Brother Bernard, commanded the said Brother that he should tread three times on his throat and mouth

Half blinded like the lepers in the world,
his shriveled heart, St. Francis called his home:
Bernard, whose tears might wash his own, called him
into this wood that had dressed him, unmade his moan --

“Come Brother, give light to this blinded man.” But Bernard,
so much a part of the different Prayer that called
to offer him, couldn’t hear the will of God.
So Francis deserted the wood, fretting the stalls

he had wrought, an obsessive past which had led them to this.
And falling on his errors before the Thorns
Who’d shaped both this and the hidden better world,
and from Whom each thing that lives must still be born,

St. Francis felt the voice of Jesus soothe--
though soon enough he was storming Bernard to accuse
himself of sin so entwined in his roots that he
could never escape--the subtlety of its rouse.

Bernard, though, seeing God’s nose in front of his face--
a torn man whose tears had planted and grown him from
the weeds that had wreathed his useless wealth--threw himself
at his feet, awaiting the usual ultimatum.

And Francis, grieving over the time he’d lost,
over the years he still wasted in courtly show,
evoked that inspired irony in Bernard:
“I command thee, my friend, with thy docile will in tow

to do what I shall ask of thee”—but the son,
who knew his crippled father all too well:
his severest ordinances, responded in turn,
“If thou promise to trade with me, a clap for a bell.”

St. Francis, impatient, nodded, because he knew
no other way to be, so flooded with grace
that chaff blew like an internal torrent of straw
as he lay prostrate on his earth’s hearth-place:

“Now press one foot upon my ivory mouth,
and with the other walk my seeding throat;
then tread on my guile and over my wagging throne
three times, for my brain is both the rabbit and stoat.”

Bernard did as much, but gently enough to shield
a fallen leaf. Then he asked his sordid boon:
that St. Francis, every time he saw him, that he
should reprove, loudly, each of his defects, his dooms.

St. Francis marveled, for he could see none or him—
since he was nearly blind. So he played the fawn
and skirted his only friend, which might have been
a good, for who could have borne such carrying on?

IV
How the Angel of God proposed a question to Brother Elias, and because Brother Elias replied to him haughtily, departed, and went along the road to San Giacomo, where Brother Bernard was, and told him this story.

At the call of St. James of Galacia, Francis came
upon a lily, trumpeting its need
along the roadside, the man’s torn petals lifted
like Patience itself: a hallway to where we bleed,

cathedraled inside our spittle and sweat: His cross.
So Francis left his legacy: Bernard,
to help both the follower and the human sore
with their passage: where to give is hard, and to need is hard.

In Spain, the Christ-Wound, still hungry for His heart,
revealed how far his crooked feet would tread.
It was a weird pilgrimage, his traveling
to hear how far he’d travel, how distant his dead.

So it was in thankful ignorance that he
collected Bernard, returned home to each sin, his soul
spread out before God like broken toys on a bed—
or curiosities: the substance of holes.

But a beautiful youth broke into that world, set himself
to the door. He rattled the dust off the hinges, packed
each punch with his need, the urgency of youth.
And Masseo, in time and turn, with his little sack

of blessings, gave greeting and a lesson: how
to knock one’s way into the friar’s world--.
Besides, the answer was away in the woods.
But the lad said never mind that. He wanted that pearl

of wisdom: the learned Elias. Masseo raised
a brow. But that gift, so busy with his mound
of leaves, didn’t want to be disturbed by a flame
so recently lit—or by any other sound.

So Masseo had to trundle back to the door,
now stuck between a lie and a rude place,
delaying, in circles—to more of that knocking, still
the wrong kind. He sighed at his servant’s plight, then pulled

the face of the door again. But this time it was
the youth who instructed, “Go tell your guiding hand.”
The woods spoke first: “Elias, you must speak to the poor,
or you will never hear them—make their demands.”

And so the nettled grudgingly went back;
but the visitor was, again, the one who would say
this tale: “Take care, for anger rips the soul. . . .
Tell me, is it mete for a man to tighten God’s ways?”

Still angrily hovering around everything
he knew, Elias slammed shut the only door
out of his world. A step back inside, though, revealed
the question’s barb, because this trendy bore

had just decreed against the eating of flesh.
So he went back to the door to—nothing, a shout
from Francis in the wood: “Thy pride will make
thee its own net. You must cast those fishes out!”

And at that same hour the youth appeared to Bernard
in a distant wood: “Whence cometh thou, good teen,
through the clear pearls of morning?” Their laughter twined
and carried the friar over a river’s between.

“What is thy name?” asked Bernard. “Marvelous . . .
and so I’m yours!” . . . Bernard, around a fire,
remaining in the angel’s light-hearted thrall,
told the story, still serving the less forbidding sire.

V
How the holy Brother Bernard of Assisi was sent by St. Francis to Bologna, and there founded a house

For the brothers, honors were misdirection, hell’s
last smile; to be assaulted with words or stones
was substance of a death to be worked for, proof
of nothing. The world got their ragged backs and bones.

And the fruit came: like Paris strawberries, crepes
in May--the true face of Europe. Take Bernard,
against the fascist state, or Marshall’s plan,
who was sent to Bologna without a gun or guard;

adults and children, instruments of ennui,
took turns in yanking his hood. To get the full
effect, he sat the piazza, hit with the first stone;
kids rammed him, some calling themselves the Papal bull.

For days he returned, with darkening bruises, but not
to say “the cross” or “how my excesses pain me.”
(He slept in a culvert near some scratching dogs,
only frigid words to keep him company.)

A lawyer, creator of fictions, watched his eyes,
which were the same, in the day or under the moon.
Who’d sent this man, he wondered, so punctual?
And what did he hope to accomplish by being gooned?

“Who art thou?” he asked, and Bernard, a man without
a name, drew out the Rule—and followed, dumb,
in a lope, as the leader read it, leading the way
to his bell-curtained home. What was this that had come?

By the next day Bernard had become the news!
Just by staying there, in an important place,
where the people could understand—but what he asked?
Some wanted just to touch him, so he had to retrace

his steps, enjoin St. Francis to send the best,
or Bernard might lose more by cake than he’d gained by stone.
And so St. Francis sent a much younger man:
to be led by the people, to be brought like a horse to a home.

VI
How St. Francis blessed the holy Brother Bernard and appointed him his Vicar, when the time came for him to pass away from this life.

Bernard, in mottled sunlight, suffered dark wills
so strong that he had to fall on his face--in the grace
of a larger symphony. That was foreground, his life
in hardscrabble, to which St. Francis added a trace

of tenor like a flight from Mozart’s last
request: a father’s voice which was still enough.
And God, who conducted from the farther back,
coaxed waves as He rode each staff and figured trough.

And our common firehouse fugue revealed itself
not just during Francis’s life, but at the door
of his final death. “Where is my first born son?”
But the founder’s friend withdrew, on the crowded floor,

sent someone else. “My brothers, this isn’t the head
of my own,” he said as he groped at the world then dropped
back on the bed, almost despairing because
he just wanted God, to do the Will that had cropped

him. But what if he were wrong again? Then his hands
found two of his heads: Bernard and the burning red
of Elias. (The thick-haired never enter first!)
“Whoever blesses thee, my first, shall be led

by tones of grace.” (We bless thee Bernard.) Be thou
our intellect’s song--as you became both bell
and lead cow. How the friars would learn to line up behind
you, proceed in their back and forth, down through the dells.

And when it came time to add your fleshy tome
to the repository of sod, Brother Giles
took you into the joy of his station and proclaimed:
“Sursum corda . . . sursum corda”; there are miles

in every inch! And you, though your body waned,
did so, curbing your angels and asking your crew
to sweep out a leafy cell, a place where Giles
might wash the world to its sunny elbows, lose

himself on the last and lasting Bridge of our lives.
And raising yourself again, you spoke a peace:
“Most beloved Brothers, I will not speak many words;
but consider that the religious state must increase

in you as this hour will also come as your life.
I find in my soul, that for a thousand worlds
as good as this, I would not have served a lord
more negligible than ours, . . . Myself, I hurl

at your feet, and ask that you give and bless my leave.
Love one another as I have not loved you.” . . .
And after these words, and a ramble on some herbs
and the gaits of various birds, he lay on his pew:

and his face grew younger, measuring the Life
which had long come to overtake him--his friends
and one angel marveling in the extreme.
And it was only then that his way found its End.

His soul, the crowning glory of his life,
moved beyond this present (and quite limited) fare—
as surely as the others who’d follow him
into that forest, in a leafy procession of biers.

VII
How St. Francis passed the Lent on an island in the Lake of Perugia, where he fasted forty days and forty nights

In the dew: bear dances, Bruegel laughter, ale froth
and mud, so Francis skirted the stalls, the fair,
chose Lake Perugia, a friend’s repose—
where fewer jugglers could rummage through the air

for misplaced choices. He chose instead to fight
the only fight that matters: in his heart, on an isle.
With two loaves of bread to knock together, he begged
for the want which had always led him—beneath the smiles

of temptation under palest moonlit clouds,
the boat and five fingers pulling through the glass.
Stars folded the plum sauce as the dark weeds approached:
the world as it had been, for a boy on the grass,

the morning thickets on that island—a cell
in a blind, in a generosity of leaves.
He prayed when he could and then when he couldn’t, when
the cost of his body paid him with glare or bees.

How many old scars got the better of him in that bush,
how much of his brain was scalded by drops of sun,
molten, that Scourge who invented the second ear:
dead hours on the grass, the core of his Lent now begun?

And the other times, when all meaning disappeared;
he could have been bark on a tree. But he was glad
for that—the earth he had to come back to, without
his God, he’d watch the ants, climb a tree like the lad

he’d always been. And eating the harder half
of a loaf, he knew he had to be poured out again,
and again, so he prayed for his foes, in his too slow way—
for friends who labored building coups and pens.

He felt saved and crushed, the wheat and chaff of a God
who loved too well to leave the thing undone.
And seeds would shed old husks, fibers—for a tongue:
yellow fetus to lithesome green, so moist it stuns.

And then miracles came because there was finally
some room for growth. New locals who began to construct
fine houses there, inhabit them in rows
in the greatest simplicity; and still later to cluck

in a newer village yet, with burghers and fries,
a slew of energetic young girls, and a famed
new friary which is still called The House of the Isle.
And to this very day, the men and dames

of the village put down rushes to walk on, hush,
because they have such reverence and pride
for the spot where Francis made his happiest Lent.

You can hear his pennywhistle from God’s other side.

VIII
How St. Francis showed to Brother Leo what are the things in which consists perfect joy

They felt frozen stiff, like a rumbling truck half full
of turnips; St. Francis trudged through his lamest sins
in bare feet, worn cloth, behind his Leo--the slow:
two farmers from Perugia, razed in

the wind, both bare as bones to winter skies,
much as they’d always been, the elements--home.
St. Francis called out ahead and named him “blood,”
“oleander.” Too bitter to talk, Leo walked alone,

ahead of his storm: “Oh, Brother,” Francis reached,
deploying the syllables like a thin stiff sheet
hung over a rope: “Great example isn’t joy.”
(Apparently not—as Leo remembered his feet.)

“ . . . , nor in miracles . . . nor in knowing every text
and scripture . . .” (Nor in any string of discursive bells.)
And on he went, like the road, like this winter life:
“No, nor tongues of angels . . . nor converting infidels . . .,”

For miles he wagged. “No, no, it’s not there, my friend.
Nor at table, nor in the quill, the hides of lambs,
nor in the warm and inn side of a wall.
And if we were to get thrown out on our hams,

into a colder night, and were to bear
that without murmuring as dumb oxen do,
and were to say in the caverns of our hearts
that the lord knew us. And if we stirred the stew

of that keeper’s rage, if our hands ached as we knocked,
and if he were to drive us away with kicks
and buffetings. And if we returned, so gaunt
that our bellies seemed a hazel-knot, the ticks,

our tongues; and if he were to growl, erupt,
come out with a bulbous club and seize us by
our worthless hoods and spin us over and roll
us, kick us into snow and beat us to sighs,

on our welts until they ripped our habits’ seams,
and if we spoke with only the joy of our sores . . .
Ah Brother, now there would be such peace, complete
as the great height of any hearth, the pour

of toast and beneficent tale. There we would find
an answer enough, my friend, to be our calm
and spinning boeuf, our flowered omelettes.
For over all the graces is the balm

of purest ignorance: of conquering self.
Our failure is gain. So let’s not waste the time,
the snow, whatever we feel; how else shall we grow
in the cold before sunrise, in these almost equitable climes?”

IX
How St. Francis taught Brother Leo how to answer him, and the Brother could not say anything but the contrary of what St. Francis desired.

St. Francis, in the throws of their noisy start,
sat down with Leo into what mattered, no book
to guide—just another stalk that shakes the wind
for what it needs, the two of them, by the look

of it, against that lapdog: the need for love.
So he instructed his disciple to say
“In truth, my maw, for thy sins and thy ravening guts,
thou deserve the hell that would sharpen its knives and flay. . .”

(But Li Po’s worm is made to teach the wren.)

“. . . ‘O Brother Francis,’ say, ‘thou hast surely racked
up so many pretty garden party wrongs,
drama woes in thy time, that they overload your pack.

Thou like the greater part of the dog: mankind,
hast merited hell to roast thee in thy turn.’”
But when Brother Leo opened his mouth, only birds
came out: “Our God will work such good as you yearn,

across the doormat of your life, the weave
itself shalt flower with the passing of feet,
and thou shalt have a home on the sun-splashed heights.”
St. Francis, though, would never hear of retreat,

and so Leo fought with himself, meeked: “I speak
in the name of God, this time I will answer true.”
So Francis, again, continued his inward turn:
“O Brother Francis, thou insignificant mule,

too stupid to take even one good step, dost thou think
our God will have mercy on such reticence?
What wilt thou ever do?” And again, Leo,
or someone very much like him, ignored the defense:

“Yea, rather, thou shalt receive great graces from God—
like honey and rain they shalt fall, because he who finds
himself in the dirt shalt own it, and more, and I
cannot say otherwise, for Jesus binds

the corners of my mouth with both of His hands.”
And in this humble boxing match, both our men
held fast to what they knew and had to say,
until the world was changed from what it had been.

X
How Brother Masseo mockingly said to St. Francis that all the world went after him; and St. Francis replied that this was for the confusion of the world, and for the glory of God.

This quack of mallard, empty morning marsh,
he’d given Masseo their only bowl, came out
of the woods behind birds, lost in his sleeves, the trees,
his twiggy cowl. So the Order asked, “Why the rout?

Of common sense, I mean?” And Francis, who played
each hand he’d been dealt, replied: “What wouldst thou say?”
“Thou art not a man who glitters when he walks,
nor were you born beneath a steward’s sway;

your stature is straight enough, slight though it be,
but you know neither religion nor the stars;
for what reason does the world run after thee?”
St. Francis, who could see the road, but not far,

rejoiced, caught up in the laughter of the Christ,
Who just then stirred some great white clouds with a bite
of breezes, moving the jocund limbs of trees.
He dropped to his knees and spoke the truth. “You’re more right

than you know. For He could find no viler man”—
And because St. Francis felt pulled up, he stood.
“And for this He’s elected me to mud the huts
of the noblest men, to codify the woods;

to give dead limbs and storms to the rich, this flesh
to the strong, to count fleas for the courts, a tongue so tied
since my birth that it takes the world from the wise; that men
may know what they’ve always known: our Lord’s bloody side.

None of this is new.” And Masseo understood
that Francis was twin to the forest’s wildest hog,
its grunt in the grass, a part of the mercy that owns
and covers this world with its contrary weathers, fogs.

XI
How St. Francis made Brother Masseo turn round and round, and then went on to Siena.

Among the charred and vacant, St. Francis lagged
behind, while the active agent, Brother Found,
worked through the issues that faced the larger them,
his present disquiet teetering like a crown.

And when the world agreed: which way to go—
to Florence, Arezzo, Masseo felt confirmed. . . .
But humility stayed the best of him; he asked,
“Where to? “Let us seek the Holy Spirit’s terms.”

“But how are we to know His surest word?”
And St. Francis set him spin as children do,
though they delight in the unknowing, falls,
and Masseo could not. He held to what was true.

He wondered, maybe he should enjoy this game?
But Francis would not let him gather his thoughts.
And his world continued its spin, as it always had
for him--okay. But why so long? He’d wrought

the pot he stewed in, yes, but who could he be?
He got no answer as Siena and
his wits--upon command--soon gathered in
his view. . . . How much correction could he stand?

On the road, Masseo plied his trade with care:
he got the metaphor, the spinning spool,
but why had Francis played the child before
these seculars who often deemed them fools--

that surely wouldn’t help the stereotype. . . .
The Sienese, though, lifted him up from his thought
and hoisted them, as if they were Jesus’s nod,
a-bounce to the Bishop’s holy manse. (They sought

a cure for the town’s relapse, its civic dead.)
And the saint, because he had nothing important to give,
could offer them the peace that drove him, bring them
the ache of God and the joy of where they lived. . . .

Relieved, with a settled flock, the bishop asked
St. Francis to share the flush of wine and the glint
of fellowship, by day and into the night.
Masseo had never expected this, this hint

of a bustling life. . . . But because Francis never gave
himself to sleep, he gathered his hungry birds,
and set off in quiet, without taking the Bishop’s leave.
Masseo fretted for miles about the words

they never spoke, the kindly prelate’s made
and rejected bed. But then he caught his foe:
“Siena had proven itself a humble road.
And if he bids thee throw stones thou ought to do so.”

Masseo was good at throwing stones. Might he
ask him to do that? Fitting, again. . . . And on cue:
the master’s hand on his back. “Those seeds thou now sow
will find good soil. But thy first spread would do

neither you, nor the birds, nor the ground any good. Your reach
was hell’s.” Then Brother Masseo saw clearly that
this man knew his heart. But he was glad because
St. Francis had never cast him out on his hat.

XII
How St. Francis imposed on Brother Masseo the office of the door, and of the kitchen, and of the almsgiving: and afterwards, at the prayers of others, released him.

St. Francis, a Van Gogh, his ear so in the world
beyond that people wondered if he spent
enough time here. He spoke from out of the blue,
like an ox that jumps its track. The friars bent

in close to hear. And so Masseo was sent:
“Thy brothers are herons who have the gift of wait
and contemplation. They need our leave to peel;
and since you, a stalwart wagon have to rate

the gift and rut of compromise: the noise
of the day in your preaching, that you may know both the rhyme
and the silence that has formed us all, perform
the door, the kitchen, and almsgiving for a time.

And when they eat, to give them more room at board,
take thy world and plate and sup at the door on thy haunch--
with the mice so that you might know all little things.”
He felt so stunned that a living saint would launch

him with a gift of preaching--since he had seen
his brothers glide recollected like great ships--
that he drew his hood and hurried to his place.
His father’s proposal, in short, made a perfect slip.

But his companions, since they were not detached
from this present world, and did not like the me,
the sting of privilege as they watched him hump
about, like a house guest trying to fit--where he

does not belong, lined up before the saint,
their shaven heads neatly bowed. Their least then asked
to share their brother’s joy. So Francis, surprised
again by the Spirit, gave his birds new tasks.

Masseo, of course, was good with either way:
“My Father, your directions are the door I trace--
the poorest hand of Jesus--in my dust.”
And St. Francis, seeing God’s earth in each pleasant face

and hearing the trees in their shake outside the hut,
allowed the Spirit to consume him, lift
him through his words. He preached how only the gifts
of God make us smaller by the day, His sift,

until we disappear. We are God’s larks
to Himself. And then as a father, Francis raised
the jobs like Christmas candy above their hands,
while Masseo swaddled his present--on a distant bay.

XIII
How St. Francis and Brother Masseo placed some bread which they had begged on a stone beside a fountain; and St. Francis greatly praised Poverty; and how St. Peter and St. Paul appeared to him

Feeling crowded by expectations, their long
and holy faces, St. Francis sent them out
with all that they possessed: their sins; then yoked
himself to Masseo, his rudder, for his last bout

with his father’s France. En route, the two of them came
to a piggy squeal of a town, with too many kids
chasing beasts, old women cut-outs in their crofts;
another place brimming with good needs and bids

to meet them. . . . It was time to beg for the day and its bread.
And because St. Francis was smaller than his size:
ungainly, ruddy, with tangled hair, he drew
the first pried morsels of charity: his prize—

a stale trencher, while Masseo, tall,
a man who had surely just misplaced his way,
was offered lighter bread from behind hinged doors. . . .
And after they’d sampled the village’s one horse sway,

its anger, they camped just beyond its noise, near a stream
where they could place their bounty: Masseo’s true worth
and want, the leprosy that would mold those hands.
“O Masseo, who are we to rake God’s earth?”

The other, though, foreseeing only want,
gaunt brothers, replied: “But prophetic Father, we lack
a cloth, the cutlery, the porriger.
Shall our future selves expire along muddy tracks?”

St. Francis, who always lived here, just stopped--then raised
his hands: “So it has always been: for the poor,
who have borne our name well before we knew their face
and could wash their feet with our praise. Embrace their sores:

these things were keen for their tables because we want.
May Lady Poverty serve us until we are fed.”
And after they’d worked their mouths around the rot
and opened their faces to water, St. Francis led

them toward the great and self-sufficient France.
But because what isn’t is so far away,
they stopped at a church. There Christ took over the saint,
who flushed past red, into the pallor of grey:

his face, now vacant, with sapped and whitening lips,
his essence, like smoke through a door as Love in-breathed
him: a conflagration for all the baffled folk
he had ever known, their names and faces, the sleeves

of their lives. And then coming back to his friend, he croaked
in a distant voice: “Ah! Ah! My brother, yield
thyself to me as the spring does to the rose,
as the rising dust does to the roads, the fields.”

Three times he repeated this, and by the last
he lifted a so relaxed Masseo up by
his breath, that the man’s arms took to following him
in his spin, and thus giving reason for the sky

outside. He felt adrift in every leaf
before its Life. Then it tossed him the length of a spear:
Masseo grogged into this same world—the one
he’d never known, so sweet of soul that his tears

enfolded him still in the creases and breath of God,
His linen hands, the fibers and weave of grace.
(The sanctified spiders and thickets--they roused too,
as did that transparent yodel: the stream’s icy face.)

What he reached for that day he found: the heaven which breathed
the world, gives it form and comfort. . . . And then he was home,
fell to a dirt floor, near the mouth of St. Francis: “Let
us visit the Apostles, St. Paul and Peter in Rome.

Let us ask for the house of mercy, Poverty,
our Lady, since her loss makes vanity reveal
itself, makes it writhe in the light of day. She is
His cross and only consolation--a peal

in our lives. May she guard her children with weakest arms,
give us these elders and walk us through holy lands.” . . .
Once on those hills, he grabbed Masseo and arched
up the lofty nave which seemed the praying hands

of the cathedral. . . . And because those saints lived so close
to his life, they turned that shortest of corners and met
him in stone: “The Lord Jesus has sent us to give you your wish
which is His; moreover, His blood would grant you yet

more, that your sons might be Her rags and call.
And whosoever shall trace thy lead shall own
the Heart that bears him thence—by the cut through stone
that reveals God here.” . . . And then they became his moans.
.
St. Francis tippled to Masseo, whose eyes
were closed, whose molars ground their way--to what?
He had seen nothing but cold floors, his dirty feet,
the world still beneath them, its pilgrims and its ruts.

So Francis gave him the other half of our tale—
one man on earth, one verging into sky.
And then it was time to turn, embrace their huts.
(St. Francis had forgotten his father’s sigh.)

XIV
As St. Francis and his Brothers were speaking of our Divine Lord, He appeared in their midst

Beneath the moon’s icy and ancient glance, this waste--
a void of voices against invented days:
God is a lie. But the earth impinged, and he turned
his ear, the river opining what was—its praise.

Besides his friends in every town knew the price
to be paid, the burdens of fellowship. So he called
the men, asked each to speak one word from God.
And as soon as one Brother would, St. Francis walled

him up inside his room of silence again
and moved on to the next talker, so that each leaf blew
in the Wind which made his bed. (That gift in place,
St. Francis would ask the next for all he knew.)

Their meekness could’ve made them clouds in the sky,
or a line of green-necked ducklings swimming the pond. . . .
And when the last had dunked, the Blessed Christ,
the Aperture appeared, all Father and fond,

the Living Substance of their words: the Ground
which waters the earth in a rush of sticks and bones.
He is the Life Who offers exactly Himself,
Who creates as we might breathe, all that we clone

in His cupped hands. It was more than their bodies could take. . . .
Until Francis rose into what he’d become: “Let’s bless
our God, Who has willed that the wavering mouths of fools
should reveal His power though all He’s not. The rest

is His, and we will march and file our days
in hiddenness, below His silent speech,
until the world recovers the war it has lost
and loses the peace beyond its articulate reach.”

XV
How St. Clare ate with St. Francis and his companion Brothers at St. Mary of the Angels

Sir Francis, a knob of cauliflower, a knot
in a stick, a wet field, set off to visit Clare. . . .
But when she needed to rest her head on his chest,
he felt the earth, its kinship, begin to tare.

“Our father, this stiffness seems unnatural;
unless you can find it in the parables
or in nature,” the brothers said. . . .“Very well, since it seems
so to those on the fence, so it does to the stupid bull.

But we will eat here with St. Mary and her troupe.”
And so St. Clare, with one of her sisters, left,
escorted by jongleurs, his boutonnières
who squired them to her Lord’s new kingdom--which cleft

their way: to the place of her betrothed’s hat,
or so these too happy feet in this out of step
dance seemed to her. With a simple table set
on the ground! (Perhaps a trap set by the adept?)

St. Francis spoke and got lost in the beauty of God
Who’d placed all food on the plate of matter: he praised
the dusk, his sister, out of whose immaculate mouth
came a woman clothed in lilies, the length of days;

the forests and wells, who foretell our lives in wet
and oaken buckets. The monks were like birds left to sing
and grieve for sin and death; he lamented that
in our comings and goings so much of the world that we cling

to outlasts us. So he raised both the friends and foes of God,
like a raiment high above them all. The race
and the family, its story: Redemption, and not.
Then he lifted this earth-bound bread and blessed the place

as he sang the Name of names, the One Who speaks
us alive, and then again in the mystery
of His choosing. And so St. Francis gave himself
to the food, to thrive his fiends, to set captives free.

And as this new community both found
its Light and lost its bearings, men from town,
from Betonia too, behind the flanks of horse
and home, their forging places, turned from their frowns,

their partial answers to see St. Mary’s wood
aflame, felt the heat from the road. And fearing the worst,
they geared and ran to help. But when they got
there, sides heaving in stabs of pain, they gasped and cursed

the good in front of the crumbling hut--where they found
too many nests on the ground, the plaster patched,
the stony silence. . . . So caps in hand, they went in,
saw people in robes much older than rags, singed thatch,

some heads bobbing back in a swoon, digesting their God.
Other holy folk nodded a similar measure. (None bore
an apron coated in blood and fat.) . . . And then
St. Francis returned to a oddly tracked up floor

to speak about the folds of Poverty,
about being her useless child: they’d been freed to hear
the voices that mattered—twigs underfoot, the wind,
the cry of the poor, the nothing that they held dear. . . .

And St. Clare, well-escorted again by the simple hands
of the saint, returned to St. Damian’s where she
could offer no relief—they were sure she’d been called
away to graft some other vine, decreed

from them, as Francis had given Sister Lamb
to Monticelli. But no, she said, she’d been sent
here--until they got it right, though she would perch
forever to go, since given lives must be spent.

XVI
How St. Francis received the counsel of St. Clare, and of the holy Brother Silvester, that he should preach for the conversion of many; and how he founded the third Order, and preached to the birds.

As he lead a flock of flapping herons, wrens,
St. Francis repented that he had no gifts
to build on here. So he asked, could he pray or should
he burden the noise and preach? What would be his shrift?

He asked Brother Masseo to go to Clare, and to
Silvestro—who spoke with God as if at lunch.
“This is what God says,” offered the Latter. “‘Thou shalt say
that Christ hasn’t called him to watch his spirit bunch

like flowers after rain. But that he feel
his death so that others might learn to live. Give him hail
to hear that his Lord will be a spoken Word.”
Masseo then turned to Clare--and the nodding of veils.

When he came back, St. Francis washed his feet
until he could see their beauty again, then led
him into the bracken, spaced trees, where mottled light
had been most of his sight, had offered the absence that fed

him. “Let’s go,” he said after hearing, and they left that spot
forever, with all the courage of one better armed.
He gave no thought to the way, but scurried, so fast
that he did his brother’s new humility harm.

The village was called Savurniano. And so
he began to preach, with no concern for what
came out, commanding the swallows to stop until
he had finished. He spoke with such ardor: words that cut

his own heart, until the whole village wanted to drop
what they were doing, leave their hammers, homes.
St. Francis, shocked, had to reign their zeal back in:
homes had to settle so the preachers could roam. . . .

Along the side of the road, he touched each trunk
at its station: erudition on the way.
But even these came alive with the singing of friends:
each wanting to be counted, to have its say;

and so he settled his Brethren: “Wait here, my friends,
a little while. I must go and preach God’s song
to my sisters, the birds. The earth is clay, but it
is river too. And they must know the throng

that gathers them in.” And he began to preach
to those at his feet about the Ground. But the lost
that perched the branches could not accept their place,
and so flew up and down off branches, which tossed

behind--now silent and earnest in the round:
like a button in its hole; and even when
he had finished spelling out duty and degree,
they would not leave the confines of their pen

until he blessed them. And as Masseo would long
after relate, St. Francis went deep and out
among them, touching them with the turns of his cloak.
He called them by made-up names, foreseeing each bout:

erupting wing or beak. The docile earned praise,
and none of them moved until he’d rejoiced in the slant
or tilt of each head. And as St. Francis spoke
again to them, they opened their beaks--not to rant

at this hungry world. But instead they stretched their necks,
their wings and bowed a mortal carpet, their heads
to the earth, to show him that his gift of words
had given them mission to go and die in his stead.

The saint then made the sign of Life, gave them leave
to depart to their new homes, to live their square feet
of life. And thereupon those birds whirled up
a sky, a chorus of air--and in precise fleets

divided themselves into four. They flew both east
and west, to the south and north, in love with the Cross,
renewing St. Francis and his Brothers, who would
possess no flight of their own--except in loss.

XVII
How a little boy-Brother, whilst St. Francis was praying at night, saw Christ and the Virgin Mother and many other saints talking to him.

Awake at night, with no family bed or tales,
no mother’s hands or voice to quiet trees,
the slashing rain as he lay, one soul, in a world
of truckle beds, under sweat, a cracking knee,

and the snores, as near as he could to Francis, who would,
long after prayer, in the buzz of flies, slip away.
The boy needed to know where he went--to what ritual,
adventure; so he tied his cord to his, a tight sway

to signal the time, but loose enough to give. . . .
St. Francis rose to untie the predictable schemes
of this world and walked out into the mouth of the night,
into a cell where he traded sleep for the seems

of light. . . . The boy startled to find the cord, put his face
behind him and walked the path into the dark wood.
He heard much speaking--and so forgot his way. . . .
And then he saw them all through the leaves, his first good:

a glimpse of heaven among the crickets, a bright man
not much bigger than he: St. Francis--and the Son!
The bright world bent into Him, its Way and Life;
and humility: his mother, who looked like a nun;

and seated on a rock . . . the face of the Baptist!
And the Evangelist, who was shorter than all
except Francis, with wings which rivaled the multitude
and crowd of angels--some high above in a brawl

of anxious feathers, some below in a nave of limbs,
around the One. But because this row was so close
to heaven, so far from the boy, he fell to the earth
like an acorn. . . . St. Francis, stumbling through a dark dose

of this world, tripped over the boy who, sunk among
its roots, lay sequestered; the saint then lifted him up
as best he could. And in the morning, having learned
how central the night had become, he sought to dim

it through obedience. The lad was not
to tell a soul as long as Francis should serve
on the altar of time. And the boy grew in vigor, in peace:
devoted to Francis, a man now, his tenuous nerves

forgotten, happy with the smallest place.
And after the death of the poorest one, his tale
was added to those which had so mastered him,
so that others could enjoy this holy jail.

XVIII
Of the marvelous Chapter which St. Francis held at St. Mary of the Angels, at which were present more than five thousand Brothers.

In a valley of daffodils, each with no place
or reason to lay his head, or brown-eyed Susans
a-flutter, like schoolgirls in a lively breeze.
Who’d have thought that Life had undone so many--again?

St. Dominic-of-His-way, though, on his cool
and studied course from Borgogna to the See
in Roma had to account the thousands himself.
And a Perugian Cardinal, too, came to free

himself in this comedy of charity,
each brother doing too much for his own: “These knights
are the truer Templars of the Crucified.
This is the crusade we sought, Christ’s visible plight

and song.” The Brothers’ tents were hung upon
the willows, in mats of rush, under trees and the moon;
positioned stones made for Provinces, though none
abided, each friar belonging to no one, so they soon

began to name themselves, “The Chapter of mats,”
or “of the trellises,” or “of this ravine.”
Their bed was the ground from which they sprang, and they found
the warmth they sought in night talk, in the straw they’d gleaned;

for pillows they had the mossy stones, or their arms
or logs of wood--and memories of home. . . .
Their hiddenness drew the busy eyes of those
who counted--themselves: on great horses in the gloam,

the flourish of ownership; and the glances, too,
of parish priests, graced abbots, they all came to see
this lowest rung of heaven--Francis, in the end,
a fool who took in each stiff: the “us” and the “me.”

“My sons, so great is the providence of God
that the fall leaves fizz yellow, cry out His name.
This world is the rapture of His voice. But its call
must not stay us. We have our work: to tame

ourselves. So we can’t be bound by the demands
it makes. Laughter of lilies, I command you to stand
and have no care for tomorrow, or for where you’ll die
since He lifts you up like water into his hands. . .”

St. Dominic, though, who’d been lessoned by his dreams
and had seen the needy orphaned girls of Spain,
knew that prudence demanded earnest husbandry--
or the men would certainly all end up like Cain. . . .

But flowers get by with the sun, and the local folk
from Perugia, Spoleto, Foligno came with mules
and carts, each laden with their lives’ red wine,
the bunch in grapes. With mindless cheer new rules

chased the brothers around, each trying to out-serve
the rest. Great knights and gentlemen who counted—
(again) themselves, who’d come to be amused,
now snapped green beans. . . . St. Dominic dismounted.

“No Brother in my Order shall own any land.”
And Francis, with an ear in the Spirit, followed suit:
he forbade leather bands, sharp-pointed chains--more than
five hundred of the latter, a cache of loot

with included circlets for the arms and lions.
(He left them there, in the field, that the crickets and rain
might eat them, teach them to rust in forgiving soil.)
Concluding, St. Francis left his own with a stain:

that each moment might be filled with blood, and with
the cage of heaven shaking all the bare trees.
He dismissed them to the halls of the woods, each place
enlivened with a chorus of bending knees.

XIX
How the vineyard of the priest at Rieti, in whose house St. Francis rested, was despoiled of its grapes, and afterwards miraculously yielded more wine than heretofore: and how God revealed to St. Francis that he should have Paradise for his portion

His eyes were dim--the way he’d always been,
out nosing among dead leaves: too slow to stand,
too quick to sit down. So if his Lord had need
of this last and hesitant dance, He could take his hand,

as his brothers had, though Francis often mused:
who was in grateful tow here, as the band
set off on another Cardinal song? They stopped
at Clare’s, his eyes, the wilted blooms in his hands.

He saw men like trees, trees like the fall of man.
It was the cross. He could tell by the smell of his blood,
by the physical pain he felt at people’s touch.
Misunderstanding, St. Clare gave him the mud

of a hut where he might rest from company.
Without his eyes, he had to endure the rats’ feet
as they scratched a horde of innuendo along
the walls, at his robe. How could he lie down, or eat?

He could get no rest, either during the day or at night;
a victim of prayer, his friends left him alone.
It was all he could do to keep from crying out.
This was the other side of Palm Sunday’s stones--

for his sins, and for those tendencies he’d passed
along to the Brothers. People thought too much of him.
He knew the state of the house in which he lived:
its stink and bad turns, the fouled cockroached corners.

This was the purge no man escapes—the truth
of his life. He lead with his hands and felt along
those internal walls, his breathing the only sound,
except for no prayer which gave a night to this wrong.

“Rejoice, little Francis. I give you a throne, a chair
large enough to embarrass, a gilded catacomb. . . .
An increase of joy brings sorrow. How could it be
another way . . . until all the lambs are home?”

Relieved, St. Francis held both of Clare’s small hands
in his own, then bowing a little to the right,
he winked at her and with his attending monk,
took his leave to go and finish flying his kite. . . .

As they approached Rieti—more threats that he
couldn’t see: many came to gawk, but all to see.
So the Brothers lead him to a church two miles
from town. It didn’t work. Folks circled, their pleas

alive with zeal, or something very like that.
In their haste, they razed the priest’s vineyard--and he died,
like we do when we consent to charity:
another faulty vision crucified.

But Francis had a heart much larger than
his own: “Good hands of Christ, how many sacks
of wine have the cuttings left you in your best
year under heaven, sun on the ground, on the backs

of your servants?” “Twelve.” “Please allow this feast for a few
of these days, and let who will, come home, for the heart
of God and for me, his useless little clown,
and eight more measures shall find you, where seas part.”

And so St. Francis, pressed about by souls,
the huge and singular presence of each child
and woman, their needs, could offer just the Lord
who owned him, pouring himself because his guile

was gone. And many went away cured or whole,
bent on abandoning the world that day;
the vineyard trampled, scarcely one cluster upon
the next, not one of them fit. So the Brothers delayed

in their going, re-set his vines and gathered the grapes. . . .
And the cleric trampled that promise, over and again
in his mind as he tread his sorry yield. . . . And of course,
he got his measures--that year and every one hence!

Who can believe these stories? Besides the folk
who read them, that is? Nobody—at least at first.
Then you realize you need the grapes, the wine.
How else would the world be drawn into His thirst?

XX
Of a wonderously beautiful vision seen by a young Brother

Did his scratchy habit expose his divided heart,
the smelly him it carried: an old, wet barn?
His angry sleeves invented lice—felt like roots
in dark and occupied waters. The hood was darned,

ungracefully knit; it whispered charade. And the coarse
weave offered no give: it bagged the saint that he
would never become. He’d known the greasy till,
but that had spat him out—unerringly.

Forever between, he wearied of his leash:
in obedience to lie prostrate before the Bread
each hour, his feet the only sound he could hear.
The void would surely take him--to where he’d been fed.

And so he went there one last time, to be
confronted by a host of heavenly louts:
saints clad in a painful daze of transfigured cloth,
embroidered calls, by gold and silver shouts,

by cyan and daffodil, with such peace, a rough
and robust glory—plush buttons and a bloom
of chestnut hoods. . . . The two most nobly attired,
almost hidden in the midst of the lavish loom

and pomp, in a torrent of fine stitchery,
seemed taken aback by the unearned march, its pace
and beauty, trying to step as everything sang
of peace. . . .Our Brother watched well beyond the brace

of their going. And then, at the end of the line he caught
a third, adorned for his glorious final course
in a wide hat, that the man appeared as though
he were a new-made knight being led to horse

and honor and a fitting home, with friends. . . .
Then the brilliance passed with the last sounds of feet
as they slapped the slate. But the Brother grabbed some heart. . . .
“We are all of us Friars Minor who have found our meat

in heaven. We have come down to show the least
of the Brothers that dilation.” . . . “Who were the two,
small in such gold?” . . . “Those who have given all:
St. Francis and Anthony. . . .And the last is the fool

who lately died, whom I name Brother Persevere,
because his road ran, like everyone’s, right up
until the end. But now it has ended, and its truth
begun. See how he drinks, at last, from the cup

as it really is. Our rough habits were our poor
and only answer, our insufficient song.
So don’t let the sackcloth of your life disturb
your goal.” . . . These words said, our youth returned to the wrongs

he knew: his life like a tent with too few poles.
And knowing how much he was cherished, the Brother fought
the face of ease and lived in the roughness of cloth:
the place that gave him the only no-home he sought.

XXI
Of the miracle which St. Francis performed when he converted the wolf of Gubbio.

Once upon the neck of time, the hide of nature
compounded Gubbio’s problems, eating crates
of snarly teens and suspicious mates; folks lived
for fear because death now loped so near their gates.

Though they beat their sticks and shouted when he came close,
nothing but itself could send the plague away.
So people carried pikes when they went out,
are far as they dared, caught up in the common lay.

And so Francis, who felt the tumid constriction as streets
seemed to squirm in their own juices, sweating and sealed,
went out to the wounded beast, though many hands
tried to hold him back. Outside, he blessed the fields

and made his way almost alone toward
their pasts, their cache of fears. The crowd behind,
the wolf gave a voice to the oldest of oral tales.
But Francis, with no home on earth to bind

him, made his treasure sign and stopped the stars
in their wheel. Then he bad the wolf to come and bend.
Overthrown, the creature did so. But because sin lives
in the wake it makes, the saint sought further amends.

If the wolf would carefully walk in its step, neither men
nor dogs would make it run. “And I promise your pelf,
both food and a hearth-place, shall be given you,
for well I know how hunger can turn--on itself.

Just be sure to save your carrots for the stew.”
And the wolf then dropped his eyes. “I would have thy hand,
Brother Wolf, that thou wilt stay in this vow, without
which I cannot trust thee to thy nature. The land

will not suffer thee.” Then St. Francis, because he knew
mankind, sought to broaden the moment, to make it event:
“Brother Wolf, in the Name of Jesus Christ, who taught
us, let us go, you and I, and confirm this time we’ve spent.”

And the wolf, disturbingly large for a sheep, walked close
to Francis to show that it understood, was changed.
And the window talkers, the gossip stalkers, the reaps
and the sewn, they filled the piazza to see the deranged

made straight: “Goliath” and St. Francis, who told
them their sin had pushed Who-Should-Be-First into
demanding that their need be better known.
“And much worse than fangs or death are the flames that are due

to those who wait. Do penance for you sins.”
The sermon ended, St. Francis sought refuge for
Sir Knight by giving himself as surety;
and the wolf gave paw—a moment later than lore

would have liked, yes, but it promised to stay and work
to keep his word. “Brother Wolf, I desire that you
now pledge your only faith inside the gates
of this place and heaven.” . . . And so littleness and her crew

again changed everything into themselves.
As for the wolf, he lived on the fat of the skim,
without harm for two years--and because he was so large,
the people gave way (to Francis) and to him.

He was what he had become. Though after his death,
it must be said, that the people did not lay
a fitting stone for either—our human needs,
though there is a tiny one selling the square today.

Earlier versions from THE FIORETTI

VI Francis chooses Bernard as his Vicar

It was cold and it snowed
the day Francis died.
The door rattled on its hinges—
last guest outside.
Tiles slid off the roof.

Bernard felt the weight
of all he had not done
as he sat on the dirt floor, cornered,
leaning his forehead again and again
into the whitewash—sepulcher:
feeling the dead-wood in his soul,
empty . . . in the by now
bird-chirping hours.

It would be another day—
unlike the previous:
the whole world, oblivious
to its tears.

Francis alone soon would be gone.

There would be other days
Bernard wouldn’t want.

And so when the poor one
called for his first born, Bernard
couldn’t help himself, shook
like a tired baby: Vicar
to the cracked pallet--
the first of many wayward children.

XXIII Francis helps a brother who is in sin

Francis walked in silence,
a step ahead of another
wronged brother. The sun was setting,
and the bark on the trees turned orange.

The two of them sat down on a hill,
first Francis, then the other.
They watched the moon rise, talk to them,
shedding its column of light
on the water.

Walking back,
Francis, alone with their lives, stopped,
picked up a dead branch.
“Did you know,” he asked,
“that the forest has bones?”

He broke the branch over his knees.
The sound echoed through the trees
in the twilight.

“Make a wish,” he said,
“. . . one that’s not your own.”

2010-11-25T02:13:00.000-08:00

A Poetry of Discipleship
The field of Christian poetry has broadened so much in the last thirty years. Flowers everywhere. Helen Vendler’s comment that she could not find a concern for the transcendental anywhere in contemporary American poetry seems hopelessly outdated. But where are we exactly? What does the phrase Christian poetry mean anyway, and what obstacles stand in the way of whole-hearted poetry of discipleship?
Mother Theresa used to urge “Faithfulness, not success.” And this understandable worldly concern is perhaps the best place to start. Secular editors (and many Christian ones as well) are so wary of the Absolute side of Truth that they will reject anything that smacks of that out of hand. Because of that prejudice, poetry which reveals an appreciation for a genuinely sacramental poetic, one that includes both the demands of God and our journey through the minefield of life, is immediately tossed into the slush pile. Poetry, it seems, must reflect a sensibility which lines up the prevailing secular heart.
There are good journals, of course, but their numbers are few. As a result so many published poems seem solely concerned with the horizontal part of the faith experience, often including a sideways jibe at those who look upward as well! How many good poets can you name who are willing to forego laurels to praise our Lord in the manner of Merton or Eliot?
A second obstacle is second-hand piety. Many fine believing poets are put off track because they are simply not yet willing to go into the believing unknown. Warmed over Holy Spirit poems which deliver the same “fresh” vision twenty years later help no one. Poets have got to work the soil, break new ground, every time out. Some evangelical poets, Protestant and Catholic, simply chose not to do this. This is sad because it turns Christianity into slightly dirty dish water. Who cares? No one is freer than the Christian poet, so our work should reflect that.
A third problem is that too many Christian writers of poetry and fiction are simply in too big a hurry to publish. One study revealed that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to produce an artistic master in any of the arts. That about three hours a day for ten years. Writers have to be slow—like workers when they come into your home to fix something. They never hurry because they know what they are doing. So it must be with us.
Fear is part of the difficulty here too. The faith we have has served us pretty well, so why should we grow, especially if it’s going to cause us pain? We all resist, except for the saints among us. But there’s no other way for an artist, for any Christian to proceed. What is the expression: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”? Each time out, with each new blank piece of paper we learn what we have learned again. And that’s a blessing because our ignorance allows God room to move, to get in there, to make us new and teach us. And isn’t that way all this is about?

2010-11-09T01:58:00.000-08:00

A poetry of discipleship. That's what I'm interested in. How do we do it?

2010-10-01T04:13:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine has just written to me, telling me that I've been too hard on Hollywood. While I don't know it that's really possible, her corrective impulse comes at just the time J.J. Abrams is finishing up shooting scenes for a movie in our fair town, Weirton, WV. And since I've been thinking about this event, too, perhaps the whole confluence is a knock from the Holy Spirit. So I dive in.

I was amazed at the size of the operation. Paramount set up a base camp two blocks from us, in a lot by the park, and when Linda and I drove through we saw about ten tractor trailers in neat rows. They were shooting up in a convenient mart lot, and there were two more up there. And since I was covering the paper route for my limping son, I had to drive around the ensuing jam, finding two more trailers on a side road. The people seemed very nice, and they did such a nice job with everything (no surprise since movies--if you don't count scripts--are so well made these days). It's been fun to walk downtown, see how they've altered stores, added 70s gifts, a date specific used car lot.

But the thing that got me was that the whole enterprise is such a heady thing. All that money, effort, time, and, scope--as well as the exhileration involved in the creative process. It would take a great deal of humility to deal with that. More than I have, no doubt.

God bless Hollywood.

Which reminds me, Dr. Mark Adderley from Wyoming Catholic sent me his new book: THE HAWK AND THE HUNTRESS. Very nice, Catholic in Arthurian dress. It's very good. I think it will be released in November. If you like action, romance, and a great take on sub-Roman Britain, do get it.

JMJ

2010-08-16T06:58:00.000-07:00

It stuck me recently that our political system could be categorized very simply: secular purtians vs. religious puritans. (I remember a bumper sticker: JP II for president!)

Also, I wonder if there is anything more harmful to Christianity than leadership training. Charismatics can especially be annoying in this area. I know a guy who runs a gym, and during basketball pick-up games, he assigns fouls--or rather delegates them--according to what each person "needs" spiritually. What ass-like behavior: but a true leader.

Of course, if you've ever seen me play basketball you'd know that the carnage engendered does cry out for a little order. Still, these people show up wherever Christians gather (with their Protestant perfectibility) and everyone with any sense has to run for cover.

I think Charismatic, and other, "leaders" should grovel, get all fawning over the fact that they have been included at all. After all, no one more clearly deserves not to be.

2010-08-02T01:43:00.000-07:00

We're watching Michael Wood's video IN SEARCH OF SHAKESPEARE again. Great enthusiasm and cinematography, fun. The phrase "Secular wisdom" occurred to me. I don't know if we'll be around on this plane for the Catholic version, but that will be a sight to see. Someone with that honeyed tongue and insight delivering plays which embody a more heavenly/sacramental version.

I wonder what it was like, being in the room when he came up with that stuff. It's like St. Francis. How cool would it have been to take a two mile walk with mr. four foot ten?

2010-07-28T17:08:00.001-07:00

Another last word on Lebron.

When I was up at Madonna House in the late 70's, Elvis had just died of his OD, and one of the guests made some young remark about the spiritual truths beneath his demise. A staff member, though, I remember, responded by saying you just never know. How many of us have to deal with what he had to deal with?

And so it is with Lebron. I've just finished the pulled ESPN article about his Las Vegas party. What a nightmare, all of it disguised as the man with everything. Here's this overgrown adolescent (if that), living in a imaginary world that may well kill him, if it hasn't already. Who could deal with that? What chance does he have?

God have mercy on all of us! Let's pray for each other.

2010-07-24T01:04:00.000-07:00

A last word on LeBron.

Cleveland's psyche has been the subject of much speculation on the net lately, so as a native, I want to defend. I think what really bugs most people is the bubble jocks can live under. "I've got to stay humble" they say; as if one can put that cloak on and be right on a spiritual level. But the spirit is inside. And who ever has enough to say "stay"? You can see why "it's harder for a rich man to ge through the eye of a needle." Money and fame can isolate, insulate one--though so can the intellect, any gift.

No one can know James' soul. We've all got enough to worry about with our own. But other people do matter. How else will we be measured?

God bless them all. I know for myself I take pro sports way too seriously some times. We the fans have given them the power, raised them up. And in the end we don't matter. "It's a business," they always say.

The sordidness makes one happy for the NCAA, who actually has a committee which tries to keep people in line. So does God, of course. We can all wear LeBron masks as we wait in line!

2010-07-21T19:05:00.000-07:00

Our Down's guy Jude gets in a groove and likes it, stays there. So he's always, at intervals bringing home LOR extended videos from the library--THE RETURN OF THE KING this time. In the past, I've recommended them to students as they go into great detail when it comes to production, just what it takes to do these things. Great stuff for young writers to see. Good work involves lots of it!

And it's such a blessing for me too. So many extraordinarily talented people in the world! It's amazing. So as much as I occasionally recoil from Peter Jackson's penchant for anvils when something lighter might've worked better, man is the guy gifted, and they all are. The sound guys really love and are great at sounds, Howard Shore; all of them. It's a shame Hollywood so often has to ruin all that talent with airheaded polemics.

Linda and I were watching ADAPTATION with Meryl Steep in it the other day. She's so good, but boy, who's been in more bad political movies? It makes me appreciate poets like Berrigan and Merton: Catholic and excellent, the truth in all its humanity.

What's it going to be when all the new Catholic voices hit the fan? Voices not longer concerned with making Jesus and imitation of themselves, with turning Him into a liberal (or conservative) poet. May we live to see a greater turning of that tide.

Come Lord Jesus. Infect us with humility! Let its dark (and happy) flower grow!

2010-07-20T16:33:00.001-07:00

Over the last few years I've had to endure my kids listening to some concertedly nasty reviewing of the STAR WARS, especially on the pre-quels. And as anyone knows who's seen them, they are real bad. But just this last weekend we took out the older trilogy. (I wanted to hear them make fun of them: summer weirdness or something.) Silly me. I was the loudest, and we only got part way through the first one. The guy who plays Luke is @ 22 or so by the look of him, but his dialogue makes him sound 12. Really bad stuff. And if you add the fact that neither he nor Carrie Fischer can act a lick. Geeze. The thing is poorly written, the dialogue, stilted.

But Bunks, you might say, this is landmark material.

Like AVATAR, the only thing it really has going for it is the world-making, the cool machines and stuff. But what complete crap. The popular culture has to eventually collapse under its own paper mache weight. Hollywood types are always standing tall for Lucas. (Who can watch the Oscars, really!)

The whole thing reminds me of a list my son got from his film making class in college. The American Film Society, or someone like that, listing their 100 most important (or was it best) movies.

The directors there must be monkeys.

But then I think of the Pulitzer committee for poetry. Before the war was bad enough. Robinson won three times. (He's from Harvard, you know, so he must be good.) Eliot didn't win for THE WASTE LAND, Stevens had to have stomach cancer, Williams had to be dead. It's hard to tell after the war because who knows if we've had any (or much) lasting poetry. Writing programs and the content police have in all probability killed originality.

Let's solve the problem! (We'll make a list of the good ones.)

But enough of that direction. I picked up Daniel Berrigan's RISEN BREAD selected poems recently, and have loved what I've read so far. Fine imagination, language play, thoroughly Catholic. Yea! I also picked up Pope Benedict's first book on Jesus, and have been so soothed. The modesty, intellect, scholarly insight and writerly skill (though it's a translation, I'm sure) make it a wonderful read. It makes me glad that the church is in such hands.

Praise God! Which reminds me, I picked up that Rossini video (I might have the name wrong), the one based on the FIORETTI, done in the 50s, black and white. Great stuff. The FIORETTI still inspire. It would be nice to have that kind of humility.

Well, Linda's in the background finishing up her cello practice. Almost time for my banjo!

2010-07-20T01:59:00.000-07:00

Just one more note on the priest thing. This good cleric told me in Confession one day that his own father would not attend his ordination in Africa. And now I learn that this family with whom he was staying in Virgina was in fact his real family. (I had just assumed it was an "adopted" one since he was from so far away.) And the little girl in question is his niece.

We've just crossed over into THE TWILIGHT ZONE. Has the other son carried on the wishes of the father--as so many sons do? Is this a heroic thing or just another abuse scandal? I wish I could be on hand at the trial.

But who knows?

As most male friends would do in these circumstances, I think of my own sins. Like the majority of us, the phrase that comes to mind is "too many."

On the other hand I think that if God could give me a life, as he has, a family and what passes for a career, he can certainly make me into something good, a saint even, as well.

The thought of paying what the good priest may be paying is enough to make one shudder, though, no?

2010-07-17T01:10:00.000-07:00

Our parish is still in shock. An amazing Kenyan priest has been charged with a child sex crime in Va. while on vacation there; everyone is disturbed. No one knows what to make of it. We've had said priest over a few times for dinner, and I really liked going to him in Confession. Very insightful. A gentle Ph.D. in philosophy. So I'm anxious for the whole thing to shake down. A neighbor couple told Linda they think it might be a set-up, though of course no one knows?* The local paper and the people from SNAP--one crusader was kind enough to come in from Missouri (another few from the "eparchy" of Steubenville) to paint the priest in the most pernicious terms possible--both have jumped on the AP band-wagon: the diocese was too slow, potentially allowing for strong-arm tactics or (and this is the one that really gets me) for time so the guy can skip the country. Yeah, I can just imagine the priest in jail, chewing on his cigar, making his contacts with Guido, the bishop too. These people are asses, all in the name of justice. And if the guy ends up being innocent, we can expect an equally pointed attempt to secure justice and broadcast that, right? They will do a front page story on that too, no? SNAP will throw a party.

If the guy's guilty, he needs to pay. There's no argument there. But the word is "alleged," people. You can spell it, say it. Meanwhile the guy sits in jail for a month, having to bear this on every level. If you have a moment pray for him, the child and for her family.

*Sounds far-fetched, I know. But I also know that a prof from our Theology Department was once perhaps saved by a secretary who found a nude woman in his office!

2010-07-09T03:20:00.000-07:00

Since it's LeBron day, and since I'm a Clevelander at heart, we got to say something. I don't feel much one way or the other about it really. It's good to see an Afro-American have such power, sway, money. (It's a little late for Andrew Jackson's Cherokee Appalachian nation in 1838, but we'll take what we can get.) And if there's a sin here on his part, it seems almost childlike. These professional athletes never get the fan part of the equation. I think of Cliff Lee's comment that Cleveland baseball loses players because the locals don't buy enough tickets. Completely clueless, but in a stupid and forgivable way. Bread or tickets, the heating bill or tickets. A tough choice.

Pro sports/ESPN, and they really seem to be the same thing, are the world in the Biblical sense. Aquisitiveness gone mad as the seed for it. The Cavs will stink. So what, really. Miami and LA can vie for glitziness until both are washed into the sea.

But we each have sins enough. Dear old Cleveland, you will have my heart right down to the empty blast furnaces, to d. a. levy and the vast steel gray lake on a winter Browns afternoon. Give me the orchestra, the theater, Mark Stieve's book store. Give me old friends and classmates, decimated public golf courses after an outing; give me the parks, the memories. Pro sports is something we do to celebrate the rest. Beer will do just as well.

2010-07-04T07:19:00.000-07:00

I was just looking at a new Christian poetry journal, and while I like the list of impressive poets, I wonder still. Why do we just assume that the way we see the world is a given: that's the way it is? Clearly, this is not so. How did St. Francis, Brothers Ruffino, Masseo, Bernard, Juniper, and Leo see the world is the better question? Our poetry should reach for that gift. What we've gotten since the Reformation has been a movement toward enlightenment stuff: Shakespeare was right! He WAS brilliant, of course, the best, but was he right? He had a great heart for suffering, humanity, issues, but was he spot on about the human condition? For one, I'd give just about anything to walk two miles with St. Francis, to somehow change my life's vision for the saint's. That's what it's about. Frankly, I'm getting a little tired of either hearing slightly bored Christian poets lecture us about the horizontal dimension in their poems when they have so little of the vertical going on, or of them doing the same old metapoetical tapdance, or of them delivering the same Holy Spirit Protestant elevated "saved" stuff (fifteen years on). The first two are beyond mundane. They're boring. And the third, though blessed, ends up being just more of the same old bidness.

Jesus, change us so we see the world as we ought to, if you can change us that much?

The danger here is, of course, sounding falsely pious (or rah, rahing it like Chesterton). How can a poet sound like what he doesn't have access to? Pray, pray, pray. It must be possible. May we all be part of a new poetry.

2010-06-14T19:36:00.000-07:00

Three observations:

Been reading Ralph Martin's THE FULFILLMENT OF ALL DESIRE. Wonderful stuff--the Fathers of the Church (and Mothers), so many of them talking about holiness, the signposts, the stages. I'd started it some time back, but bogged. And the prose style can occasionally get in the way, but now that I'm back in I'm very grateful. Growth! I can feel it. The little tubers! I'm into the second part, the Illuminative Way (is it?). Don't get ahead of yourself.

Run you tubers.

And speaking of not getting ahead of yourself, I've been rereading the FIORETTI, trying to get more poems from the same sources I used more than thirty years ago. One of the things that I really like about the text, XXVI today--and the early prayer ("Those who do not do penance") in THE SAINT, EARLY DOCUMENTS book of the scholarly trilogy on him, is the emphasis on hell, justice. We don't hear enough about it, the cut corners that come back. Lots of people are paying for that, I'm sure. I don't know about you, but I rely on mercy so easily. Perhaps that's not a good thing. I need to feel what I am the way the saints did/do.

And the last thing is the Duke. Saw THE SEARCHERS today. It's funny, how Wayne was run out of town in the late 60's; but when you go through everybody's 30 best westerns, the guy keeps showing up. A main--to quote Sam and Dave. (Though the actor who later played Jesus--Jeffrey Hunter, really pales compared to Montgomery Cliff in RED RIVER. Cliff is a good male lead there too.)

Christ is Risen!

2010-06-13T07:49:00.000-07:00

ONE FOR THE SQUISH

Since there's so little at Blockbuster, we usually get our videos from the library. But even there I have to pray for guidance. Something good, Lord! Does He answer is often the question, though my stockpile of virtue may have something to do with that. Anyway we picked up THE SOLOIST with Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. Great movie for the most part. "Jesus gonna be here, gonna be here soon. . . . He's gonna cover us up with leaves, with a blanket from the moon," or so goes the Tom Waits song. So much destitution, lost folk. But what great heart on the part of the squishy LA Times reporter. Moving stuff. Of course, like any Hole-ywood film these days Christianity must be assaulted. Fundamentalism in this case, the invader with no compassion, just his body-less cross. I suppose I could be happy that the other enemy wasn't involved: the Church. But why so these secular Puritans feel this need?

Oh well, take what good you can find. Nice movie. Praise God for the "wound of love."

2010-06-09T03:27:00.000-07:00

And speaking of Rowling, Columbus's great picture of Fudge in the sixth movie reminded me of the Star Trek Borg in that the first is so British and the second so American. That great likeness flapping in the breeze brought fascism to mind, uncles Adolf and Benito, always fresh in the British consciousness. But for us, the specter is communism: the red scare, Kruschev's shoe on the UN table, the Cuban missile crisis. That's our base line--at least until 9/11.

But Obama's going to change all that.

2010-06-09T02:03:00.000-07:00

Having been summoned before the bar of inquisition, I must clarify. In an earlier post when I alluded to Westerns in Rowling and Tolkien, I was talking movies. Jackson and Columbus--those directors. (Unless we want to talk James Fenimore Cooper, whom Tolkien liked very much, since Jackson rips him off too: Aragorn as Hawkeye, ear to the ground.)

All art is collaborative, of course. As Frost says, "Good poets borrow, great ones steal." But the old misdirecting tossed rock was ancient when Roy Rodgers did it (or whoever that was in my foggy youth).

2010-06-07T02:41:00.000-07:00

Is the Domino pizza/Ave Maria guy trying to use his money to legislate Catholic culture? To what extent is EWTN part of that?

2010-06-07T02:10:00.000-07:00

“Catholic poetry,” “Poetry by Catholics.” Thanks largely to Flannery O’Connor we may never be able to untangle what those two phrases actually mean. But one thing is clear, and that is that the lives of the saints are always in front of us. They are who we would do well to model ourselves after. That is true for every Catholic, poet or not. And the one defining characteristic of those who were or who would be saints is an absolute obsession with Jesus Christ: who He is, what he wants. So it would follow that every Catholic poet’s work should likewise reflect that pre-occupation, whatever he or she is writing about. I mean if St. John Vianney rode a bicycle down the cobbled roads of France, he was surely enjoying the presence of God as he put out his feet, perhaps even talking to his Lord as his cassock and hair flapped in the breeze.

But how often does Catholic poetry center itself on the Christ who defines us, who pumps the blood, spiritual and physical, into our veins? He gives all pain expression, and meaning. He is the reason we get up each day. Granted the world does not want to hear this. Oprah would find it excessive. Some would argue as Gerald Stern does: one is not always a Jew or a Christian; some poems are just about an itchy back or a fear of death. “Everyone fears death.” But for the Christian, again, we do everything in God’s contemplative presence, and that should express itself either explicitly or implicitly.

As I say, the world does not want to hear this. And it is this very tension which creates the contemporary literary landscape behind the Christian poem.

And so how can one be true to his or her vocation and still get published in “group mind” POETRY magazine? What kind of Catholic poems can get into little magazines, any way, and which kinds can not? These are good questions, reflect the difficulties. But there is more. Even on friendlier turf, there are other problems. Many overtly Catholic “literary” journals make demands which seem to come short of the liberty offered by the gospel, insisting as they do on a mahogany old-world European-laced perspective. Quality does not seem to be an issue for some of these editors, either. They seem more concerned with formula and the catechesis involved. Art, literary value, seem secondary. (Though we do need to tip our hats to Philip C. Kolin for his good work with VINEYARDS.)

This leads me to Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s wonderful book MOVING HOUSE by Word Press, 2009. It reflects both some of the problems and something of a solution to “the world” problem mentioned above. Broken up into seven sections, she delivers some fine Catholic poems here—though she, admittedly, does not spend a lot of time directly concerned with the King. Still, many of the offerings are wonderfully and overtly Catholic. The strongest of O’Donnell’s pieces in this book for my money revolve around her childhood coal town memories and those concerning her contemporary domestic scene. Some of these are so powerful that I feel they may still be around well down the road—a rarity, I think, in this postmodern world.

The poems I liked less might be said to edge either toward the coffee table variety or toward the herd mentality of the literary magazines. Such poems, when they fail in the large, usually acknowledge some pain, but it is controlled by wit, resource and a saving last line. In Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s defense, however, even when she verges in that direction, her judgment, sense of surprise usually saves the day.

Still, I prefer the poems that shake my bars, punch me in the mouth to put it baldly, poems that make me profoundly grateful to the poet for giving me real news. “Breaker” is one of those first-rate poems about her youth. In it we’re brought into a dark and damp coal town world, “A town of heaving men/who slept upright in their darkened parlors.” It’s a place I’ve never lived, a place where we later learn the kids must sleep wearing coats. The next poem “Northern Lights” does it again: mom and dad up early, after Robert Heyden, trying to breathe life into the soot-dark cold of the house.

“In “Grandmother’s Living Room” we learn “The floor sloped sharp/in the cavernous dark” and that abandoned shafts ran underneath the house. The kids squeal in delight because they are kids:
Still we braved it all the same,
The crazed plaster and warped floor boards,
The chill smell of sulfur,
The gray-tasting dust,
And holy Mary on the western wall
Suffering her sword-pierced heart.
The poem ends in delight, but a wise delight.

“Staking Claim” features the speaker as mom, delivers much. And “Division,” which follows is a fine, fine poem. The speaker, a mom, is Gertrude from HAMLET in the latter, can feel with the woman because she is a mom. This is the kind of thing Angela does best, though I liked all the poems about art as well. Still, it’s the poems like “Division” that really punish the reader. (Jorie Graham once said that it’s the poet’s job to break your heart.) This is a mother’s pain. The two which follow are marvelous too: “Dante in the Kitchen” and one of my long-tome favorites of hers, “Waking the Children.” There the mother knows, fore-suffers because she knows what days always bring to the young, to all of us.

Part VI has many wonderful poems around moving from one place to another: again, a woman’s take—as is fitting, since as Proverbs tell us, she is the heart of the home. There are other fine poems, too, ones which do not deal with my two favorite topics: childhood and motherhood/wifedom. Anything on Melville is going to be good because she clearly loves him so much, gets him in some powerful way. The death poems also really catch you up short.

There’s much to like here, which is a good thing because Angela is such a quality person, and it’s good to be blessed with that on the page. In parting, I would encourage here to write a book just on family. That is where she shines brightest.

Of course, God only knows where future poems will venture, or where they come from for that matter. May He have mercy on us all as we struggle to fit more snugly into obedient lives.

2010-05-31T10:29:00.000-07:00

Over a good friend's house, I saw this Bob Dylan video. Now I know Bob plays Mr. Chameleon, has done so forever. (I looked at his two volume autobiography a few years back and was not surprised to find that he was totally absent.) In the video I was watching he was doing this Chaplin thing with a straw hat, with Robert Downey Jr. and Michael Douglas. Where was Bob? Again--in the poses, in the poses: all lies, all the truth. But it struck me as weak and loud too.

He refuses to be counted, and he does go on about it. (What was with all those teeth shots?)

I like the guy, always have, and I know he's trying to keep his fame, his notion of being an artist. He has to stay on top. But on some level the guy's weak.

Why not just be what you are?

2010-05-31T10:13:00.000-07:00

Having long insisted to my my son that both LOR/Peter Jackson and HARRY POTTER ripped off Westerns shamelessly, I checked on the net for the top 30 and have started watching them. THE MAN FROM LARAMIE, HIGH NOON, and RED RIVER first; I was struck first off by the men. Stewart, Cooper, and Wayne--each had a sense of heroic virtue: of what is required of men. A little WASP-ish probably, but they get the good. I mean, could you imagine Brad ("Who's your daddy?") Pitt playing any of those roles? Or to put the shoe on the other foot, imagine some super model with four inch biceps saying that to the Duke!

Our culture has no sense of what it means to be a man or a woman. Females are now ordinarily physically superior to men in action movies, infinitely brighter on tv commericals; and all sensitive men have become feminists. I saw that in grad school: the pansy patrol. One of the reasons they have men sporting events separate from women's is because men are, generally speaking, broader at the shoulder, more narrow at the hip. They run faster, jump higher.

Hollywood is pretty clearly the land of idiots, followed closely by the arts community in general. Yes, women can kick your butt, but it seldom happens in the sprints. "You said you'd do this?" Yes, I did, so now I will do it.

And who doesn't value women's opinions, sensitivities?

But men have them too. David tells Solomon to play the man. John Wayne got that. Our culture does not.

As far as cliches go, I haven't seen them yet. RED RIVER surprised throughout. Maybe I'll have to go to Roy Rogers and SKY KING re-runs.

2010-05-19T10:13:00.000-07:00

I want to post this because these issues always come up in Christian (and secular) literature classes.

Hinging Hejinian: When "Openness" is not Enough

Some years ago, I had the pleasure of teaching a Contemporary Christian Poetry class. It was something I felt ready to do as I had just completed co-editing ODD ANGLES OF HEAVEN, but I felt I needed to supplement those poems with some representative essays on the poetics of the Post Modern and contemporary periods. Paul Hoover's POSTMODERN AMERICAN POETRY, A NORTON ANTHOLOGY, which I had just gotten in the mail, seemed like an ideal text. And it proved very useful as it contained not only some golden oldies--Creeley's jazzy poetic, Olson's justly famous "Projective Verse"--but it served up, as well, a good (and expected) menu of some of the newer poetics. State-of-the-art feminists, anti-capitalistic Language poets, and performance po-bizzers all got their turns at bat, each trying to create a new pagan aesthetic, each tying to knock the stuffings out of the, if you will, straw man patriarchal.

But it much of these writers' insights contained a little too much of the screeching foolishness many people have come to associate with Bill Moyers' most recent videos, some of the writing proved very thought-provoking as well, some even eye-opening. I was especially struck with how often these poets as essayists reflected the apparent poetics of many of the Christian poets in our anthology. That is, they could see and expound brilliantly on open-endedness,or, to put it in more overtly Christian terms, on the tenuous dark night of faith experience, on the working out of one's salvation with fear and trembling. But what neither camp could seem to come to grips with was the fact that "openness" is not the whole story, especially for the Christian poet. for us there is more, much more. An that "more," I would like to assert, has everything to do with what has come to be pejoratively called "closure." What I hope to show is that this whole other level of poetry writing, indeed, this whole other level of personal experience offers the other half of a GENUINE wholeness, one that is not available to those who choose to ignore it.

I would like to quickly emphasize here as well that neither of these forms of discourse: "openness" or "closure," negates the other form when it comes to creatively giving utterance go the Christian walk. The "openness" or sense of absence experience which makes up so much of our Christian days does not in any way contradict or make void the fact that it is often possible for us ecstatically and obediently bask, through infused grace, in God's absolute presence. And, at the same time, neither is it true, I hope to show, that the language of the one experience is sufficient to express the other.

It seemed to me as I was working on the anthology--and it still seems so--that today's Christian poets have been, perhaps, overly influenced by the contemporary, largely politically motivated notion that "openness" does, in fact, refute and negate closure. And it also seemed to me that the best place to respond to this error was where its point of espression was strongest. And that led me to Hejinian.

She is a very eloquent spokesperson for the notion of openendedness, and I would, to a very large extent, agree with what she has to say about that in her essay, "The Rejection of Closure." There she tells us that language encourages and partly answers a healthy longing we all innately have for wholeness, and that any kind of imposed closure, be that from the God the Father machine, or even from the purely sexual interpretations French feminists have put on that longing, is limiting. She tell us, too, that this very inability in language is helpful because it provides a medium of differentiation, and that through it we can come to grips with a world in flux.

Most of this, in its place, seems very good to me. But it's her larger take on the writing experience that I have trouble with. She very strongly states that no other way of seeing, writing is possible. Why, I had to ask myself, does she have to have such an either/or perspective? And how would she know that "closure," or life in God the Father, if such a life were to exist, limits anyone? Those of us who have, to some extent, experienced what we call His love would say that, on the contrary, He frees people, both in the living and in the writing. The limits she has set for us, I would like to argue, are simply not sufficient to contain our experience.

First, a closer look at what she does well. She provides keen insight into how poets attempt to find meaning within the very clay and process of composition itself. And further, she correctly points out that there are no easy or final ontological answers within the borders of that process. This is a crucial notion for us as well, because as Christians, Christian poets, we do the same thing in OUR search for the Truth in the complex situations we write about. It's the very process of composition that allows us a place and mean to myll over life in the darkness of faith in our efforts to make Williams' machine made of words.

And while it is true that a Christian might choose different language to express the same process, St. Paul's phrase "work out your salvation with fear and trembling" is the one that always comes to mind for me; but at his or her core, heart, the Christian poet usually engages in exactly the same enterprise. He, like his more secular counterpart, wrestles with language, with meaning as he attempts to apply the Gospel to his work and life, as he struggles to find Jesus in what he is doing. But Hejinian makes the crucial mistake of thinking that that wrestling makes up the entire poetical process for everyone. It does not, at least for the Christian.

For us there is even more "openness." And that "more" can be found, oddly enough, within her very notion of "closure." Faith is the result and the precursor of presence, and the boundaries it provides, along with the Presence make it possible for poets to lyrically express a truth that is purely given. And while this apparent contradiction might seem confining to the uninitiated, it is in reality anything but. It is, rather, freeing in the extreme. A poet can emanate truth, reveal something of God's own heart. he or she can occasionally live in that overwhelmingly illumined peaceful place of absolute Presence, in complete freedom, and, if lucky, he or she can find a "closed" group of words and symbols to express the joy in that experience. This is a paradox, granted. But Christianity is loaded with them.

Moreover, I would argue that this life of faith, this "closed system" is the ONLY place that can offer us this kind of freedom. It's a good place, a joyful place; it's a place so full of joy, in fact, that it has its own subjectively mimetic lyricism; it's a place where the expression of the interior presence, where a given reality can, at times, give actual form to that Life with a capital "L," at least as close as we can get to It given out still, though saved and being-saved, good natures. (It could be convincingly argued, I think, that the only place where "essence" and language perfectly reflect each other, where they become one in fact, is when the word "Jesus" is used to heal someone--the Eucharist being the material manifestation of that union.)

It's interesting to note that there's a delicate irony in Hejinian's perspective here. one could argue that this reality evades Hejinian and many others, at least in part, because they think too much like they might accuse a Christian of thinking, a curious twist considering the title of her essay. Her thought process, upon close inspection, reveals a "closed" either/or tendency which could well be seen to have its roots in Puritanism, whatever spin latter-day Transcendentalists try to put on it. Writing and the spirituality connected with it, for her, provide only two ways: "closure," the bad thing, the place of the damned, or "openness," the good, the place of the elect. For her, if one is unfortunate enough to fall among the "closed" crowd, well, there is not room for him in her heaven. Let me take you through some of her essaygs to show you what I mean.

She says, early on, that "the world" is "vast and overwhelming," that "each moment stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete" (653). And while her us of the "certainty" may suggest some hostility toward a perceived Christianity here, I would argue that she is not far from us in this statement. The recorded lives of the saints are full of similar dark night of faith experiences. It would be short-sighted, unchristian of us finally, I think, to dismiss her observations out of hand, as many knee-jerk conservative Catholics would, because they, on he surface, may seem a rather pagan take on the human condition. There is much truth in what she says. How, after all, do we love in every situation we find ourselves in? And how exactly do we make our lives a prayer anyway? Not easy things to answer given the often tangled days within which we find ourselves. We pray, stumble, imitate the saints, do the best we can. And through grace, God turns our lives into something good.

Not that all this uncertainly need get the better of us, of course, nor is it the whole picture. We have a Church to guide us. God, Emmanuel, is with us, in the Eucharist, in the praise He inhabits. And this is precisely where Hejinian misses the boat. She has no concept of the absolute side of things, of God's nature, His presence. For her, longing and language are pretty much all we get. There is no inner separate transcendent reality which can use language to make itself palpable, that seeks to use it to place people in a communion of love. there is only a heavy-footed rummage through a void as the artist searches ponderously for meaning.

"Language generates its own characteristics in the human psychological and spiritual condition" (654), she says. Hejinian clearly is something of a language behaviorist here. Language, the clay, is the only means we get to shape our realities, and one would assume, with those shapes, to "know" anything. That is, what it gives us is the only tools we'll ever wrestle with to find out what it means to be alive. And here, as I feel I must repeatedly emphasize, she's not far from the truth.

"This psychology is generated by the struggle between language and that which it claims to depict or express, by our overwhelming experience of the vastness and uncertainty of
the world and by what often seems to be the inadequacy of the imagination that longs to know it, and, for the poet, the even greater inadequacy of the language that appears to describe, discuss, or disclose it." (654)

This is well said and certainly accounts for the struggles of any writer who labors through the hard critical work, the discursiveness, the first person spirituality, self-absorbed or otherwise, associated with the craft. But again, these things do not make up the sum of the process. There is an area of pure lyricism available to poets as well, an area in which writing can be animated by, and reflect the surety of the Holy Spirit. And while Hijinian later in her essay does come to an intuited sense of this truer other-centered spirituality, she doesn't really know to contextualize it and leaps to the easiest, most comfortable port in her storm:
As Francis Ponge puts it, 'Man is a curious body whose center of gravity is not in himself.' Instead it seems to be located in language, by virtue of which we negotiate our mentalities and the world; off-balance, heavy at the mouth, we are pulled forward. (654)

Drawn though she is toward the real Center of things, she veers off, insists on mistaking the created thing, language, for the One who ultimately deserves credit for giving it form. She does, thankfully, if only for a moment here, move the focus from herself as shaper of the only valuable and provisional meaning possible in her world. And she's right, too, in insisting that language does offer a valuable working place, a place where we can find some tentative solutions to temporal )and therefore temporary) problems. But what she missed is that language can give us so much more than just that. Words, besides offering their own beauty, offer us the closest non-sacramental correspondence possible to who God is. And in the language that praise gives to us, we are free to bask in the cherubs of an attendant joy; we are free to be God's little trumpeters, His holy noise!

To put it baldly, there is no such pervasive good fruit to be found in Hejinian's kind of language materialism. Creatures simply can not offer it. Instead, she's too often only left with club-footed phrases, words like "overwhelming," "uncertainty," "inadequacy," "off-balance," "heavy at the mouth," and "are pulled forward."

And while it's true that we as Christians can experience all that too, it's absolutely vital to note that is not all we get. The very fact that we, not to mention language, are not the center of our lives is ultimately a cause for celebration among us, not heavy-mouthed despair. We need and are grateful--gartitude is the mother of joy--for God's response: revelation, direction. and that's what makes us wax lyrical. Gratitude moves in us and the right words can be there, at least for that portion of the process. this is the half that Hejinian misses.

Again, I don't want to give the impression that language is all roses for the Christian poet. It is not. There is much tearing that goes on--and language bites back. But it would be an even greater crime to leave the giver of the gifts available unacknowledged. With Him comes a grateful spirit, and with that, praise, unreflective poetic movement; God Himself can dance on bright waters. And it is in those moments when words, purely given (almost purely taken), can appear, because it is in that place, if only for those moments, that can finally feel Integrity, Wholeness. We are able to respond with our whole beings, as free and nearly complete men and women; we are able to almost perfectly express that. That given state doesn't last, of course. heaven can not be totally here, or yet. But it is, as some saints have said, all the way there as well.

There is no corresponding joy in Hijinian. She has nothing to be that grateful for. There is only the language, for her, a suit with nothing in it but a fine weave of cloth. Granted, that's a fine thing. But for the Christian, that's only one of its properties. Language is the timbrel and harp, and in the hands of a Christian it can reflect that "still point," that fleeting moment of ecstatic repose that is a promise as well as a partial fulfillment. Hejininia misses that.

"Language itself is never in a state of rest" (654), she claims. And she's right, at least a good deal of the time. Language has a fluid quality that makes it marvelously tactile. It can help us work through the stuff of our daily lives. It can help us come to tentative meaning, closer to Meaning, yes, and we should be thankful for that. And because we are not medievalists or Puritans, we can appreciate its more-then-symbolic properties as we would any gift. It is a thing to be enjoyed. there is the pure joy of childhood here, as there is in any gift, a joy Hejinian can never really fully appreciate, I would argue, because she can never stop along the side of the road, because she keeps mistaking language for God. "The 'rage to know,'" to use her words, "is one expression of restlessness produced by language" (655).

She's so hard after meaning on her own terms, in fact, that she misses the fun. And though she has an intuited sense that the Knowable might be had in a more spiritual realm, she doesn't quite know how to get there. The extent to which this is so can be found in her description of how the very real sense of absence inherent in the discursive or self-ish use of language pushes us toward meaning. "The knowledge towards which we seem to be driven by language, or which language seems to promise, is inherently sacred as well as secular, redemptive as well as satisfying" (655). I would have used "reflects" rather than "seems to promise," but she's not far from the kingdom. She actually values the redemption at some deeper level.

But what really surprised me in all of this was how she manages to refute the real redemption through her discussion of language. She does so by playing the Puritan, the stereotypical Calvinist! Like the American Transcendentalists who came before her, whose zealous banner she continues to raise, she can't shake who she is reacting against. She's as much a Puritan as Whitman:

"The NOMINA SIN NUMINA position (i.e., that there is an essential identity between name and thing, that the real nature of a thing is immanent and present in its name, that nouns are numinous) suggests that it is possible to find a language which will meet its object with perfect identity. If this were the case, we could, in speaking or writing, achieve the at-oneness with the universe, at least in its particulars, that is the condition of paradise, or complete and perfect knowing--or of perfect mental health." (655)

This is classic either/or thinking, the kind we would excoriate our Freshman Composition students for engaging in. but here she embraces it with both arms. Either one is "saved," completely and forever from the dunghill of the her nature, or such a thing is not possible. (Here, as with so much of the criticism regarding Christianity in American literature, this stereotypical Calvinist notion is taken as the defining Christian position!) Amazing! We are fallen, yes, but we still sin. But that does not mean we are not well-intentioned now, nor does it mean we were without some good--the natural law, in itself an expression of a salvageable nature--before. We, as St. Paul says, will continue to work out our salvation with "fear and trembling" for the rest of our lives because in the attempt to apply Christ's saving work in our lives we still fall so often. this does not mean we need to scupulously examine our every movement as a Puritan might. No. Rather what we do need to be aware of it our need for a continuing grace, mercy. And as St. Paul says, we walk by faith and not by sight. We can't depend on our sense to ascertain anything. What we can do, rather, is be confident because of who God is, because of how He is. Really, would you give your child a stone if he asked for a fish? All this is cause for even more praise. Poets can come as close to that perfection as grace and talent and openness will allow them as it changes their lives, and to the degree that they ask a love Father for that perfection. But that doesn't mean that every word will reflect a continually experienced personal paradise. Nor does it mean that writers will lose their stories in the process either. Rather, each individual and pitched personal story serves to magnify the Lord in every person's telling. We can rejoice because God continues to show us such mercy, all the while giving us abundant life in the process.

All this is nowhere in Hijinian. She, rather, having thus short-circuited her own direct search for meaning with the either/or fallacy, leaves herself no option but to seek her naming, structures, where she can not so perfectly find them. Her context remains spiritual, yes: Benjamin Lee "Whorf goes on," she says, "to express what seems to be stirrings of a religious motivation: 'what I have called patterns are basic in a really cosmic sense.' There is a a 'PREMONITION IN LANGUAGE of the unknown vaster world'" (656), but she has given up on sign posts--fallen creature that she is--and predictably, soon begins to wander all over the road.

Instead of realizing that the center is a redemptive God, the One who gives all things meaning as well as identity, she, as I have said, focuses on the created thing itself, its potential: language and what the process involved in using it can never, by her own admission, adequately reveal.

What she doesn't seem to realize is that finding what matter in life, in language, is not a matter of choosing some self-serving sense of "openness" over an equally skewed notion of closure. It comes only through the ruthless pursuit of truth. We can love the Absolute, live in that love, in, at time, that praise, and we an enjoy the gift of language, purely, in ways that are ecstatic. But we have to apply what Love teaches us in our lives as well; and we have to do so often in "fear and trembling." Both aspects are part of the Christian experience. Hejinian, chooses rather, for her part, to be true to only what she can generate, sense.

She speaks about the potentially curative language theories of French feminists, yokes them with the spiritual "rage to know," which for her is "In many respects a libidinous drive," one which "seeks also a redemptive value from language" (656). In short, she tries to help initiate a newer Pelagianisitic Solipsism, a more comfy revelation. She quotes Elaine Marks.

"The project for these French feminist writers is to direct their attention to 'language and the unconscious, not as separate entities, but language as a passageway, and the only one, to the unconscious, to that which has been repressed and which would, if allowed to rise, disrupt the established symbolic order, which Jacques Lacan has dubbed the law of the Father.' "(qtd. in Hejinian 656)

Each to his or her own evangelization, gospel, no question. But it's important to map the distinctions. These folks would judge the Gospel by psychological or political theories, not the other way around. This is a fundamental flaw and is based on a misunderstanding regarding the human condition. They, like other Enlightenment folk, believe they can perfect themselves without the aid of revelation. And beyond even that, were one to look on a purely physical sense level, there is another, more direct consideration: which offers the better fruit?

Hejinian pulls back from making the rage to know quite so blatantly sexual as the French writers in question seem to, but it's clear whose ax she's grinding and in which direction she intends to aim it. No surprises there.

It becomes a matter ultimately, I think, of do you want the truth or do you want yourself, do you want God or do you falsely want to be Him. It's something we all have to fight with in one way or another, whatever side of this fence we happen to be sitting on. You can see this struggle in Hejinian when she makes an attempt to line up with "avant-garde" writers. (I don't know about your experience, but no one I know could ever get away with actually using that expression seriously: "the avant-garde." Cream pies have always been in order.) Hejinian, however, has no such qualms; she tells us in the most serious tones that

"What is striking to me . . . was that the kinds of language that many of these writers advocate seems very close to, if not identical with, what I think of as characteristic of many contemporary avant-garde texts--including an interest in syntactic disjunctions and realignments, in montage and pastiche as structural devices, in the fragmentation and explosion of subject, etc., as well as an antagonism to closed structures." (657)

This concern with limits, being on the edge of things brings mind some comment I heard by a fellow named Miller on PBS concerning the difference between Mozart and Salieri. The gist of his comments went something like this. Salieri was always concerned with being original, and because of that, he never was. Mozart, on the other hand, never gave it a thought. It also brings Pound to mind--his comments about innovators and imitators.

All this, again, in not to dismiss Jejinain. (We all have to wrestle with out egos.) When it comes to language and the ordinary, she has much to say:

"In the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceived there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertion. We delight in our sensuous involvement with the materials of language, we long to join words to the world--to close the gap between ourselves and things, and we suffer from doubt and anxiety as to our capacity to do so because of the limits of language itself." (658)

She's on the money here. (I think of Eliot's complaint in THE FOUR QUARTETS.) Whatever our poetic high points, our moments of infused contemplative experience with the God who made heaven and earth, who is absolutely holy, who is the same "yesterday, today, and forever," knuckleheads that we are, we still have to work out our day-to-day salvations in the present moment, with all the uncertainly that entails. As poets we still have to marshall our critical abilities, make tough choices, go with faith to where th process leads us.

It would be a mistake to fall into the stereotypical Calvinist trap ourselves. What is missing in our experience as we wait and work for heaven, after all, allows us work and the good room to do it in. And as we do so, we will "discover," in her words, "structure, distinction, the integrity and separateness of things" (658) in a way that those who don't believe in an absolute Lord never, in my opinion, really can. That, along with the personal gratitude that comes from it, is our gift to give. I can only hope that all of the marvelous Christian poets I have been fortunate enough to work with, can add something of this Absolute sense of god in their, in many cases, breath-taking ruminations on the "fear and trembling" level. Many already have. I think Denise Levertov, Luci Shaw, Richard Wilbur, perhaps some Kelly Cherry--I'm sure there are many others. After all, if we don't speak the Gospel, who will?

2010-05-12T11:28:00.000-07:00

Here's a paper I gave a few summers ago at the West Chester Poetry Festival.

A review of Marjorie Maddox's WEEKNIGHTS AT THE CATHEDRAL

In George Walton Williams' introduction to his 1970 edition of THE COMPLETE POETRY OF RICHARD CRASHAW, he begins with a startling sentence: "Richard Crashaw may be considered the most un-english of all the English poets." And later on in that same paragraph he points out that Eliot, still something of a cultural force at that time, similarly found Crashaw's style "fundamentally foreign to the spirit of English poetry." I bring up these observations for two reasons. Firstly, I think Crashaw's "A Hymn to Sainte Teresa" may well be the most exquisite mystical poem in our language, not a good sign than if it is un-English and, perhaps by extension, un-American; that is, if it is something we cannot of simply choose not to do--write mystical sacramental poetry which actually includes the body. And secondly, I think those sentences and what follows in this review will help me to demonstrate that the largely incestuous American literary Christian party generally speaking simply will not embrace poetry which actually points out that God has a pretty traditional notion of sin, nor that he makes serious demands on His people.
Marjorie Maddox's latest book, WEEKNIGHTS AT THE CATHEDRAL, is in many ways a tonic for this kind of religious block-headedness. She offers up a poetry which moves in the direction of the body, a poetry which stands up for the whole truth of the gospel. As a result, though, as a Catholic now--she has just converted, she will probably never get invited to "Prairie Home Companion," "Fresh Air," or "All Things Considered," nor will her faithful work ever get published by "The Atlantic," "Poetry," Norton, or HarperCollins, she will have the gratitude of many earnest and genuine pilgrims. (WordTech editions, a smaller, bolder press gets the credit here.)
Crashaw's poetry, my primary example, includes the body--in spades; it is profoundly and authentically Catholic in that regard. In fact, it finds its most exalted mystical utterance when speaking from a place where mind and body are, in fact, one. Great overt American Protestant verse, generally speaking, while it can be very good--think of religious poets as diverse as Richard Wilbur and Luci Shaw's--seems to spring from a cultural sensibility which reveals itself more through both an exalted, disembodied intellect and a concern for blessed perserverence-of-the-saints conduct than it does through a contemplation of mysticism wich is centered in the body.
And just to give you two other more extreme example of that sensibility which places a very high value on disembodies intellect and blessed conduct, though neither have to do with poetry directly, allow me to point out David L. Edwards' narrative voice in JOHN DONNE, MAN OF FLESH AND SPIRIT and the main preacher character in GILEAD, Marilyn Robinson's justly-acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winning novel (in this latter case versus say Greene's THE POWER AND THE GLORY). Both speakers are as moral as God, or darned close: admirable, people you would like your children to grow up and be like in many ways, and yet, as I read the books, I couldn't imagine actually having a beer with either person. One would have to run out of the bar. Each lives so far above the body, in a place so full of "coulds" and "shoulds" that it might prove exhausting just to try and get a belly laugh out of either.
And if one were to compare those largely admirable sensibilities to someone truly embodied, radically sacramentalized like, say, St. Benedict Labre, he'd have to scratch his head, ask: where would this flea-bitten saint, this Christian loser come down on the conduct scale? Would he pass the "We are blessed" test" I don't think so. And neither would St. Theresa of Avila come to think of it. She was an odd bird as well: an introvert, a contemplative; she longed for martyrdom even as a child, actually marched away to find the Moors. She'd be under McCarthy-like suspicion in literary America, I think: she just didn't behave in a socially acceptable liberal, Christian or secular, way. And yet, as we look at Teresa's life, at these lines in Crashaw's poem about her, we see someone who was much MORE human than most of us are, someone who had been truly set apart, but always within a feeling, important body:
Blest powers forbid, Thy tender life
Should bleed upon a barborous knife;
Or some base hand have power to race
Thy Brest's cabinet, and uncase
A soul kept there so sweet o no'
Wise heaven will never have it so.
Thou are love's victim; and must dy
A death more mystical and high.
Into love's armes thou shalt let fall
A still-surviving funeral.
Crashaw then drives the message physically, painfully home.
O how oft shalt thou complain
Of a sweet and subtle Pain.
Of intolerable joyes;
Of a Death, in which who dyes
Loves his death, and dyes again.
And would fo ever so be slain.
And lives, and dyes; and knows not why
To live, but that he thus may never leave to dy.
How kindly will thy gentle heart
Kiss the sweetly-killing dart!
The saint longed for the excruciating experience, because, as Catherine Doherty has put, pain, rightly understood, is the kiss of Christ. Teresa understood that. Most of us don't. She was an embodied person who would've agreed with Doherty's exhortation that each Christian needs to learn to "fold the wings of his intellect," to experience life holistically, sacramentally. Or, to put that idea into the words the larger scope and goal of St. Theophane the Recluse: "The principal thing is to stand before God, with your mind in your heart, day and night, until the end of your life." (No one of "Fresh Air" or "prairie Home Companion" does this.)
Crashaw achieves this in these great lines. His character lives and breathes where she thinks. there is no "dissociation of sensibility" in the words of Eliot--something he himself could not avoid, brilliant though his work is.
And that brings us to Maddox, a fine Christian poet whose overtly religious work seems to occupy a position part way home. (As I say, she became A Catholic shortly after this book was published.) The poetry in this book is marvelously metaphysical, both as far as technique and sensibility goes. She places a great deal of stock in the embodied spiritual life, too, mostly when she's feeling joy and repentance--though, thankfully she doesn't limit herself to those. And even if she doesn't examine deeply-rooted, embodied sin or a mysticism which includes the body to the degree we might want, still, we should remember that it is not yet her rhetorical project to do so. She writes to bring the light of the Absolute Christ to the literary masses, and has justly had much success in doing so. Her poems are often very funny, too, revealing as they do a profound knowledge of the human condition; they hit squarely home because she knows who and what we are, and she knows who and how God is--what He demands from us.
The conduct part, no surprise, is very much in evidence here as well: she is well-behaved, has a healthy psyche and well-directed will--it would be silly to speak of such thing in a negative light. She may, in fact, be as close as our Contemporary Puritanically-soaked American culture and publishing world (secular or sacred) can get to offering a fully embodied Christian voice, one that recognizes both sides of the Christian experience: on the one hand, justice issues and the moral nuances involved in any healthy relationship, and on the other, the awe-ful holiness of the living God, the black-and-white demands He makes on his people. To her immense credit, she realizes that the real trick in pilgrimage is not to find a place for God within a secular perspective, but rather, to attempt to turn our self-serving perspectives into Christ-centered spiritual ones.
This takes courage. After all, will the more powerful literary world ever accept a vision which in any way indicts it? Probably not. Still, she stays her admirable course: she never neglects the absolute holiness and demands of God--as so many horizontally-obsessed Christian poets seem to do.
The first section of this book is wonderfully direct in revealing what it's up to In fact, her whole project is nicely summed up in the title of the first offering: "How to fit God into a Poem." Here she's at her comic and metaphysical best, doing what she can to take the reality of Jesus and church to a very dim world. Part I begins with this stanza:
Read him
Break him into stanzas.
Give him a pet albatross
and a bon voyage party.
Glue achetypes on his wings with Elmers,
or watch as he soars part the Slough of Despond
in a DC-lO.
The approach is very typical, canny. We get Coleridge, Jung, and Bunyon, all alluded to in a very funny stanza. What secular person could object: the thing is so absurdly apt. Imagine: God, in the present postmodern age! He does not fit--but wait. He's never fit before either. Bunyon wrote his poem in jail, and Coleridge, Christian though he was, could only struggle to formulate a way to get Christ into his life, or was that his life into Christ? The Jung reference serves a slightly different purpose. It demonstrates to the reader that this in no knee-jerk fundamentalist Christian poet. Depth psychology is embraced, as is the contemporary world, including postmodern poetic concerns: "Break him into stanzas." Clearly Maddox's goal her is to move as far away from Stevens' "high-toned Christian woman" as she can, and in doing so, away from what any editor might ruefully expect in the way of cliche Christianity. She turns the expected on its head, and does so with metaphysical humor, regularity. What other poet, after all, would yoke "the Rime of the Ancient Mariner" with a "bon voyage party," Bunyon's "Slough of Despond" with a jet?
Maddox's method is clear: present Jesus in a way that says yes to what we are, stopping the reader in his tracks as she does so by insisting that these Christian poems resist the cliche. Other examples can be found throughout the poem: most people might expect the traditionally religious poet to be conservative, a formalist. But Maddox will have none of that. Speaking of God, she derisively says, "Cram him into iambic pentameter"; and then to show us she is not literary snob: "publish him annually/in the new yorker"! (In the next poem she brings in Richard Simmons! Remember that guy!)
God plays trick or treat, hide-and-go-seek in these poems. He goes fishing, He walks a tightrope. And why wouldn't he? She's clearly having fun, but her mind is always engaged as she's doing so, snackling with noise, like it's charged with static electricity. Near the end of the section, for example, she shifts gears a bit on her reader. She moves from talking about God to talking about angels. and for a very good reason--because any attempt to put in a box must necessarily fail. This shift emphasizes this point because these angels are not theologically correct angels. They are, rather, her very self-consciously produced, slightly oddball poetic creations. They are, to put it another way, quite literally, he imagination, her self on the page. In fact, she comically merges with them, presenting a world of imperfect praise because that is all the language will finally allow her to do. (In smaller letters, she co-creates the world and finds it good!)
And the angels are delighted to find this imperfection. consider one of them wo ends up in the women's section of a department store.
You try on a bra that's too big and charge it.
Shaking hands with girdle-clad mannequins,
you saunter from aisle to aisle,
dressing room to dressing room.
Naked, you stand before mirrors
searching for stretch mark.
You press pale hands against breasts and smile.
Since the angels here are so obviously products of her imagination, they give her part of the stage: the two of them, angel and woman poet, are one created fictional person. And by moving in this way to angels/herself, again, she accomplishes two things: firstly, she has necessarily distanced herself from any claim to absolute theological accuracy and perception, and secondly, she has emphasized the process itself. All this writing is an exercise in searching as well as finding after all.
I once heard an Archbishop say that the angels must envy us because they cannot love a God who is invisible to them. they cannot offer Him that gift. And so though we may be a lower order, Maddox is emphasizing, too, that ours is a good (if fallen) one. Our sad and imperfect bodies are beautiful for the same reason that our lives are. We are imperfect, but we are a created order, just like the angels, though unlike them we have an advantage in that we can migrate toward God! So here Maddox, a mother herself, rejoices in her journey, her own flawed body, the once she begins to thoroughly inhabit, stretch marks and all.
The second section is big fun as well. It is composed of mostly personal poems which then slide into overtly metaphysical ones about the high Protestant sacramental life. In the first poem of the section, entitled "Weeknights at the Cathedral," the name she's given to the whole collection, she gathers us, the body of Christ, into the text. The characters in this particular narrative are a soprano boy who can't sing, a priest who suffers through every minute of that, and a beggar woman in the fourth pew. Which are you? Which is Christ? All of them of course. And this is a note she sounds often in the collection. We are where we start with our charity: "love your neighbors as yourselves." And who is every beggar we ever meet by Christ, a Christ who is also miraculously present in an absolute, palpable way in us, in His Mystical body, in the now. All all of this is delivered with the earnestness of a believer who realizes the extent of her/our need. This isn't Sunday at the cathedral, after all, it's "weeknights."
In the second poems of the section, she delightfully moves against Stein (Gertrude, not Edith) in her praise of a comma, here found in the "Apostle's Creed": "of all that is, seen and not seen." It's a very nice poem. Like Paul, we know that "we walk by faith and not by sight." And we know too that to hurry anywhere is a mistake in the spiritual life; we need to live in God's infused contemplative presence. The first step in any spiritual wealk, after all, is always learning how to stand, and still.
Maddox is still strongly Protestant, too here, in a good way. Her poems reveal the strong will of a healthy person, a sense of decorum too. These poems have good posture. And she's a nice, almost equal mix of the two sensibilities: the intellectual Protestant and the contemplative Catholic.
Throughout the collection, two things remain constant: Maddox is an orthodox Christian, and she knows how to write outside the expected Christian box. She usually does so, as I have noted earlier, employing humor, but not always. there are other edges as well. Look at the two poems about abortion. These are entitled "Dread Is the Language by Which We Disguise Our Deeds" and "The Third Day of Christmas." Both poems are written from contemporary woman's point of view--something of a surprise in itself (Doesn't she ever want to win a Pulitzer?)--and take on society's sick and pressing need to divest itself of its children.
In the first poem "Dread" may be a typo for "Dead"--or it may not. It's no secret that we have to kill language in most instances before we kill innocent people (or savages):
. . . the two dead children alive
again for the ten seconds it takes to read
in newsprint the absence of their breath

a mistake of transposition
A Down's Syndrome child is mistakenly identified, and her "healthy" twin is aborted first. the correction, happy day, is made, and now everybody can be normal again:
. . . the mis-filed, the not-
chosen, the-accidentally-left--
for, inconveniently worded, dead.
The anger is just, and the pome accurate in its way--since the actual dead have been so for some time, walking around like that, trying to have perfect children.
How can one be too angry here? As the father of a lovely Down's boy, I can't express the extent of cultural sickness completely enough. If you want to know joy, have a Down's child. You can take that sweet and wide chubby hand in yours, cross the street for many, many years if you're lucky.
To Maddox's credit, she's fierce here. And she doesn't stop with the elimination of "imperfect" children. She bemoans the act itself, for any reason:
In Rama there is weeping,
in Charleston, in Bismark,
in Portland, in Trenton,
in Pittsburgh, in New Orleans,
in Santa Rose, in the thin sac that holds us
from heaven. . . .
This is very bold, and welcome--especially gratifying from someone who's so set on reaching the popular culture.
Maddox knows there is only one way to be saved: "the icons waiting" as she says at the end of "The Episcopal Priest Cleans Out His Office." We know the truth and must wait of It, live a life of self-sacrifice which is love. This is what we are all called to do; this is the nature of love, both human and divine.
I must say, again as well, that I really enjoyed Maddox's healthy Protestant sense of self, will in these poems. they brought sister's Wendy's painting videos to mind. At the beginning of the one of the Renaissance, the good nun tells us that the period really begin with Masaccio. And as she looks at his picture of Adam and Eve being turned out of Eden, or rather, turning themselves out, she tells us that here is the Renaissance: "Humanity, as upright, suffering but responsible." That's Maddox. she asserts, has a will to believe. A short poem, "The Existence of," demonstrates as much:
It has nothing to do with moon.
Even a sliver of night punched out
is you looking through
from something not-quite day.
A slow blink. A slice of sleep.
An opening into Eden. A closing.
It lasts as long as the earth
drips from your fingertips,
was once said to be good
by you. What it is
not is the line that divides,
the wrong edge of belief,
the thread of horizon I wake to
when everything is gray.
The poems have a strong Protestant feel, though they are too lively, technically interesting and body-centered to be boring. Look at the striking metaphysical imagery in "Substantiation":
Such swallowing of limbs,
ingestion of veins, begins again in us
his resurrection, the rough
rock of our unworthiness
rolled away
on the red carpet
of tongue.
Or "Concomitance":
Nailed now in our throats,
miracle and man stirred
into morsel and sip,
his Lama Sabachthani's flatten
the bricks of our teeth,
rend in twain our tongues,
commission our lips to leave
bleeding for more.

And of course there is always the humor. Christ eclipses all our sorry expectations. You can get a sense of that just by looking at some of the titles in the third section: "Fiacra, Patron Saint of Cab Drivers," "Patron Saints of Baseball," "Vitus, Patron Saint of Comedians," "Nicholas of Myra, Patron Saint of Pawnbrokers."
This is where we live, in a Nazareth where we find our lives--inside our good and fallen bodies; in the ordinary, yes, but in a world which also offers us enough joy, humor and chances at repentance to make the days "abundant," exquisitely worthwhile. After all, that IS why Dante called this crazed pilgrimage THE COMEDY.

2010-04-06T04:30:00.001-07:00

Welcome to THE SLUMDOG SCHOOL OF CATHOLIC POETICS--a necessity, given the old money wanna-be purveyors of false Catholic mahogany culture everywhere in evidence.

How to recognize the virus:

If you are drawn to an authentic blue-collar (edged) Catholic poetic while others have either joined the squishy secularized herd or cling to a notion of prosody that is no longer fully alive;
If you come from lower-middle stock or have a friend or relative who has, or if you've actually worked with your hands at some point in your life;
If watching 2 hrs. of consecutive talk shows on EWTN would constitute torture for you;
If you actually like the "Who-ville" quality of the English-speaking Mass, some contemporary liturgical music;
If you are wary of Catholic cultural (pizza) money, doilies and glass cathedrals in general;
If you've ever--with head held high--bought kitchen plastics (or anything else) from Walmart;
If Catholic sycophantic literary mags, east coast intellectual privilege make you want to hurl;
If you distrust MFA programs and the content police, and if you try to hold a faithful course;
If you have withstood the Catholic home-school fashion mongers;
If hearing Chesterton's poetry read aloud makes you want to hurt yourself;
If you profoundly distrust the generic Catholic Renaissance/great books/back-to-the-land "I am the orthodox answer" man;
If you are a theologian or catechist who likes Harry Potter or Thomas Merton, or a historian who doesn't much care for Dawson (honorary membership);
If you've ever read ON THE ROAD, hitch-hiked, or are not sure what the second fork next to the dinner plate is for;
If you've read a book of poetry published after 1962, or if you've ever thought of living in a commune;
If you've ever feel like the Catholic barbarian at the gates--and were thankful;
If you find many conservative Catholics tiresome, still communicate with liberal writers because they have more welcoming souls;
If you don't confuse deconstruction with the devil;
In short, if you can keep your head while all about you are stuffing theirs with straw;
If you will not be deterred, either by "originality" or by "tradition";
Then, then you'll be a "main" my son (to quote James Brown).

2010-03-21T05:50:00.000-07:00

Just a quick word. Dane's book THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT does deal with the blues--I've just been looking it over! Though given the sub-title, I doubt he'll mention Whitman: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO EUROPEAN VERSIFICATION SYSTEMS. On the other hand, the Blues are American.

Can one really talk music without the gorilla in the middle of this hemisphere's living room banging on his drum? In any case, I look forward to the read, despite the Turco-ese introductory posings: "Boy, aren't you guys lucky I came along." (Big boat, I know.)

2010-03-18T10:09:00.000-07:00

Just saw 9 over break. "My people perish for lack of vision." Isn't there some verse like that? Though Burton and the boys try to save their show with four spirits giving up the ghost to green up humanity near the end. And why attack the Church anyway? It had nothing to do with the whole science/inhumanity thingy. But this one dogmatic doll who's taken control wears a steepled hat, has a miter, and for some reason has set up shop in an old church whose angelic stain-glass windows haven't been blown out by the world-wide rage. Ah, Hollywood!

It makes me think that when the wave of great Christian fantasy comes, it's going to blow this weak stuff out of the water.

Keep writing, people.

2010-03-18T04:39:00.000-07:00

American Poetry, just past the midterm. We're using Lehman's OXFORD BOOK OF AMERICAN POETRY, and it's okay for the most part--if you don't count the Merton gaff. It's kind of amazing who he has in here in that light: a march of postmodern trivia.

Bradstreet is always a joy. The Mother of American poetry indeed, who delivers a kind of humility we never really see again. On the one hand, I think that's the trouble with the feminist influence--it's tough for even believing women to embrace humility (in the face of injustice). And here I'm thinking of all the believing women poets whom I like. But on the other hand, men don't do so well with that either. And what excuse do we have? I think Bradstreet's "Before the Birth of One of Her Children" is a great, great poem. It's embodies that humility, but there's also just a tender affection for her spouse: Aquinas's deep friendship.

The funny thing about the Bradstreet entry is that Lehman has Berryman comment on her. Is that a little like Daffy Duck commenting on Chopin? Overstated a bit, perhaps, but the editor does that a lot. Later Yvor Winters comments on someone else, I forget whom. If Mary Karr is right about Lowell (Who reads him now?), how much more could we say the same thing about Winters, who certainly made up for any shortage of critical acclaim by striking up his own brass band. (Big boat there, of course, captain . . . arg.)

Taylor is harsh, ok, and Freneau brings Burroughs and Dillard, that peculiar and wonderful brand of American nature writing to mind. But after Bradstreet, not much goes on until Wally. The (fireside) poets, those of the three names: Bryant, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Poe, and Lowell always remind me of today's politically-charged poetical landscape. A heightened civil mediocrity, patrolled by the content police. Great poetry, but written in an accepted way, with an accepted POV, poetry that probably will not stand because of that fact. "The company of poets," as Boland puts it. Could you imagine Wordsworth saying that--at least speaking of the living in those terms?

(Which reminds me, I went to conference on Christianity & Literature this last weekend, and I wonder why people so take to Seamus Heaney. For a man bred near the bogs, there doesn't seem to be a lot of depth to him.)

But back to America, I liked Poe this time, at least in his "fairy" poems. He fits nicely there, into that whole fantasy wave. (Like Jerry Lewis, his value to the French is probably what most sets him apart.)

Whitman is the nine hundred pound gorilla that sits in every formalist's living room. I just picked up Dane's THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT, A PRACTICAL GUIDE OF EUROPEAN VERSIFICATION, something I want to read before doing Poetic Forms again. But Wally influence is (justly) ignored here--since it's the Euro. But a quote on the back got me. Seth Lerer, who I think has done some nice work for the Teaching Company, says" ". . . Students of literature, and of creative writing, need to understand that verbal expression is not the unmediated release of sensibility but the crafted and highly nuanced organization of that sensibility in forms." He can be right, if the student wants to go the old world way. But I always stress Whitman and the Americas, plural, because no one has had a greater influence in the Western Hemisphere than Wally: Mr. Release of Sensibility. Mr. Lerer, who comes across in his audios as something of a squish should be horrified that he is on the side of privileged colonialists here! (Strike out the Beats, all blue-collar usurpers of culture!)

As for myself, I love formal poetry, (though I am against it personally--no, no, I've got that wrong. I mean I'm against anything that would hurt me in any way personally. No. . . no, oh cue the clone.)

I've work with forms, mostly with the one most abused: the sonnet. And along with many others, I would argue that free verse is just harder to write. One never knows if he's done enough in a line, or too much. There are no markers.

I always tell my students that poems are like people. You have to take them one at a time. It doesn't matter what kind of poem the thing is; if it brings us joy on both the form and content level, we should rejoice.

In the class, we got Tuckerman and Very in there before Emmy. Tuckerman is beautiful, a deflated romantic, a dazzlingly good formalist, but there isn't much new to him, so he's generally given a second rung. And Very is fun, a real religious wack job, on the Calvinist el-train. (I bet he was Republican "in spirit.")

Dickinson is always a delight: "I taste a liquor never brewed" and "There's a certain slant of light!" are two of my favorites, though there are so many. She would've made a great Catholic. (Think how it would have irritated her family.)

Master, Sandburg, Robinson. Eh. Critics from Harvard always try to blow up Robinson, and he's okay; but the tube won't hold the air. He's just not that interesting.

And then to the moderns! HA! Frost, Stevens, Williams, Pound, Moore, Eliot. America: "flexibility," to quote Dana Carey. Great poets do so many things. Lesser poets do less. I think of Chesterton and H. G. Wells. They do what they set out to do, and that's a good. But Frost and James, they go on! Jeffers I like a lot too. He's fun. There's a real depth to him, a bass resonance. Akin to sacramentality, maybe more than all the modernist greats--except late Stevens. Which raises a question, "Is America too Puritan to have much depth in its poetry?"

We often do a quick classroom dip into Loy, H. D., though we didn't get there this semester. I won't do Stein, even though I probably should. (Outside of her Pound quote, I don't find her worth my time: "Ezra is the village explainer, which is okay, if you're a village.") Besides, she's just the first of many. We'll pick up all that stuff when we get to L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry.

We ended the time before break with the Harlem Renaissance. Mr. Lerer, does the blues have form, or form enough?

2010-02-08T04:35:00.000-08:00

Contemporary Christian Fiction has been a real eye-opener so far. We started off with O'Connor, Spark and Powers: three great Catholic short story writers. I like to do "The Geranium" and "Judgment Day" together since the second is a rewrite of the first, an attempt to move beyond God as purely reactor (see her letters). "The Portobello Road" and "Prince of Darkness" are also part of the biannual fun. But then we did Ann Rice, her ROAD TO CANA. Great for discussion. She has zeal, faith, and earnestness, plus I must admit it was a breath of fresh air to more from the density of more academic prose--though the three above are nowhere as painfully self-conscious as so many of the Iowa/Carver MFA types can be--to Rice's rich and airy style. Very poetic, beautiful, and nothing was lost really. Depth of perception, James' "lived life."

The rich part of that experience was seminar discussion. How she sees scripture, the deposit of faith and tradition all came up--no surprise. After all, theologically she's a squish, big-time, is basically defending her son's sinful homosexual lifestyle in the book. I say sinful for a reason--besides the fact that any premarital sex is so. The biggest failings in the book are 1) just what her sense of sin is, and 2) how she perceives Jesus. In the first case, she's a typical Obama, Winfrey, Keith K (my cousin) self-regulating kind o' guy. "Step aside church, I'll figure this out." Stating it baldly, for her, sin is anything that goes against the PC code. So taking issue with homosexuality or extra-marital sex or abortion would constitute the sins of homophobia, a repressed psyche, and misogyny.

Praise God for the Church--the real (and entire) Roman Catholic Church, the magisterium.

The second failing has to do with Jesus. She actually does a nice job of presenting Him in many ways. He's given to wisdom, not learning. He has a zeal for the Father's house, and he takes great pains not to hurt people, even if the expected response would not have appeared sinful. But I kept waiting for the power of God to show up in her Jesus. Maybe after He discovers that His time has arrived (with His fourth public miracle--at Cana!). But nope, Jesus is a squish, made in her own image. "We'll let the road surprise us!"

Weak.

It got sad for me. What is the Eucharist if not to power of God breaking into the physical word, doing violence to it because He is God and wants to literally feed us. Jesus is heaven, He is power.

This became very clear for me when I was working on some sonnets based on the Gospel of Matthew. If you pay very close to the language of those passages, all you'll hear is power. No one has ever spoken like that, no one else has ever built the portico of heaven in words. And He just uses words like "fish" and "wind" and "God" and "love." It is a stunning piece of work--I know that's obvious to the informed, but how often do we miss that? Rice and the Hollywood squishies certainly have. Robinson too.

But I don't want to make this political. I'm no Bushie, republican. I grew up in Cleveland, in a union home, so I'm familiar with their solid critique of Glenn Beck and Co. If you don't think the poor matter you're just not paying attention.

GILEAD is a fine book, too, though I'm only 100 or so pp. in at this time. But it fails to comprehend the power of Jesus as well, probably because squishy Protestants (and non-squishies) don't have the Eucharist. What a great loss that is! I also object to the Quaker feel of the thing. My time at the Earlham School of Religion showed me that Quack-ers are in the main people with great heart, people with a real concern for the victims of war. But the down side of that is that they also could get pretty smug about it. (As I suppose is natural for anyone who wants to point to themselves as they dictate morality.) A liberal purtian take in the end: we elect, you not.

We all have our own sins, of course, but the last thing any of us wants to do is make Jesus the less because of that.

Anyway, it's been fun. I look forward to seeing what the students have to say about Robinson's richly poetic text.

2010-01-01T03:46:00.000-08:00

Words for me in the new year:

Sirach 51: 23-30

Come close to me, you ignorant,
take your place in my school.
Why complain about lacking these things
when you souls are so thirsty for them?
I have opened my mouth, I have said:
'Buy her without money,
put your necks under her yoke,
let your souls receive instruction,
she is near, within your reach.'
See for yourselves: how slight my efforts have been
to win so much peace.
Buy instruction with a large sum of silver,
thanks to her you will gain much gold.
May your souls rejoice in the mercy of the Lord,
may you never be ashamed of praising him.
Do your work before the appointed time
and at the appointed time he will give you your reward.

"Within your reach" or in another version "near at hand." What is necessary to live a fasted life is always so close, isn't it? Get out of the chair, help, or don't eat something: the little thing, always the little thing, because that is all we get.

My God bless us. May we live like John XXIII did, in simplicity and humility, obedient.

"Put your neck under her yoke."

2009-12-31T10:42:00.000-08:00

Went with the kids to see AVATAR. (My brother-in-law recommended it.) Fantasy is so much fun. The canvas is so big, you can do anything. Great world-creating here, stunning imaginative and visual power. Story was, no surprise, something less; but these kinds of things always get me charged up, make me want to see great new Catholic works, stories where the subtext radiates truth. Imagine going to the movies and actually seeing great work. Think of the scope, the diversity, the actual human condition. And I do believe that is going to happen. Christ is risen!

This one was pure Obama/Oprah. You can make a list: The United Fruit Company, Al Gore, noble savage/Native Asian Americans, paganism, national health care, an embracing of Islam.

The setting and backdrop of the story would've made Ernesto Cardinal smile. It's the UFC in Nicaragua all over again: the US invaded the country nine times in the 20th century by his count, never built a school or a road into the capital. All roads led to the "bidness," as an Oklahoma evangelical businessman might phrase it. Bottom line: we need those bananas, boys. But the setting is equal opportunity here, and it morphs into the Iroquois, Iraq & oil as well; characters actually use Frost's "displacements"--word choices which suggest other meanings/resonances. In this film you hear the turned-good Caucasians actually warm up to the words "terrorism" and "suicide bomber" when they see the light and turn native blue (purple knifs--Cleveland joke . . . sorry).

So in effect the blue world here (Max) becomes any indigenous victim of the Republican imperialist machine: South & Central America, Vietnam, the Mid-East, the US. And just to try and put us off the scent, the director throws in a couple of red herrings as well. At one point, for example, Sigourney Weaver's character says of the Mother worshipping natives: "They're not pagans." Huh? . . . And the limp-legged hero victim who can't get healed because his country has no national health care claims he doesn't want to become a "tree hugger." (But wait, he does finally die and gets to leave his hated human body, so maybe that works--the skin shed. BLUE IS TRUE.)

And there it is, the whole sorry batch. But we've been down this Hollywood trail before.

Al Gore and the noble savage/Native Asian Americans show up too of course--anything that is not "Christianity" will do.

(As an aside, I'm still waiting for John Kerry to win his Nobel. He should whine about it--but maybe that's the problem. His face is in the dictionary next to the word. Now Sweden is all about whining, but they want to look normal. . . . Still, skipping him just doesn't seem fair. In a way, he is this movie. On the ride home, I told my son that the film reminded me of those Kerry/Edwards stickers you still see on cars. . . . Now I'm no fan of that WASP muzzle-loader, Cheney, but Hollywood's glitter-socialists are every bit as pathetic.)

I put Christianity in quotes as far as this movie goes because Hollywood has no idea what Christianity is. To them it's Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart. (Catholics are not as hard on pagans or the environment.) And so our director, in a spike of heroic neandrathal insight, takes the required hard left. The capitalists have destroyed their world (see Walli) and now they must take out anyone not like them: any and all third world peoples. In this version, those would be the sinless blues who live in a world without mosquitoes or greed.

Why is the world so stupid?

St. Francis, true lover of the natural world, pray for us.

And keep writing, Catholics! Things will get better.

2009-12-13T04:18:00.000-08:00

Went with the family to see WICKED up in Cleveland. Great stuff on a plot level; the kids enjoyed in. And the physical comedy was positively inspired. (Brought Profs. Dougherty and Anderson to mind!) But on the downside the play reminded me of a Grisham novel. A great ride with nothing to say. I know it was a comedy, but I like subtext. This one offered a squishy "be nice to animals" message. (I went home and didn't kick my dog.) But I had a good conversation with my cousin afterwards--he's always good for that. He was going on about DEATH OF A SALESMAN. I really hate that play. I don't like Miller at all--though the only other thing I've seen was THE CRUCIBLE. Insufferable. Boring, long-winded; and the people are stupid. Why am I here? I don't want to be? How can I get out of here? (Reminds me of being stuck some years ago at a FUS Christmas carol service-y kind of thing at the chapel. The performance positively creaked with self-aware tradition. I couldn't breathe--and the only way out was to excuse ourselves and walk right right through the singers! God I love culture . . . Thankfully, though, I've heard that with the new personnel, offerings have much improved.) But if I were ever locked up in a stalag prison camp, they could just make me watch those Miller plays. I'd crack, work in PR.

Long works seem so hard to pull off in any form. In grad school I did a course in O'Neill. LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT was actually a description of the reader trying to get through the thing! I loved his one-acts. In and out, with punch. But the long ones! All that was missing were the straps to bind you to your seats. Diodes. (What are diodes anyway?)

I find that's true of novels, too, and of long poems. "No man ever wished it longer," as Dryden said about PARADISE LOST. I wonder if Milton had to take out a gun and finally shoot the sucker, whimpering on the floor (the text, not him--my next entry will be about squinting and/or dangling modifiers). Really an act of epic perseverance just to get through the first book. And then there's THE FAIRIE QUEEN. Whoa, pure flagellation: purgation. A fitting irony as Spencer was doing a concerted anti-Catholic dance at the time. People have died! English halls littered with the vanquished--some still breathing. (If you went to school in the 70s, you know what I mean.)

I did MOBY DICK for quite a few semesters, back when I was the American Lit. person here at FUS. I liked the book very much--and as I say, I don't really like long works--but it was a trial every time. And once I tried ULYSSES when I was saddled with Modern British Novel. Give me THE DUBLINERS, story, not Freud's poop lectures in prose. (That's probably too easy, but without inner resources, I hated wading through Dublin's outhouses. . . . My wife once read FINNEGAN'S WAKE for fun. . . . a wonderfully strange woman. . . . She's told me that she often feels most novels decline sharply during the second half, so maybe I got part of this from her.)

And what's the baggier monster: PIERS THE PLOWMAN or HAMLET? No one ever stages the whole play. Shakespeare is Shakespeare of course, but I am always more interested in how his tragic characters got to be where they are when the plays start than where he wants to take them. I know, too "realistic" (and quite off the road--though there is much to be said about high grass).

But in the spirit of the times, I want to blame my difficulties squarely where they belong, on my daughter's ADHD. ("I was just following orders.") I flash back to Mr. Powers, SJ, scholastic at Jesuit St. Ignatius HS in Cleveland, during detention, 1970--mine, not his; though that might be another story--: "Mr. Craig you just can't sit still can you?' ----uh, no. And so the great student/critic was born!

The lyric poem is an almost perfect form: too short to get stupid or boring. Maybe if they hired scops at MTV, had them, like Caedmon, SING! Tim Russell, a fine poet from Toronto, OH once told me that due to some sort of brain condition, his interests in writing poetry ran to shorter and shorter forms. Some years later he won an international haiku contest in Japan. Is that where I'm headed? The land of the rising abbreviation? On the other hand I love oriental stuff; Chinese and Japanese--Li Po, falling drunk in the water, trying to embrace his image, or Basho, singing at Horsetooth Reservoir.

I'll stop now.

2009-12-10T07:12:00.000-08:00

This spring I'm doing Contemporary Christian Fiction once again, and that's both fun and weird. It's weird because somehow so many Christian writers feel obliged--because of the old Ovid, Pandarus poet-as-pimp routine--to deliver play by play sex in their works. A sign of mastering the craft apparently! Dubus was the first place I found that--I was not native to these waters.

Irritating! I don't think Catholics are free to do that: titillate. Sex is a holy part of life, but near occasions of sin don't need to be--if we can avoid them. I once had an e-mail conversation with a Catholic woman fiction writer from Ohio State. She recommended her own book, but told me I might have to skip chapter 11!

I try to start with three great short story writers: O'Connor, Powers, and Spark. Masterful stuff, right on the spiritual mark. (I was so taken with Powers early that I thought I'd try one of his novels: THE WHEAT THAT SPRINGETH GREEN. Great if you don't count chapter 2 or 3; I forget now. Pornographic stuff.) O'Connor is a marvel, witty and ruthless. Her characters pay, and she never damns any of them; then she leaves the ball in the reader's court. Where are we with the Pharisee thing? Powers, at least in the stories we've done, is wonderful as well. There's a kind of pre-Vatican feel to them. First rate stories on priests! "Prince of Darkness"! Spark on the other hand is wonderfully diverse. I once told Ron Hansen, via e-mail, that some of her difficult stories seemed almost iconic: you had to meditate on them before they unfolded. He relayed that someone had just asked him to review her latest novel. She was 90 at least then. Anyway, Hansen said that the thing just didn't make any sense at all to him! Everybody's got their own take, I guess. And while I will admit that some of them are tough, still, I like her a lot. She can do a British Jewish/Catholic O'Connor thing, scald British racism in Africa; but there are other kinds of stories too. Fun! I like to go back to the three of them several times during our novel reading.

This semester I want to go next with Robinson's GILEAD and Hansen's EXILES, just to set off Protestant and Catholic sensibilities. Robinson is a great writer, but I could never imagine having a beer with her main character. No belly laughing aloud. Hansen is so good! I'd love to do ATTICUS, because it really moved me--the thing opens up so beautifully at end to a Prodigal Son allegory. (The funny thing there is that when he came here to keynote for a Catholic Writing Festival we were having, he told us that the NY critics never got that part--because they didn't know the Bible!) But I just can't do it for some reason. I can't do "who-done-it"s: I need more symbol or something--places to hang my hat as we go through.

My standbys have been THE POWER AND THE GLORY, Endo's DEEP RIVER. and Percy's best one, prose-wise: THE MOVIEGOER. Endo is Catholic, but his book veers toward monism. (Discussion to follow.) It's a good read though. A group of Japanese tourists goes to India to visit Hindu shrines and the Ganges--which really functions like Christ for them; all of it told from a darned near Catholic POV! (It's also a nice rip on scholasticism: Euro-centeredness, that Catholic right-wing fixation. It's so EWTN, the deep rich mahogany, the smell of old European money. All brought to you by classical music. No jazz aloud: like rock its Satanic.

Now we all love reverence, classical music, but come on! Culture is not dead.)

We'll do Lewis's space trilogy. He's not as good a novelist as the others, but he is Lewis! And I love how close he gets to the sacramental in THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH. And then we going to do Rice's CHRIST OUR LORD. I haven't read her yet, but did catch an interview: seems a kind of squishy Catholic. Her son is/was gay, so the Church needed to rethink that.

God bless us, every one.

The students will have to pick a book to present too: Bernanos, Mauriac; there are lots of folks out there. (And please, please feel free to e-mail me with ANY suggestions, about fiction or poetry.) We've done a few Idylls writers in the past: Debra Marphy's (Murphy's) THE MYSTERY OF THINGS, O'Gorman's AWAITING ORDERS. There's Dubus, as I mentioned, Tobias Wolff, Price, Hijuelos, Hassler, Waugh, Salzman, Crace, McDermott, Betts, Wiowode, Godwin, Tyler, Payne, Thon, McGraw, Cary, Malamud (He's so Franciscan!), Undset, Cather, Malone, MacFarlane, Lagerkvist, Breslin's THE SUBSTANCE OF THINGS HOPED FOR. Who else? Tell me so I'll know. (But no LeFort or Mazoni, none of that stuff.)

Hey, it's my birthday today! Me and EDickinson. (Any port in a storm. But I do like myself. I do.)

2009-12-04T08:21:00.000-08:00

Victory! With Linda's help it's done. You can hear the podcast; just go to links at left. This is fun.

2009-12-04T07:58:00.001-08:00

I've got a podcast up but haven't been able to link it yet. So if you're interested, at this point you can go to the English faculty page on the FUS web site and link to "Some kind of Pilgrim poem." It's clear and Linda liked it!

If I can find a way to successfully link it, I'll get back.