The Martyr, the Grizzly, and the Gold

There are gifts good enough that you can envy them without sin. Imagine being able to say what the rest of us see, touch, and smell and in the saying make us see, touch, and smell again only better. That is a gift of a certain sort of poet and Dr. Tim Bartel is a poet with the gift and so very much worth reading.

His collection is The Martyr, The Grizzly, and the Gold and you should read a poem a day as a prescription against the diseases of the age. This would be a licit Lenten feast, licit because a feast only of words and Lenten, because they are sometimes hard words. If you are in California, you have seen a donut shop, every strip mall has one and every street has a strip mall.

Bartel is willing to write about grizzly bears and saints: normal stuff for classical poetry, but also donut shops and a youth outing, normal for contemporary poetry. He does both, because he can and that is a gift.

I can (sometimes) think as a Victorian or even an ancient, but I have never mastered thinking like my contemporaries. Dr. Bartel can reach to the past and somehow live now. God bless this gift.

Most of us can almost see what is there, but Bartel shows us plainly:

To the Donut Shop

Sell me 50 cent

Cigarettes, lotto

Boasting host- drip brew

The early dawn dark,

Glaze day in maple,

Noon in pink,

Evening in

Thick slow sleep.

This can be read quickly, but it was crafted slowly and deserves more attention than we give most things we read. The list of “things” you can get at the Donut Shop frame the Los Angeles day nicely: sound, air, hope, and tastes.

His poem Peter the Aleut balances legend, his own experiences, and the reality of a nearly forgotten sacrificial death. The poem’s central idea:

that was the richest scent I’ve ever known.

Bartel forgets odor less often than most of us and that may be one reason he became Orthodox. If Protestants stress hearing, Catholics seeing, then surely the Orthodox are the church of smelling.  There is an odor to sanctity and Bartel recollects this truth:

And the smoke of the incense, which came with the prayers of the saints, ascended up before God out of the angel’s hand.

He knows the smell of a hardware store and finds beauty in it. There is more to Bartel than beauty. He has truth as well ranging from bankruptcy to true love. He is not afraid to be pretty, but the same poet jars with a very disturbing poem about a mattock. Anyone who knows enough to celebrate the genius of Ricardo Montablan knows something about these times.

Don’t be discouraged about culture. We are in a golden age of art, poetry, and movie making if you look about you. Smart people like Dr. Bartel have been empowered to create beauty. This is a lovely book for Lenten days. 

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I am blessed to work with Dr Bartel at The Saint Constantine School in the college program.