Pinging a Post-Conversion Scrooge

December 21, 2011 in General, Relief News with 0 Comments

Scrooge meets Ignorance & Want

What does Relief want for Christmas?

The same thing we want every year: money.

Not for ourselves, of course – we’re still an all-volunteer staff – but to keep us solvent and able to offer high-quality print books in our lo-tech virtual world. We’re also a 501(c)3 non-profit, so when we ask for money the government is looking over our shoulders to make sure it goes back into the business – no stockholders or CEOs to pay off, here, which is why you’re not likely to see an Occupy Relief anytime soon.

But the fact of the matter is that we’re still a very small company and we’re made of creatives rather than accountants and marketers, so we’re still learning how to keep up a steady stream of income in between print runs.

That makes us both Ignorance and Want in the current economy. We have 5.2 all ready to go, and I’m personally very excited about it, but we’re a bit shy of where we’d like to be to print and ship it.

So, what we’re asking is that you consider giving Relief for Christmas Twelfth Night (Jan.6, Epiphany, the namesake of the Twelve Days of Christmas). We’ll keep the print version available at the pre-sale price of $11.47 a little longer, and we also have the eBooks for only $4.99 (those you can get for Dec. 25th; see right —>). Either one would make a great gift and set you right with the cosmos1 to begin the new year.

If you’ve already bought a book, consider buying one for a friend. If you’ve bought an eBook, consider the same. We know there are workarounds for digital files, but this is about supporting something valuable.

Alternatively, if you have a heart like a converted Scrooge, bursting with Christmas spirit and looking for an outlet, or if you know someone who fits this description, we also welcome last-minute, tax-write-off donations.

Some relevant Christmas-y links:

1 Editor’s Note: Relief does not endorse a kharmic view of the universe.

Poems for Christmas: John Donne’s Nativitie

December 19, 2011 in General with 0 Comments

John Donne

This pleasant little fourteener is actually number 3 of 7 from “Holy Sonnets,” a short cycle that links each poem by repeating the last line of the previous poem as the first of the next.

Nativitie

Immensity cloistered in thy dear wombe
Now leaves his welbelov’d imprisonment,
There he hath made himselfe to his intent
Weake enough, now into our world to come;
But Oh, for thee, for him, hath th’Inne no roome?
Yet lay him in this stall, and from the Orient,
Starres, and wisemen will travell to prevent
Th’effect of Herods jealous generall doome.
Seest thou, my Soule, with thy faiths eyes, how he
Which fils all place, yet none holds him, doth lye?
Was not his pity towards thee wondrous high,
That would have need to be pittied by thee?
Kisse him, and with him into Egypt goe,
With his kinde mother, who partakes thy woe.

The Banality of Death – Marsha Matthews

December 17, 2011 in General with 0 Comments

Marsha Matthews

5.2 poet Marsha Matthews remembers a childhood tragedy.

My poem “Crossing the Dead” draws from a difficult childhood memory. The incident happened in the backyard of my family’s modest ranch home on 49th Street North, in St. Petersburg, Florida, when I was about nine years old. My best friend fell from the top of our old pine tree, which towered several stories high. I remember the sound more than anything: her shriek and the clatter and pop of branches as her body slipped to the ground.

That day, we struggled together to pull my dad’s heavy wooden ladder out of the garage. Without it, we couldn’t reach even the lowest branches. We propped it against the tree, and I was the first one up. I climbed until I could look down on my roof where fluffy gray moss sprawled across the shingles. My friend caught up with me, climbed right on by, and kept going – higher and higher. Boy, did that make me mad! After all, I was superior – prettier, faster, smarter— those attributes came with being a year older. (Seniority was big in our neighborhood.) But the moment she climbed past me, through clumps of green longleaf needles, and into the clouds, I lost my clout.  She climbed so high, I couldn’t see her, except for a bit of her pink t-shirt or a flash of denim. “Come on, Marsha,” she said. “It’s easy.”

I could’ve strangled her. How could she have outshone me this way?  “Are you kidding me?” I looked at the teeny tiny pinecones on the ground. Our patio chairs had shrunk, too. A trembling worked its way from my bare toes, up my legs, into my tummy, and then shot into  my throat. Clutching the soft bark that so easily broke, exuding a wet smelly sap, I headed down, not up.

When I reached the safe, solid ground, I felt better. For about two seconds, that is, only long enough to remember that my best friend had climbed higher than I ever would, and she was still climbing. I didn’t taunt her, as does the narrator in “Crossing the Dead.” I didn’t want her to fall. But I was miffed.

She’d turned me into a scaredy cat. Me! Marsha, tightrope walker of chain-link fences, jumper-offer of rooftops, and spelunker of lake drainage pipes. Me? Sadly, I was too trembly to climb the old pine tree in my own back yard.

Crack! Though decades have past, I can still hear that crisp, deadly sound of the branch breaking under her weight. In seconds, she lay on the ground like a sack of oranges.

Did I cry for help? Did I run inside to get someone? No, I stood there, looking at her, on the ground, unmoving.

All I know is I should have been freaking out, running for help, or at least checking her pulse. What I did was the worst possible thing: nothing. That’s what I find difficult to accept about myself and why the memory has lingered so long in my heart, finally finding some release in the creation and sharing of “Crossing the Dead.”

True, I was only a little girl when the incident happened. A young girl with quite a bit of growing up to do. Back in the 1950s, we didn’t have 911.  But we did have moms who stayed home while their husbands worked. For some reason, my mom had a way of looking out the window at just the crack of disaster.

Marsha Matthew‘s poem “Crossing the Dead” appears in Relief issue 5.2. Read her full bio here. Those interested in reading more of Marsha’s poetry might enjoy reading her book Northbound Single-Lane, which can be purchased at Amazon.com. for $14.

Questions on Eternity – Lynn Domina

December 15, 2011 in Author News, Writing and Publishing with 1 Comment

Lynn Domina

5.2 poet Lynn Domina discovers her human perspective and is okay with it.

For about twenty years, I’d found myself puzzled by the idea of eternity. It wasn’t so much the idea of no beginning and no end; I could almost imagine (if not understand) that. It was that with no beginning and no end, there could be no middle either—and that led to all kinds of loss. With no beginning, middle, or end, we have no sequence, no narrative, no possibility of story.

Then I read something that suggested that in eternity, everything happens all at once. I mulled this over. How could this be? How could I, for instance, stand at the bus stop on the first day of kindergarten, adopt my own child, and bake tonight’s pumpkin bread all at the same time?

Years passed. (I live in history, not eternity, and so I can say, “Years passed.”)

One day I realized that my problem was perspective. I cannot understand eternity because of my stance in time. In order to understand eternity, I would need to position myself outside of time. Since I could not actually place myself outside of time, I began to think figuratively, and I realized that if I had a bird’s eye view of time rather than of space, I would see everything happening simultaneously. Eureka! I had solved this intellectual puzzle at least well enough for myself, at least well enough that I could begin to think of other things.

I am a poet, though, not a philosopher, as much as I enjoy sitting around thinking (some would say brooding). I prefer to read and write poetry, with its images, its specificity, its concrete language, rather than philosophy with all of its abstractions. How could I ever write a poem that spoke of how I’d come to understand such an abstraction as eternity?

I sat at my desk and tried to imagine what I would see if I could have an aerial view of time. Because I live in the Catskill mountains, what I see whenever I look out a window are sloping hills, and the pines and oaks and maple trees that cover them. I see peaks tangled with bare branches in winter, tinged with green in spring, bursting into yellow and orange and red during October. Images of mountains and images of snow have drifted into my poems during the years I’ve lived here. So when I tried to imagine what I would see if I could see everything happening at once, I saw the buds on trees, and I saw the leaves surrendering to decay.

But then I came to this great truth: I don’t want to live in eternity; I enjoy living in time. I cling to story, to memory. I want to grasp the excitement of time’s rush, the contemplative solace of time’s creep. And so I conclude the poem with this blessing: not that we may each live in eternity, but that we may each live attentively, in time.

Lynn Domina‘s poems “Flickering Green, Flickering Bronze” and “Omniscience in Babel” appear in issue 5.2. Read her full bio here.

Poetry & Presence – Michael Martin

December 13, 2011 in Faith and Culture, General, Writing and Publishing with 0 Comments

5.2 Poet Michael Martin offers notes on a poetry manifesto.

I used to think that Guillaume Apollinaire was the author of the single greatest line in the history of literature: “I know that only those will remake the world who are grounded in poetry.” I’m not so sure anymore. The word “poetry” has lost its savor. I’m not sure if the aura of professionalism promised by the MFA is to blame, though there is something within me that groans at the thought of poets updating their websites, planning their career trajectories, networking for the big grant money. There must be more to poetry than that.

I don’t write poetry for the sake of having a career or for satisfaction of writing “poet” on my income tax forms. I write poetry in order to wrestle with the problem of God in the only way that seems to work for me. The academic study of theology, of religion, or of hermeneutics, I think, generally avoids the problem of God. This avoidance comes about primarily through the tyranny of the thesis statement: the need to come up with an argument. Poetry doesn’t need an argument. In this, it is not unlike negative theology, which also refuses to be forced to define, abstract, and, above all, name that which cannot be named. So perhaps I come to terms with God by not coming to terms with God. The poems “Visions of Vladimir” and “Words written during the suffering and subsequent death of John Paul II, the Pope of Rome” both figure ways in which I try to contend with this problem.

The best poetry can hope for, I think, is to open us to presence. This is why I am so interested in religious poetry, which, in the best cases, opens us to the presence of God, to the mysterion. I am very fond of Simone Weil’s story about reciting her translation of George Herbert’s wonderful poem “Love” every time she had a migraine. She wrote to a priest she knew about this experience, explaining, “I used to think I was merely reciting it as a beautiful poem, but without my knowing it the recitation had the virtue of a prayer. It was during one of these recitations that, as I told you, Christ himself came down and took possession of me.”

I do not pretend that my two offerings in Relief 5.2 will figure that for the reader. Rather, they are documents of my attempts at discovering God’s presence through a phenomenological attendance to the world which I then try to render into language. What this betrays, of course, is that my view of the world is underwritten by a belief in the sacramental participation of God in creation. God is not purely transcendent. Christianity, in addition to affirming God’s transcendence, tells us that God is also immanent: that God abides in all creation. But remaining aware of this presence is not always easy. We often read about God’s “absence,” but I have the feeling the absence is mostly on our account. In these poems I try to make myself aware of God’s presence in the midst of my own absence.

Michael Martin‘s poems “Visions of Vladimir” and “Words written during the suffering and subsequent death of John Paul II, the Pope of Rome” appear in issue 5.2 of Relief. Find his full bio here.

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