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!
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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.
+ :)
