Category Archives: General

The Poem on the Telephone: 6.1 Author David Wright

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Telephone BoxDavid Wright explains his O’Hara-esque, telephone approach to writing poems.

Consider the poems of the field, how they are spun out of nothing but language and time, how they come from a desire to listen and to be heard. Consider how damned many of them exist, and how they wither and die and go, mostly, unread, certainly by the many and, more certainly, by the eternal eyeballs of history and fame.

That’s what I did last summer after I finished writing a new poetry manuscript. I considered. I despaired.

But so what, I thought next? Who writes and doesn’t despair? Shouldn’t it be enough to know that I’ve written, spun a little yellow dress of thought and sound? I’ve made a little thing of near beauty that exists in my temporary eye? Perhaps the poems mattered at least in the sparrow-centered eye of God?

You can be Platonic, but I want more. I think most other poets do too. I don’t love poetry in the abstract. I don’t want the poems that Wordsworth or Whitman or Denise Levertov or Robert Hayden or Lisel Mueller (or thousands of others) wrote and no one ever saw. I want and value the verse they did write, the messes of sound, image, and fierce conniving that have come to me as gifts between covers or on screens or as little blessings while trying to fall asleep at night, that have detonated as frightening explosions in the midst of conversations. I need those poems, not invisible ones. Poems won’t and can’t save world, but some have come close to saving me. So I’d like the ones I write to do at least a portion of the good that other folks’ poems have accomplished in my own experience.

So I decided to start writing poems for and about particular people. On my tumblr, I posted a little note to friends, family, and acquaintances inviting them to “send me your mailing address and I will send you an original poem, written just for you, on a postcard, for free! I’ll do my best to make the poem as personal as possible—maybe something about our relationship, or about you as I know/remember you, or perhaps something we might talk about if we were hanging out together.”

Several of the poems included in this issue of Relief come right out of the postcard poem effort. They have people’s names on them, either explicitly or implicitly. And when I looked back at earlier poems, I realized how many of those also include someone’s name (see the poem “After David Hooker” in this issue, a poem for an amazing artist and teacher of art). 

As a way of getting myself writing again after finishing a long project, I knew this approach would work, in part because I’m motivated socially, always working better when others are part of the process. But another important motivation was to remind myself that I write poems because they exist most vibrantly for me when I see them as exchanges between human beings, not as the construction of mere linguistic artifacts abstracted from lived human experience. While Keats’ urn may tell us that melodies “unheard / Are sweeter“, I think music requires other listeners and other singers. A song is incomplete until someone else’s body receives and repeats and varies the tune. 

Now you might think I’m echoing ideas from Frank O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto“, and you’d be right. It’s a great little manifesto where O’Hara says that, after having lunch with the poet LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), O’Hara invented a new philosophy of verse. O’Hara was talking to Jones about how he was in love, and then he went home to write a poem. Writes O’Hara: “While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It’s a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.”

Of course, as O’Hara points out, it’s not a completely simple idea. As he describes it, personism is not just  a transcript of some kind of thing in the world. It “does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.” In my case, though, I suspect my own poems are about intimacy, about the desire for it to be practiced and overheard.  

To do anything worthwhile, I think, poems have to matter—to someone, in some place—at least in the generating of the poem itself. I want to feel like someone cares, even if they don’t. That’s why so many of my own recent poems have come into being because of some other person, often named or mentioned in the poem. Some of the people in the poems are very much alive and make appearances in the poems whether they like it or not. Some of the people have been dead for a short or long time, and when they show up I enjoy their presence again. Some of the poems are not about anyone, but I still think of them as gifts to someone, often someone particular. So in my head, the poems matter to them, even if they don’t, and that makes them part of the world of matter, of relational knowing and being.

I don’t think to read or to care about these poems readers of Relief need to know the two persons between whom a particular poem lives. What matters, though, is that the poem was generated by persons, living ones, and that makes me feel pleasure and opens possible pleasures for readers. That’s why there are names on and in the poems—names of real women and men to whom they were dedicated and often mailed; names of writers whose language I was given and wanted to pass along or fiddle with; names of people who make other kinds of art or are writers themselves.

Wendell Berry, another guru of mine, has said that the real habitat of art is not the textbook or the museum but households and friendships. Poems, says Berry, “exist as a common ground between the poet and other poets and other people, living and dead. Any poem worth the name is the product of convocation.” That’s what I’m thinking of these days—what is the convocation, the conversation of which I want to be a part, poetically and otherwise. It’s not simple, but it’s worthwhile. Perhaps, now that summer is here, I can start writing those postcard poems again. Ask me for one if you like.

David Wright‘s poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in Ecotone, Image, The Artful Dodge, Wunderkammer, and Books & Culture, among others. His most recent poetry collection is A Liturgy for Stones (Cascadia, 2003). He lives with his family and teaches in Champaign, IL.

Crafting the Community of the Word

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6.1 poet Jill Reid found community in words, and now she is working on a Holy Spirit building one word at a time.

As a writer, I can’t get away from words, and most of the time I am glad of it. I like the feel of a good word in my pen or on my tongue the same way I like the crunch of my grandmother’s homemade biscuits. I consider both—the biscuits and the words—gifts that savor, that satisfy.

I am a child of the Deep South, a place some associate with worldly ignorance, pat answers, and religious clichés. However, the South I know is rich place, blooming with story and rooted in a tough and enduring faith. I am deeply grateful for the region I live in, the red dirt roads, even the hot and sprawling summers, and especially the sweet, old ladies who held my face between their crooked fingers and “God bless”-ed me every Sunday of my childhood. But while I owe my initial grounding in the Christian faith to my parents, to the little red- brick church filled with neighbors and family who more than demonstrated the unconditional love of God, I also have sometimes felt the hollow isolation that comes from wandering around in search of a place, a community where strong craft and strong faith not only co-exist but also thrive in relationship to one another.

I owe to C.S. Lewis my sense of belonging, the knowledge that writing is not merely “academic,” that faith is not merely “spiritual,” that God inhabits both aspects of my identity in a way that unites my calling to faith and calling to writing. Over time, I have begun to embrace the mysterious and interesting ways I find my faith come alive when inked it into words that often say absolutely nothing explicitly about the God I love but who has a way of showing up in all that I write or read, even when his name doesn’t. As a human artist, I attempt to use the gift of language, of craft, and all that I can glean from insight and imagination to transcend the limits of my humanity, to trace the outline of God. I understand that tracing to happen in both the light and the shadows, among doubt and belief, or in moments that only trace the longing for or seeming absence of God. Discovering a journal like Relief has helped me feel less isolated, less alone in a world that seems bent on drawing a hard line between the sacred and the secular. I love being a part of a writing community that erases that line one good story or poem at a time.

My two poems in Relief 6.1, “Of Yellow” and “To Jochebed,” are offerings of that combination of craft and faith. “Of Yellow” utilizes the image and texture of the color yellow. Throughout my life, yellow has been tied to my associations with God—like a scent that blossoms in places where God is near. Unlike most of my poems which are patched together with revisions, “Of Yellow” came to me as a tender gift during an agonizing time. The morning of the day a divorce I couldn’t fathom became final, the poem came, and it came from a place deeper than my poetic sensibilities could reach. I treasure that poem not so much for its literary merit but for the way an unforeseen grace threaded itself through both my grief and imagination.

“To Jochebed” is a poem born out of admiration. As a young mother myself, I became fascinated with Jochebed’s story, her resilience in hiding the baby Moses from Pharaoh only to send him down the river toward a future she could only imagine. The poem also was born from a moment of realization I experienced with my own child. In the midst of a toddler tantrum, my daughter reminded me . . . of me. Yikes. Suddenly, I was facing down my own worst qualities inside the skin of my three-year old. And, like Jochebed, I will still have to send her down the river and into the hard world. I will also have to sit on my hands and pray her through outward and inward obstacles over which I have no control. Dealing with a topic so charged with raw emotion required a lot of revision, a lot of sitting on my own hands in order to let the emotion charging the poem compress and the truth of it declare itself.

Jill A. Reid

Jill A. Reid lives among the pines and bayous of central Louisiana with her four year old daughter, Ellie. She teaches English at Louisiana College and recently began an MFA in poetry at Seattle Pacific University’s low residency program. Her poetry has appeared in journals like Ruminate, The Fourth River, Big Muddy, and The Penwood Review.

After Ash Wednesday: A Confession

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Ash Wednesday

Photo by gocyclones, via Flickr

It’s Ash Wednesday, and 6.1 poet Angela Alaimo O’Donnell heads to a bar full of Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and others. She has a black ash cross on her forehead.

Ashes didn’t stay
on my forehead yesterday.
–”Ash Thursday”

“Ash Thursday” happened by accident, like most poems. It’s also, sadly, true.

One evening last February, I left my office at Fordham University in the Bronx earlier than usual. I had been invited to give a poetry reading down in Greenwich Village at The Cornelia Street Café, a marvelous venue on whose storied stage the likes of Alan Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, and other such artists of the beautiful had performed. Even though the café is only 15 miles away from campus, it would take me over an hour to get there in New York City rush hour traffic, and I didn’t want to risk being late.

I had looked forward to this for weeks. I would be reading, along with several other poets whom I didn’t know but whose work I admired, all of us having poems published in the new issue of Tiferet, a beautiful interfaith journal. As a Catholic writer with a continually-evolving sense of the importance of my faith formation to my poet’s imagination, I have long been fascinated by this intersection of faith and art. The opportunity to read my “Catholic” poems alongside those by Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist poets was a delightful prospect. I felt honored to be invited to the feast.

I made my way across campus as darkness began to fall along with a light snow. I climbed into the driver’s seat of my car, and, as is my habit, moved to adjust the rearview mirror. It was then, as I caught a glimpse of my reflection, that I saw the heavy, black cross traced in ashes in the middle of my forehead. I had forgotten—today was Ash Wednesday and, like many of my colleagues and students at the Catholic university where I worked, we had lined up at noon Mass to mark the beginning of the season of Lent and to be marked as Catholics, as penitents, and as followers of Christ. In fact, because so many of us had been marked, and because I had been looking at those crosses all day in my classes and in my department—some of them lightly made, the suggestion of a cross, some of them crude and stark—they had become the norm, invisible to my notice after a few hours. I had not even seen my own, until this moment, and was interested to note that it was the darkest I had seen all day.

My interest, however, quickly gave way to horror. Was it really possible that I was about to walk into the Cornelia Street Café, located in one of the most militantly secular neighborhoods in the world, and read my poems to a potential roomful of Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews wearing a black cross the size of a medieval dagger hilt emblazoned on my forehead? My initial response to this hypothetical question was “Not on your life!” My secondary, guilt-ridden-Catholic-schoolgirl response was, “How dare you even ask the question? Of course you will! You are a Catholic.”

W.B. Yeats once famously stated that poetry does not arise out of the arguments we conduct with others but out of those we conduct within ourselves—never did this observation seem truer to me. There was no clear answer to this sudden conundrum and no obviously correct choice for me to make. The Catholic inside of me argued that one ought to wear the sign of one’s faith with pride—even though, ironically, the ashes are supposed to be a sign of humility. That, in fact, to hide that sign might be interpreted as a denial of the Faith. On the other hand, the Poet and the Citizen of the World inside of me both suggested that the symbol I loved, that I took for granted as a central truth in my own belief as a Christian, has also served as a source of pain and suffering to many peoples in the world. That the cross is a scandal to the Christian in a very different way than it is to the Jew in our post-Holocaust world or to the Muslim whose ancestors endured the Crusades long past but not forgotten. My marching into an interfaith poetry reading with a

black cross temporarily tattooed on my face might be misconstrued as a sign of smug triumphalism as readily as it might be seen a symbol of repentance and piety. I was deeply troubled by the choice I clearly had to make—and make soon.

Helpless cradle-Catholic that I am, it makes sense, I suppose, that both the poem—and this essay—should take the form of a Confession. Bless me, reader, for I have sinned: I washed the cross from my forehead. Though I knew that I might justly be accused of faithlessness, cowardice, and complicity with a culture that views Catholicism with suspicion and prejudice, I chose to wipe away that outward sign of my Faith rather than trouble the hearts and minds of my Jewish and Muslim brothers and sisters. After all, I reasoned (wheedled and cajoled), my poems have “Catholic” written all over them. I lay claim to that identity without reservation in the words of my poems and in my speech—I saw no need for an outward show of the symbol that is deeply branded in my heart and so plainly evident in all that I write and say.

I even had scriptural justification for my decision: the Ash Wednesday reading I had heard earlier in the day reminded me (as it always does) of the disturbing disjunction between the public parading of ourselves as observant Catholics (getting ashes being the equivalent of receiving a gold star) and Christ’s warning in Matthew 6:1 regarding the behavior of the hypocrites who parade their fasting and acts of penitence before the synagogue and the city: “Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.”

Clearly, my mind was at ease with this decision, but my heart was not. Thus began the poem written down the day after, “Ash Thursday.”

Poetry is an argument, says Yeats. Yes. “Ash Thursday” does not attempt to reconcile the contraries. At the end of the poem, the arguments on both sides (implicit, rather than explicit) still stand, as they inevitably must.

Poetry is a way of being of two minds at the same time, Robert Frost once said (and I paraphrase). In its imaginative space, one submits to the purest fact of human existence—the knowledge of the limitations of our knowledge. Instead of exerting one’s reason (a highly overrated human attribute) to arrive at a definitive answer to unanswerable questions, poetry permits us, in Rilke’s terms, “to live the questions.”

I cannot ever know the rightness or wrongness of my action described in my poem, when I “knelt at the sink / paused at the brink / and washed [the cross] away.” I like to think that, as the De La Salle Brothers say, I do “live Jesus in my heart, forever” and that my decision was somehow the consequence of that way of living, rather than a denial of it. But I cannot know for certain whether even this is true.

The one thing I do know is this: Ash Wednesday ashes can be washed away, but “Ash Thursday” will be always with me.

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell teaches English and is associate director of The Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University in New York City. Her recent book, Saint Sinatra & Other Poems (2011), has been nominated for the Arlin G. Meyer Prize in Imaginative Writing.

This Wasn’t About That: Musings on the Art of Fiction and Fictionalized Abortion

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Joshua Hren

6.1 fiction author Joshua Hren describes the role of short stories in a tragic world.

In The New York Times, that centripetal force of public opinion, Milan Kundera mused upon the fate of his novel The Farewell Party:

Five years ago, a Scandinavian translator confessed to me that his publisher had wavered seriously over going ahead with ”The Farewell Party”: ”Everyone here is left-wing. They don’t like your message.” ”What message?” ”Isn’t it a novel against abortion?” Certainly not. Deep down, not only do I favor abortions, I’m for making them mandatory! Still, I was delighted with this misunderstanding. I had succeeded as a novelist. I succeeded in maintaining the moral ambiguity of the situation. I had kept faith with the essence of the novel as an art: irony. And irony doesn’t give a damn about messages!

Some of the great literary luminaries of the 20th Century took abortion as a central action of their stories. Faulkner in Wild Palms. Hemingway in “Hills Like White Elephants.” David Foster Wallace in “Good People.” Denis Johnson in Jesus’ Son, most directly in his story “Dirty Wedding.” And Kundera in The Farewell Party. Regardless of their personal-political positions concerning abortions, each of these authors capture (sometimes perhaps against their own wishes) the essential tragic nature of “novelistic fiction,” of which, incidentally, I consider short stories a part.

While “giant” theorists of fiction such as Milan Kundera and Mikhail Bakhtin contend that the novelistic world is primarily one of irony and comedy, I would position my own little aesthetic aims under the umbrella shared—at times comfortably, at times like two travelers who, stuck walking in the rain with the same destination, nevertheless grow apart when the conversation shifts awkwardly to God, and even more so to the God-Man—by Georg Lukács and René Girard. For Lukács, “the universe of the novel signified an essentially tragic condition marked by the ‘transcendental homelessness’ of the modern self, who had lost the possibility of experiencing totality, meaning, and redemption. It was, as he strikingly put it ‘the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.’” Girard’s vision of the novelistic universe “was equally anguished, though for somewhat different reasons. In his case the source of critique was not the absence of totality but of spiritual transcendence in the modern world where desire, envy, and ressentiment were always inevitably intertwined.”

As Christians writing in the (post?)modern world, our fictions, if they are to effectively render the zeitgeist not of our personal beliefs or lives but of the overarching world we inhabit, we would do well to work hard at sympathetically depicting characters who (subjectively) have either been abandoned by God, or who have abandoned God by their own mysterious wills.

In an epilogic paragraph at the end of Denis Johnson’s “Dirty Wedding,” the narrator notes:

I know they argue about whether or not it’s right, whether or not the baby is alive at this point or that point in its growth inside the womb. This wasn’t about that. It wasn’t about what the lawyers did. It wasn’t what the doctors did, it wasn’t what the woman did. It was what the mother and the father did together.

Similarly, my story “Control” is not about abortion so much as it finds in abortion a centrifugal image-idea through which to undertake a memento mori. It does not argue that abortion should be illegal or legal. A single abortion makes up part of the action, but fiction is not the place to engage in a par-for-the-course-politicized debate that removes the dignity of the subject. In the words of my friend Dr. Jeremiah Webster, such a debate gravitates toward already established binaries: dialogue tends to disappear. The novel, as Bakhtin argues, creates a space in which the dialogic imagination reigns supreme. Each person’s “position” is incarnated not in some platitude-ridden exchange, but in the wonderful and terrible mystery of his or her human freedom, a will that acts in a world in which most have more or less live as though God is dead. A world of tragedy whose sole redemptive source is the shadow of the “dead God’s” cross cast before those who have eyes to see—a cross whose dark outline only accentuates the light surrounding it.

Crucially, as we see in a novel such as Kundera’s Farewell Party, the absence of God doesn’t result in an absence of human depravity and evil. Although he may try to create ironic characters and conflicts, his world, one in which people are driven—and, the key point, driven unabashedly—by the will to power, by ressentiment, by romantic imitation of all-too-human gods, Kundera’s novel, separate from Kundera himself, succeeds not in establishing moral ambiguity, but in revealing the tragic vale lurking behind the (post?)modern penchant for cynical irony.

Considering the artist’s capacity to reckon with depravity, Jacques Maritain writes that,

The essential question is not to know whether a novelist can or cannot depict such an aspect of evil. The essential question is to know at what altitude he is prepared to depict it and whether his art and his heart are pure enough and strong enough for him to depict it without complicity or connivance. The more deeply the modern novel probes human misery, the more does it require superhuman virtues in the novelist. To write Proust’s work as it needed to be written would have required the inner light of a Saint Augustine. The opposite occurs, and we see the observer and the thing observed, the novelist and his subject, rivaling each other in a competition to degrade.

I cannot make accurate claims about the altitude at which I am prepared to depict beings and actions steeped in the that archaic word sin. But I would not dare lead you through the inferno, through the purgatorio, without allowing that paradisio of inner light—a violent grace! a severe mercy!—to strike, and, whenever the fictionalized human heart would have it, to make holy, if even this holiness does not erase the existential tragedy.

Sources

Mary Gluck, “Reimagining the Flaneur: The Hero of the Novel in Lukács, Bakhtin, and Girard.” Modernism/modernity. 13.1 (January 2006): 747-64.

Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son. New York: Harper Perennial, 1992.

Milan Kundera, “Key Words, Problem Words, Words I love.” The New York Times. 6 March 1988. Retrieved 13 November 2010.

Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry. New York: Scribners, 1962.

Joshua Hren is associate editor for Dappled Things: a Quarterly of Ideas, Art, and Faith. He and his wife Brittney have two small children, Anaya and Soren. When it pleases God, when the house sleeps, he drinks from the books of those who have rendered justice through language to visible and invisible worlds.

Cauliflower, Christianity, and Short Fiction

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Caralyn Davis

6.1 fiction contributor Caralyn Davis describes her ineluctably Christian imagination.

Last week I crunched my way through four colors of cauliflower: standard creamy white; rich amethyst; Day-Glo cheddar; and a white tinged with veins of violet. The web of tailgate markets crisscrossing my adopted hometown of Asheville, NC, allows me to indulge in multihued crucifers. However, when all is said and done, I’m still eating the vegetable cauliflower, not a chocolate bar or a muffin.

I have that same basic approach to my religion. I was raised a Christian. I don’t practice in a specific denomination because, to be brutally honest, the meanness that the “rules and regulations” can often generate troubles me. In my religious viewpoint, Jesus isn’t standing around with a sword of righteousness ready to poke people who don’t follow a prescribed path or even a Christian path. The wonder of Jesus is that he gave everyone the right – and the ability – to find their own path to God within a framework of love, kindness, compassion, and mercy. It’s the rest of us humans who have turned religion into an obstacle course chock full of conditions and qualifiers over the last 2,000 years.

My point is: I like to be open to people whose path to God is different from my path. Yet at heart I am still a Christian, just like cauliflower remains cauliflower no matter how much its external coloring may suggest otherwise. And that Christianity informs everything I do as a writer.

That’s not to say that I “write Christian,” with Christian characters battling Christian problems and making Christian decisions based on a Christian thought process. So far, the short stories I’ve written have tackled everything from apocalypse to incest, war, alcoholism, lost chances, the sadness of women’s lives as embodied by condiments (yes, mayonnaise, mustard, and the like), and in my story “Epiphany” in Relief 6.1, a woman struggling to grasp the sudden death of her husband. The characters aren’t always Christian, and they may not go in the same direction that most Christians would themselves go.

However, I like to think that those core Christian beliefs of love, kindness, compassion, and mercy color the actions of many of my characters – or, even better, are evoked in readers as a response to my stories once they move past their initial reactions of sadness, happiness, hope, despair, laughter, or disgust. (Note the omission of boredom in this list of possible reactions, reader boredom being anathema to writers the world over.) In other words, I hope my stories entertain, linger in the brain, and make inroads to the heart.

Caralyn Davis is a fiction and nonfiction writer based in Asheville, N.C. Her work has previously appeared at Monkeybicycle, The Drum, and Side B Literary Magazine. She is a student in the Great Smokies Writing Program, a continuing education program at the University of North Carolina-Asheville.