"What the House Knows": An Anthology by Diane Lockward

Next year, we will have lived in our house 40 years. We raised our two sons here. Every room (and the basement) has stories to tell.  

But we’re newbies compared to our parents. My mother lived in the house in New Orleans I was raised in for 57 years. My mother-in-law has lived in her house in Shreveport for a mind-boggling 77 years. 

 

Houses provide shelter and family community. They can be a refuge. They can oppress. They are workplaces. They require ongoing care and attention. Houses can inspire our hopes and haunt our dreams. 

 

As Diane Lockward has discovered, houses have often served as the subjects for poets. And she’s edited an anthology, What the House Knows, that shows exactly that.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

The Truelove – poem by David Whyte.

 

“Lines Written During a Period of Insanity,” poem by William Cowper – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” poem by William Wordsworth – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

"Echoes of Hemingway: An Anthology"

In early May, I was reading A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. Coincidentally, a writer named Harvey Stanbrough announced a writing contest for short stories inspired by any work of Hemingway's.

This must be a sign, I thought; I'm right in the thick of what's known as the great love story of World War I. 

 

I wrote a story and submitted it. It wasn't one of the stories chosen as top 3 (with a little prize money) but it was chosen to be in the e-book anthology, "Echoes of Hemingway." 

The title of my story is "Sonnets to Psalms," and it's about what happens to the main character in A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry, after the war ends. The title comes from a sonnet written in 1590 by George Peal, which some literary critics believe inspired Hemingway to write his World War I story. The sonnet’s title: “A Farewell to Arms.”

Then it became a matter of fitting pieces together – the town of Montreux, Switzerland, where Frederick and Catherine lived; an abbey not too far away; and some basic research.

The anthology contains 20 stories by 13 writers (a few overachievers wrote more than one story), and it has some very fine short stories covering a surprising number of genres. My own story would be categorized as general or historical fiction.

You can find more information about the anthology at https://payhip.com/b/3ibI5, and it will be available on the various book sites July 12. It can be pre-ordered at Amazon or at Books2Read. And it’s available right now at Harvey’s web site.

I’d never done this with a short story before, and it was actually a lot of fun.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

How Medieval Monks and Scribes Helped Preserve Classical Culture – Bernd Roeck at Literary Hub.

 

Eleanor Crow’s Falling Light (artwork) – Spitalfields Life.

 

A Writer for Our Times: Why John le Carre’s Work Remains More Essential Than Ever – Rav Grewal-Kok at Literary Hub.

 

An Anthology on Reading and Writing Poetry

Most poetry anthologies follow one of several standard templates. They may be chronological, or the subset of poetry by century. They may be selections of contemporary poets, or poems by nationality. Some anthologies focus on a single theme, like T.S. Poetry’s own Earth Song. 

Mark Yakich, a professor of English at Loyola University in New Orleans, has taken the idea of thematic anthology an academic step further. With The Poetry Reader: An Anthology, he’s assembled an anthology of two broad poetic themes, reading and writing. It’s an eclectic but purposeful gathering of poets from across the world and across the centuries, using their selected poems to show how to read poetry and how to write it.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

An Alternate Ending to Romeo and Juliet – Patrick Hastings at Library of Congress Blogs.

 

“Aprilian,” poem by Bliss Carman – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Orwell Knew What Made Shakespeare Great – Michael Lucchese at Providence Magazine.

 

“The Rolling English Road” by G.K. Chesterton – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

Spitfire Roundabout, a Dark Teesside story by Glenn McGoldrick, is free on Amazon today.

An Anthology of Contemporary Catholic Poetry

Growing up in late 1950s and early 1960s New Orleans meant by definition that you were part of a Catholic culture. My family wasn’t Catholic, but most of my neighborhood friends and school classmates were. Within relatively easy walking distances were several Catholic churches and schools – Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Our Lady of Divine Providence, St. Mary Magdalene, St. Christopher’s, and St. Philip Neri. Our Lutheran church could only be reached by driving. My parents almost sent me to a Catholic high school. Because the Catholic church was so dominant, you didn’t think of “Catholic” as anything but normal.  

We certainly didn’t think of “Catholic” poetry or fiction as something distinct. Poetry was poetry, and fiction was fiction. We did learn about the importance of Catholic faith when we studied T.S. Eliot, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Henry Cardinal Newman, or Reformation writers, or the religious wars of the 16^th and 17^th centuries. But no one talked about a distinct Catholic literature, even if it might have existed. If anyone had asked me to name a Catholic writer, I would have said G.K. Chesterton, Flannery O’Connor, or Giovanni Guareschi, author of the Don Camillo stories (which I read in high school and loved them all). And that would have exhausted my knowledge.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Sweet Gal, You Made Me Think – poem by Jonathan Rogers at Rabbi Room Poetry.

 

A Letter from Rome – poem by Morri Creech at The Hopkins Review.

 

A Savannah Poet – Richard Kreitner at Jewish Review of Books.

 

I Have Waited for September – poem by Roy Peterson at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Poetry Prompt: Wordle Your Way – Tweetspeak Poetry. 

“The Wild Duck,” poem by John Masefield – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

"Christian Poetry in America Since 1940"

It’s said daily more times than anyone can count: Christianity in America is in serious decline. Cited are churchgoing statistics. The rise of the so-called “nones” people professing no church allegiance. The scandals in the Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church, Protestant churches, and independent megachurches. The rapid slide in membership in mainline Protestant denominations. 

Yes, there’s all of that. But there’s something else, too. Christian poetry. And if Christian poetry is any indication, Christianity in America may not be in as bad as shape as we read about in the secular and religious press.

 

To that point, professor Micah Mattix and poet Sally Thomas have joined together to select and edit Christian Poetry in America Since 1940: An Anthology. Featuring 35 poets, Mattix and Thomas have managed to showcase the talent, the range, and the depth of Christian poetry in the United States. The anthology includes only those poets born after 1940, and so by definition excludes such poets as Luci Shaw, Wendell Berry, and Fred Chappell.

 

Micah Mattix

The included poets represent a veritable feast of poetry: Paul Mariani, Jeanne Murray Walker, Robert Shaw, Kathleen Norris, Jay Parini, Dana Gioia, Mark Jarman, Marly Youmans, Scott Cairns, A.M. Juster, Marjorie Maddox, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Julia Kasdorf, Christian Wiman, Tania Runyan, James Matthew Wilson, Benjamin Myers, and more. The breadth is as startling as the depth; all Christian faith traditions are represented.

 

But these poems are not what you might think of as “religious poetry.” These are poems addressing the same kinds of subjects that all poets address – the seasons, geography, relationships, crises, historical subjects like the Great Dust Bowl of the 1930s, brokenness, and more. The difference is the perspective and the self-understanding that these poets know they are part of a much larger story. 

 

Mattix and Thomas introduce each poet with a basic biography and summary of what they write about (an accomplishment by itself – think about writing 35 concise yet perceptive introductions and keeping them all interesting). Then they include three to five poems by each. What you get is a sharp snapshot of 35 poets with an overall composite of achievement and depth.

 

Here is an included poem by Andrew Hudgins, born in 1951.

 

Raven Days

 

These are what my father calls

our raven days. The phrase is new

to me. I’m not sure what it means.

If it means we’re hungry, it’s right.

If it means we live on carrion,

it’s right. It’s also true

that every time we raise a voice

to sing, we make a caw and screech,

a raucous keening for the dead, 

of whom we have more than our share.

But the raven’s an ambiguous bird.

He forebodes death, and yet he fed

Elijah in the wilderness

and doing so fed all of us.

He knows his way around a desert

and a corpse, and these are useful skills.

 

Mattix is a professor of English at Regent University, poetry editor of First Things Magazine, and the editor of Prufrock, a daily newsletter on books, the arts, and ideas. He previously taught at Yale and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

 

Sally Thomas

Thomas is a poetry and fiction writer. She’s published two poetry chapbooks, Fallen Water and Richeldis of Walsingham, and the poetry collection Motherland. Her novel, Works of Mercy, was published by Wiseblood Books this fall. Her poems have been published in a wide array of literary magazines and journals, and she currently serves as associate poetry editor for the New York Sun.

 

Between them, Mattix and Thomas have accomplished a great blessing for the Christian poetry community in particular and the larger poetry community in general. Christian Poetry in America Since 1940 resonates with a vibrancy that many might find surprising. The real surprise should be, why haven’t you been reading these poets all along?

 

Related – my reviews at Tweetspeak Poetry of some of the included poets’ works:

 

Marjorie Maddox Hafer Publishes 2 Poetry Collections.

 

Mark Jarman’s “Bone Fires.”

 

A.M. Juster and “Wonder & Wrath.”

 

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and “Love in the Time of Coronavirus.”

 

Paul Mariani and “All That Will Be Knew.”

 

Benjamin Myers and “Black Sunday.”

 

Tania Runyan and “What Will Soon Take Place.”

 

Scott Cairns and “Idiot Psalms.”

 

James Matthew Wilson and “The Strangeness of the Good.”

 

Dana Gioia’s “Pity the Beautiful: Poems.”

 

Christian Wiman and “Once in the West.”

Experiencing Nature and the Earth with “Earth Song” by Sara Barkat

Do you know where you were on April 22, 1970? 

On a warm April Wednesday, I was on the parade ground at Louisiana State University, sitting in the grass with about a thousand other people. We were part of the first nationwide Earth Day, inspired in part by the infamous Santa Barbara oil spill the year before. We listened to speeches and music, we signed petitions, and we chanted slogans. We knew we had become something larger than ourselves, and we knew that college and high school students all over the country were doing exactly what we were doing.

 

I also got sunburned. 

 

Four days earlier, on April 18, poet Allen Ginsburg participated in what may have been one for the first Earth Day poetry readings. At Sr. Generosity’s in New York City, Ginsberg and two other poets read Earth Day poetry. Ginsberg’s reading, apparently, included chanting along with Hare Krishnas. 

 

Earth Day 1970 witnessed the birth of the national environmental movement, bringing together a number of disparate streams of concern that had been building over the previous decade. Twenty years later, in 1990, Earth Day went global.

 

More than 50 years after that first Earth Day, we’re still concerned about the planet. We’re still observing Earth Day. National governments have made the environment a special area of focus. 

 

And we’re still reading, and writing, poetry about the earth. It turns out we’ve been doing that far longer than Earth Day 1970.

 

Writer, artist, book illustrator, dancer, and medieval armorist Sara Barkat has edited a collection of 93 poems about the earth or some facet of it. Earth Song: a nature poems experience includes poems well-known and not-so-well-known. It includes poets who are household words and poets who are striving to be household words. It includes poems you might expect and some you don’t. And it surprises: I didn’t know, for example, that novelist Louise Erdrich also wrote poetry.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks: The Golden Shovel Anthology

If you’ve never heard of the “Golden Shovel” form of poetry, you’re not alone. It’s relatively new, created by National Book Award winner Terrance Hayes to honor Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) in her centenary year. Brooks garnered a number of significant “firsts” in her life – the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize and the first African-American to be Poetry Consultant (poet laureate) to the Library of Congress.

The Golden Shovel poetic form is usually based on a line or verse from Brooks’ poetry – the last word of each line of a poem are the words taken from a line or verse of a Brooks poem. A Golden Shovel poem can literally be read in two ways – the standard way of reading a poem from left to right and reading the last word of each line downward, to read the verse or line from Brooks. The poem doesn’t have to be about a Brooks poem or even the subject she was writing about, but it can be and often is. And so you can read a Golden Shovel poem as either direct homage to Brooks and her poetry or as an acknowledgement to her ongoing influence.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: poet Gwendolyn Brooks.

“The Paraclete Poetry Anthology 2005-2016”

“We are made for poems,” writes professor, writer, poet, and historian Mark S. Burrows. “As children, we come to them naturally, delighting in how words play on our tongues, whether in nursery rhymes and lullabies or the songs we make up in the delicious hours of daydreaming.”

But something happens, and we think we need to outgrow those rhymes and lullabies and the poetry that made our childhood hearts sing.

The Paraclete Poetry Anthology 2005-2016: New and Selected Poems, edited by Burrows, seeks to restore that loss. It assembles works from the poets published by Paraclete Press over the past decade, and serves as post a signpost of what has been and an indication of what is to come.

The 131 poems from 13 poets are what can be called spiritual poems – poems about faith and its lack, poems about Scripture, poems about faith places, poems about day-to-day life and the meaning of life, poems about the cosmos and our place in it. The range across the spiritual landscape, probing, exploring, defining, wondering, remembering, and understanding.

The poets included in the anthology are Scott Cairns, Phyllis Tickle, Paul Mariani, Anna Kamienska, Father John-Julian, SAID, Bonnie Thurston, Greg Miller, William Woolfitt, Rami Shapiro, Thomas Lynch, Paul Quenon, and Rainer Maria Rilke (editor Burrows has translated poems by SAID and Rilke from the German for publication by Paraclete). The poets represent various faith traditions but there seems a kind of oneness here, as if these different traditions have the same object in view.

Phyllis Tickle (1935-2015) was the founding religion editor at Publishers Weekly, the author of more than 40 books, and for years a member of the Paraclete Press editorial board, where she championed the publishing of poetry. This is one of her poems included in the anthology:

Old Man River by Phyllis Tickle

My father called it

His boyhood’s fiercest teacher.

And child-wise, I knew

He’d once used its even fury

As a mark to sound his own.

My mother turned form us

When he made river talk.

For her, its waters ran

With married tears.

And long before I’d aged enough

To want or rear a man,

She’d willed on me

The anger of her years.

There’s a bridge above it now—

Tightly built—

No different from the land—

But it can no more bear my sons

Across his hunger

Then it can lift my breath

Above her fears.

Mark S. Burrows

Burrows is well-equipped and experienced to serve as the anthology editor. He  has translated Prayers of a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke and 99 Psalms by Said. He’s also co-authored several books on Christian faith, theology, and spirituality, including Minding the Spirit: The Study of Christian Spirituality; Faith Can Give Us Wings: The Art of Letting Go; Biblical Hermeneutics in Historical Perspective; and Poetic Revelations: Word Made Flesh Made Word: The Power of the Word III. He is on the faculty at the University of Applied Sciences, Bochum (Germany) and a historian of medieval Christianity. His collection of poetry The Chance of Home is scheduled to be published this year. Burrows is also a senior editor Paraclete Press.

The Paraclete Poetry Anthology is filled with beautiful poetry and, collectively, a sense of the wonder of the world and how we pilgrims of faith navigate through it.

Related:

My review of Prayers of a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Mark Burrows) at Tweetspeak Poetry.

My review of 99 Psalms by Said (translated by Mark Burrows) at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph by Lynn Greyling via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.