Archive - November, 2011

Avenues of Grace: On Writing “Four Counties”

November 29, 2011 in General with 3 Comments

5.2 Poet Timothy E.G. Bartel traces his poem’s long journey from inspiration to quasi-completion.

Some poems come in a rush of inspiration. Henry Longfellow claimed that “The Arrow and The Song” rushed fully formed into his mind one day as he glanced toward the morning paper on the breakfast table. Others require that long slog of work that Helen Vendler calls “our secret discipline.” “Four Counties” began in the former way, then continued in the latter. The entire first section, or “county” of the poem, “Ventura,” spilled out on a cloudy afternoon, a year after I graduated from college, while I was browsing at Borders bookstore (R.I.P.) in Southern California. As the first lines of the poem hit me, I snagged the last empty chair at the cafe and fluttered my pen across the page till “will we ever be human again?” Then the torrent stopped, and I realized what was smeared and scrawled before me in my Moleskine was something like a miniature, psychological Odyssey of my college experience.

A lot of young writers I know are really eager to write about the phenomenon of their undergraduate years, whether the hung-over buzz, the pregnant girlfriend, or the academic ennui. I guess that for a while after college I had assumed that I would escape that desire—I went to a small, Christian, liberal arts school with a dry campus and no football team where everyone is required to minor in Biblical studies. I didn’t think I had much to process. But I did, apparently. After writing the first section, I sat on it for a few months, then timidly work-shopped it at a summer arts conference. The feedback all pointed to one thing: it wasn’t done.

So I kept adding to it—scenes from post-college life. “Los Angeles” is largely inspired by my slow turning toward liturgical worship and sacramental theology in my own spiritual life, only to find that most of my friends were doing so as well. It was like we all woke up one day and realized that Southern California is haunted by Saints—their names are on practically every road sign and highway marker. “Riverside” contains scenes of my long commute from LA County down the 15 freeway to Temecula, in Riverside County. Soon after I finished “Riverside,” I decided to join the Eastern Orthodox Church.

I work-shopped the poem again, and still the feedback was: you’re not done yet, Tim. I had been working on the poem from the spring of 2006 to the summer of 2008. So I called the poem “Three Counties” and put it away again. Then I got married. My wife and I joined the Orthodox church. I wrote other poems and decided that “Three Counties” was an odd piece of psychological juvenilia.

But “Three Counties” kept snagging the attention of my mind, like a painting that hangs crooked on the wall, or a hangnail that catches on every jacket cuff. The poem was indeed unfinished; there were longings recorded there—for holiness, for forgiveness, for (I’ll admit it) a girl. As my first anniversary drew near, I opened a new draft of the poem, and decided to try writing about something like closure. The problem is, of course, that the long-lined free verse poem has not often been used as a form for closure. It’s a form for longing, as we learn from “Song of Myself,” or from “Howl.” As I worked on “San Luis Obispo,” I realized that the poem wasn’t just about guilt over sin, or becoming an adult, or really wanting to get married, it was also about about a desire I didn’t realize had been driving myself and my generation: the desire to learn to pray.

I finished “Four Counties” about 4 years after I began it, or maybe it’s still not done. Maybe not till I have a son, or lose my parents, or die myself. For now, it chronicles a search for lots of indefinite things and records the finding of a few definite ones, or what you will. I sometimes don’t know what I think of it. Maybe it is psychological juvenilia. But I know I discovered, through writing it, what it means to live with an unruly and unfinished poem and learned something about being committed to a craft that promises no answers, but can sometimes be an avenue of grace.

Timothy E.G. Bartel‘s poem “Four Counties” appears in issue 5.2 of Relief.

Announcing 5.2 Poets

November 23, 2011 in Author News, General, Relief News with 5 Comments

Timothy Bartel
"Four Counties"

Timothy E.G. Bartel is a husband, writer, and educator from Whittier, CA. He currently resides in Edinburgh with his wife, while he pursues a postgraduate degree in poetry and theology at the University of St Andrews. Timothy's work has recently appeared in The Other Journal, Christianity and Literature, and the St. Katherine Review.
Cindy Beebe
"My Son Says What If Jesus Were Playing Basketball"

Cindy Beebe lives in Collierville, TN, a suburb of Memphis, with her husband, their two teen-aged sons, and a couple of slacker house cats. She sings in her church choir, home-schools her children, and ministers to the community as a member of Continuum Arts: Engaging Culture With Culture Through Acts of Creative Excellence. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Image, The Cincinnati Review, RATTLE, The National Poetry Review, The Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review, Radix, and APJ, among others. She also has poems in previous issues of Relief. Feel free to contact her.
John J. Brugaletta
"Itadaki Masu"
"Everything Is Otherwise"

John J. Brugaletta is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at California State University, Fullerton. He was editor and publisher of South Coast Poetry Journal during its ten-year history, and contributing editor of The Lamp-Post. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, The Tongue Angles and Tilling the Land, and is co-author of Discovering the Way of Wisdom: Spirituality in the Wisdom Literature. He lives in Northern California with his wife Claudia, where he makes tables, clocks and poems.
Sara Burant
“After Reading from Genesis I Consider Angels"
“Within"
“The Place After Words”
“Meditation on a Man’s Figure”

Sara Burant's poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Comstock Review, and Ruminate Magazine, among others.  Her first chapbook, Verge, has just been accepted for publication by Finishing Line Press.  She lives in Eugene, Oregon with her husband, a ball-crazy dog, elderly cat and small flock of chickens.  This summer she was fortunate enough to be present at the birth of her first grandchild.
Scott Cairns
"Two Trees"

Scott Cairns, Professor of English at University of Missouri, is director of MU Writing Workshops in Greece: Thessaloniki/Thasos, bringing graduate and undergraduate students to Greece every June for engagement with literary life in modern Greece. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, etc., and have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing. His most recent books are Compass of Affection (poetry), Short Trip to the Edge (memoir), Love’s Immensity (translations), and a book-length essay, The End of Suffering. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006.
Maryann Corbett
"Knowledge"

Maryann Corbett's book Breath Control is due out in 2012 from David Robert Books. Her chapbooks are Dissonance and Gardening in a Time of War. She has been a winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and a finalist for the Morton Marr prize and the Best of the Net anthology. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals in print and online and in the anthologies Hot Sonnets, The Able Muse Anthology, and Imago Dei: Poems from Christianity and Literature. She lives in St. Paul and works for the Minnesota Legislature.
Lynn Domina
"Flickering Green, Flickering Bronze"
"Omniscience in Babel"

Lynn Domina is the author of two collections of poetry, Framed in Silence and Corporal Works. She is also the editor of a collection of essays, Poets on the Psalms. Her recent poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, The New England Review, The Southern Review, Christianity & Literature, and several other periodicals. She currently lives with her family in the western Catskill region of New York.
Michael Martin
"Visions of Vladimir"
"Words written during the suffering and subsequent death of John Paul II"

Michael Martin lives on a small, organic farm between Detroit and Ann Arbor with his wife and eight children. He teaches English at Marygrove College in Detroit. His work has appeared in many different journals, most recently in Tiferet and Prose Studies. This is his third appearance in Relief.
Marsha Mathews
"Crossing the Dead"

Marsha Mathews’ Sunglow & A Touch of Nottingham Lace has won this year’s Red Berry Editions Chapbook Award. In 2010, her first book of poems, Northbound Single-Lane, was published by Finishing Line Press.
Magazines that have published Mathews’ work include Apalachee Review, Appalachian Heritage, Fourth River, Greensboro Review, Hampden-Sydney, Inkwell Journal,  Melusine, and Pembroke. Her poems appear in these anthologies, Child of My Child (Gelles-Cole Literary Enterprises, 2010) and Touching: Poems of Love, Longing, and Desire (Fearless Books, 2011).
Mathews teaches writing at Dalton State College, in Dalton, Georgia, where she advises the campus literary magazine, Tributaries.

Julie L. Moore

Julie L. Moore
"Prayer Shawl"

Julie L. Moore is the author of Slipping Out of Bloom (WordTech Editions) and Election Day (Finishing Line Press). In addition, her manuscript, Scandal of Particularity, was a finalist for the 2011 FutureCycle Press Poetry Book Prize and a semi-finalist for the 2011 Perugia Press Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize from Ruminate, Moore has also had her poetry published in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Journal, Atlanta Review, CALYX, Cimarron Review, The Missouri Review Online, The Southern Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Verse Daily. You can learn more about her work at www.julielmoore.com.
Paul Willis
"After Saying Goodbye"
"The Closet in the Skeleton"
"Dinah Morris Digresses in Her Evening Sermon on the Green"
"Friday Night"
"Looking Away"

Paul J. Willis is a professor of English at Westmont College and the current poet laureate of Santa Barbara, CA. His most recent books of poetry are Rosing from the Dead (WordFarm, 2009) and Visiting Home (Pecan Grove Press, 2008). He is also the author of Bright Shoots of Everlastingness: Essays on Faith and the American Wild (WordFarm, 2005) and the four-part eco-fantasy novel The Alpine Tales (WordFarm, 2010). He spends a little too much of his time creating obscure trails through the poison oak canyons of his campus.

Birthed From Struggle

November 15, 2011 in General, Writing and Publishing with 2 Comments

5.2 CNF author Heather M. Surls describes how her essay “The Door of Hope” responds to the suffering of real people.

After a day of volunteering at The Door of Hope, a shelter for prostitutes in Tel Aviv, I would crowd onto a bus with dozens of Israelis and ride to our apartment near Jerusalem. Sometimes I’d read on the way; sometimes I’d watch the orange trees, wheat fields and melon fields of the coast rise into the pines, scrub oaks and rocks of the hill country. Once home, I’d shower to scrub away the smells of bleach and sweat and dying. Then my husband and I would sit at the table and I’d begin to talk. Deflated, spent from fighting on the front lines, I’d sketch with words the women I’d met, my tasks and conversations, my small victories in speaking Hebrew.

Then I’d write. I used my ugly journal at that time, the plain spiral notebook with the cover that had soaked up something greasy on the bus. I wrote about my experiences to let go of them—catch in words, commit to the page, and release. After several months of this—visiting The Door of Hope on weekends and writing when I came home—I began my essay. I collected the scattered scraps of senseless days and senseless pain and tried to craft something beautiful. The result, after months of experiencing, writing, compiling, and editing, was “The Door of Hope,” a patchwork of stories, faces, and meditations.

The shelter, a concrete basement in the slums of south Tel Aviv, was full of art and artists. Although the walls were moldy, although rats sometimes scampered from one hole to another in full view, although sometimes a prostitute woke screaming from a nightmare, The Door of Hope made people make art. Photographers, especially, came and captured scabbed faces, desperate eyes, grocery bags stuffed with clothes, occasional hugs and smiles. The walls held some of their art: a portrait of a wide-eyed, unsmiling woman in front of a red cloth. She died. One of a skeletal woman with blonde waves of hair, wearing a piece of white silk and lace, leaning against a building. She was beaten to death with a pipe.

Art was a response to pain—that became clear as I worked and wrote. The photographers tried to find beauty in ashes. I tried to reconstruct my experiences so I could cope, so I could handle the hell I saw in back streets and broken bodies. But, perhaps deeper than that, I wrote because I wanted to redeem the pain. I wanted to make something beautiful from withdrawal-complaints and shouts in the alleyway, something poetic yet fragmented to show my lack of understanding—girl after girl, day after day, what can this mean? I wanted to make all this suffering good for something. If these prostitutes had to suffer, I wanted to expose their misery so others would see their need and feel compassion.

Does all art come from pain? I don’t think so, but I do believe that some of the best and most enduring art is birthed from struggle. I think of David and his many poems, which I’ve read for years during dark nights of soul. How wonderful that God took David’s anguish, allowed him to express it, and preserved it for thousands of years to encourage me, riding on the bus to Tel Aviv, bracing myself for the onslaught of evil and fallenness, clinging to bits of truth.

The seas have lifted up, O LORD,
the seas have lifted up their voice;
the seas have lifted up their pounding waves.
Mightier than the thunder of the great waters,
mightier than the breakers of the sea—
the LORD on high is mighty

(Psalm 93:3-4).

Heather M. Surls is the author of “The Door of Hope,” featured in issue 5.2 of Relief.

For Our Great and Marked Events

November 13, 2011 in General with 1 Comment

Jean Hoefling

5.2 CNF contributor Jean Hoefling is haunted by her past and seeks redemption.

There is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime, and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.

~Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

What is it in some of us that habitually seeks out the defining, heavyweight geographical places where childhood was engulfed by the world’s fallen realities and, we’re almost positive, irrevocably altered? By temperamental default, a lot of writers live inside this tendency to romanticize the power of past events—and the places they happened—whether those events were of the horror genre or the Disney.

I am admittedly driven more by the ruminative bent than the pragmatic one; something beyond intellect, yet hopefully not completely unreasonable, drives me to trudge again and again (as much as God will let me get away with it) past the demarcating tangibles of the formative years: the firehouse on the way home from my grade school where the flag rippled at half-mast the day President Kennedy was shot; the thresholds (the very doorknobs, if you can believe it) of former school buildings that still elicit apprehension about unfinished science projects; the swimming pool where a dark, balding teacher shattered innocence; and that spot on the sloping lawn of the high school where I still crazily believe if I sit long enough, I’ll spy a miniature Rosetta Stone half buried among the grass tufts, the key to finally understanding the puzzling intricacies of an ancient romance that still hangs morbidly in the air of that place.

This sort of nostalgic pilgrimage along old paths is one way my soul attempts to make sense of this broken world, a world for which the human soul was not created. The Greek roots of the word nostalgia mean “return of pain.” If by returning to the places of the past our wounded psychic tissues might find some measure of redemption, what of it? Yet in those movies in which characters find themselves hurled backward in time to their teenage days, they usually discover that even with the wisdom of many added years to their credit, they are still unable on the second round to alter life-changing events. The deaths we died and the blood we shed at the end of childhood were carnage for a reason, and in God’s providence are forever woven into the soul fabric of the people we are today.

And though our brains may not have processed reality in completely rational ways in those long-ago days that still haunt us, our true inner lives, deaths, and resurrections were as vast and complicated as younger people as they are within our well-ensconced adult selves. The still-developing prefrontal cortex that sits just behind the waxy-smooth forehead of a pubescent child, that vital compaction of nerve tissue that modulates mood, judgment, and impulse control, is not the defining measure of the child’s soul. The heart is an ageless thing, and eternal, wrote the Christian ascetic St. Macarius centuries ago:

Within the heart is an unfathomable depth . . . a small vessel; and yet dragons and lions are there . . . rough, uneven paths are there, and gaping chasms. There also is God, there are the angels, there life and the Kingdom, there light and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the treasures of grace: all things are there.

It is in the spirit of St. Macarius that I struggle to allow God to sanctify my “great and marked events.” And more importantly, Christ offers in real time a redemption more fathomless than analysis of any tangled past, by reducing himself routinely to humble mystery, in a cup we call golden.

Jean Hoefling‘s creative nonfiction piece “Remission” will appear in issue 5.2 of Relief.