A Job in Poetry

This new venture, which I'd like to advertise except for my ambivalent commitment to anonymity/security, is technically a job, but looks more like a volunteer position at the moment. It all started when I ran into my ex-girlfriend at a conference in Michigan. Within 30 minutes of us catching up the last 6 or 7 years, she had decided to ask me to be her poetry editor for her start-up literary journal. The impetus for the journal was her and her husband's dissatisfaction with the quality of Christian literature they had encountered, coupled with their own interests in writing essays and stories that made a serious engagement with the world and didn't sanitize their content.

The journal is largely possible because (a) the editor's husband (and the journal's financier) is a computer tech guy and (b) there's so much free or inexpensive stuff available in our digital age. Our first issue is due out in November and I pretty much expect most of my friends to buy it.

It turns out it is difficult to be a poetry editor. To begin with, there's the aura that surrounds poetry as a form. It's supposed to be all high and lofty and esoteric, which often means difficult to understand. As 'the poetry guy' on the team, I'm sort of expected to get everything that comes our way, but, frankly, I don't always. Sometimes I can find other reasons for rejecting it anyhow, but some stuff appears formally strong yet is difficult to decide on respecting meaning.

On the other hand, there are plenty of people who think they can write paragraphs with funny line breaks and it counts as poetry. As it turns out, this is not true. I don't know that I could give a definition, but poetry is certainly more than line breaks.

It is also more than copying out psalms. A lot of stuff we get is just regurgitated church sermons which may or may not have tasted fine the first time, but certainly turn ugly the second time around.

Then there are our editor meetings. These include myself, the editor-in-chief, and the assistant editor, all of whom have widely divergent tastes in poetry (plus the editor has her more pragmatic commercial concerns). We end up getting into these fights about whether something is wonderful or complete tripe, which may sound like a lot of fun but can really be frustrating--especially at the first such meeting, when I wasn't even sure what position our assistant editor was in, and only knew she kept arguing with my opinions as though she had some business there. The thing I try to keep in mind is that all of us will have our names on this thing, so we all have a stake and are taking it very seriously. The end result is an issue that represents a great diversity of talents, a handful or so of compromises, and perhaps one or two that require me to swallow my pride.

We just had an editors' weekend of workshopping and socializing. This at least provided me some extended periods of rubbing against my fellow editors (in the non-scandalous sense) that hopefully will lead to increasingly constructive meetings over the months and years. This is actually a rather exciting experience, though at times I'm not sure I believe it will go anywhere. But we are all very interested in not only succeeding but in creating a quality product. Whether it lasts one issue or seventy, I do believe in our mission and am deeply intrigued to see if and how God will use it.

Back on; Updates

It should be easier than it is keeping up with this thing. I think I have self-esteem issues complicated by cultural with-itness issues; that is, I often don't think people are interested in what I'm thinking, or else I have been thinking a thing so long that it doesn't occur to me other people don't already think it, too.

But blogs aren't necessarily created for the sake of others...

For those of you who do read when I post, I recommend checking out RSS feeds. Some e-mail accounts, like sbc/yahoo, have built-in RSS capability, but otherwise you'll probably need to google it to find the software. The basic idea is that you get a notice when I post things, so instead of checking every six months you can just go about your life and be notified when I actually write something.

The two biggest events of recent note are (1) we moved and (2) I've become the poetry editor for a start-up literary review. As to the first, it was a great idea. We disliked Highwood within weeks of moving in, whereas we still love Evanston after a month. Our new place also suits our personalities better, if that makes sense. It's probably smaller, but there's a hallway that angles around one of the bedrooms to the dining room and kitchen, which at least creates the illusion of great space--now it is possible to think, "oh, I left my beer all the way in the kitchen."

We kept our cats in carriers during the move, setting them on the coffee table facing the door so they could see us coming and going. I don't know for whom it was more traumatic: A was alright, but P just lay there panting and with a racing heartbeat. They are fine now, and trailing clouds of furry wherever they go.

My first taste of power

I just finished teaching my first two "trial" classes of college writing; I figured it was blogable (if perhaps bloggeral, and therefore unbloggishly impertinent of me, in which case I have committed a faux blaugh). My mentor teacher didn't have much to say except he liked it. He took issue with some minor points of my argument, which is fine since I'm trying to apply his model in a way I've never had to do before.

Observations:

• It's hard to call on students when you don't know their names. You have to sort of wait until they look up and then wave your hand and catch them.
• Students think you can't see and hear things, like when they chat in the back of the classroom (it's not very big) or when they don't have the story out that we're studying. I still call on them because I'd rather they felt uncomfortable than me.
• When you find a student or two who talk all the time, it's hard not to just call on them all the time so you can move on, but probably wise not to.
• The second class went rather differently than the first, in part owing to having had one run through the material, in part owing to getting different sorts of responses. I found myself often departing from my notes when it served the overall purposes of the lesson.
• It's hard to tell if they're interested or not, since talking doesn't of itself indicate comprehension or attention. One guy wasn't even taking notes, but I called on him anyhow and he was able to answer. Also, every once in a while I got a laugh out of them.
• Getting laughs is nice, and makes you want to caper around like a Shakespearean fool just to know you have their attention. But I don't think they'd get my foolery at that point.
  

Society Still Has Its Problems (warning: potentially un-PC content)

BBC World News reported this morning (on Chicago Public Radio) on a British Psychological Society report that nine of ten British women still think sex should have an emotional component. This raised concerns about "whether women have really gained the sexual freedom they are supposed to have enjoyed since the 1960s." "The results," researcher Dr Hinchcliff observed with apparent perplexity, "did not fit in with images of today's independent woman who can go out and get sexual fulfilment without the ties of a relationship."

You can go to the story yourself (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4863770.stm) if you're having a hard time believing your eyes. The study didn't seem interested in men's opinions, but the assumption underlying Hinchcliff''s comments seems to be that men have already figured out how to act like animals.

What strikes me as most interesting is how open Hinchcliff is. Of course all science has its biases, but few are honest enough to admit to them. But if science is descriptive, then why should the results of this study worry anyone? If nine of ten women want emotional involvement in a sexual relationship, then it seems psychology has to work with instead of against that desire. Shoot, there may even be something to it. The radio story included comments by an author who wasn't particularly worried, figuring that sexual fulfillment might be about more than drive reduction. In Ulysses, Bloom addresses a woman as "the link between nations and generations...sacred lifegiver." Such appellation is becoming impossible in a world that, despite the warnings of C. S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, Flannery O'Connor, et al., seems intent on pursuing instinct over intimacy and hedonism over humanity.

He's alive!

It's a strange irony of literary studies that I don't read a lot. That is to say, I don't read a lot of authors who are still living (in fact, I do little else but read). Loyola's English Department hosted poet Desmond Egan recently, which gave me the chance to discover someone living and worth listening to. He's won a number of awards, but it's kinda hard to find his books. Here's an excerpt from one of 'em, which doesn't include the best of what I heard him read, but what are you gonna do. This guy happens also to be a major organizer for this Hopkins festival that happens for a week every summer in Ireland. At the mention of Ireland Katie started to think maybe there was some point to all this literature stuff after all.

Poems in Performance

So I was at this Gerard Manley Hopkins, S. J., conference over the weekend in Denver. It was a good time and I met a lot of swell people with a passion for this obscure Victorian. One of the highlights was not reading my own paper but hearing British actor Richard Austin perform a number of Hopkins's poems. GMH wrote with his ear--his poems are marked up like a music score--and believed poetry's meaning wasn't fulfilled until it was performed. Austin grew up near Hopkins's own hometown, and so may even have a similar accent as the poet. More importantly, he loves the poetry and tries to draw out its meaning and sound together in his delivery. For poems as quirky as Hopkins's, hearing them opened their pleasures up to me in a way I wasn't prepared for. You can listen to a couple poems at Austin's website, conveniently linked below:

http://www.richard.austin.sh/index.htm

Churches Searches III-V

Pursuant to our Advent purposes we’ve continued to try out high church services, or, as the Presbyterians call it, Traditional worship. It’s been kind of nice to do the same denomination three weeks in a row, since things begin to look a little familiar (though even today when they read verses from the New Testament I confusedly poured over the program trying to see how I missed the “Old Testament Lesson”—but that’s apparently a Roman-Catholic/Episcopalian thing.)

The first of these was easily our favorite of any church thus far. It was in the city just north of us in this large, beautiful building. One of the cool things about this church was that they had brochures in the pew explaining the scenes and symbology and history of the stained glass windows and other art work like statues and banners around the sanctuary. Some of the earliest ones, which had decidedly art nouveau characteristics such as flowery patterning and an antique color palette, were bought from Louis Tiffany in New York in the first decade of the 1900s. Obviously this community has been well off for a while. Many of the later windows were donated but, interestingly, their style was more classical and therefore made them look older than they were. The pastor gave a fine speech, alluding to figure from Augustine to Auden, about the mixture of trial and triumph that typifies the life of faith and ought to inform our celebration of Christmas. The weird thing about this church is that none of the maybe two-hundred attendees sat in any of the front five or six rows of pews. It gave the effect that they were either afraid of being splashed with holiness from the altar, or that the faithful had been raptured from those rows and nobody happened to notice.

At the next church the pastor doubled as the youth leader and the kids’ choir director, which made it seem like he was doing everything. It had been some years since I’d been in a church when they had a little “children’s church” segment of the service, or, as I have long thought of it, “Children’s Exploitation Theater.” I’m sure the goal is to model to parents how to teach their kids and to give the kids a sense that they have a real place in the main service, but there’s also that sense of romanticized youth where the leader repeats the cute little answers to his or her theological questions and the audience laughs and thinks how wonderful is the world of the child. Of course, even if you’re a cynic it is still very funny, and even if you’re a cynic it serves to remind you what it means to “be ye like little children.” The kids came back later in the service to sing a song which, much to our surprise, did not sound like a bunch of street urchins singing for alms but actually showed signs of training and practice.

Today’s church brought in a brass band and had a pretty quality choir sing a number of cantata-type pieces. They also had a kids’ choir, but they sounded like you expect kids to sound. The funny thing here was how no one was sure whether it was okay to clap after any of the musical pieces, though they were all so impressed that they very much wanted to.

Presbyterians around here seem to value a highly-crafted sermon delivered in a voice in imitation of Abe Lincoln. The ministers get up in their pulpits and speak slowly and soberly, full of the gravitas of their position. Often they compose their sermons with an eye to a combination of narrative and poetry that, though appreciated, can often sound merely antiquated as opposed to truly lofty. No doubt it is difficult to be truly lofty these days of increasing irony. That is to say, the idea of a high style seems to rely on a notion of something grander than the individual, something universal, even transcendent. Even those of us who believe in the transcendent feel less comfortable making claims about its nature, and therefore the “lower” style of informal speech often suits us, since it has more the tincture of personal opinion, belief, and experience. Furthermore, one needs to feel that a high style has its own merit and use it as such if it is to come off properly; its authority cannot come merely from its “sounding old.”

I’m finding it interesting to note how unsatisfying the familiar evangelical-type “contemporary” worship has been for me lately. I’m not prepared to make any prescriptive claims about the natures of the two, but at least for the moment, when we’re churchless and far from friends, traditional liturgies connect us to something larger than the people in the building, i.e., the tradition of worship, whereas evangelical services seem to work best when one feels a part of that community. Moreover, traditional liturgies do not base worship on feeling in the same way; rather, they emphasize participation as a kind of minimal virtue, as good enough if you don’t feel you can do more. And now, having written that, I smirk at myself, for it is humbling—as I think it ought always be—to realize how much one has changed.