Call for Submissions: The Poet's Quest for God

The Poet's Quest for God: 21st Century Poems of Spirituality
(cross-posted from The Wonder Reflex)

Edited by Dr. Oliver V. Brennan and Dr. Todd Swift
For Publication by Eyewear Publishing 2013-14
Deadline for submission: August 1, 2012

A trimmed version of the call for submissions:

Eyewear Publishing is planning to publish an anthology of new, mostly previously-unpublished poems, written in English, concerned with spiritual issues in this secular age, by persons of any faith, or none. Submissions will be welcomed via email as word documents, containing no more than three poems, and including contact details and a brief 100 word biographical note about the author.

One of the characteristics of our contemporary culture which is generally described as post-modern is the human search for the spiritual. The advent of post-modernity has been accompanied by the dawn of a new spiritual awakening. Many spiritual writers say that desire is our fundamental dis-ease and is always stronger than satisfaction. This desire lies at the centre of our lives, in the deep recesses of the soul. This unquenchable fire residing in all of us manifests itself at key points in the human life cycle. Spirituality is ultimately what we do about that desire. When Plato said that we are on fire because our souls come from beyond and that beyond is trying to draw it back to itself, he is laying out the broad outlines for a spirituality.

This new emphasis on and openness to the spiritual dimension of human existence which is characteristic of contemporary lived culture is accompanied by a new emergence of atheism as well as a sometimes-aggressive secularism. Perhaps the best response to this rage against belief in a Divine Power at work in the universe is a poetic one. 

The purpose of this collection is to awaken debate, create an imaginative discourse and generally open a space for religious poetic practices in the contemporary world, while at the same time refusing to delimit the horizon of the possible.

For more information, or to submit, contact Dr Swift at T.Swift@kingston.ac.uk. I certainly intend to submit, though not in an attitude of resisting secularism. My involvement in secular activism, and my impulses to write and study poetry, are for me two sides of the same coin. I recognize the stone of the world doesn't reveal any message on its surface left by its Maker: not any commandment or token of assurance, no instructions, no threat; and I take that blankness as an invitation to write my own message upon it, and to see what others have written there.

Related reading: Norman Finkelstein's On Mount Vision: Forms of the Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry.

Frost Farm Prize submission deadline: April 1

A reminder: submissions for the 2nd Annual Frost Farm Prize for metrical poetry must be postmarked by April 1, 2012. The winner will walk away with $1,000 and an invitation, with honorarium, to read as part of The Hyla Brook Reading Series at the Robert Frost Farm in Derry in the summer of 2012. The poem will appear in the 2012 edition of The Evansville Review. Submission guidelines are available at the Farm website.

Lahiri on the Sentence

Draft is a new New York Times blog series about the art and craft of writing. Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Unaccustomed Earth, The Namesake and Interpreter of Maladies, was asked to write the first entry. She writes:

All the revision I do — and this process begins immediately, accompanying the gestation — occurs on a sentence level. It is by fussing with sentences that a character becomes clear to me, that a plot unfolds. To work on them so compulsively, perhaps prematurely, is to see the trees before the forest. And yet I am incapable of conceiving the forest any other way.

Local coverage: Wachusett Writers & Poets Club

Here, for those interested in the goings-on of local literary clubs -- and for the purpose of keeping a full record of coverage of local literary news in the area media -- are a few portions of an article by Michael Hartwell which appeared in the Sentinel & Enterprise newspaper, March 3, 2012, under the title "Wachusett writers plan tribute to founder." The article should continue to be available as a version cached by Google.

WESTMINSTER -- Montachusett Regional Vocational Technical School will be printing copies of a book from the Wachusett Writers and Poets Club in a tribute to Dolores Ouellette, 81, of Westminster, who helped found the group in 2004 and died of cancer in September. Only 50 copies of "Expression & Inspiration 2012" will be printed, and copies will be given to contributing writers and local libraries, senior centers and genealogy groups.

[...]

"This is not just a social club," said Janice Ouellette, 64, of Ashby. "We are trying to become better writers." She leads the group with her twin sister, Janet Ouellette. The two are distantly related to Dolores Ouellette.
 
[...]

Nine people attended a group meeting on Monday. Janet Ouellette, a retired reading teacher, shared a writing prompt, and assembled members wrote short pieces for 10 minutes under the theme "I remember."

[...]

Janet Ouellette wrote about the time she broke her collarbone from heaving a muffin with all her might. Janice Ouellette wrote about an argument the two had as children that ended with her throwing a wooden spoon at her sister across the yard -- and bonking her square on the head.

[...]

Later in the meeting members shared poems and short pieces they had written. Ingrid Wheeler passed out copies of a work in progress about her husband's failed attempts at fixing things around the house.

"Too many times I've caught him menacing my garden with a weed whacker," she wrote. The piece concluded with an anecdote about him wearing pants that don't fit, which fell down while he was gripping a heavy saw on top of a ladder. He couldn't step down because of the pants and his hands were full, so she had to climb the precarious ladder to help him.

[...]

The club has printed copies of its collected work before. The last time, the work was titled "Expression & Inspiration" and came out in 2009.

The group meets about once a week in the Westminster Town Office and their next meeting will be Monday at 1 p.m.

A gathering for poetry at Boston University

Dan Chiasson, Robert Pinsky, and Rosanna Warren at Boston University's Creative Writing Annual Faculty Reading in Spring 2012. (From the Boston Globe Names blog)

Lecture on Lettering

Typophiles, designers and book-lovers may all be interested in attending "Letter Forms as Content", a talk next week by letter designer Russell Maret. He will be discussing his work, the history of lettering, and the difference between digital and foundry type, at the Boston Athenaeum, 10 1/2 Beacon Street, Boston (at Park Street station). Tuesday February 28, 2012, 7 PM. $30 admission, or $15 for Athenaeum members.

Impressions from a reading

"One of the country's best writers...""Melissa Green is a contemporary, world-class poet who writes timeless poetry."
"Melissa Green is one of the most original and gifted poets writing today."
"Melissa Green is simply a wonderful poet. Her language and her imagery are poignant and extremely original."
                                -- testimonies from an online petition asking American publishers to reissue Melissa Green's previously printed books

Fred Marchant, introducing Melissa Green as the first of two readers at a literary evening sponsored by the Suffolk University Poetry Center on February 2, 2012, said of her most recent book-length publication, Fifty-Two: "Such an amazing little book. I wish we could all pitch in five dollars each, right now, and republish it again." I happen to know these poems well, and couldn't agree more: how fine it would be if Arrowsmith Press would hear the demand and do another hundred or two hundred copies. I was in the audience at the reading in 2007 when a veritable pageant of renowned poets -- Derek Walcott, David Ferry, Lucie Brock-Broido, Frank Bidart, Rosanna Warren, fifteen writers in total -- turned out for "A Tribute to Melissa" to celebrate the publication of Fifty-Two. The readers were there to honor the beauty and brilliance of Melissa Green's work, and to celebrate the appearance of another collection after she'd been a long time silent on the page. We'd had to order our copies in advance, and I gave away one of the two copies I'd bought for myself to my friend Daniel Pritchard (now Evans Pritchard), who hadn't reserved one in time. Oh, I hope he appreciated that gift! For the book sold out that evening, and it now commands a commendable price in the catalogs of fine booksellers, if you can find it at all.

Cover of Green's 2010
collection, Fifty-Two.
Click here to read a
sample poem, "Library".

How resplendent Melissa the poet looked that night when she finally walked to the lectern to read from her work, steadied by a cane, clothed in royal purple. What else do I remember about that night? How the evening's impresario, Meg Tyler, waited patiently for the crowd to calm itself so she could open the event with a few words of welcome and introduce the first speaker; how the auditorium hushed save for one voice near the front: Derek Walcott, turned in his seat, chatting hospitably, with those seated behind him in the second row. Finally he noticed Tyler's presence, perhaps cued by his seatmates who with bemused low hisses were trying to get his attention. And here's what he said as he cut his conversation short and turned right way round: "As the Shakespearean actor said: 'What is the play? Where is the stage?'"

Back to last week's reading at Suffolk. Fred Marchant described briefly the unique form of the poems in Fifty-Two: short lyrics, neat and even and well-made, as I think of them, as Shaker boxes, but each split into two halves by a break -- as crisp as a pencil snapping; as decisive as the sound that startles a body out of dreaming reverie. The first half of each poem portrays, as if the present, a moment in youth when one was looking ahead to a life full of promise, to a future full of love, companionship, comfort. The second half, in the true present, looks back upon the years that have passed to tally another way in which hope did not bear fruit. If there can be a beauty in sadness, Green's poems are beautifully sad.

Cover of the German
translation of Melissa Green's
memoir, Color is the Suffering
of Light (1995, Norton).

She read two sets of poems. The first was a series of miscellaneous lyrics, in her characteristically rich language: "Phi" (published in the first issue of Little Star); "Chrismaria," taking its name from the kind of casket or jar that holds the sacramental chrism of the Catholic church; "Nearing Winter", in which featured the feather-topped marsh plants called phragmites; "Prophecy", a poem drawing on the seascape and seabirds of Winthrop, as well as Virginia Woolf's having feared for her sanity when once she heard the birds singing in ancient Greek; and, the third poem in this landscape triptych, "First Snow", in which the sky and salt-spray and sea are laid over one another with all the enthusiasm for layering of a Renaissance artist. The last piece in this first movement of her reading was a war poem titled "Casualty", dedicated to the poet and translator David Ferry.

For the second movement, Green read a clutch of poems from a sequence concerning the tragic circumstances of Mad Maud, a mythical street woman in long-ago England and her love, Poor Tom O' Bedlam. Tom, Green explained, the critic Harold Bloom thinks must have fallen out of Shakespeare's folio, a part-mad, part-gypsy, part-wise fool figure named after the London asylum, St. Mary of Bethlehem. There's a famous poem which tells the story of Poor Tom -- and of course, his name and fate are used in the ravings of Edgar out on the moor in "King Lear" -- but of his beloved Maud, less is written. In her Maud poems, then, Green is giving flesh and voice to a woman who has been for so long not much more than the shadow of a myth.

The Maud poems form a sequence; I won't name them all, but I will quote a few lines and mention a few images which stuck in my ear as Green told the story of Mad Maud at the river, Mad Maud and the swans, Mad Maud's four dreams, Mad Maud's song. They knit together in a fabric of tattered, desperate longing for refuge and love:

A horse-drawn sledge of brick in the mud, a child buried in the foundation of the pier, his "weep, weep, like a little wind"; "When he fled, my Tom, he trod upon the stars, and put the morning out"; the lovers clinging to each other at the water's edge, and a swan bearing down upon them, his breast furrowing the water like a prow, then rising into the air with his white wings spread wide, like an emblem of protection or sanctity; "soaring toward the day-moon from the radiant Thames"; "he sees not me, but I think a succubus!"; "there are lovers living yet that lie together"; Maud shivering with a nither in the night air, imagining the mawk's eating out her heart; "blood bracken takes the woods"; "when Tom is from me I cry"; Maud looking for her Tom, heart-sick, though he is once again in the asylum while she is on the streets; Maud speaking of he trees: "I heard their singing boughs"; beside the ivied trees, beneath the theater of the moon.

"Nither" (to shiver with cold) and "mawk" (maggot) are not words we use today; but are given renewed currency in Green's verse. These rescued terms are the latest in Green's ongoing replenishment of the word-hoard -- her as-yet unpublished book-length sequence Akeldama, based on the romance and tragic outcome of Heloïse and Abélard, returns many forgotten words to the language -- a glossary of some of these -- including dimmet, skyme, wistness, and other darlings -- appears in the September 2009 issue of The Charles River Journal, along with an author's note and selection of text from the book (click here to view a PDF of those pages).

Let us hope that the Maud poems, as well as all those in Akeldama, make their way into print soon, and from there to bookshops, and from those shelves to readers' hands.

*

Really, this post is only the impressions of part of a reading. I'm sorry I could not stay to hear the second poet of the evening, Tom Sleigh. I have long appreciated his writing in print, though I have not heard him read it in person. One of my favorite poems of his is "New York American Spell, 2001", in his collection Far Side of the Earth (2005, Houghton Mifflin). Look at how he ranges between modes in different sections of this long poem, from "Under my tongue is the mud of the Nile, / I wear the baboon hide of sacred Keph" to "A woman hugging another woman / Who was weeping blocked the sidewalk." Great.

*

Melissa Green's first collection, The Squanicook Eclogues (1988, Norton), was brought back into print in 2010 by Boston-based publisher, The Pen & Anvil Press, and is available for purchase at the press website, Amazon.com, and Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Mass.

*

NB, on the German translation of Green's memoir: How serendipitous that "Glas", glass, is also glas, "green" in Irish Gaelic. Both the fragile heart of glass, and the heart of Green.