Freaks & Monsters – Being an Artist in the South – My interview with Nick Norwood concludes – Part 3 of 3

22 August 201722 August 2017 / alejojoyner / 1 Comment

Nick Norwood’s poetry at an installation at The Eagle & Pheonix cotton mills, now lofts

Nick Norwood, director of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians at Columbus State University, is also a great poet. Like McCullers, he writes about what he knows – the American South and its eccentricities. In previous segments of this essay we talked about the universal themes in McCullers’ work and her sense of place. In this segment we wind up with a discussion of race talk and talk about what it means to be an artist in the Deep South…

How do think Carson McCullers’ views on race relations hold up today?

One of the papers that was read at the [recent international] conference was about how she was a part of her culture, too. You see that in her depictions of African-Americans. Even though it’s clear that she is sympathetic, it’s almost unavoidable that she’s gonna say things that are patronizing or that show a blind spot here and there. So the argument that Sarah Schulman makes is that we shouldn’t just consider where she makes a mistake. It’s the attitude towards other people that we should try to emulate. She really was sympathetic to other people and even if she might have had some blind spots that’s not the important thing.

The New Yorker critic Hilton Als is a gay African-American man. He won the Pulitzer prize for criticism and he has long been a McCullers fan. He wrote a really important piece on her back in the early 2000s and has written other pieces on her. He points out things in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter that make him cringe. He acknowledges what Richard Wright says and he says, “I’m not gainsaying what Richard Wright says. He was right and yet still there are things I think that are embarrassing to all of us.” For instance, in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, she wants to make a clear distinction between Dr Copeland and his children and she does it partly with her speech but I think she overdoes it a little bit.

There are things that she has especially Portia say. She makes comments like walking in a black neighborhood “it had that negro smell” and that was one of the things that Hilton Als said. She was a product of her time in that way. So I think the main thing to try to emulate and to appreciate now is the attitude towards other people and especially the ‘other’, that I think is clear that she had, that’s the thing.

Nick Norwood

So she talks a lot about, and has a lot of characters who are freaks and outsiders—like the circus freaks who come to town. I’m sure she felt that way growing up a lot. How is it for you being a poet in the Deep South?

You know the famous comment by Flannery O’Conner when she was asked, “Why do you Southerners have so many grotesques in your work?” She said, “Well maybe it’s because we know one when we see one.”

My good friend Fred Fussell, who is a historian and musicologist and is married to Cathy Fussell, who was the second director of the McCullers Center—they are local historians interested in the art and culture of this place. He explained it as “Every place has its eccentrics; we’re just exceptional.”

I think maybe that is sort of true of the South. I feel like I am not exploiting that in the way that those famous, now we refer to them as Southern Renaissance, authors did because it would feel like an adaptation to me. On the other hand, I’m writing about things that really happened to me in my life. I know a lot of people see that.

When I make friends with people that are from outside the South and we start telling stories of our childhood and they look at me like “Wow!” What can I tell you? That was just home. So I don’t know if the South is exceptional in that way but it seems to be so.

I am like Carson. Seriously, I came to Carson McCullers in my 20s and she was an influence on me as a writer. I was only writing fiction at the time. I later found out I was a poet but still I think that she’s an influence and one of the ways that she is that is, I think, to pay proper homage to a place, especially your own place, is to be absolutely honest about it and that includes writing about a lot of people that other people are going to see as freaks and monsters.

Carson McCullers

So it might be easier to be a poet in the South because you’ve got a lot of material.

Yeah, fiction writers have gone to town. I was lucky to find models amongst the poets, many of whom became my friends, I don’t know if you know Andrew Hudgins for instance. He is a poet from Montgomery, Alabama writing from a Christian perspective. I met him when I was in graduate school in Texas. He’s still a good friend of mine and he writes with blunt honesty about the South and it’s a shocking thing. His most shocking poems are the ones that are most about his Christian faith. He likes bad jokes more than any otherwise intelligent person I think I’ve ever met and he would tell a joke sometimes in his poems.

Also this poet David Bottoms, who’s a Georgia poet, who’s just terrific. He’s a great poet also become a friend and mentor. His first book, which was chosen for the Walt Whitman Award, made his career—a book called Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump. It is unrelenting in its focus on the violence and the brutality of Southern culture and yet it is unmistakably a book by a serious poet.

So I had these models to find a way to talk about my Southern childhood in poems but I think that for a long time it was difficult for Southern poets to do it. It’s almost like poetry had to evolve to a point where you could write that kind of poem. Previously it seemed that, if you were a fiction writer, the South was a good place to grow up because there was all this great material for fiction. I’m just lucky that I came along a little later so there are a lot of prominent American poets who are from the South and writing about the South right now.

Nick Norwood is the author of The Soft Blare (2003), A Palace for the Heart (2004), and Gravel and Hawk (2012), winner of the Hollis Summers Prize.

Carson’s Place – My Interview with Nick Norwood Continues – part 2 of 3

20 August 201722 August 2017 / alejojoyner / 2 Comments

In the first part of my interview with Nick Norwood, director of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians at Columbus State University, we talked about the universal themes of McCullers’ writing. Today we talk about the strong sense of place in her work and the way Columbus, Georgia, her hometown, informs it.

The Eagle and Phoenix Mill in Columbus, GA

So we think of Carson McCullers as a writer of the heart but she also has this strong sense of place. How do you see this having lived here a long time? How does Columbus fit into her work?

I once tried to write fiction when I was at the University of North Texas. I also loved poetry but one of the things I noticed about writing fiction is that I could not take myself seriously writing, creating characters who didn’t speak with a Southern accent. For better or worse my characters were gonna have to be Southerners because that was the only way that I could have them speak in what I considered to be an authentic way. It occurs to me that that is partly where Carson is coming from, not just in terms of how characters speak but how they act, and what they eat and all the letters and all of those things — that was her foundation.

You can find all of these different writers who make this remark about your best stuff comes from your childhood. I believe that’s true, I really do. It’s been true in my life as a writer and I believe that it’s true and this is the place where she grew up so it’s the source for all her stuff. The other thing is that she saw firsthand the situation of the poor millworker. So she had that firsthand experience of poverty and that sort of hard life and what it does for instance to race relations. These people are on the lowest rung of the socio-economic ladder for white people and so they’ve got to have somebody that they feel is beneath them—that’s African-Americans. So you can imagine what it’s like being an African-American. So I think all of that stuff informs her work.

Nick Norwood

You can also find other things in her work where you realize, once you know about her life, “Ah, that had to have been partly where she gained the insight.” For instance, in her second book, [Reflections in a Golden Eye], we have this homosexual army officer and that was one of the things that really angered people [about the book] here in Columbus. One of her best friends was Edwin Peacock, who was a gay soldier here, and through him she met other gay soldiers. This is this thing that people didn’t want to see, didn’t want to recognize, wanted to pretend it didn’t happen. It was dangerous for someone like Edwin Peacock to have someone know this about him but Carson knew it.

So you can find things in her work all the time that show you: “Oh, she had the real experience that she had in Georgia that helped give her the insight about this.” Carson was able to see in her own little town things that relate to the human condition in general. It was like all great writers who end up being able to connect with other people: [through] experiences they have growing up, they’re able to see people beyond just the way that their neighbors try to see them.

They’re both insiders and outsiders. She grew up Lula Carson; that’s about as Southern as you can get and she loved Southern food. if you’ve ever heard her voice—I have people from Columbus tell me, that’s not just a Georgia accent that’s a Columbus accent that you hear there.

So she’s an insider but on the other hand she was an outsider and was shunned by a lot of people because she was ‘weird.’ That’s the term that they always used to refer to her from the beginning. She didn’t dress right; she was much more interested in the society of books than she was with society of her neighbors. She was just a young person who remained aloof and was mocked and didn’t care, which rural people do not like. So she was an outsider which allowed her to observe them more objectively than most people who are from a place are able to do. That’s where Columbus shows up in her work. She was able to see, in Columbus, so many different facets of the human experience in this one place.

Maybe that has something to do with the particular place because even though it’s a relatively small town, it was about 40,000 when she was growing up, it’s kind of interesting the number of people from different walks of life, to use that cliché, but also from different geographic regions that this place brings together. Fort Benning is huge and when you start reading about the history of the army in the 20th century, all the major players came through this place.

Eisenhower was the commandant at one point. Rusty Calley was tried here [for the My Lai massacre in Vietnam] and then spent most of the rest of his life living in this town. My partner lives a few blocks from where Omar Bradley had lived around the corner from her house. Still, as a teacher at Columbus State, I teach students who come from all over the country and even from different parts of the world because of Fort Benning. Then there’s the Coca-cola connection and the cotton mills that drew in all of this industry. So it was, in a way, a good place to soak up humanity.

Nick Norwood’s poetry in an installation at the Eagle and Pheonix Mill in Columbus

I read your piece about the millworkers for Library of America. Even though she’s got those characters like Jake Blount and Dr. Copeland who are really engaged in thinking about political realities and economics, I’ve never really thought of her as having that side developed. Of course, she was only 19 when she wrote it but you see that she had a real feel for it.

The other things that she wrote about are more widely discussed. They’ve become part of this prominent national conversation that we’re having about, take for instance, sexual orientation. At [a recent] international conference, there was a lot of talk about that. In fact, they had an open call for proposals for papers and then, based on the proposals that they got, they came up with the sessions because there were so many people writing about like things. They had to have two sessions for gender and sexuality cause there were so many people who wanted to write about that aspect of her work. Not one paper on her writing about the working class, not one.

That’s partly because, McCullers tends to attract a certain type of scholar—people who are interested in certain kind of things. People who are attracted to writing about the working class and so forth have more often gone to other writers. But I think that’s a mistake that you overlook that aspect of her work because it is prominent and one of her major characters in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is Jake. That’s what he’s all about. If you read her author’s outline where she’s describing the town, clearly it was a big part of what she was thinking about and writing about. Setting the story in a town like this with the mill culture and poor and how the mill workers all had that look of loneliness and sadness. It’s a big part of her work that is currently being overlooked, but with the popularity of J.D. Vance’s book, [Hillbilly Elegy], because of this recent election, maybe more people will consider that aspect of it.

Alex hanging out with Carson McCullers

She talks in one of her essays about homesickness being the American disease—we’re always looking for a home.

“Loneliness: An American Malady” is the title of the piece.

How does that play out with Columbus because after she left she never really returned to live?

She’s sort of like James Joyce—left and never wanted to live there again but never wrote about anything else. It’s a cliché, again, this love-hate relationship, but, especially if you’re as sensitive a person as Carson McCullers was and you’re exposed to this place at that most impressionable time in your life, its going to be a big part of you. At the time same time, as Thomas Wolfe says, you can never go home again. It’s never going to be the same.

Even though I think she was grandstanding a little bit when she said, “I have to return home periodically to renew my sense of horror,” she really was horrified by what went on here—the poverty, the race relations, and all of those things. You can’t get away from it and on the other hand you can’t return to it.

But what she says in that essay about the particular American version of loneliness, (and I’ve flown this by people from other countries to see if they would say “Well, that’s not true. We have the same thing” and no one’s really called me on that), her argument is basically that we don’t have the class ties that the European countries have and that long history. I was just in Italy and you study all of this Roman history and realize even that was built on earlier histories. You have these traditions that have been going on for thousands of years. We don’t have that here, so to be disconnected here is to really be disconnected.

One of the interesting things that she says is that writers and artists have often formed themselves into schools. They branch out from the mainstream but they’re not doing it alone, They have other people similar.

She says more often what happens in America is that writers and artists branch out by themselves. They launch themselves out into outer space alone. Maybe it’s that pioneering spirit in them. Those are her arguments for why Americans maybe experience spiritual isolation, if not in fact, in a more intense way, at least in a unique way.

It is a strange thing in the case of somebody like Carson but one of the things to me that shows that she really did feel a sort of homesickness is when she talks about food and holidays and the trees. You can tell that she misses those things intensely.

She was asked by Holiday magazine to write a piece on the South and they couldn’t publish it. She could only be honest, so it was not just talking about good, happy things, which is what they wanted—the things that you love about Columbus. She couldn’t do it without also talking about the things that are not good, about the natives’ racism and other things. That’s one of the things that has estranged her from a lot of people in Columbus especially during her lifetime and among people who were still alive in the decades after her death. She exposed the town’s dirty laundry and they think that’s unforgivable.

Nick Norwood is the author of The Soft Blare (2003), A Palace for the Heart (2004), and Gravel and Hawk (2012), winner of the Hollis Summers Prize.

Segment 3 of this interview

The Spiritual Isolation of Carson McCullers – An Interview with Nick Norwood – part 1 of 3

18 August 201720 August 2017 / alejojoyner / 2 Comments

Nick Norwood in front of a painting of Carson McCullers in Columbus, GA

So, I’ve got a thing for Carson McCullers. Anybody who read this blog through the McCullers-palooza that was her 100th birthday celebration in February will know that this Southern writer speaks to me. The characters that she introduced us to in such classics as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Member of the Wedding, and The Ballad of Sad Cafe are indelible, all afflicted with the same malady – the longing for love and connection. It’s the same theme that some of our greatest Christian writers (Augustine, Julian of Norwich) have dealt with.

Nick Norwood, who is, among other things, the director of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians at Columbus State University, calls this theme ‘spiritual isolation.’

On my current renewal leave, I stopped by Columbus, Georgia at the childhood home of McCullers, who was born Lula Carson Smith. Sitting in the kitchen of that house where a young Carson produced her earliest works using the pocket doors for a curtain and her siblings as actors, I got to spend a great hour with Nick, who is also an accomplished poet and Professor of Creative Writing at CSU.

In the three parts of this interview we talk McCuller’s sense of place in writing, her ongoing influence, and what it’s like being a Southern poet.

So if you had to say why people should still be interested in Carson McCullers what would you say?

Well, I think one of the things is that Carson McCullers developed universal themes. To me that’s why she’s a writer with real staying power. She took on, as a major theme, what she refers to as spiritual isolation. People have used other terms for it. The term ‘loneliness’ has gotten attached to her, mostly I think because of the title of that first novel, [The Heart is a Lonely Hunter], but also because that’s the theme that she continued to return to in all her major works.

She’s one of those writers who’s going to speak to people no matter where they’re from or what age they live in. To me, here’s proof of that: Why would people in France, in Italy, in China, in Japan, all relate to her so strongly if it weren’t for the fact that she’s developing something universal. Not only that but she’s doing it in a unique way, in a fresh way. To me, what she does with John Singer in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, that’s a piece of genius. So to me that’s the main reason.

A lot has been said recently about how a lot of the social issues that she dealt with in her books are now at the forefront of some national conversations—things that have to deal with sexual orientation, gender, race, all those things. Sarah Schulman, a novelist and lesbian rights activist, wrote a really interesting piece that was published in The New Yorker last year. She makes the argument that now is the time for writers to be returning to Carson McCullers. And the specific reason she said was that there is now this ongoing debate about white writers writing about people who are not like themselves, people of color for instance. It’s gotten kind of contentious and [Schulman] is very sensitive to that and doesn’t dismiss it at all but says, “Still, I want to be able to write about the full human spectrum, so how do I do it?”

She notes that Carson McCullers does it and she quotes the famous review by Richard Wright of Carson’s first book: “She’s the first white writer to be able to write about black characters with as much understanding and sympathy as she does her white characters.” So, there’s one reason why people should be reading her now. But to me the main reason is that she wrote about universal things that are still as important as they were when she wrote them.

The Smith-McCullers House in Columbus, GA

What makes it spiritual isolation? I like that term for it.

There is literally being physically, if you will, isolated but what’s more important to her is this idea that we all feel at times that we’re alone and nobody completely understands us. That’s why I think The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is so brilliant because we have this character, John Singer, who is an exemplary human being and really is sensitive to other people. And because he doesn’t speak, it makes people think that, not only is he a good listener, but he understands them. Then, of course, the big revelation is: no, he doesn’t.

My partner is also a colleague of mine. She teaches art and she taught The Heart is a Lonely Hunter this past year too. A lot of us did because of the [100th anniversary] celebration. We argued about this character of Antonapoulos. She thinks that John Singer’s devotion to Antonapoulos is ridiculous and unbelievable. I said, “No, I think the reason that she had to do it that way is to show how strong is this desire to have somebody to connect to.”

Antonapoulos is the only person Singer knows for one thing. There’s the practical issue that Antonapoulos understands sign language. He’s also a mute so he can relate to Singer and it just helps her develop the theme. So when she talks about spiritual isolation it’s this idea that we’re alone and nobody completely understands us. That is pretty bleak but that is the situation of all humans. Maybe it’s not always that way. Maybe there’s some temporary relief from that situation but that is the basic situation.

So, you have Singer, the most exemplary lover, and even he has his own isolation.

When she has him write the letter to Antonapoulos it is revealed to us that he doesn’t know these other characters who come to him with their problems. He’s not sure what they’re talking about. I love it when he says, about Jake, “He thinks that we have a secret together but I do not know what it is.” But all of this is prefaced by the fact that he’s writing this letter to Antonapoulos whom he knows is not able to read.

Nick Norwood is the author of The Soft Blare (2003), A Palace for the Heart (2004), and Gravel and Hawk (2012), winner of the Hollis Summers Prize.

Segment 2

Why Books Will Win

12 July 2017 / alejojoyner / 1 Comment

photo by John-Mark Kuznietsov via Unsplash

I’m making a wager that books will lead us to the future.

Heartlands came about as a desire to understand the present age, particularly from the perspective of rural America and rural church ministry. In the beginning I was trying to figure out why the place where I live seemed suddenly so strange to me. Things had shifted, and not just because of an unexpected outcome to the presidential election. We had been shifting for some time and no politician could claim credit for creating the Great Divide.

What we lost was texture. Red and blue became easy stand-ins for the complexities of our culture and we let the color labels define us. We latched onto them as identity markers. Who we are, in all our contradictions and quirks, was less interesting than a convenient narrative that prevented us from observing and thinking deeply.

As I wrote in a piece for Topology magazine, “Rural is Plural,” there was a tendency in some writers from the coastal cities that sounded like they were writing off the heartland. The reason Heartlands is plural is because there is diversity here, too, that is unrecognized. So I began to search for the lens and the language that would help me bring it to sight and voice.

The surprising thing is that literature has become one of the most useful tools in that search. You know—books. Stories have the capacity to carry so much more freight than other forms of communication. Good stories don’t force the world into neat categories and simple morals. Characters in a book should always be able to surprise us because, like real human beings, that have complex motivations that they don’t always understand. That’s certainly the case for biblical characters.

photo by Lysander Yuen via Unsplash

So the jaunts this blog has taken into books and interviews with authors like Alix Hawley, Trudy Hale, and Arlie Russell Hochschild, and with the photographer Michael Mergen, have ended up not being diversions but central to the whole project. Perhaps the best language for an age that has destroyed truth is the vernacular of art, which is groping, not desperately, but confidently in search of new truth. It’s obvious that the old vehicles have broken down—science, politics, and the like. But the arts still sparkle – underfunded as they are.

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice” — T.S. Eliot

“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice,” T.S. Eliot says in ‘Little Gidding.’ So I’ll keep reading and writing, awaiting another voice. Literature may not be the fluff we have presumed it to be. It may the gateway to what comes next.

A Dialect of Longing – Poetry Tuesday

28 June 2017 / alejojoyner / Leave a comment

photo by Jason Briscoe via Unsplash

And what is wind

but a dialect of longing?–: the high

pressure rushing to fill the low, the sky

trying to slake its heats against the earth’s

asymptotic cool, its somersaulting cools

against the earth’s radiance. All weather

springs from currents of failed desire. No wonder

the wind, when it says anything at all,

howls.

O fugitive God, my glorious jilt,

my heart has learned a tempest’s grammar

in your pursuit. Listen: it thunders up

its truest, its most hopeless, prayers

for you.

–Kimberly Johnson, “[ ].” in a metaphorical god

It’s a Howlin’ Shame

27 June 2017 / alejojoyner / Leave a comment

Photo by Cristian Newman via Unsplash

Crawling under the skin of the present age is a reality, an anthropology so old that it infests everything we do. I felt it as I read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s sociology of Tea Party Louisiana in Strangers in the Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. But it’s there in liberal moral puritanism. It’s in the narcissism of Trump and the pretension of a hipster coffee bar. It’s shame, back from the never-dead to be reckoned with once again.

“We need to talk about Addie Mae,” the blues singer Adia Victoria growls in a reference to herself on the song “It’s a Howlin’ Shame.”

“Oh that girl is a ghost

Burnin’ in a hell that don’t nobody know

White flag twistin’ in the wind
And at her best she is witherin’
And she all set for death, she can’t be saved.”

Adia Victoria

The song is a mournful, angry descent into the pain of a young African-American woman growing up in South Carolina. “Being the other in the South meant that I was never afforded a complacency with my history that so many Southern white people live with,” Victoria told an interviewer from i-D. “I understand, and still feel, the reasons why my ancestor’s blood was spilled on the very same land I live on. I am bound to this injustice because it was never made right.”

But, of course, the effect of this is to feel that she was never made right—that there is nothing she could do to be made visible and worthy in an environment she considered “hostile to my very existence.” So she howls:

“A murder of crows

They followed her home

And they didn’t leave much

Just a bed of bones

Get away, away

Away, away, away”

Then the title of the song twists. The descriptive third-person voice sinks into the first person. “I’m a howlin’ shame.”

Shame-based discourse does this. It dehumanizes. It takes behaviors and qualities and totalizes them into causes for disregarding the worth and dignity of a person or group. Trump voters become an undifferentiated gaggle of racists. Democrats are “not even people,” the president’s son says.

At its heart, shame is experienced as a profound lack. When we are in touch with shame, we have a sense of being insufficient, defective, deformed, unlovable, incapable, and generally ‘not enough.’ “At her best she is witherin’/And she all set for death, she can’t be saved.”

There is a psychological component to shame. My own time in therapy has convinced me of its awful power in my own life. The thing that can’t be said, even in the safest company, festers and grows. Partly because of the perversity of believing that I still have to seduce my therapist into accepting me and that the saying of the thing would bring the whole enterprise to ruin. Partly because I don’t want to hear myself saying the thing. Mostly because to give voice to it would cause masks to drop, walls to crumble, certainties to tremble, and worlds to change.

The last thing is certainly true. But discovering that truth was one of the great liberations of that time.

Then, of course, there is the next layer down. And the layer after that. As John Donne puts it in puns on his name in one of my favorite of his poems, “A Hymn to God the Father”:

“Wilt thou forgive that sin which I did shun

         A year or two, but wallow’d in, a score?

                When thou hast done, thou hast not done,

                        For I have more.”

Eventually you know that no matter how deep the confession goes and how many “unforgivable” things you throw out to God/your therapist you will always have more. It gradually becomes clear that there is no ridding yourself of the defects you imagine or cleansing yourself of mistakes. The ones you bring to speech are blessedly defanged but, oh, there is always something else. I have more.

So you come to understand that there is something more essential at stake here. Wherever you go, there you are. You, with your darkness and your pain. You, with your perverse tendencies to seek affirmation in a funhouse mirror of your desire. You, with your suspicions and your fears. You, with your doubts that you could ever make yourself acceptable or be made acceptable. Shame. It’s a howlin’ shame.

The therapist, or pastor, or trusted confessor provides some relief. He or she, by not turning in disgust for the door at your tentative honesty, can give you the gift of being seen. Or as Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground put it in “I’ll Be Your Mirror”:

“When you think the night has seen your mind

That inside you’re twisted and unkind

Let me stand to show that you are blind

Please put down your hands

‘Cause I see you

I’ll be your mirror”

Except that inside we are twisted and unkind and we need to see that, too. A good confessor won’t tell us we’re OK. But she will clear the space for us to stand in dignity anyway and point out all the ways we are working, below the surface, against our interest, to erase that space.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his Ethics, saw shame as elemental and relational. It is the “ineffable recollection of [a person’s] estrangement from the origin; it is grief for this estrangement, and the powerless longing to return to unity with the origin.” Like the nakedness of Adam and Eve in the garden, we are exposed as disunited, lacking something essential.

Bonhoeffer felt that shame had a role to play in the journey to God. Though it leads us to put on masks, “beneath the mask there is the longing for the restoration of the lost unity.” In human relationships, particularly our most intimate ones, we pull down those masks for another and risk being wounded. In the spiritual realm, shame is the sign of a yearning for union with God. “As the deer pants for the water, so my soul longs after you” to quote Psalm 42:1.

It is unseemly to talk of such longing in our disenchanted world. To speak, without irony, of dreams and hopes, desires and loves is to invite debunking, ridicule, and scorn—shaming, to be blunt. And then it will not just be your words or your beliefs or your political views that will be held up to the klieg lights for interrogation, but your very self. It is who you are that’s problematic.

We need to talk about Addie Mae. She’s the victim of the distorted lens of the world that allows no place in the flesh for redemption and reunion. And her howling is the deep cry of shame seeking some recognition and release.

Grant’s Migraine – Tuesday Poetry

6 June 20176 June 2017 / alejojoyner / Leave a comment

photo by Malik Earnest via Unsplash

I know what caused

Grant’s Appomattox migraine,

not death

nor politics

or Sheridan’s whereabouts.

It was the slant light of April

nigh to the equinox.

The same light troubling my eyes

on this slatted porch.

It should fall gentle in this season

or so I advise the Crafter

but instead it blotches my retina

sears into my brain

wanders off with a morning

condemns me to dark.

I’ve no armies to command

but I fight the light like Ulysses.

In these seasons of change

the sun sneaks through the cracks

needles through the trees

flares even off this pen I use

to describe its dangers.

We live with an excess of light

and, when it is not high overhead,

an excess of shadow,

And if you raise your eyes

to look at it

if you go unshielded into the bright,

you will be felled

as sure as any furnace can fell.

You will await in some darkened, fetid room

the return of your senses

Or you will soldier on

anticipating that even in the cruel light of the world

some good news must come.

–Alex Joyner

Down the Line and on the Edge: Poetry Saturday

19 May 201720 May 2017 / alejojoyner / Leave a comment

photo by Antonie Schibler via Unsplash

There’s no mystery

to the ball hit to the gap in right centerfield.

So much room for error. So many

ways it could have been a hit anyway and otherwise.

It’s the tailing ball

down the line that sprays up chalk

that makes a difference.

It could so easily have been

elsewise:

A forgotten foul ball.

Equally forgettable, a mundane double.

But to hit it down the line and play

on the edge. Just barely in bounds.

To invest that edge with the consequence it deserves.

That’s the stuff.

–Alex Joyner

86 Sermons on Song of Songs

6 May 20176 May 2017 / alejojoyner / Leave a comment

photo by Alexander Lam via Unsplash

The 12th-century monastic, Bernard of Clairvaux, wrote 86 sermons on the Song of Songs…

86 Sermons on Song of Songs

Bernard of Clairvaux no

doubt wrote many more.

The more scandalous never made it out of his cell.

But he knew that there was nothing more essential

than the one theme of desire.

If he couldn’t make that means of communication work

we might as well be damned.

But who would cop to such hunger, unseemly

as it is?

To look out

on our fields of plenty, our beautifully

stocked shelves in innumerable super

stores, over waves of

grain, our full tank of

gas, and say ‘It’s not

enough’?

I want more. I want the burning

engine of purpose, the alluring

seduction of beauty, the cause converting

me into roiling motion and threatening

to reduce me

to essence or

oblivion, the release

from solipsism, the laying

myself at Her feet,

the mystic union, and yet

more!

I am insatiable in this desire.

I am transgressive in my wants.

86 sermons is a drop in the bucket compared

to what I will do for Love.

—Alex Joyner

Feathered, Pleated Strength – Psalm 36 loosely translated

3 May 20173 May 2017 / alejojoyner / Leave a comment

photo by Ray Hennessy via Unsplash

Psalm 36

I know the sinful utterance of the wicked–

know it like the back of my hand,

know the sound of it,

the taste of it as it passes my lips.

I have heard myself quickening the dead letter of law

while God whispers in my ear,

“Let it die!”

I protest my innocence by acknowledging my guilt

yet wallow in the protestation.

I cannot trust my own words.

Authenticity,

truth

speaks only in silence

But this spring spewing lies

has been my mother tongue

for ages

upon ages.

Bare beneath the heavens

on some island or plain

I sense your Love,

immense and free

righteous.

It saves all creatures,

draws all to an end.

Like some great wing

or flourished skirt,

You cover us with feathered,

pleated strength.

A table is set.

There is drink and food.

A river flows

and a new fount gurgles.

It is as if we had never drunk before,

never seen the light.

If I have any place of pure desire

let it be met by your Love.

Don’t let it be trampled by my arrogance

or chased by my confusion.

Here I lay aside my dead body

and deader soul

to be sustained by You.

–Alex Joyner