Sherry Chandler » Poets
Recently some one dear to me asked me to read William P. Young’s The Shack. It is not the kind of book I would be drawn to when following my own nose and if I had to talk about it as a novel, I’d have to say that it is pretty bad.
The man can’t write a tight sentence and he pulls his characters around by the leash of his message. Plus, he performs infuriating tricks like having his main (human) character exclaim “No kidding, Sherlock!” To which I have to say, if you have to bowdlerize your conversation with God you’ve lost me. And anyway, why not find an clichéd exclamation that you don’t have to bowdlerize. Just “no kidding” would have done.
In short, the whole thing reads like a Sunday School lesson, a question and answer session with the Christian God in his tripartite personnae: a black mammy, a vaguely Jewish handyman, and an Oriental will-o-the-wisp. [Added: I want to add here that these forms of God, being part of Mack the protagonist's own dream vision, are intended to be the forms of God that Mack needs to see at that time and not as what you might call a complete definition of God.]
And the questions lobbed have about as much substance as those you might hear at a televised political debate. Which is to say they seem picked to elicit answers that don’t get us too far from God’s talking points. I kept thinking I could ask God harder questions.
But I have a certain prejudice in this. I just really never have been able to tolerate being preached at. The Shack compares itself to Pilgrim’s Progress and I’ve always found that work to be a real yawner, too. So I’m not this novel’s audience.
Okay, so those are the negatives.
On the other side of the equation, as a book of popular theology, I have to say that The Shack provides a much-needed balance to the sheep-from-goats revenge-theology popularized by the Left Behind series. Full disclosure: I have never read a Left-Behind novel and, unless shackled in a stress position and forced to do so, I never will.
In The Shack, God is love.
The God of The Shack values mercy over justice.The Jesus of The Shack is more likely to cry with you over your losses than to melt the flesh off offending sinners. When asked about judgement, an avatar of God asks our avatar of humanity which of his children he will send to hell.
Forgiveness is an act that benefits the forgiver, in that it rids her of a burden of hatred and judgement. Finding God in your life is not the same as being religious, and in fact, religiously following a set of rules might hamper your spirituality.
One of the most delightful exchanges in the novel (and there are some delightful passages in spite of what I said earlier) occurs when Jesus proclaims that he never asked anyone to become a Christian or even to ask What Would Jesus Do? He did not, he said, intend to become a role model.
There has been a confluence in my reading toward reconciliation lately.
On Friday, I found this passage in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry:
Trigant Burrow cautions us, in his essay The Social Neurosis, not to “fall a prey to the common illusion that a disorder in social behavior is a disorder outside of man’s own organism.” The typical fallcy of normality, he believes, explains conflict “not as a condition of mind common to both contending parties, but as the ‘wrongness’ of the other fellow, the other group or the other nation.”
And over the weekend, this from William Stafford, in Writing the Autralian Crawl, when asked in an interview whether the four years he spent in an internment camp as a conscientious objector during World War II had defined him or “steeled” him as a man of stong convictions:
I suppose four years in a concentration camp, wherever it is, would make a difference, but the reason I reacted to “steeled” is that if we’re not careful—and that’s why I place my feet with care in this world—if we’re not careful, any extreme experience like being in a camp for four years, you know, drafted into it and held there, will so tilt us that we’re not ready. It seems to me the intellectual life and the life of the arts depends on a kind of readiness, and so many of my firends who were in this experience were in fact locked into an attitude toward society that is very disquieting to me. I mean you can become addicted to losing fights with any society you’re in, and I just feel nervous about it. I’m probably betraying more of that past in the way I respond to this, than in what I say about it. I feel nervous about overreacting to any experience.
. . . no matter what’s happening in society for me . . . I still learn from the people around me, as a writer. I don’t feel full of insights and ready to proclaim for sure, discoveries, but even under the extreme circumstance of being put into camp for four years, I found it interesting to talk to the people who were holding us there, you know, the bosses, and so I would have this feeling today that it’s not a cops and robbers problem in society, it’s a kind of mutual problem in society. . . . I don’t locate the trouble in the bad guys so much as I do in some kind of phase that maybe we’re all going through.
I’m not exactly sure where all this confluence will lead me. Someplace better than the last eight years, I hope. Certainly to a renewed effort to stop seeing the world as armed camps of good and evil.
__________
Added: Border fences are not a good thing.
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A conversation with spoken word poet Kelly Tsai at Post No Ills.
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Diane Lockward, whose poem “My Husband Discovers Poetry” was featured here on October 13, has drawn my attention to a blog that deserves some attention:
This is a themed blog (poems about poetry) that will lead to a print anthology. Dan Waber invited five of his favorite poets to send him an ars poetica they’d written along with the names and email addresses of five other poets. He then invited those twenty-five poets to do the same. He then invited those hundred and twenty-five poets to do the same. He then invited…you get the picture.
Every poem submitted will appear on this blog, one per day. The print anthology will be published by Paper Kite Press when the editors (Jennifer Hill-Kaucher and Dan Waber) determine that a book length collection of the very best of these poems exists, which, at a poem a day, is likely to take a year or more.
A neat poem by Marilyn Taylor on the blog: “The Spondee” and one by Kentucky poet Lynnell Edwards “Workshop Poem, or, Sorry Austin”
By the way, Dan Waber also hosts one of my other favorite sites: altered books.
This post was written by sherry
Morehead State University’s Department of English, Foreign Languages and Philosophy and the Kentucky Folk Art Center (KFAC) have announced that poet Diane Gilliam, author of Kettle Bottom, a collection of poems written in the voices of people living in coal camps in the 1920s, is the recipient of the 2008 Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing.
A celebration honoring Gilliam will be held at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 23, at the Kentucky Folk Art Center. She will read from her work, followed by music and a reception as part of the celebration.
A native of Columbus, Ohio, Gilliam’s was the daughter of Appalachian outmigration (her father from Johnson County in east Kentucky; her mother from Mingo County, W.Va.). She earned a Ph.D. degree in romance languages and literatures from The Ohio State University and an MFA degree from Warren Wilson College.
Her other books include Recipe for Blackberry Cake (Wick Poetry Series from Kent State University Press 1999) and One of Everything (Cleveland State University Poetry Center 2003).
Kettle Bottom and Gilliam won the 2005 Ohioana Library Association Book of the Year Award in Poetry, a Pushcart Prize and also an (2005) American Bookseller Association Book Sense Pick for the Top 10 Poetry Books.
The Chaffin Award, which includes a cash prize of $1,000, recognizes outstanding Appalachian writers in all genres. Past winners of this award include Erik Reece, Sharon Hatfield, Ron Rash, John Sparks, Silas House, Crystal Wilkinson and Denise Giardina.
Additional information is available by calling KFAC at (606) 783-2204 or the Department of English, Foreign Languages and Philosophy at (606)783-2185.
This post was written by sherry
From Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry (c William L. Rukeyser, published by Paris Press, 1996):
Certain lives [reach us imaginatively], so that the whole life becomes an image reaching backward and forward in history, illuminating all time. The life of Jesus; the life of Buddha; the life of Lincoln, or Gandhi, or Saint Francis—these give us the intensity that should be felt in a lifetime of concentration, a lifetime which seems to risk the immortal meanings every day, pure in knowledge that the only way to realize them is to risk them. Think, too, of Beethoven’s life, of the Curies and Father Damien; or of that living person whose daily meanings carry most to you. These lives, in their search and purpose, off their form, offer their truths. They reach us as hope.
At the “singular points” in history …certain gestures provide expression. Heroes are made. That is, a man or woman allows many people to feel the moment of crisis, and to understand that it is common to all imaginations ready to receive its meaning.
In this country, one man who cut through to the imagination of all was John Brown, that meteor, whose blood was love and rage, in fury until the love was burned away. That crazy murderous old man, he must be called by Lincoln, and he must be hanged, condemned in agony. But that precipitating stroke, like the archaic bloody violence of the Greek plays, spoke to many lives.
In Belgium, during the last war, the Jews were required by edict to wear the yellow Star of David which would mark them and set them apart. On the first day of the edict’s validity, nobody appeared in the street without the yellow badge. In a great simple act of love and identification, the Belgian people had cancelled the power of a ruling that, without the acceptance of the majority, could not force any group apart from the rest of the people.
…
The form of their belief marked those in Belgium that day, all the underground fighters, the savage and gentle heroes of our long way. At the same time, that form evoked its comparable belief in countless lives.
These men and women express connection. That is their gift in life, as it is the gift of art.
The knowledge of this gift is powerful.
The uses of such knowledge are wide; its ignorance is fatal.
Oh, and “Wild Nights” indeed.
This post was written by sherry
From William Stafford’s Writing the Australian Crawl (Univ Mich, 1979):
Well, most of the poems I write I don’t send out at all. And of those I send out, maybe of tenth of them finally get published. So that means an awful lot of them get rejected, even ones I think are all right. I look at it this way: you can run across a log pond—you know, where they’re floating the logs at a sawmill—by stepping on one log at a time. And if you don’t stay on a given log very long, you can go hopping clear across the pond on these logs. But if you stop in one, it’ll sink. Sometimes I feel a writer should be like this—that you need your bad poems. You shouldn’t inhibit yourself. You need to have your dreams, you need to have your poems. If you begin to keep from dreaming or from trying to write your poems, you could be in trouble. You have to learn how to say “Welcome . . . welcome.” Welcome, dreams. Welcome Poems. And then if somebody says “I don’t like that dream,” you can say “Well, it’s my life. I had to dream it.” And if somebody else says “I don’t like that poem,” you can say, “Well, it’s my life. That poem was in the way, so I wrote it.”
This post was written by sherry
I have been reading Randall Couch’s translation Madwomen, the Locas mujeres poems of Gabriela Mistral (University of Chicago, 2008).
In his introduction to this bilingual edition, Couch says
As a channel for “the song that comes,” Mistral’s medium was ventriloquy. In the dramatic monologues of the “madwomen,” the poet plays the part of prophet or sibyl, speaking through the masks of personae. To the extent that they form a composite portrait, the poems imply a fragmented subject: as songs of experience, they question the possibility of a unitary subject—a mujer who is not loca—in the face of extreme conditions. Here, as in her earlier work, it is specifically the experience of women that exposes the costs of history and the madness of a calculus that accepts those costs.
Because I am ignorant of both South American culture and the Spanish language, I feel I was not able to read these poems well. Where I could connect best was with poems where I was familiar with the back story: Martha and Mary, Electra, Antigone, Clytemnestra, Cassandra.
From “Martha and Mary:”
Martha and Mary were born together,
lived together, ate together.
They closed the same doors,
drank from the same cistern.
The same grove watched them,
and the same light robed them.Martha’s dishes clinked,
her porridge-pot bubbled.
Her henyard teemed with doves,
with red cocks and plover.
Coming and going, Martha
was lost in a cloud of feathers.In a whirlwind, she would rule
over meals and linens,
the winepress and beehives,
the minute, the hour, and the day . . .And wherever she went, all things
voiced a wounded cry to her:
crockery, latches, doors,
as to their bellwether;
and for her sister they grew hushed,
spinning tears and Ave Marias.
From “Electra in the Mist”
Now she doesn’t breathe the Aegean Sea.
Now she’s more dumb than a tumbled stone.
Now she does no good or ill. She is without works.
She names me not, loves me not, hates me not.
She was my mother, and I was her milk,
nothing more than her milk turned blood.
Only her milk and her profile, moving or asleep.
From “Clytemnestra”
The little creatures know by the air,
and the ten fountains by the great shout,
that Agamemnon cast on the pyre
like cypress-pine or common cress
the lamb that slept in my arms,
that suckled my milk like a fawn
and, from my milk, was lithe and white.The ragged shout of the crowd came
without a breeze to these thousand doors,
when her back the color of the myrtles
fell to the flame and the flame took her.
The crowd howls against heaven
as if drunk, whipped up by the fire,
the name of its King and not that of my lamb,
it dances and belches victory shouts,
swarms like ants, deafened by drums,
belches, dances, bellowing to its gods,
and she, Iphigenia, falls, falls, falls,
while I, walled in so near the pyre,
claw at the bolted palace doors.
This post was written by sherry
Here are the first three stanza’s of W. H. Auden’s poem, “Barbed Wire.”
Across the square,
Between the burnt-out Law Courts and Police Headquarters,
Past the Cathedral far too damaged to repair,
Around the Grand Hotel patched up to hold reporters,
Near huts of some Emergency Committee,
The barbed wire runs through the abolished City.Across the plains,
Between two hills, two villages, two trees, two friends,
The barbed wire runs which neither argues nor explains
But where it likes a place, a path, a railroad ends,
The humour, the cuisine, the rites, the taste,
The pattern of the City, are erased.Across our sleep
The barbed wire also runs: It trips us so we fall
And white ships sail without us though the others weep,
It makes our sorry fig-leaf at the Sneerers’ Ball,
It ties the smiler to the double bed,
It keeps on growing from the witch’s head.— Selected Poetry of W. H. Auden (Modern Library)
When I came across this poem in my reading the other day, I was struck by how nearly it describes the world that between them Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush have wrought. I thought particularly of Baghdad.
Ronald Reagan may have commanded Mr. Gorbachev to tear down one wall, but we have spent the intervening years building countless others, from gated communities in U.S. cities to the concrete barricades between Shia and Sunni in Baghdad, to the cages in Guantanamo, to the border fence between Israel and Palestine and our own useless fence on the Mexican border.
What are we afraid of losing that is worth this much sacrifice?
Our lives, you might say. A pretty bleak survival, I might answer.
This post was written by sherry
