Yes! I'm a winner! (Redux)

I just found out over the weekend that one of the poems I submitted to the Mormon Artist Literature Contest (for writers under 30)---"For the Man in the Red Jacket"---took an honorable mention. Apparently, though I don't get any dough (bummer!), I do get some name recognition: I've been informed that I'll be interviewed for the next issue of Mormon Artist and an essay will be included about the poem (though who's writing it, I don't know).

Whatever the case, I'm stoked.

Oh, and POETRY ROCKS!

Svithing at AMV

So I'm paying my svithe in AMV dollars today. I just posted the talk that I gave in sacrament meeting yesterday: "'To Know the Names of All the Vital Things': On the Virtue of Words and the Word of God."

Link on over and take a look.

Watching the Sunrise at WIZ

Friend, fellow poet, logophile, and co-blogger Patricia Karamesines has posted my poem "Watching the Sunrise in St. George, Utah" over at Wilderness Interface Zone, where she's doing a run of spring poetry. Come on over and watch the sunrise in the space where language and humanity meets wilderness.

And so it begins...

I am now an official member of the Rocky Mountain Modern Literature Association (RMMLA), my first professional association (though I'm awfully close to joining the Association for Mormon Letters (AML), too---I just need to work up the guts or find sufficient motivation or twenty spare bucks to take that plunge; it might just happen soon, especially as I consider the increasing quality of Irreantum, the AML's journal). Part of the reason, well, the only reason, really, I forked out the twenty-five bucks for a one-year student membership in the RMMLA is because I'll be reading two papers* at the convention this fall, one in the Skin as Text session and the other in the AML session (unless both sessions are scheduled for the same time).

As a preview for what I'll be reading, here are the proposals I submitted for your viewing pleasure:

Skin as Text Session

Paper Title: “Between The Dead and the Living: Reading Beneath Sharon Olds’ Textu(r)al Skin” (part of my MA thesis on Olds)

In his review of Sharon Olds’ third collection of poetry, The Gold Cell, Roland Flint asks, “What is [she] […] but our gifted and startling poet of the body?” Within the context of his argument on the “epistemology of [Olds’] touch,” this generalized “our” refers not simply to the readers of Poet Lore (the journal in which the review originally appeared) or even to the American poetry reading public in general, but to the society of fully embodied individuals. On the one hand, this might seem a moot point since all human beings have bodies. On the other, Olds’ “audacious intimacies,” as Flint calls them, provide a daring, if shocking glimpse into the human confrontation with the viscerally charged realities of the embodied life, absorbing our attention, as Olds has absorbed herself and her writing, in the human body’s physical acts and details. To read and truly connect with Olds, then, is to be immersed in bodily space and experience. Through such an engagement with the poet, we see her textually disrobe as she describes the body in ways often considered too crude or personal for mixed company and, in the process, discloses a self seeking to fully possess and express its own corporeality. This paper explores Olds’ textual embodiment in terms of her second collection, The Dead and the Living, a rhetorical space through which Olds textually penetrates corpses ravaged by poverty and war, the body shamed by incest and abuse, and senses placed at odds with the body through cultural mediation and social mechanization. She moves thus all to the end of (re)writing the body’s history and celebrating the flesh as matter worthy, in every aspect and from every angle, of our deepest attention and respect; and to remind us that the body and its essential functions can be, in the most primal sense, sources of ecstasy and identity.

* * * *

AML Session

Paper Title: “Reading the Mormon Gothic: LDS Vampires and the Uncanny” (an extended version of my review essay scheduled to appear in Dialogue this summer)

This paper examines two Mormon vampire texts, Stephenie Meyer’s series of Twilight novels and Eugene Woodbury’s Angel Falling Softly, in terms of psychoanalysis and gothic literature. Although Angel differs from Twilight in form, approach, and audience—Twilight is a sprawling young adult romance published by a national publishing house, a story in which Mormonism plays a largely metatextual role while Angel, a genre-based book printed by an independent Mormon publisher, takes an outsider’s view of Wasatch Front Mormon culture even as it pokes at the boundaries of LDS theology and of the vampire genre—each is firmly linked to the other and rooted in Mormonism in its interaction, however unconscious, with Freud’s notion of the uncanny. Since the uncanny occupies the threshold between the unfamiliar and the familiar, the imagined and the real, in its broadest sense it essentially serves a subversive function in the systems through which we mediate the immaterial and material aspects of our world, including psychology, language, and religion. In terms of the Mormon gothic, as this paper suggests, this repressed and subversive familiarity deals with more than simply the hidden aspects of each book’s vampire protagonists. Beyond that, it suggests that we must confront the psychologically or linguistically or metaphysically repressed aspects of our psyches (as represented by the gothic monster) if we are to move through the silence, solitude, and darkness of spiritual/emotional estrangement into a genuine state of at-one-ment with self and others, including God.

* * * *

So there you have it. My time in the big leagues begins this October.

We'll see how things turn out.

(*Note made 3 April 2009: I was mistaken. Presenters are only allowed to read one paper per convention, and since the AML session only has three presenters and since I'm trying to bolster the AML, I withdrew my paper from the Skin as Text session. I'll have to save that one for another day...)

100th Post: Clinton Larson On the Problem of Mormon Literary Art (Svithe)

I don't feel much like blogging today. So I'm doing it anyway. But I'm going to relegate my 100th post (this svithe) to Clinton Larson, the man Karl Keller, Mormon literary critic, called the first Mormon poet.

In this 1969 conversation with Dialogue, he comments on the problem of Mormon literary art and points toward the power of language in a way that's inspired me in my own efforts as a writer, as a poet. I'll be commenting more on this later (I'm sure), in my continued interactions as a Mormon deeply invested in the works of language and literature, so I won't add much more to his words than this: Woah. There's a lot of deep stuff here.

I look to some of the prophets for guidance in the problem of Mormon literary art. Take, for example, the great prophet-poet Nephi, who in Second Nephi indicates his great love of books. He claims that he is a poor writer, but to my mind he is a fine symbolist poet. He used the branch of the olive tree as a viable figure of speech. He had the same vision that his father Lehi had, a vision which involved profound metaphors and the affective interpretation of metaphors. Nephi’s expression was, of course, for the benefit of Laman and Lemuel and the whole family. But Nephi repeats the metaphors again and again to convert Laman and Lemuel to the truth, which is the method of the artist. And I think it is marvelous how he ends Second Nephi. He says farewell; the spirit of the Lord tells him to speak no more — no more will he be stirred to poetic expression. In his humility, he claims that what he has spoken is not poetic, but it is, with the substantive qualities of the best literature. Nephi’s farewell is particularly poignant because his great desire to communicate spiritually through symbolic language has failed, and because of Laman’s and Lemuel’s intransigence regarding the Lord’s will. What Nephi is trying to do is to cause his brothers to flex their minds and spirits so that they can accommodate greater and greater truths.

I think that as we look back to Joseph Smith, we see a man of tremendous capability, a great prophet and poet in every sense of the word. I am concerned that we do not lose that tradition of love of language and the great verbal ability, you see, that was invested in the early brethren of the Church. Not that this ability has been completely lost, but sometimes we adopt opinions that seem to negate its importance. We get doctrinaire rather than affective in our use of language. Mormons should cease sounding like medieval schoolmen, to whom religion became an abstract adjustment to religious theories; rather, we should leave most doctrinal matters to the latter-day oracles and then convey testimony and religion into the actualities of art and life. (74-5; italics mine)

Comments welcome.

I'm off to do some pondering...

Yes! I'm a winner!

I mean, did you doubt it?

Last week, I posted about two poems that are being published in Black Rock & Sage. Tuesday, I was notified that another of my poems, "Submerged: Two Variations on Serrano's Piss Christ," is also being published by BRS and that it will be featured on the cover (whatever that means). And yesterday, the same editor informed me that I'm the winner of this year's Ford Swetnam Poetry Prize (which I thought was just for undergrads, but I'm not saying anything, especially since the bio I sent with the poems tells them I'm a doctoral student).

So, while I'm excited about publication and the prize, I'm waiting for them to tell me there's been a mistake.

Then I can cry.

But until then, at least I'm a winner for a while!

So it's okay to feel "Outcast" every now and then? (Svithe)

Not, you know, that I necessarily do....

The Lord doth build up Jerusalem: he gathereth together the outcasts of Israel.

And he shall set up an ensign for the nations, and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.

For I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds, saith the Lord; because they called thee an Outcast, saying, This is Zion, whom no man seeketh after.

Inside JKirkRichards.com

After I posted the first sequence of Browns and Rusts at AMV, Kirk asked if he could post one or two of the poems on his blog, which is part of the "Insider Pages" on his website. You do have to register with his site to access his behind the scenes stuff, but it's free and he's got some interesting things back there for anyone that's interested (if only to see which poem of mine he decided to post---that's right: my lips are sealed).

It was exciting for me to have him respond the way he did. I appreciate his support of my response to his work.

Anyway, thought I'd pass along the news. Just in case you wanted to know. And because I can.

Confessions

I'm perplexed. My Facebook status tells me so. And I only barely know why.

It has mostly to do with school, with being frustrated with the pedantry and pretension of it all---the institution of literary criticism, that is. I've gone through bouts this semester when I just want to give it all up, to become a reclusive poet, self-exiled from the world.

Then again, that wouldn't work either. Poetry is rooted in experience with the world. So while a poet must necessarily be solitary, able to retreat into the self, they must also be connected to the world.

And that's really why I can't give up, can't give in to the pedant, the pretense: I'm passionate enough about literature and language and sense the power therein that I have to believe that I can make some difference with the institutionalized knowledge a Ph.D. offers.

There's that, and my wife won't let me. She has too much confidence that I can make it work.

And my fortune confirms that (darn it all; I was hoping someone would pander to my self-pity. Alas, even the two-week-old fortune cookie gods think I can do it): "Your troubles will cease and fortune will smile upon you."

Well, fortune, smile away.

I'm waiting.

I Just Don't Feel Like Blogging (Svithe)

Truman Madsen suggests about prayer that "the Lord honors you when you level, when you stop praying from the neck up and begin praying from way inside, trusting the Spirit to take even the ineptitudes and translate them perfectly, trusting the Lord to know and daring even to voice those particular feelings about which you are most anxious and even guilty, including the prayer which [Heber C. Kimball] occasionally offered: 'Father in heaven, I just don't feel like praying.' That's an honest and powerful prayer. I recommend it."

Well, today I don't feel like blogging. All the same, I'm here and I hope the blogging deities will accept this svithery, however honest and powerful it might be (or not be---I guess that's the question, eh?).

I leave it to you.

Amen.

Advance Praise, or At Least Publication

...and for now, that's good enough for me.

I just got news a few minutes ago that two of poems have been accepted for publication in Black Rock & Sage, Idaho State's "Journal of Creative Works." One is a slightly revised version of "Siren" (thanks for your feedback, Th.); the other is "Lull," one I haven't posted here (at least for the time being; don't want to step on BRS' toes). I will tell you, though, that it's a short poem about a dead crow I met while running and I patterned it (kind of, but not really) after this "Lull" by Molly Peacock.

Anyway, yay me. (Crap---Disney's London Tipton made it past my mental firewall; darn you, Disney Channel and the five-year-old you've brainwashed!)

On Laughing Jesus (Poem)

This prose poem is from the most recent Browns and Rusts sequence I've been working on. And though I don't think Laughing Jesus is one of J. Kirk Richards' better paintings, it is an interesting piece if only because it portrays Christ in a completely unexpected (some may say blasphemous, but not me) way.

I'm wondering how it reads outside the lens of my personal experience, if it sounds too trite, too cliche; so, as usual, comments and feedback are more than welcome, including on the title.

* * * *

On Laughing Jesus

I’ve run my memory over “Jesus wept” since junior high when I used it to justify crying after Jenny flipped me in the eye with a rubber band. She apologized years later when our paths randomly crossed and we had a good laugh about her feeling so bad for being young and brash, for drawing my tears. I wonder if that's why Jesus laughs in this votive panel, his head cocked back in a cathartic guffaw because, years later, during a chance meeting, an old friend confessed he’d never meant to hit the young Messiah in the eye, to make him weep, to make him bleed and thanks for listening and for laughing with him about the mistake—could they forget the whole thing and still be friends?

Will the World Be Converted through New Media ? (Svithe)

For some time now, I've been considering the connection between Spencer W. Kimball's watershed talk on missionary work, "When the World Will Be Converted" (delivered to regional representatives in April 1974, just after he was called as Prophet), and M. Russell Ballard's "Using New Media to Support the Work of the Church," delivered at BYU-Hawaii's graduation ceremony in December 2007 and republished in the Ensign July 2008.

While I'm not sure if Elder Ballard had President Kimball's counsel in mind when he wrote his talk or if President Kimball foresaw the information and networking explosion facilitated by the Internet and, more specifically, Web 2.0 (and by extension, the possibility of sharing the Gospel through the Web's digitally mediated environment), one thing is certain (in Elder Ballard's words): "The emergence of new media is facilitating a worldwide conversation on almost every subject, including religion, and nearly everyone can participate." While there are still some grand socioeconomic limitations barring access to the Internet for some people around the worl, it has yet had a democratizing effect on words, "facilitating a worldwide conversation" about important things, and not simply the things this faceless "elite" thinks are important. Rather, we can talk about the things we think are important; we have the potential to tell and to illustrate our personal story with the Gospel as we never had before; and by "we" I mean whatever member of the Church feels so inclined to join the ongoing conversation.

And if conversation, then (by implication) the work of conversion, because, as Paul reminds us, "faith coming by hearing" and hearing by words.

Now to quote President Kimball. After discussing Christ's command that the Gospel be taken to the "uttermost parts of the earth," he asks this:

"I wonder if we are doing all we can. Are we complacent in our approach to teaching all the world? We have been proselyting now 144 years. Are we prepared to lengthen our stride? To enlarge our vision?"

And I've become convinced that, though there are limitations to what individuals can do within the bounds of new media, an acceptance of the converting potential of the words shared through this technologically mediated environment is one way the meek and lowly members of the Church can move toward this vision of a Zion culture.

At least that's one way I think of what I'm doing here.

Otherwise, it just all feels so nihilist, and I'm not really ready to deal with all that jazz...