“It’s the rhythm in rock music that summons the demons,” said the church community of my childhood. So I took my musical thrills where I could find them. In front of my grandfather’s turntable, I air-conducted Ferde Grofé’s “Grand Canyon Suite,” Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” and Benjamin Britten’s “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.” (more…) Read more
The band quit playing at church because our priest asked them to sing from the choir loft rather than the altar of St. Joseph in front of the sanctuary. They not only refused, they left the parish. At the music ministry meeting, the guitarist had said, “We get energy from the audience. If we are behind them, it won’t be the same. We won’t play as well,” which is likely true. (more…) Read more
“Without the traffic, silence / itself would sound red birdsong…” As I’m reading these lines in the poem “Seeing in Silence” in Murray Bodo’s latest volume, A Far Country Near: Poems New and Selected, I pause and ponder. How can silence “sound”? I could get literal and say that without traffic’s noise we can hear the birds. But that doesn’t catch the paradox of birdsong as silence. (more…) Read more
The best way to write about the third installment of God’s Not Dead is to write first about Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One. Their unexpected but undeniable tie is the desire to see yourself onscreen and what that representation reveals. In Ready Player One, people spend their time in the virtual reality called the OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation). This story takes place in 2045 when the modern world has devolved into destruction. To escape the ugly state of... Read more
Wakefield’s poem presents the metaphor of a peach as the speaker’s body: “I’ll let the sun singe the peach, / my flesh, luxurious, ruined.” The image of the body as a soft fruit blurs the boundaries between human and nature, planting identity within context. In this way, “To Begin With” reminds me of Mark Strand’s “Keeping Things Whole” and Denise Levertov’s “Action.” The repetition of the “I” and the sense of absence joins these poems in a frank depth, one... Read more
When I was a soccer-obsessed fifteen-year-old, I had no use for poetry. I endured my school hours like a crated dog, waiting to get out on the field. One afternoon in the library, I picked up a random book of English verse and flipped through it. Eventually I landed on a song from Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies, offered most often now with the title “Old and Young.” The first stanza goes like this: When all the world is young,... Read more
I took several short flights this month, the kind in which going through security takes longer than the flight itself and you wonder if you should have just driven. But what you can’t do behind the wheel, if you want to get to your destination intact, is write poetry. I challenged myself to write a villanelle on each flight and found the form quite conducive to bumping through the clouds. Here’s the Poetry Foundation’s definition of a villanelle: “A French... Read more
There’s nothing to say about Haiti. Even to begin, to start, to try, is to fall into cliches. The cliches of the poverty. The cliches of the beauty. The cliches of the complications. Even the cliche of talking about the cliches. You can’t write about Haiti without overdoing it. You also can’t write about Haiti without missing the mark completely. Also, what does any American know who spends a week in Haiti? Even if you don’t go as a tourist,... Read more
For a long time I’ve said that the 1982 film Blade Runner is my favorite motion picture, though I’m really only a small-time devotee of science fiction. I find many examples of the genre fail to achieve its high calling by degenerating into childish self-indulgence. And movies that fit the category often run even further astray, especially when they aren’t attached to a master writer. Without the strange combination of artistic and scientific genius that belong to the greats of... Read more
Throughout her poetry, Pattiann Rogers observes and describes the natural world with profound detail, compassion, and awe. In fact, Rogers will be awarded the John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Poetry next month. In “Manifest, by Reason of Birth” she writes, “The universe/ thrives/ and pulses, rumbles and roars, sings, explodes, trembles and erupts.” From the “spinning arms of galaxies” to “the nucleic center of seed” Rogers celebrates the complexities and limits of our world and, more importantly,... Read more
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