I’m in a plane ascending to 37,000 feet. How restless have I been this year? How easily distractible? Already on this flight, from the time of boarding the plane until now, I’ve jumped from e-mail to Facebook to FiveThirtyEight to Jane Hirshfield on Basho to Mishkan Hanefesh, Sanctuary of the Soul, the Reform movement’s new high holiday prayer book. Already I’ve skipped from skimming to sinking to expanding to avoiding: I don’t want to look at that e-mail right now.... Read more
Whenever I first meet a long skinny poem, I ask myself: Why has the poet chosen these very brief lines for the poem’s shape? In Todd Davis’s “Nothing More,” the effect of these short lines is a sort of staccato: short phrases punched out in succession and often snapped by startling line breaks. Yet what fascinates me is that the content of this poem is contemplative—so a tension is set up between the poem’s shape and its substance. How perfect... Read more
This post originally appeared as web-exclusive content in Image issue 68. Scott Cairns, the author of numerous volumes of poetry, a convert to Orthodox Christianity, and a longtime contributor to Image, has often advocated what he calls a “sacramental poetics”—the idea that a poem should not so much describe something as do something. Mary Kenagy Mitchell interviewed Scott Cairns for Image. Image: Your poems use an exacting, prophetic voice, but they’re also very funny. Where does that voice come from? Is it with you all... Read more
The light on the ceiling of our bedroom is slanted in a parody of the open doorway, letting in the blue glow of a nightlight from the hall. This nightly and usually innocuous shape hides something in the darkness tonight; I see it creeping in the light box, plotting something against me, about to attack. Nightmares, night paralysis, and obsessive fears are not new to me. They have been part of my life since I was three and my mom... Read more
“A world created out of silence gives itself over to prayer.” I’m listening to local painter Debra Korluka discuss her work: the icons she’s painted since she was a child studying in the Ukrainian Orthodox church. I’m interested in the symbolism of an icon’s composition and in the paints—their colors, chemistry, poisons, and history. All the hidden things that, like the completed icon, promise travel from invisibility to visibility; what is seen depends on where the journeying paths of the... Read more
My father: Roy Franklin Harmon, Jr., M.D., passed away on September 22, 2016 at the age of eighty-seven. He was the best man I will ever know. Difficult as it was, my mother wanted me to say something at his funeral service that would at least attempt to encapsulate something of his character. I chose the following story, which captures only a small part of the incarnational Christianity that he practiced. There is not world enough and time to relate... Read more
We pass into this world at birth. We pass out of it at death. And in between: holiness and horrors. This is probably the largest of themes that a poet could take on, and in “Intercession: For My Daughter” Brett Foster wraps his mind and language around it with consummate craft. First, to keep us grounded, there’s the reassuring pentameter beat. Then the three-line stanzas hold the expansive topic in a visual shape. And throughout: wordplay and stunning line-breaks elaborate... Read more
I want you to watch me run. My daughter Becca sent me that text last Friday morning, just a couple hours into her first “24-Hour Challenge.” For weeks she’d been anticipating the annual event at her middle school, during which students run ten miles in half-mile installments around the track, breaking to sleep (or at least pretend to) in tents overnight before finishing in the morning. A major community event, the fields come alive with loud music, tents decked out... Read more
This post originally appeared as web-exclusive content in Image issue 78. Steve Prince, a New Orleans native, works primarily in printmaking and drawing. His richly textured images are steeped in religious and visual culture; critic D. Eric Bookhardt characterizes their metaphorical power as “an ability to elucidate inexplicable worlds within worlds.” Prince’s recent work includes the Katrina Suite, a series (created in public spaces) on the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the resurrection and rebuilding afterwards. Beth McCoy interviewed Prince... Read more
In the twenty-plus years since the Internet became a feature of our lives, there have emerged a couple of articles of conventional wisdom that I, for one, find pretty dubious. First, there’s the claim that “everything on the Internet lasts forever,” usually made in reference to warnings about the dangers of teen “sexting,” or work emails that are discoverable in lawsuits. I can personally attest that the “Internet is forever” claim is less true than you would think: once when... Read more
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