Jeff wrote:

> I'm grateful that PoetryEtc is a safe haven and refuge where poets are
> able to work through these unpresentable transitional phases. I don't
> think I could talk about this on the larger American Lists.
>

So am I too, one of the beauties of this place is that people actually
_talk_ to one another.

Astonished about the Episcopalian A4, my mind is taken aback by that, tho'
that 'taken-abackedness' is a based on perceived or received image of a
person, not an actuality (I really _don't'_ know much about Ashbery as a
person, just the poems)

I utterly agree with you about the omission of the religious dimension, my
own forays have ranged from Meeting House silent meditation to humble knees
in churches devoted to St Francis, I find I'm very two-fold about it all, I
like the magical vestiges of the Mass, for instance, and both the ethical
beauty of Matthean Christology and the mystical worldfold of Johannine
Gospel thought but too I'm dismayed by some of the words from the pulpits
(while the dear Quakers don't seem to know how to talk to one another,
unlike us garrulous poets) - the balancing of liberalism with church
teachings, as given, seems unmanageable to me.

Love that diagnostic label, I'll remember that!

Best

Dave


David Bircumshaw

Leicester, England

Home Page

A Chide's Alphabet

Painting Without Numbers

www.paintstuff.20m.com/index.htm

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/index.htm
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeffrey Jullich" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2001 9:45 AM
Subject: Re: Poetry Etc Interview: ROSMARIE WALDROP


> Quoting "david.bircumshaw" <[log in to unmask]>:
>
> > Ah, I see, Jeff . . . I try full-blown religion myself, every so
> often, btw, but never feel as though I belong there. But I love
> lighting candles in darklit churches, with a breath, a thought, and a
> silent prayer. One can but try!
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I guess the (rather unstylish) "struggle" in me that this
> obstreperousness is coming out of is---
>
> I ~am~ a practicing church-goer ("practicing," in all the senses of
> the word, as ~just managing to show up~ on a weekly basis can be its
> own challenge), with, locally, a somewhat visible presence in the
> church (they call that "ministerial," when you go public about it) by
> virtue of my reading at Mass up in the marble pulpit,--- so that more
> people know my face from there than I'm comfortable with, actually
> ("fame" is its own separate problem for me, as I don't like being
> approached by strangers and I think I suffer from --- I found the
> diagnostic label for it! --- "prosopoagnosia": I don't recognize faces
> well). That generates its own dilemmas, since my liberalism sort of
> splits me between causes celebres.
>
> Anyway,--- this one-foot-in/one-foot-out does much me conscious of the
> glaring ~omission~ of the religious in contemporary literature.
> Ashbery IV, whom you claim to know nothing about, for example, is
> reported by the New York Times to be--- a practicing Episcopal who
> shows up as a member at his Hudson country home's parish church!
> Literary criticism and our general assumptions about who's who and
> what's what in our totally cool post-modernity is utterly unprepared
> for these inconsistencies. The French painter, Yves Klein, one of my
> favorite examples, for example, if you know his work, --- his best
> known: blue monochromes in a pigment he actually patented --- your
> quintessential XXth cent. artist, at the end of his life presented as
> an ~ex voto~ offering a little box that he slipped through the gifts
> offering window of a convent of cloistered nuns, filled with emblems
> of his career, a block of Yves Klein blue pigment, gold, etc., and
> some little Thank You note devotional appreciation to a patron saint!
>
> I think it appeals to me to bring these elements to the surface
> because they're so ~taboo,~ too.
>
> Who I consider two of the topmost American poets, Susan Howe and Cole
> Swensen, have been filling their post-modernism with more and more
> frank material about--- Jesus {eek!} and Christology. They both, in
> fact, focussed on the same New Testament passage, where "The Risen
> Christ" tells Mary M. not to touch him ("Noli me tangere"), perhaps a
> denial holding some multi-dimensional poignancy for women writers.
> Swensen originally seemed to approach the material through a safer,
> distanced device: her good book ~Try~ focussed on Renaissance
> paintings (ekphrasis), which was this pretext that allowed her to
> describe and write "meditations upon" madonnas, pietas, etc. But her
> latest, ~Such Rich Hours~ now uses the Tres Riches Heures illuminated
> MS breviary to the same ends, . . . although with a somewhat wider
> historical sweep this time: Annunciations!
>
> At the same time, --- which is what fascinates me --- they're sort of
> cagey about this (embarassed?) and never spill over into the sort of
> rhapsodies or sentimentality that deform inspirational verse, that
> might definitely label them as oxymoronic Post-Modern Christian Poets
> (!). They still maintain their very staunch, intelligent thinky-ness,
> so it's not at all the sort of belly-up capitulation that the most
> frequently cited case, Eliot, went through, where a return to the
> church meant tossing out reason, in his poetry.
>
> I'm grateful that PoetryEtc is a safe haven and refuge where poets are
> able to work through these unpresentable transitional phases. I don't
> think I could talk about this on the larger American Lists.
>
> + :)
>