Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression - Thoughts about Calvin's Festival of Faith and Writing from our Poetry Guy Brad

Thoughts about Calvin's Festival of Faith and Writing from our Poetry Guy Brad

Written by Brad Fruhauff

Thursday, 01 May 2008

I just caught Mark Bertrand's post on his "Calvin Haul" in which he shares a photo of the books he brought back from the recent Festival, and thought I'd take my own photo and compare notes. Our only title in common is Stacy Barton's , but it's a fine book to have in common. Stacy hung out a lot at the WordFarm booth, who were our neighbors, so we got to hang out with her by proxy, which was a lot of fun. I hope she doesn't mind my sharing that she has a novel in the works, for which you should all be on the lookout.

I'm glad Mark discovered Scott Cairns . We've published him twice already and he gave us some great encouragement when he came by our booth at Calvin. His poetry is both accessible and mystical and makes for a great introduction to the genre for those who are otherwise scared of it. I had a similar experience to Mark's with poets Mary Karr and Franz Wright. They had a "conversation" session on Friday morning in which they discussed their friendship, their poetry and their mutual conversions to Catholicism. Then they each read one of the other's poems, and afterward I went out and bought the books, got their autographs, and asked them to send something to Relief (that's called networking). Late that night I read the first poem in Karr's Sinner's Welcome, in which she uses the word "scrim." I wasn't even sure what it meant, but I was so excited I thought I could run back to her hotel and give her a big kiss - but that kind of thing doesn't fly in western Michigan.

If you look closely you can see four titles from Wordfarm Press . I only bought three of them (including Barton's), which is still $30 of my money they took home with them. Luci Shaw is always worth a read, especially for nature-poem people, and I was told that Erin Keane's The Gravity Soundtrack was the best book of poetry ever. Of course, that was the book's editor talking, but I decided to take a chance on it. John Leax's Tabloid News was a gift from our own editor-in-chief Kim Culbertson, and I can't recall how she had it.

That was the great and wonderful surprise of the weekend - all the free books. The Zondervan booth was giving away books like Velvet Elvis at the end of the weekend. Poet Paul Willis traded me a chapbook of his poetry for a review copy of Relief, and our new friend, Renee Matheny gave me her copy of Satterlee's Burning Wyclif because she just thought I needed to read it that much. I haven't read any of these yet, but the semester's almost over and that means my time will become my own again, soon.

Finally, I can't recommend highly enough Paul Mariani's poetry. He's a passionate and fascinating speaker, if you ever get the chance to hear him. He's also one of these paradoxical figures who has a rough exterior but a tender heart (if he doesn't mind my publishing that to the World Wide Web). My advice to you is to go out and buy his poems.

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