Paul Hoover’s “The Watchman of Ephraim”

This article is a revised version of the original posted at The Master’s Artist.

Poet and editor Paul Hoover is a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. He and wife, poet and fiction writer Maxine Chernoff, edit the literary magazine New American Writing. He’s won awards, prizes and fellowships. He helped found the Poetry Center at Chicago’s Art Institute and the Poetry Series at the DeYoung Museum of Art in San Francisco. He’s published 13 collections of poetry. He is definitely what we might call part of the “Poetry Establishment.”

The March 2011 issue of Poetry included three poems by Hoover: “House of Cedar, Rafters of Fire,” “The Dry Bones,” and “The Watchman of Ephraim.” It’s not unusual for Poetry to publish poems by such an established, widely respected and admired poet like Hoover. What is surprising is that all three poems are infused – obviously and overtly infused – with religious themes and symbolism. In fact, each begins with a line from a book of the Old Testament: Song of Solomon, Ezekiel and Hosea, respectively.

The Poetry website links three other poems by Hoover published in June 2010, which are also inspired by books in the Old Testament: “God’s Promises” (Zephaniah); “Have You Eaten of the Tree?” (Genesis) and “To the Choirmaster” (Habakkuk). (Click on this link and then the “About This Poem” tab for the links to the poems.)

It’s interesting what Hoover does with these six poems. They are not so much interpretations of the Old Testament books or even specific passages as they are applications to contemporary society. Consider how “The Watchman of Ephraim” begins:

Hear the word of the Lord,

ye children of Pittsburgh

of Calistoga and Tlaquepaque,

ye hierophants and wishbones,

teraphim and household plants,

for I am a jealous God betrayed.

The lines have the flow and the feel of Hosea, the sense of it connotes the themes of Hosea, but the use of the three cities injects a particularly modern feel – Pittsburgh, associated with industry; Calistoga, CA, at the northern end of the Napa Valley wine country; and Tlaquepaque, a part of Guadalajara, Mexico. Then Hoover calls the children he’s addressing “hierophants” (priests of the Greek Eleusinian mysteries) and wishbones, Teraphim (Semitic household gods) and household plants, combining references to ancient religions to common, everyday household items.

Hoover does the same thing in “God’s Promises,” using Biblically prophetic language to describe what are everyday items in our modern society:

I the Lord will make barren

your fields and your fairways.

Your refrigerators will be empty,

no steaks and no legs bones,

no butter and no cornbread…

In “The Dry Bones,” he sounds distinctly like Ezekiel (and Revelations, for that matter) when he describes the four creatures with the likeness of a man, each with four outstretched wings and  “each wing had four eyes emblazoned, wide open / given to weeping at the worlds they contained…” And then he names the four creatures: Dow Jones, Cargill, Chevron and DeKalb of the frozen seed – the financial news wire owned by the Wall Street Journal, a grain company, an oil company, and a corn seed company. The poem continues with describing what the princes of the sea wear – Nikes, Reeboks, scholar’s robes, sharkskin suits and Chuvashian mittens, and says that they shall cast these garments “upon the land’s end…for the-princes of fire consume what they love, / with the reckless ambition of gods.”

So what is going on here, with this use of Biblical language applied to contemporary life, society and even business?

One suggested approach is that Hoover is writing about the unchanging nature of humanity, that even with all of our knowledge ad and understanding we have simply substituted refrigerators and fairways for the idols of ancient Israel, that we have our idols and household gods just like idolatrous Israel did.

Ultimately, of course, the gods we create, the gods that make the one God so jealous, are ourselves. We are the princes of the sea, the princes of fire; we are the hierophants and teraphim with our household plants and our refrigerators and our Nikes. We are the idols of clay, and it is to clay, to dust, that we will return.

Photograph by Lilla Frerichs via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Poetry of Illness

This post was originally published at The Master’s Artist. I’m periodically reposting some of the articles here.

Can poetry speak to illness? Can poetry speak to something as personal, terrifying and life-changing as breast cancer? Poet Anya Krugovoy Silver says yes.

Silver is an associate professor of English at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia. Her poetry has been published in such journals as Image, New Ohio Review, Witness, Prairie Schooner, Christian Century, Christianity and Literature and Anglican Theological Review. And it’s also been published in a collection entitled The Ninety-Third Name of God: Poems.

The heart of this volume is a series of extraordinary poems about breast cancer, from biopsy and diagnosis through mastectomy and recovery. These poems are about shock and fear, heartbreak and hope, and all the clinical trials and details in between. Like the illness they describe, these poems find their own discoveries, their own processes and flows, as the mind and the heart tries to make sense of what is happening.

After the biopsy and confirmation of diagnosis, Silver begins with a blessing that is simultaneously a kind of mourning.

Blessing for My Left Breast

Your skin slit round with a scalpel:

be brave.

Rise to the aluminum tray, the biopsy needle.

Go, nipple, go, milk ducts, go, veins.

Take with you my lymph nodes,

canaries of illness, blood cells’ puff balls.

Blessed be my chest wall for surrendering.

Now you will never shrink and wrinkle with age,

clove-studded orange, bittersweet.

Taken in your beauty, let the last hands

that hold you

be gentle.

She survives the surgery, but now comes the follow-up – the procedures like radiation and chemotherapy which sound so “medical” and yet are personal, invasive and themselves destructive. Yet even here she finds a dignity and even an unexpected intimacy, a pouring of grace upon the terrible.

 

Everything is Perfect

If my cancer recurs,

if I vomit from chemo,

help me follow the one who knew

she was dying, who turned

to the man wiping clean her face

and said, Everything is perfect.

Scrape me like a nutmeg, Lord.

Release my fragrance.

And then later, post-recovery, a kind of normalcy resumes, but it is only a kind of normalcy, because what was cannot be recovered; only what is can be grasped, and only what will be can be hoped for.

Ash Wednesday

How comforting, the smudge one ach forehead:

I’m not to be singled out after all.

From dust you came. To dust you will return.

my mastectomy, a memento mori,

prosthesis smooth as a polished skull.

I like the solidity of this prayer,

the ointment thumbed into my forehead,

my knees pressing hard on the velvet rail.

If God won’t give me His body to clutch,

I’ll grind this soot in my skin instead.

If I can’t hold the flame that burned my breast,

I’ll char my brow; I’ll blacken my pores; I’ll flaunt

with ash this flaw in His creation.

She finds comfort in the familiar Ash Wednesday ritual of the forehead smudge, simply because it is familiar and she’s alive to recognize the familiar. And while the last five lines of this poem seem almost jarring, like a fist being shook in God’s face, they are also a declaration of survival, in spite of the “flaw in His creation.”

These poems are a journey from despair to hope. Poetry does speak to illness, in profound and yet very human ways.

            

A Kaleidoscope of Perspectives

(This article was originally published by The Master’s Artist. The site is still live but ceased publicationmore than a year ago. I’m posting some of my articles here.)

Poet and essayist Nick Samaras grew up a P.K. (preacher’s kid) in England, the island of Patmos in Greece, and Massachusetts. Except he wasn’t exactly a P.K. like we think of a P.K. His father is Bishop Kallistos Samaras, a well known Greek Orthodox theologian and clergyman.

His first book of poetry, Hands of the Saddlemaker: Poems, received the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1991. It’s a wonderful collection, full of poems of distance, separation and measured judgment, as if the time Samaras spent growing up in several different places made him a permanent exile – but one who loved where he was. It’s a tension Samaras carries throughout the poems in this volume.

How he writes also allows an insight into what a poem can do, or perhaps even should do. Consider this one from Hands of the Saddlemaker:

A Plum Night in Jerusalem, Three A.M.

Go out into a dry, blue heat.

Walk alone in a sleeping city.

Leave your friend sleeping.

Curve and wind your way through the old sector.

Come to live only in the oldest sector.

Mark how fine the dust is, how

smooth the cobbled hallways,

how much they are what they are.

Listen to where the report and echo

of your footsteps go, how

many years they travel back.

Know that a city is in its deserted hours.

Know that to be alone is to be for once yourself.

And know there are

stones that breathe.

Stones that remember you,

remember the weight of your stance,

where you’ve come from and are

going for years. 

The first time I read this poem, I saw the words of a traveler or visitor, exploring the city of Jerusalem, walking through the old city in the early morning hours, while it is still dark. To find himself, he has to separate himself from those he knows, yet the stones he walks on recognize him.

Now reread the poem, and imagine that it is Jesus who is speaking. See how the meaning changes, how the words themselves become something different. This could be Jesus in the middle of his ministry, walking though a city he loves, knowing that alone he can be who he really is, and yet the very stones (one expects them to cry out) know his identity.

I read the poem a third time and imagined the speaker was Paul. He has returned after a long absence, possibly his “wilderness years,” and he has left his friend Barnabas sleeping while he walks through the city he knew as a student of Gamaliel – a very different perspective, almost a different lifetime. This was my own particular favorite reading. You can also try it with Pontius Pilate as the speaker – and it’s just as interesting.

This poem does what good poems do. It encourages you to read the same words but find something new each time, leaving something ambiguous enough where you have to go back and reread it. And then you find something unexpected. Or, as in the case, the perspective itself is ambiguous, and the meaning changes depending upon who is actually speaking.

And so a poem ostensibly about walking around a city at 3 a.m. becomes a meditation of faith and understanding.

Photograph by Ron Mzr via Public DomainPictures. Used with permission.

The Most Influential Poem of the 20th Century

(This is another is a series of articles I wrote for The Master’s Artist.)

In Woody Allen’s movie Midnight in Paris, writer Gil Pender (played by Owen Wilson) desperately wants to live in Paris of the 1920s, the city and time of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Cole Porter and Josephine Baker. And he gets his wish, if only for a few hours each night at midnight. In one scene, he climbs into a taxi and finds T.S. Eliot, and he says that “Prufrock” is like his mantra, but where he comes from in Hollywood, people measure out their lives in coke spoons, not coffee spoons.

If you don’t know the poem, you miss the reference. In the poem, Eliot wrote, “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.”

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was published in Poetry Magazine in 1915, when Eliot was all of 27, and it is still considered by many critics and scholars to be the most influential poem of the 20^th century. It’s difficult to imagine any poem today having the kind of impact that “Prufrock” did. Published by Poetry with the urging of Ezra Pound, the poem played a major role in shaping and defining Modernism in poetry and literature generally.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table…

The poem is longish, unfolding a series of scenes that seem unrelated. Scholars still argue about the subject and meaning of the poem, but it is clearly a poem about the disconnectedness of modern society and man’s disconnected place within that society. In that sense, it is as contemporary today as it was in 1915.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains…

Eliot uses a combination of rhyme, free verse and repetition. The reader happens upon the rhyme but is soon swept away from it, only to return suddenly to it. There’s nothing predictable here, no planet in its orbit or star in its galaxy. But there are delightful lines, including some of the most famous in 20^th century poetry:

   In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

When I was in high school, Eliot’s poetry always posed a problem – should it be taught in American literature (junior year) or English literature (senior year)? My school solved the problem by teaching Eliot in both years. In American literature, we learned “The Hollow Men” – This is the way the world ends, / Not with a bang but a whimper. In senior year, it was “Prufrock” and the poems published as Four Quartets. (I still have the paperback edition of Four Quartets published for 95 cents in 1968; underlined in many places with margin notes in my own handwriting.)

“Prufrock” was written more than two decades before Eliot embraced the Christian faith. And yet the sense of a broken world and broken people permeate it. In an odd way, to read it now is to see the poem anticipating the intellectual and spiritual frame of mind of the poet that would eventually lead the poet to faith.

Eliot might smile at that. Despite all of the scholarly hubbub about the themes and meanings of his poems, all he himself said was that he simply wanted people to read his poetry.

There are various recordings of Eliot reading the poem, and you can find these at YouTube, but one of the best I’ve come across is the reading by Spoken Verse, which allows you to follow the words as they are read.

Photograph by Vince Mig via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Literature as National Consensus

For years I regularly haunted used bookstores and book sales. I generally looked in the fiction and poetry sections, but for quite some time I bought books of speeches, speech textbooks, and books about rhetoric and oral communication. This has to do with the fact that for a long time, speech writing was a significant part of my career.

If you visit used bookstores and especially sales of old books, you will inevitably find old textbooks. I found the textbook I had in my senior English class in high school (longer ago than I care to think) and I immediately plunked down a dollar to buy it.

Another textbook find was the 1940 edition of Prose and Poetry of America, originally published in 1934 and edited by H. Ward McGraw. My find was what two additional editors, Julian Maline and William McGucken, described in the preface as the Catholic edition. They were both Jesuit priests, and found in McGraw’s textbook the basis for creating a version for Catholic schools. From the looks of things, they kept most of what McGraw had included, adding only a few additional writers. (They even commended McGraw for being particularly careful to avoid offenses to Catholic students.)

To continue reading, please see my post today at The Master’s Artist.

The Poems of Padraig Daly

Padraig Daly is an Augustinian priest in the Dublin parish of Ballyhoden. He’s published several poetry collections and translations from poets writing in Irish and the Italian poet Edoardo Sanguineti.

In his own poetry, and especially The Last Dreamers: New and Selected Poems, the reader finds Daly focused on faith and how it is expressed, in the importance of daily life (be it in Ireland or Italy), in rituals, in loving and comforting, and in prayer.

To continue reading, please see my post today at The Master’s Artist.

The Poetry of Personal Loss

The death of any close friend or loved one is a wrenching, dislocating experience. The knowns disappear, replaced by unknowns. Simple things – a regular afternoon visit, the way the dinner table is set, a shared piece of music – suddenly disappear or become painful reminders. For Christians, the loss is tempered by the knowledge and hope of heaven, but the loss and absence is no less great.

When one loses a parent, a number of transitions begin, some immediately. Some say the loss of a parent is when you truly become an adult. Death sets certain processes in motion – legal processes, family processes, personal processes. If there is a surviving parent, that relationship will change as well. Things can both ravel and unravel, and at the same time.

It is those ideas underlying the death of parent that inform After the Ark: Poems by Luke Johnson.

To continue reading, please see my post today at The Master’s Artist.

A Meditation in the Mud

Last summer, Grace Church in Arvada, Colorado, had a 10-week sermon series entitled “Storytellers.” The series focused on “life issues in our relationships, living our faith and studying the steps of Jesus.” The sermons were drawn from stories Jesus told as recorded in the gospels of Matthew, Luke and John. What made this sermon series unusual was the accompanying work done by artist Nicole Brown and poet Joel Jacobson.

Jacobson wrote a poem illustrating the core story or message for each of the sermons. He’s assembled them in a small book, Water the Mud.

To continue reading, please see my post today at The Master’s Artist.

The Poetry of Hope

I was reading D.S. Martin's Kingdom Poets blog, and learned that Martin was the editor of Wipf and Stock Publishers Poetry Poiema Series. And he had a new volume coming out -- Six Sundays Toward a Seventh: Spiritual Poems by Sydney Lea. It was the first volume Lea had published since 2006, and it was a collection of his spiritual poems -- poems of faith -- from a lifetime of writing poetry. I was hooked, and I bought it.

And then I read it.

To see what I learned, please visit my post today at The Master's Artist, "The Poetry of Hope."

When writing a poem could get you arrested

In free nations, we usually take our freedoms for granted. We don’t think about getting government approval to rent an apartment, buy a car or move to another city. We would likely be outraged if someone told us we had to do that.

What if writing a poem could get you arrested? Would you still write? Would you share your poems with friends? Would you take huge personal risks to keep writing your words?

To read about a poet who took that risk, please visit my post today at The Master's Artist.

The Calvinist Was Also a Poet

Antoine de Chandieu was a Calvinist poet, student of John Calvin and a key figure in the French Huguenot church. He was also a poet, writing poetry all of his life, including a collection known as the "Octonaires." And Nate Klug, a soon-to-be theologian at Yale Divinity School and a poet himself, has been translating them.

To read more, please see my post at The Master's Artist.

The Gods We Create

The March issue of Poetry included three poems by Paul Hoover: “House of Cedar, Rafters of Fire,” “The Dry Bones,” and “The Watchman of Ephraim.” It’s not unusual for Poetry to publish poems by such an established, widely respected and admired poet like Hoover. What is surprising is that all three poems are infused – obviously and overtly infused – with religious themes and symbolism. In fact, each begins with a line from a book of the Old Testament: Song of Solomon, Ezekiel and Hosea, respectively...

To read more, please see my post at The Master's Artist.

The Poetry of Illness

Can poetry speak to illness, and a life-threatening illness at that? Poet Anya Krugovoy Silver answers that question in the affirmative, and wrote The Ninety-Third Name of God: Poems to demonstrate it.

To read more, please visit my new post at The Master's Artist.

Those Poetic Perspectives

Today at The Master's Artist, I have a new post about poetic perspective -- and how the entire meaning of a poem can change depending upon who's speaking - or whom you believe is speaking. The poem I use is " A Plum Night In Jerusalem, Three A.M." by Nick Samaras. Take a look and let me know what you think.

"Reading God as a Poem"

That's a title of a poem by Luci Shaw in her latest collection, Harvesting Fog: Poems. I talk about the poem and the creative imagination today in my first post for The Master's Artist. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Michael Snyder's "Return Policy"

I'm reading Return Policy by Michael Snyder, the story of three people (Willy, Ozena and Shaq) whose part-tragic, part-comic lives intersect, beginning with an espresso coffee maker that Willy unsuccessfully tries to destroy. It's Snyder's second novel; I haven't read his first, My Name is Russell Fink, which has a lot of rave reviews on Amazon.

How I came across Return Policy is a good example of how online connections work (and can help sell books). I began to follow a group blog called "The Master's Artist," written by several writers who are, according to their purpose statement, "united by the blood of Christ and a love for language. We come from different backgrounds, have different theological outlooks, and are interested in a wide variety of genres and artforms." I read Snyder's posts, and then the note about his new novel being published. I thought if it were like his posts, it was going to funny, entertaining -- and with something important to say behind the comedy.

Snyder is the comic in the group, but as with all comics, there's a seriousness just below the surface. His most recent post on the blog, "Conversating," is a short conversation about a possible broken jaw that's funny in and of itself but then becomes a satire when Snyder adds a list of "Reader's Group Questions," a send-up of the practice that's become common in Christian fiction. (These are guides for book discussion groups.) Other of the blog's writers and readers have been adding additional discussion questions in the comments, and the post with comments has gotten out-of-control funny.

Return Policy, by the way, does not include a group discussion guide. But I'd love to read the one Snyder would create for it.

Back to the novel.