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The Strangeness of Being Here at All: Franz Wright’s Redemption Story
There are days I wake up in sluggish wonder, newly aware, as a last dream image drifts away, of the marvel of my beloved still beside me in the bed, the fan beating time through the air, and the persistence of this body and mind. Or as the poet Franz Wright would put it in… →
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So You Want to Write Poetry…
Come for the instruction in how to write poems. Stay for the poetry that flows from Mary Oliver like an undiminished spring. “Poetry is a life-cherishing force. And it requires a vision—a faith, to use an old-fashioned term. Yes, indeed. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down… →
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“Behavior is a Fraction of Who We Are”: Virginia Reeves Interview (2 of 3)
In the previous segment of our interview with Virginia Reeves, we talked about the origins of her new book, The Behavior of Love, and the inspiration for one of its main characters, Ed, a behaviorist working within a Montana institution. In the second part of the interview we discuss behavior, identity, and the windows of… →
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Why Reading About Burundi is Reading About Humanity
“I hope you can understand why it is that despite all its faults and its legacy of violence, I so very much love my country and my culture. It is an amazingly rich, vibrant, and active way of life. So, it is possible that in one country you can find such extremes as genocide and… →
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A Bombblast of Uncommon Prayer: The Pitbulls & Pendulums of Kimberly Johnson
“When thundering through the heavens I hear the B-2 Stealth Bomber—it’s elusive grace as it banks trailing fractals from its skin, its clandestine maneuvers, its trinitarian aerodynamism—I think of God.” (38) Spend some time in Kimberly Johnson’s 2014 poetry collection, Uncommon Prayer, and you’ll think of God in some unlikely images—a bug-zapper, a corpse flower,… →
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Recovering the Body: Another Visit with Scott Cairns
A brief word of thanks for an old collection of poems by Scott Cairns. Twenty years has passed since the first publication of Recovered Body, a small collection of Cairns’ poetry. It doesn’t have the warmth of some of his later work, (despite the passionate interludes with Erato, the muse), but it is fun to… →
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Why You Should Not Underestimate Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver gave me a great gift, though it only came after her death in January. I had often heard her name in sermons and with hushed awe among my tribe at the Festival of Faith and Writing. But I always thought her a bit too tame. She wrote a book on dogs! How domestic!… →
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Call It Forever: Poetry
‘Every day has something in it whose name is Forever.’ —Mary Oliver, ‘Everything That Was Broken’ Poets are not being imprecise when they finger God with other names. It’s just that they’re gobsmacked at the plenitude of Her appearances. In a lover or a creature or a wind-sparked memory or a laden scent, She… →
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Joy Comes In the Morning: A Review of Christian Wiman’s Poetry Collection
“Joy: that durable, inexhaustible, essential, inadequate word. That something in the soul that makes one able to claim again the word ‘soul.’” (xxxvii) Last year two books from Christian Wiman made their way to my reading stand. If nothing else had happened in the literary world in 2018, those two works would have been enough.… →
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In Praise of Feral Felines – Poetry
A plumb line drops (I know not where) by which feral cats are judged and marked ‘outside the bounds.’ I always saw their resistance to compassion as a noble trait along with their intemperate hisses at attempts to conquest. Feral, yes, but less skulky than the shark with its fin erect and its teeth… →
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Heartlands 