chasing the long white cloud

The ramble and catch of my tumblelog

2011-10-21T15:32:00.001-06:00

I haven't been chasing many clouds lately, at least around here. And I'm okay with that. Life's crazy. I'm busier than I've ever been. Yadayadayada. But I've recently started to sidle up to Tumblr. So follow me there. Or not. Whatever. Just know there will be shorter posts, more poets, more poetries, more poetics there.

I'm just sayin'.

BYU-Idaho Teaching & Learning Conference

2011-07-06T21:51:00.001-06:00

Last week I posted a conference proposal-in-progress. This week I've got the proposal-as-submitted. Any thoughts are welcome.

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Title: “Would that All God’s Children Were Poets”: On Teaching the Virtue of Words

Proposal:

As an online writing instructor, I view it as my primary responsibility to help my students begin to grapple with the ethical implications of language use, to help them understand more deeply the responsibilities communicators have when writing, speaking, and/or listening to others. This philosophy of responsible communication centers on four main things:

1. Alma's faith in the persuasive potential of spiritually-sensitive language. Mormon calls this “the virtue of the word of God” (Alma 31:5); it can also be characterized as what writer Patricia Karamesines calls the rhetoric of belief, which, in her words, “labors to close the gap between people and between a people and that to which it aspires, like the company of God.”

2. God’s counsel to Joseph Smith about how to access power in the priesthood and to most effectively influence others for good (see D&C 121:41-46). Especially germane to the issue of ethical language use is God’s statement that “no power or influence can or ought to be maintained [. . .] , only by persuasion” (D&C 121:41; italics mine)—persuasion being the subject of rhetorical education at least since the ancient Greeks.

3. The idea—which is closely related to number two and which was first explored at length by philosopher J.L. Austin—that we can use language to act upon the world, to influence others in ways that compel them to action without violating the principles of moral agency. My main interest here is on the ways in which carefully-crafted language can open minds and spirits to new possibilities and new relationships and transform knowledge, behavior, and relationships in the process. By carefully-crafted language I mean poetry and rhetorically-sensitive prose, e.g., prose marked by such figures of speech as metaphor, metonymy, parallelism, etc., and with a keen awareness of audience, a well-defined argument, and clarity of voice and tone.

4. The ethical, empathic affect of generous, rhetorical listening (a principle developed in depth by rhetoricians Krista Ratcliffe and Wayne Booth), of making ourselves vulnerable to others’ language, to others’ stories such that we can enter into their experiences and, like Christ, work to bridge the distance between Self and Other.

In my presentation I will elaborate on these ideas, drawing from the work of prophets, poets, philosophers, rhetoricians, and scholars of language and mind in order to explore how these principles inform my study of language and my teaching of the foundations of writing and reasoning in FDENG 101 Online.

Slam Poetry's (Disappointing) Spokesmovie

2011-07-01T16:05:00.001-06:00

Mark Levin's Slam (1998)

I didn't like this award-winning, much-acclaimed film as much as I was hoping to. Don't get me wrong, it was okay and it makes a decent social statement, but it's disconnected and, frankly, a little bit strange. But maybe that strangeness is a result of the vastly different worlds these characters and I inhabit. Overall, however, I just didn't find the story that compelling.

It follows aspiring poet Raymond Joshua (played by real-life poet Saul Williams, whose work I really like) from his wanderings through a D.C. ghetto selling marijuana, sharing poems, and contemplating his dreams (whatever they really are) to his arrest for possession and his short time in prison, where he meets Lauren Bell (Sonja Sohn), a writing teacher who volunteers at the prison teaching inmates and who quickly becomes Ray's love interest.

Ray tracks Lauren down after he gets bailed out of prison and, after a backyard poetry reading, they have sex—Ray convinces her they should because he wants to live in this moment; what a line—followed by a big, dramatic fight the next morning, though I'm not 100% what that fight's about. They part ways, but the tension gets resolved when Ray shows up at the poetry slam Lauren invited him to check out. When she stands to slam, she dedicates the performance (which I didn't think was that great) to this promising new poet she's just met. (Yes, she means Ray.) After she finishes, Ray gathers enough guts to get on stage and he gives a strong performance (much stronger than hers) to an awestruck audience, then he hides in the bathroom, where he and Lauren talk for a minute about his potential. He then tells her he has to get some air and goes running through the streets of D.C., ending his night—and the movie—staring up at the Washington Monument.

The film does have some strong moments, say, when Ray freestyles with the inmate next-door (WARNING: strong language) or when he performs to break up a fight in the prison courtyard or when he stands in Lauren's backyard or takes the stage in his first poetry slam (though it's really less a slam and more of an open mic). I just wish it had more of these compelling performances and less of the brooding melodrama that takes place in-between.

Ah, well. At least I can watch the good parts on YouTube.

"The Sun Never Sets On the English Language"

2011-06-30T12:46:00.001-06:00

Or on Open University's pedagogical reach. Or for that matter on YouTube's democracy.

@openculture just posted a link on Twitter to OU's video series "The History of English in Ten Minutes." I couldn't help reposting, mostly because, well, it's a witty animated journey through words. And who doesn't love witty, animated, documentary-type videos on YouTube? And words, words, words.

That's what I thought.

As a teaser, here's one of my favorites: "The English of Science"

A Proposal-in-Progress

2011-06-30T09:58:00.000-06:00

Following are some thoughts I've been developing for a presentation proposal I plan to submit for BYU-Idaho's fall faculty conference. The conference theme is "Improving the Quality of our Teaching and the Depth of our Knowledge."

As I've pursued my thinking on this topic of responsible language use and the virtue of words (an interest that really undergirds my pursuits as a parent, teacher, poet, and scholar), I realized I've been summarizing ideas that I've been pursuing for some time now but have never really collected in one place. It was kind of a liberating moment for me because it seeks to bring together under one tent the disparate thinkers who have influenced my own nascent philosophies of language and human relationships. So I'm reveling in the serendipity before it makes for the door.

Anyway: the proposal-thoughts-in-progress. Feedback welcome.

On the Virtue of Teaching Words and On Teaching the Virtue of Words: What I've Learned About Language from FDENG 101 (Online)

Pricking Hearts (Jarom 1:12)
More Powerful Effect (Alma 31:5)

Language not only as a call to action but as a form of acting. Language enables us to act upon the world. Language as a means to exercise agency.

Teaching students that language is a form of action by, first, the language I use to frame their rhetorical agency/to frame them in the classroom—as seekers of knowledge whose language is a form of inquiry and knowledge. That language is a means of ordering the world and our experience of it. That language is a means of exerting our agency and influence in the world

Through the rhetoric of the question: Cecil O. Samuelson on questions—learning to ask effective questions

Through generous rhetorical listening, becoming vulnerable to another's language (and its intent)

Through the mutual pursuit of understanding (see Booth's rhetorology)

Rhetoric as a means of regulating behavior, yes, but it ought to/can go much deeper than that. The right language at the right time can change souls, can persuade people toward greater faith, toward transformation

Our relationship with God through the Holy Ghost is in part rhetorical. The power of the HG as a rhetorical act. Makes much sense if we consider that the angels speak by the power of the HG, speaking the truth in a way that resonates with our spirits and persuades us to change

Language as a means of proving contraries, of approaching, exploring, understanding the paradoxes and ambiguities of human experience and relationships

Language as a metonymic expression of and means to deepen human connection with one another, with the natural world, with God

Language as a situated, embodied act

Promoting rhetorical responsibility

No Power or Influence, Only By the Acts of Language

Faith as Firm Persuasion

A Memorable Fancy

Raising Others into a Perception of the Infinite

Thinkers:
• Wayne Booth (rhetorology)
• J.L. Austin (performative utterances)
• Krista Ratcliffe (rhetorical listening)
• Kenneth Burke (rhetoric as identification)
• William Blake ? (Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
• Patricia Karamesines (using language responsibly)
• Richard Marback (on vulnerability on rhetoric)
• Kristie Fleckenstein (on embodied literacies and a poetics of teaching)
• Alex Caldiero ? (defamiliarizing language to persuade others to a new perspective on the world)
• Joseph Smith (on language, the pursuit of knowledge, responsibly exerting our power and influence through acts of persuasion [rhetorical acts], and God)
• David A. Bednar (on seeking learning by study and by faith)
• Mark Canada ("Students as Seekers in Online Courses")
• Mormon (on the virtue of the word of God)

Marco Iacoboni. Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others. [L3]

2011-06-15T10:37:00.002-06:00

Iacoboni, Marco. Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008. Print.

[Edit to add: 7/1/2011] I read this one on my Kindle. Here are my highlights and notes (note: I did far more highlighting as I read this one than I did note-taking.]

Iacoboni details the discovery and significance of mirror neurons in an accessible way, showing how parts of the brain come alive while we're performing certain tasks or experiencing emotions and how those same parts of the brain also come alive (though to a lesser extent) while we watch or think about someone else performing the same tasks or experiencing the same emotions. In this light, perception and action are combined. Follows the application of brain imaging techniques in various circumstances to assess how mirror neurons are activated (or not) and how they influence (or don't influence) human behavior in various circumstances: for instance, in our grasping the workings of other minds and the intentions behind others' actions, in the mother-infant relationship, in language development, in the development of empathy (the forging of understanding and connection between Self and Other), in imitative violence, in consumer choice, in politics, in the autistic brain. The workings of mirror neurons may provide a biological explanation for the relationship forged between performer and audience during a performance.

(Image source)

Come slip between atmospheres of memory

2011-04-23T08:09:00.001-06:00

My poem, "Vestment," was featured at WIZ the 19th. Gustave Doré and a New Zealand fern leaf made it into this one. But you'll have to make the connection between the two yourself.

The Realm of Potential Being at the Waffle House

2011-04-23T07:52:00.001-06:00

I'm a day late shouting this from the wilderness, but virtual friend and poet Terresa Wellborn turned the spotlight onto one of my poems Thursday. Link through and come enjoy some chocolate chip waffles as you dip into the realm of potential being.

Carol L. Birch, "Storytelling: Practice and Movement" [L3]

2011-04-22T12:31:00.000-06:00

Birch, Carol L. “Storytelling: Practice and Movement.” Teaching Oral Traditions. Ed. John Miles Foley. New York: The Modern Language Association, 1998. Print. 308-17.

Birch's main contention seems to be that the storytelling community needs a critical vocabulary with which to discuss storytelling as a conscious practice.* Moving beyond the many efforts to illuminate how-to tell stories, Birch focuses her attention on exploring how storytelling works as a complex socio-cultural interaction---on how the process of telling stories means. She lays down two terms that provide insight into this process and the dynamics of the relationship among audience, text, and teller; these two terms are "conviction" and "credibility." And she captures the dynamics of inherent in this multi-faceted relationship in this question: "Do I believe what this person is telling me?"

I take this to mean the following: "I," the audience member, has certain expectations about how the storytelling event should meet her needs. These expectations center on personal moral and aesthetic standards---her beliefs about what and how a story---a text-in-performance---should mean. As the teller tells her tales, the audience member is weighing the text and the teller's performance of it against her beliefs; she's testing the teller's conviction and credibility. If she's convinced the teller's tale and its performance are credible, she can answer that, yes, she does believe what this person is telling her. She can subsequently give herself over to the interaction facilitated by the text-in-performance. However, if she's not fully convinced, she my shut herself off to the audience-text-teller relationship or at least hold back the attention required by her participatory role in the storytelling event. If all audience members did this, the performance would be a flop

As Birch suggests, these dynamics exist on a continuum, from total connection among audience, text, and teller to total disconnection and many degrees in between. She further suggests that these terms (conviction and credibility) can be used to evaluate a range of storytelling circumstances---from everyday storytelling ("situational") to storytelling meant explicitly to pass on a culture's moral standards and ethical principles ("conscious-cultural") to professional, staged storytelling ("platform"). Her categories---situational storytelling, conscious-cultural storytelling, and platform storytelling---can further be used to discuss how stories and their performance mean in various social and cultural contexts.

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*Even keeping in mind that this essay was published in the '90s, Birch has some fundamental things to say about the critical vocabulary used to discuss texts-in-performance and storytelling/performance events.

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Image source: The Storycrafters

Landscape, with a Cricket's Chirr (Poem)

2011-04-13T19:00:00.002-06:00

A fairly recent addition to my Browns and Rusts series. Feedback absolutely welcome.

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Landscape, with a Cricket's Chirr

Beneath the ramble and catch
of tumbleweed: the lull of horizon
delicious with distance and elegy,

dead-ends and blue highways hoarse
with the whisper of wind, dust,
wood, bone, memory—the grist

of solitude stirred up
the morning you woke determined
to pluck the sun from God's thigh

as he passed, full-stride,
over this side of town. That's
how Jacob got new-named, you say

when the story comes up with friends—
and strangers, for that matter.
Like when you were painting

plein air roadscapes outside Redmond
and you used it to ply conversation
with the breeze as she watched you

seduce landscape from ripples of soul
stirred by her sigh. Yes, you say,
that's how Jacob got new-named.

Nevermind it was his hip flicked
out of joint when the angel
stopped wrestling fair, wrested God

from Israel's shank. Nevermind
your layover in Peniel via Genesis
left sand in the visions you put on

and off like shoes at Mnemosyne's
fire ring. Nevermind that won't earn you
a cross-reference from “Jacob (see

Israel)” in God's Almanac
of New Names: From Michael (see
Adam) to the Present. Nevermind

God hasn't appended his reputation
to your presence on these roads
supple as a cricket's chirr

from the cleft between landscape
and soul, soul and skin, skin
and the palette you've charted

like desire’s ramble and catch
down the back roads and canyons
of memory.

(After a series of roadscapes by J. Kirk Richards)

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This is part of One Shot Wednesday, a communal writing event sponsored by One Stop Poetry.

82 Significant Mormon Poets

2011-03-30T10:32:00.000-06:00

Peculiar Pages released the complete contributors list for Fire in the Pasture today. You can find it here. Also, you can hear me speaking about my editorial intentions for the collection here.

Leaving Egypt (Poem)

2011-03-29T22:56:00.001-06:00

I'm posting this as part of One Shot Wednesday, a communal writing event sponsored by One Stop Poetry.

Feedback welcome.

* * * * *

Leaving Egypt

couldn’t have been easy. Walking away from
tangible gods, elaborate bodies. No more
spooning with the throne or imposing your thirst
on the Nile’s fertility. Just wind and wilderness
between desire and your next meal. Just
the breath of your mother’s God calling
from the reeds. Now from the shepherd’s well.
Now from the backside of Sinai’s emptiness.

But would you have known this side of loss,
this side of anxiety if God hadn’t drawn you
from Egypt’s bed? Read your name between
the lines of Israel’s pleas and snared you
on the sun? Caught your eye, pupil wide, and
wound it tight around the quarters of the wind?

Richard Bauman Verbal Art as Performance [L2]

2011-03-28T18:18:00.001-06:00

Bauman, Richard. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, Inc, 1977. Print. [L2]

The central premise of Bauman's monograph is that the critic of verbal art (i.e. the performed word/language in performance) needs to frame his/her object of study as performance in order to most effectively and responsibly analyze and interpret the art. He takes the notion of framing from Erving Goffman. In short, Goffman suggests that human experience is organized into a series of social/cultural frames that set each aspect of our experience apart from the other aspects. For example, everyday experience is distinguished from a cultural arts event is distinguished from religious ceremony by the ritual formality called for in each event. The formality (or not) of an event's rituals thus frames our experience with each event differently, giving us cues as to how best to behave, interpret behavior and expectations, etc., in the different social circumstances.

Bauman extends this idea to verbal art, observing that spoken expressions of artful language can and ought to be interpreted differently than everyday spoken language and artful written language. This is so, Bauman says, because verbal art is performed. And the performance event ought to be viewed as taking place in a different frame or across a different series of frames or socio-cultural contexts/traditions than those in which everyday events take place or within which written language is constructed. An understanding of verbal art as a mode of performance and of performance as a mode of speaking opens the way to view performative language as something that exists beyond self-contained linguistic structures (as a book, a story, a poem, or even a specific performance). Rather, verbal art is something that tends more toward the extra-ordinary usage and/or patterning of speech as used across a range of texts and contexts.

In this sense, Bauman suggests "that performance sets up, or represents, an interpretive frame within which the messages communicated [through performance events] are to be understood” beyond what the words spoken or the gestures performed literally mean (9). That is, in order to get increased meaning and value from the text-as-performed, the audience needs to think less about what exactly the performer’s words and gestures mean and more about how these words and gestures might relate and respond to the performance’s cultural, historical, and social contexts.

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Image source: Waveland Press, Inc.

There's a Fire in the Pasture

2011-03-28T11:43:00.000-06:00

And I'm fanning the flames.

Peculiar Pages Press posted an announcement about their latest anthology today. It's not really news to me, however, because, well, I've been in the thick of preparing that anthology for some time now. Follow this link to see what pot I've been stirring on my back burner. And stay tuned throughout the week as Theric posts more info about the book.

Jerome Rothenberg "Old Man Beaver's Blessing Song" [L1]

2011-03-28T10:58:00.001-06:00

Rothenberg, Jerome. “Old Man Beaver’s Blessing Song.” PennSound. Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, 2004-2010. MP3. [L1]

Rothenberg infuses his reiterative performance of this short poem with a Native American-Dadaist strain. These two influences, I think, have had tremendous influence on his performance style—at least they're the influences he seems to be most associated with. Seven times in this rendition he repeats the line, "All I want's a good five-cent cigar," followed by a short chant: "Hee hee ho ho, hee hee ho ho, hee hee ho ho." If I were to lineate the base-poem—the text Rothenberg begins with then revises with each reiteration—based on his performance, I'd do it like this:

All I want's
a good
five-
cent
cigar.

Hee hee ho ho
Hee hee ho ho
Hee hee ho ho

—where each line break represents a short pause (probably about half-a-second, though I haven't measured) and the stanza break represents a slightly longer pause, which signals a change in the discursive action—the movement from language to, shall I call it?, something pre-language.

Like a jazz musician improvising variations on a chord or musical phrase (Jazz might be another influence on Rothenberg's poetics), Rothenberg takes this base-poem and, with each repetition, shifts the tonal emphasis, the stress given to each syllable, etc. Words meld into other words and become something different, perhaps something more. The only thing that doesn't seem to change with each reiteration is the chant, which I categorize as pre-linguistic utterance. Rothenberg's breaking down of the poem's words begins to lean toward this primality, defamiliarizing language until it nears the inutterability of the body's desires. And this fits nicely with Old Man Beaver's addiction, his reiterative wanting of that good five-cent cigar.

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Image source; PennSound

On Crucifixion (Poem)

2011-03-24T16:52:00.002-06:00

Here's the latest addition in my meditations on J. Kirk Richards.

Feedback welcome.

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On Crucifixion

Some seduction, this—flesh stripped of sweat,
blood, breath, soul; body gone limp at the crux
of God's mystery, shipped home C.O.D.
in a crate stamped "Fragile," pinned

to the threshold of paradox like a sack spit
by vespers into the neighbor's vining buds.
From here, leaf chatter and whisper of plastic
sound like questions shedding their skin:

When God cross-dresses in death, does
the universe blush? Does it worship
the crimson-stained grain of his skin,

the shadow of his ribs? Does it praise
his left breast until milk warms the tongue
like redemption? Like silence? Like blasphemy?

Dennis Tedlock, "Ethnopoetics" [L2]

2011-03-18T20:04:00.002-06:00

Tedlock, Dennis. “Ethnopoetics.” Electronic Poetry Center. Loss Pequeño Glazier and Charles Bernstein, 2010. Web. 25 Oct. 2010. [L2]

I like this short statement attempting to define ethnopoetics by one of it's founding practitioners very much. It lays down some of the motivating principles behind ethnopoetics as both theory and practice. First and foremost, Tedlock asserts that ethnopoetics is "a decentered poetics"---meaning that it doesn't work from the assumptions of canonicity. That is, it doesn't posit one poetry or poetics as greater/more important than all others; what it does posit is poetries as an always plural noun. In this view, no one poetry deserves to be emphasized over another; rather, many poetries are worth hearing and reading, just as there are many different peoples and cultures worth listening to. Hence Tedlock's assertion that "any poetics is always an ethnopoetics"—every poetics (poetry) is embedded in a particular cultural/traditional heritage and those heritages and their influence on each poet, poetry, and poetics is worth understanding.

Giving place for the work of culture as it's manifest in texts, especially texts in performance, is central to ethnopoetics. In fact, a real defining practice of ethnopoetics is teasing out the ways in which a culture is performed through and constitutes or gives shape to texts. The emphasis, then, is on bearing out the relationship between performances, texts, and the contexts out of which these performances and texts arise and upon which they construct meaning. The practitioner of ethnopoetics accomplishes this by transcribing a performance into a written record. Through this transcription, the practitioner seeks to score each aspect of the performance event—including gestures, intonations, silences, sound effects, etc.—such that this score can be used by others as a guide for re-performing, studying, and interpreting the performance in its live setting/context (or an approximation thereof). And ideally this is done while quenching the desire to be definitive.

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Image source: Electronic Poetry Center

Tracie Morris, "Hard Kore" [L1]

2011-03-16T21:21:00.000-06:00

Morris, Tracie. “Hard Kore.” PennSound. Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, 2004. MP3. [L1]

(This is part of Morris' reading for the 3rd Annual Caroline Rothstein Oral Poetry Program at the Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania, October 28, 2008. A recording of the complete reading can be found here, courtesy of PennSound's awesome audio archive. My responses to the other poems Morris performed at this reading are here.)

Pronounced hard KOHR-ey, Kore being another name for Persephone. To me this title implies at least two things: 1) Persephone's stubbornness and 2) her sexual ripeness—Kore is, after all, the goddess of fertility. Both traits are emphasized in the poem and Morris' performance of it. In the beginning, Kore refuses to yield to her situation (i.e. being given over to the underworld) and to Pluto and his extra-ordinary body. This stubbornness and rebellion come through in the poem's explicit language and imagery and through Morris' halting performance of this language: she pauses mid-phrase in several places (which I would transcribe as an enjambed line break) and picks up speed in others. I take this performative ebb and flow as a reflection of the ebb and flow of desire, of the body's rhythms. This ebb-flow movement is also reflected in the language of the poem's concluding lines in which the ebb of Kore's stubbornness flows into her pent-up "hunger" to receive in return for what Pluto has r(e)aped from her and her body.

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Image source: Wikipedia

Alex Caldiero, "Seeing a Body" [L1]

2011-03-16T17:43:00.000-06:00

This poem, which I've taken to calling “Seeing a Body” for ease of reference, melds performance and content in order to compel an awareness of the body’s connection to the earth and to language and sound—even to compel an awareness of the body’s connection to the earth and to tradition through the sonic dimensions of language. What follows is a textual representation of his performance:

Rain mists the people gathered for the 350.org organized event. After a brief introduction from the event emcee, Caldiero takes the microphone, steps before the crowd, and lies down on the cement. Holding a hardbound tome over his face, he puts the microphone to mouth, pants for a few seconds—each breath with increasing intensity—and begins to read/recite this short poem:

(Click image to enlarge)

After closing the extended /i/ in “body,” he finishes the performance with a series of drawn-out guttural sounds—primal gruntings—then stands up, thanks the crowd, and replaces the microphone. Yet, even after his performance is completed and Caldiero has left the stage area, his presence—a serendipitous reminder of his performance, its grounding in the full-bodied, epic tradition of the cuntastorie, and the intended impact and meaning of his speech-act—lingers: because he had lain down on somewhat dry cement just as the rainfall picked up, when he stands to leave, the outline of his body remains on the ground.

This physical marker of the sonosopher’s presence further highlights—and in the process deepens the viewer’s embedment in—the acoustic geography mapped out by his performance: the aural composition evoked through the process of experiencing Caldiero’s words, allowing those words—metonyms for objects and experiences, even experiences in themselves—and their sounds to wash over the imagination, and attending to the physical sensation the performer’s voiced-text produces in the hearer. This physical experience of sounded language, prompted by the paralinguistic play of Caldiero’s words—the intonations, the cadence, the verbal gestures toward connection—foregrounds the notion of words, as embodied sounds, as experiences in themselves.

For My Infant Daughter/Por mi hija infante

2011-03-16T11:12:00.000-06:00

I wrote this poem after our second was born (she's five now) and pulled it out earlier this semester for an exercise in translation. (Yes, I'm learning Spanish.) I'm posting both versions today as part of One Shot Wednesday, a communal writing event sponsored by One Stop Poetry.

Feedback welcome.

* * * * *

For My Infant Daughter

Ignorant narcissus,
wide-eyed at time's well:

When will knowledge
eclipse your innocence

and cover your laughter
with the pain of love?

* * * * *

Por mi hija infante

Narciso ignorante,
los ojos anchos antes

del tiempo pazo, ¿cuándo
eclipsarán el conocimiento

tu inocencia
y cubrir tu risa

con el dolor de amor?

Tracie Morris, "Heroine" [L1]

2011-03-15T21:01:00.000-06:00

Morris, Tracie. “Heroine.” PennSound. Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania, 2004. MP3. [L1] (Follow link to listen.)

(This is part of Morris' reading for the 3rd Annual Caroline Rothstein Oral Poetry Program at the Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania, October 28, 2008. A recording of the complete reading can be found here, courtesy of PennSound's awesome audio archive. My responses to the other poems Morris performed at this reading are here.)

Morris reads this poem straight, against a background of synthesized sounds. The most striking thing about her performance, though, isn't any connection she forges with the music; in fact, I'm not sure there is a purposive connection at work in this regard. Rather, the most striking aspect is something she says in the prefatory remarks in which she frames her poem—and her larger poetic undertakings—for the audience. "Working with language and sound," she says, "is about contextualizing things for the community that you're working with." Heeding her own observation, she goes on to contextualize "Heroine" as an act of language (my words) that sounds or gives voice to the community experience she had growing up in 1970s New York. This was a socially/culturally disruptive experience, she continues, that "we . . . might always be in danger of going back to." As I read it, the core of this poem (at least in part), as the core of the experience Morris takes up in it, is a desire or compulsion or need to dress in the fashions of a certain time and place and the simultaneous longing to fly away from or to leak through the boundaries of these spatio-temporal limits. The poet (the heroine of the poem's title?) brings language to bear as a possible means to revise past experience and to redeem communities and individuals from immediate spatio-temporal bonds—to help us move beyond crippling desires and to rise to our potential.

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Image source: Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania

Alex Caldiero, "Beautiful. Idyllic. Isn't it?" [L1]

2011-03-15T11:37:00.000-06:00

(Note: In this reading/summary, I practice some of the ethnographic transcription techniques I'll be using as I approach Caldiero's work in my dissertation.)

Caldiero, Alex. “Bite-Sized Poem: Alex Caldiero [‘Beautiful / Idyllic / Isn’t it?’].” YouTube. YouTube, 23 July 2009. Web. 26 Aug. 2010. [L1]

This performance is an example of the interconnecting contexts, processes, and products of the verbal arts. It was produced to be experienced and reproduced online. It was first recorded in 2003 as part of the Interplay: Intransitive Senses multimedia, multi-artist performance that was sponsored by the Another Language Performing Arts Company and transmitted over Internet 2 from the University of Utah to various universities, colleges and research institutions throughout the United States, Asia, Australia and Europe. A video of that performance can be found here. (This poem begins 11:29 into the performance.)

In 2009, the poem was recorded again as part of a larger collection of short poems initiated by Utah Poet Laureate Katharine Coles and intended, I believe, to increase contemporary poetry’s digital profile (each performance is uploaded to YouTube [here and here] in hopes, perhaps, of taking them viral), Caldiero’s act incorporates the body, the entire viewing screen, the range of the poet’s vocal register, and the camera’s ability to direct viewers’ attention in predetermined ways. The event--infinitely repeatable as it is--begins with a close-up of Caldiero’s mouth. Framed thus, he speaks in a near whisper, enunciating each syllable in order to highlight the materiality of his word-sounds and their origin in the body. As the camera pans out, Caldiero repeats the poem ten times, enunciating as before but growing louder with each repetition until, the camera having settled on a view framing the poet’s chest and head, he has reached the other limit of his register and is voicing the words at the top of his lungs. I've attempted to capture these processes in the following transcription:

(Click image to enlarge.)

My scoring of the performance underscores the additive nature of Caldiero’s acoustic recursions and points to the connection between these recursions, his paralinguistic play, and the rhythms of his body. The latter becomes especially apparent when considering the length of each voice cycle (from /b/ to /b/)--11.1 seconds at the beginning of the performance to around 7.0 seconds at the end, the speed mounting as he involves more of his body in the act of voicing the words--and the way Caldiero uses his eyes.

A consideration of the poem's performance contexts is a beneficial way of reading this speech-act, which makes full use of its context (the Internet and the viewing screen, to name two) to cull something of a collaborative response from the audience. And it is only in (re)performance that the response can be provoked: simply reading the text on my computer screen, I can’t grasp the gravity of the poem’s catechistic reenactment. But by taking the cues Caldiero offers through his infinitely repeatable performance (cues that become more evident and analyzable once the event--brief and reiterative as it is--has been scored), I can begin to enter and understand what might at first seem like an infinite loop of meaningless chatter, or, as Chelsey Richarson more explicitly puts it: “WTF or Possible Internet Terrorism."

Indeed, by considering the performance venue--a video uploaded to the Internet--and the way Caldiero has orchestrated his speech-act to fit within the viewing screen, I can begin to make connections between the event and the shared contexts out of which it arises. Since the video begins with a close-up of the poet’s mouth whispering the poem, I can consider, first, the “beauty” of the actions associated with speech--with sounds origins in the body and with the materiality of language as a process of voice. This leads to a broader consideration of Caldiero’s sonosophic project--of the wordshaker’s attempts to spark a greater awareness in his audience (among other things) of what language is, how language means, where it exists in the body, and its role within human communities. Additionally, as the performance continues and the poem is repeated, each time with more intensity and physical expression, his words metonymically convey something near solemnity for language and its present context (hypermedia) to an ironic, fully-voiced performance of the same and of contemporary (hyper-)masculinity. However, to grasp this metaphoric metamorphosis, I need to be tuned into Caldiero’s performance cues and to the context(s)/traditions that contribute to how the oral poem means, something I've only just begun to explore here.

Alex Caldiero, "Flowers" [L1]

2011-03-14T22:50:00.000-06:00

Caldiero, Alex. “Alex Caldiero–Flowers.” YouTube. YouTube, 19 Feb. 2009. Web. 4 Oct. 2010. [L1]

This twenty-three second performance concludes with three words: "Flowers are amazing," a sentence that takes Caldiero less than two seconds to annunciate. The first twenty-one seconds of the performance, however, add value to that less-than-two second climax. During this time, Caldiero breaks the word "flowers" into its component sounds (its phonemes, if you want to get linguistic), then performs acoustic variations on each phonemic theme. This improvisational fragmentation emphasizes the materiality of the word and its sonal making and unmaking through the vocal apparatus (i.e. the lungs, the throat, the palate, the tongue, the teeth, the lips). Which is to say that the performer, through his extra-ordinary sounding of "flowers," makes the word less familiar for listeners, something illustrated in the recording when the audience laughs, whether out of discomfort—because they don't quite know what to make of the performance—or because the performance is perhaps a bit ridiculous and funny—or maybe a little bit of both. Whatever the reason for the laughter, by making "flowers" less familiar, Caldiero compels us to look beyond the letters and what they mean when arbitrarily combined into the word and to feel how and where the word's sounds originate and combine in the body. In this way, when he concludes by saying, "Flowers. Flowers are amazing," he could be observing that the sign (the word) and/or its component sounds and/or the thing they signify (the brightly-colored, petaled plant that I can't get to grow in my garden) are somehow worthy of our wonder and our continued (critical) attention. And by so observing, he invites listeners into a renewed relationship with and understanding of language and its material, embodied processes.

Tracie Morris, "Project Princess" [L1]

2011-03-14T17:18:00.000-06:00

Morris, Tracie. “Tracie Morris at WHNY09 [Performing ‘Project Princess’].” YouTube. YouTube, 4 Nov. 2009. Web. 9 Dec. 2010. [L1]

Morris performs the poem twice in this performance, first in hip hop mode, second in sound experiment mode. I find this juxtaposition of registers intriguing and think it illustrates what I see as major influences on Morris' work specifically and on performance poetry in general. Her hip hop performance has the flair---the tone, cadence, attitudes, content---many associate with underground hip hop culture. I say underground because, unlike much commercialized hip hop, it's not an angst-filled performance. It's neither abrasive nor violent. And much of the commercialized culture (say, for instance [among other things], gangsta rap) seems infused with anger. Additionally, both of Morris' performances combined make me think of the improvisational prowess of freestylists, laying down their mutual rhythms and interlocking lyrics on a street corner (or in a car or on the stage), each performance playing off of and feeding into the other.

And while both performances seem to bear some marks of hip hop culture,* the second seems more obviously influenced by a Dadaist poetics of fragmentation, dissociation, and experiments with sound (as in these examples). There's also a strong feminist element at play in Morris' voicing of a silenced community. Martina Pfeiler and others suggest that these three poetics---Dada, African American, and feminist---have heavily influenced contemporary American performance poetry.

-----------------

*The five main aspects of hip hop culture are as follows: emceeing, breaking, graffiti art, beat boxing, and DJ-ing.

To the Ashen Woman—

2011-03-13T21:48:00.000-06:00

This litany poem is in response to the One Shoot Sunday poetry challenge hosted by One Stop Poetry. The photograph linked to in the title and to which the poem responds was taken by Fee Easton.

As always, feedback welcome.

* * * *

To the Ashen Woman—

To part your ashen
veil—

To slip into the eyes
you wear like a plea,

the eyes your soul
palms like the pair of

cast-off rosary beads
the coroner found

clenched in your fist
of a death and slapped

into your skull to fill out
the lids—

To spoon into the hollow
of your grave—

To bathe in the ash from
your soul's holocaust—

To sift for the arsonist's
smoldering joint—

To settle like seed into
elegy—

To wait for new fertility
to rend the ashen veil—

To slip into your eyes like
a plea—

Tracie Morris, "Love in 2010" [L1]

2011-03-11T13:06:00.001-07:00

Morris, Tracie. “Love in 2010.” Sexualities and Politics in the Americas. Spec. issue of e-misférica 2.2 (2005): n. pag. Web. 9 Dec. 2010. Real Audio file. (L1)

(The embedded video takes a minute to load.)

Launch in external player

Morris performs the erotic body in this performance in such a seductive, sensual way that I often find myself unconsciously recalling the movement and incantation of her words. At first this seemed to occur at the strangest times. I've noticed myself reciting the opening stanza—with Morris' cadence and tone, no less—while I was running, while I was on the waking edge of sleep, while I was sitting at my desk, doing some tedious editorial task or another.

But I looked closer and noticed (or theorized) a connection: at each moment of recall, my conscious mind was empty enough that my physical desires and rhythms surfaced in a re-performance of Morris' poem. Running always clears my head and makes my body scream. In the moments just before and at waking, the body seems to spoon into the cavity usually filled by consciousness. And the editorial work I sometimes do is tedious and repetitive enough to numb the mind; and with the sieve of conscious thought out of the way, the body can feel and express itself more deeply. So it seems that Morris' voice has somehow slipped into bed with my physical desires and rhythms. And while for the most part I consider this engagement with the body healthy, even sacramental, it can also be manipulated for others' gain and to our detriment, something that can lead to a "dystopia of desire."

This seems to be in line with the poem's performed content: as I read/view it, Morris is both physically and textually taking up the (female) body objectified in its transient, passive relationship with a viewer who actively clicks a hyperlink that leads to a highly sensuous image (whether it's pornographic, from Hollywood, or an advertisement) that then flickers on the screen, seducing the viewer into another clicked link and another flickering image, and so on. In this highly sensual and consumption-based process, the images slip beneath the conscious mind and manipulate the body's desires and rhythms, which then spur us to further consumption. In my mind, Morris' performance thus gets its point across quite effectively.

Beverly Long and Mary Hopkins, Performing Literature [L3]

2011-03-10T17:50:00.000-07:00

Long, Beverly Whitaker, and Mary Frances HopKins. Performing Literature: An Introduction to Oral Interpretation. Eaglewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1982. Print. (This links to the second edition, which is pictured below; my citation is for the first edition.) (L3)

This book isn't quite what I expected. While Long and HopKins briefly mention (in the Afterword) the features of orality that constitute oral performance, their main purpose is to offer basic instruction in the performance of literature. And this instruction is directed towards how performance can help students to understand and to interpret texts and on how effectively interpreting texts can lead to better textual performances. Here, then, performance is understood as oral interpretation (hence the subtitle): interpreting written texts through the process of performance. This process includes preparation to perform and most of the book is geared towards helping students prepare themselves to perform various texts in public forums, especially the classroom.

As I see it, this preparation can be broken down into two parts:

1) learning to recognize and understand the features of narrative that lend themselves to performance (i.e. context, drama, tone, attitude, form) and

2) learning to translate these features into an engaging, persuasive performance.The basic principles of dramatic/critical/rhetorical analysis and narratology are thus the first things students need to learn when approaching a text with an eye toward taking it off the page. Only then, Long and HopKins suggest, can students effectively focus on bringing the narrative to life and interpreting it for an audience. And such interpretation should, in turn, be informed by certain rhetorical concerns, including how the performer's actions, attitude, preparation, and diction (from the time they stand up to perform) and how the performance setting (which includes the physical environment; the use, or not, of props; and the use, or not, of a script) influence the audience and their reception and understanding of the text.

Although this introduction is an insightful beginning to the study of oral interpretation, the authors' discussion of the process is offset by a sprawling anthology of texts that they find worthy of interpretation through performance; these texts include poems (lyric, narrative, and epic), fiction, non-fiction, and drama. Granted, by devoting so much space to presenting these texts and by including a series of workshops at the end of each section through which they illustrate the principles that have been discussed, Long and HopKins suggest that the performance of literature can only be learned through practice. But I was hoping more for an exploration of how the principles of orality might influence our reading, reception, and interpretation of written texts and how we might translate that understanding into the processes of primarily oral performance.

Polipoesía and the Ph.D.

2011-03-10T13:38:00.001-07:00

What exactly is polipoesía*, you ask?

Literally translated, it means "many poems," which suggests to me two things: 1) the many interpretations we can make about a single poem/performance of a poem and 2) the many different varieties of poetry---or more rightly: poetries---as performed. Spanish sound, visual & text, and performance poet Eduard Escoffet defines the term this way:

Polipoesía is nothing more than a term used to encapsulate poetic expression that goes beyond text or book form to utilize all possible media, from sound to performance, via body language or technological elements. What's most important is that, given its nature, it requires an audience. (ref)

So the transcultural polipoétic movement---or performance poetry movement, if you prefer the less romantic term---essentially tries to return poetry to its oral origins. Think Homer's orally composed and performed epics, medieval French troubadours, West African griots. And while we'll never be able to fully return to those origins, embedded as modern cultures are in writing and print, new media technologies offer access to and the ability to share widely what Walter Ong calls "secondary orality": an orality that exists in sound and verbal/embodied performance but that can't be separated from writing or print. This is the orality engaged and explored by many contemporary poets whose work is written for the stage. And this is the orality upon which my dissertation research is focused.

Per yesterday's considerations and in an effort to be transparent with this research, to share its subjects and processes with a potentially broader audience, and to increase my chances of connecting with scholars and anyone else engaged in similar pursuits, I'll be posting my summaries of and reactions to the material listed on the flip-side of the links posted in the sidebar under "Polipoesía and the Ph.D." These posts will be titled like so: "Name, 'Title' [L1/L2/L3]," where L# refers to the exam list in which the item is referenced.

Here's to the pleasures of poetry in performance. And, y'know, to the study thereof.

--------------

*I came across the term recently while perusing the work of Cornelia Gräbner, a scholar of culture who specializes (among other things) in the study of performance poetry (see this and this, for instance). I think the Spanish rolls nicely off the tongue.

--------------

Image source: Voices Education Project

(Re-)Asserting Myself

2011-03-09T18:15:00.005-07:00

A number of things have me reconsidering my recent (non-)uses of social media, this blog and Twitter especially. In order of cognizance:

1) The reading I'm entrenched in for my comprehensive exams and my need to

a. synthesize that reading,

b. catalog my notes for fairly easy access during my exams, and

my dissertation advisor

2) This tweet by @thmazing which basically implies, "Geez, @KingTawhiao: where've you been? Your blogs collecting mothballs."

3) These two comments by Sarah Dunster on Wilderness Interface Zone (one and two) that suggest to me

a. that some people are finding their way here even though I haven't been and

my focus

4) Alex Reid's "On the Value of Academic Blogging." These thoughts seem especially salient as I transition into my professional career:

[T]o get tenure at a research university, perhaps you have published ten articles, a book, and presented at 20 conferences. This would be a pretty solid vita, in my experience. How large an audience do you think this is in total? Less than the number of monthly visitors to this very modest blog.

It would seem to me that the average academic (or academic journal) seeks to avoid exposure. Publishing an article in the "Journal of narrowly-focused humanities studies" is a good way to hide. Those who do manage to find you will probably be sympathetic. Plus you always have the shield of peer-review: clearly someone thought what you said was ok. Even if someone disagrees with you, the differences will likely be on details that very few people will know or care about. Besides, by the time that person manages to write and publish a response, your article is in the distant past. In any case, this almost never happens. Since 93% of humanities articles are never cited you can safely publish with the assumption that no one will ever mention your article again. Phew!

The same cannot be said of blogging. You might note there is a comment box below. Sometimes people will write about you on their own blog, or go after you on Twitter. Books and articles are too long for most of our colleagues to read off-hand. But colleagues in other departments on your campus will come up to you and mention reading your blog. You are exposed. People will read your blog, and they will respond. I would never suggest blogging as a replacement for other forms of scholarship any more than the conference presentation replaces the article or the monograph replaces the presentation. I do think that blogging and/or other means of digital-networked communication can be an important mechanism for sharing academic work, for connecting to a new, and likely larger, audience.

(Maybe I'll respond to this more in-depth later.)

Sitting at the confluence of these ideas, I decided two things:

1) Give the blog a paint job. Ta-da!

2) Use the blog to share your reading, research, and current projects with whoever cares to listen. If people respond, cool. If not, cool. Hence "Polipoesía and the Ph.D." in the sidebar, where I'll offer/link to updates on my exam reading. Hence "My Mormon Poetry Project." Hence "My C.V." in the header.

My hopes are modest. And I'm busier than ever. But I'm still intent on chasing those clouds.

Better than Thanksgiving?

2011-03-08T09:52:00.001-07:00

I think so. Well, maybe.

Litany, with Wings

2011-02-28T18:04:00.003-07:00

Here's another of my meditations on J. Kirk Richards' work. This time, however, I've thrown some Herbert in just to mix things up.

It's still in progress, so any feedback is welcome.

* * * * *

Litany, with Wings
(After winged figures by George Herbert and J. Kirk Richards)

With Thee, O, let me rise, let me combine. O, let me imp my wings on thine. Let me slip across your lesser coverts like the lift that slips you into sky. Let me hitch on that lift up Jacob's ladder. Let me spoon with your slipstream beneath the atmosphere's sheets. Let me tease plumes of light from the altar of your skin. Let those plumes purl like incense. Let us purl like incense into God's sanctuary. Let's sear the soul's tabernacle. Let desire rise like leaven. Let our verbs rise like leaven. Let our flesh braze and sweeten on God's flaming tongue. Let's allelu this sacrament of flesh. Let's savor the body's carnival. Let's masquerade singular as Legion. Let's pronoun singular as God.

Have an ekphrastic day!

2011-02-21T09:03:00.001-07:00

I've another poem featured at WIZ today. It's ekphrastic and includes the word "brumal."

Giving Birth On WIZ Today

2011-02-18T08:28:00.001-07:00

Come check out the miracle of life (times seven).

Something New

2011-02-15T21:07:00.002-07:00

All of the poetry I've been reading lately in my scholarly and personal activities has turned me back to my own writing. What follows is an unlineated poem that sparked an idea for a new sequence of poems with really long, explanatory titles.

So, here goes:

* * * * *

Upon Learning, at Thirty-one, that My Astrological Sign Had Been Changed from Sagittarius to Ophiuchus,

I split my tongue taste-testing the serpent bearer's anapest, clave desire tongue-tracing the equinoctial groove: linea negra long as the tracks on God's favorite L.P.: the adagios he composed and recorded while an intern in his dad's studio, the ones he still plays as he paints, flings timbral aeons to the infinite corners of his canvas while he dances at the infinite edge—a slow breaking two-step, his body long and low in divination's groove, flesh folded into movement folded into universe folded into the technique he picked up from Pollock when the artist came upstate for a show and gifted the Creator his latest meditation, its fractals spinning out and out till they shed the ground like so much paint and God knit them into desire to clothe this uncertainty of a universe, to graft into the stories I recite as I wait to shed this womb and slip into the serpent's sidereal skin.

In which I break my dissertation proposal on the world

2011-01-12T11:26:00.001-07:00

Exclusively at A Motley Vision.

Three Poems, the Pushcart Prize, and Proof of Life

2010-11-19T00:47:00.002-07:00

I recently had three poems published in the Victorian Violet Press Poetry Journal: "Mother & Child," "Reaching for the Hem," and "Landscape with Figures." Karen Kelsay, an excellent poet and the journal's editor, nominated "Mother & Child" for a Pushcart Prize (more on the prize here). While I'm flattered at the nomination, I'm also honored to be included in the journal.

As for the proof of life promised in my title, here's me reading "Mother & Child." Happy listening!

Toot-toot...

2010-08-25T10:03:00.003-06:00

My (brief, necessarily biased) review of the current state of Mormon poetry was published in the latest issue of Mormon Artist. Here's something to whet your appetite:

[T]here seems to be an increasing number of (as best I can tell) believing Mormon poets making names for themselves beyond the Mormon journals and publishing houses—those like the core group reviewed below [Lance Larsen, Javen Tanner, Scott Warren Hatch, Philip White, Neil Aitken, Kimberly Johnson, Mark Bennion, and Karen Kelsay] and the many more I don’t have space to mention here. Taken together, these poets compose a concentrated dose of our literary kin who are making noticeable splashes in the American mainstream, such as may or may not be happening in the more visible genres (the novel, for instance).

I’m not certain whether this increasing movement of our poets into the national spotlight (a) warrants the “Golden Age” appellation or (b) is “commonly known” among a broader audience than the few devout followers of contemporary American poetry who happen to have an interest in those mainstream poets who are also Mormon (or is it those mainstream Mormons who are also successful poets?). However, I am certain the field of contemporary Mormon poetry is “already to harvest” (D&C 4:4)—again—and that this trend and these poets deserve more of our community’s attention.

Mormon Poetry Now!

2010-08-19T08:42:00.000-06:00

. . . and occasionally maybe "then." New at AMV. Don't miss it. That would be, er, devastating. Or something.

By reason of breakings they purify themselves (Poem)

2010-08-17T18:09:00.005-06:00

This is a sonnet of sorts (backwards, if anything: sestet, then octet) I've been tinkering with, riffing off of this verse in Job, letting words play off of and harmonize with each other, letting language spin out and out.

Your thoughts welcome. (If you've no flash player, click here for your listening pleasure.)

* * * *

By reason of breakings they purify themselves.
So Job. So flesh flung in leviathan's wake,
rolled loose soul in the infinite boil. So leviathan
riffing off the riptide, cacophonous staves
upwelling from the Good Book's selvage swart
with the fingerprints of sin's compulsive caress.
Sins legion as the ridge and whorl of waves
spread horizonward from leviathan's violent
weave. Sins thin as spindrift—lustrous spit
and prism—spun from the tango of scale and sea.
Sins brazen as scales down compulsion's backside:
Weathertight. Weather trim. Weathered
shiv and shimmer breaking on bodies blanched
in the rush and boil of birth.

Scratch that

2010-08-13T08:41:00.004-06:00

I should have done this in the first place---set my audio up like a podcast, that is. Now you RSS readers should have means to listen to my beautiful baritone without leaving the comfort of your Reader.

If not, there's nothing more I can do for you...

#justironingouthekinks

Heh...

2010-08-12T19:54:00.002-06:00

I guess if you RSS readers want it, you'll just have to come and get it...

Self portrait with closed eyes (Audio)

2010-08-12T18:43:00.015-06:00

Because I'm convinced more and more that poetry is most fully expressed and experienced orally/aurally, I've been looking for a way to post readings of my poems here along with the words, y'know, for your reading pleasure (or some such). After getting serious about this belief this week (it's been a nag in my mind for a while now), I found a free, open-source process that will work (for now). (Obligatory head nod to the folks at Audacity and The Internet Archive.)

Now don't hold me to this (especially considering my blogging track record during 2010), but I'd like to exhume my poetry archives in the coming months (year?) and post readings of the poems I've already posted. I'll also try to include audio with the poems/poems-in-process I post in the hope that doing so will enhance your reading experience, giving you more pleasure in and through my texts.

So, here goes take one (after those annoying test posts I flung into your readers trying to figure this out!): "This is me reading "Self portrait with closed eyes" (and a link to the poem in case you'd like to read along). [Added 8/13/2010: you can either listen by following the link or using the embedded player.]

Self portrait with closed eyes (Poem)

2010-08-10T19:12:00.001-06:00

Something new from my meditations on J. Kirk Richards. This one springs from Self Portrait with Closed Eyes. (And, yes, the title is also the first line and vice versa.)

Again: all the usuals---feedback, praise, lurking. Whatever.

* * * *

Self portrait with closed eyes,

like a brumal serpent
listening to Earth

shed her crystalline

skin, slip off her chill
at dawn's seductions

supple as hibernacula

warm with bodies
slendering into instinct

and appetite—Eden's

infinite metaphors
sidled up to God's breast,

areola iron on the tongue,

milk rich from desire's simmer
and slow burn, the flame

set low so not to sear the soul

still this side of vision, lurking
like the mourning dove's

anti-climactic elegies

teasing Eve from her
backwoods mythology

heavy with temptation's

pome and tang and the rasp
of cherubim wings strung like

words along Lucifer's tongue

as he conjures shame from
her constant wound—fig

weeping matins in Eden's half-

light while Adam snores
downwind, only stirs when

she's roused scent enough

to slip into his dreams
as the rib slipped from his side

the morning God stopped by

and found the basket of figs
he'd left last visit

still sitting on the altar,

thrumming with June Bugs
undone in the eating, mad

with the zephyr's rasp

through the scales of the constrictor
stretched at sleeping Adam's side.

Streaking through Asphodel Fields at AMV

2010-08-09T10:04:00.006-06:00

Last week, I posted a poem at AMV: "No Botticelli, This—". As described in my post there, it's a lyric mash-up of two paintings, one by Sandro Botticelli and one by galen dara. For some reason, viewing the latter invoked the former, which in turn invoked my lyric, ekphrastic impulse, which led to some streaking through asphodel fields outside Eden. Fun, fun, fun, if I do say so myself.

Irreantum and Me x 3

2010-06-03T13:38:00.001-06:00

Angela Hallstrom, editor of Irreantum, has offered a sneak peak at the journal's next issue (edited by Jack Harrel) by releasing the table of contents. And there I am, times three: two poems and one review essay.

I must say: It's always nice to see your name in print. And what's more, that motivates me to seek publication elsewhere. So off I go to write and revise and seek publication and stuff.

- Tyler-at-large: chasing clouds, blogging live

Making a Comeback?

2010-06-01T18:08:00.002-06:00

Maybe, though I'm not making any promises, save to say my time commitment is being placed elsewhere right now.

And to say that I've got a post at AMV today. The second part of this two-parter will go up tomorrow. Stay tuned.

N-Zed, Again

2010-04-27T14:43:00.002-06:00

I've got another poem at WIZ today: "Across the Hokianga," which is drawn from time I spent living by Hokianga Harbor in New Zealand. Enjoy.

Another Poem at WIZ

2010-04-20T11:53:00.002-06:00

Running today, "Pacific: Mateu, Matem," a poem dedicated to a Gilbertese woman I baptized in New Zealand. Go check it out, along with the rest of the poems Patricia's been running there this month. Lots of good stuff.

The Realm of Potential Being

2010-04-08T09:28:00.004-06:00

Catch my poem, "Te Kore"---which is Maori for The Void, or the realm of potential being---today on WIZ. Patricia's started her Spring Poetry Runoff again and has graciously included me in the rhetorical rebirth. Come join in the interface.

Tensions, Texts, Twitter, and Emma Lou Thayne

2010-03-11T16:46:00.001-07:00

Read all about it at AMV.

Public Service Announcements

2010-03-11T12:58:00.002-07:00

Found on the bulletin board on the wall just opposite my basement office.

Any takers?

- Tyler-at-large: chasing clouds, blogging live

For a Limited Time: Fob-ulous Digital Literature

2010-03-10T12:11:00.006-07:00

Well, readers. It's read an ebook week and Peculiar Pages Press is offering FREE digital copies of The Fob Bible---for this week only.

What's The Fob Bible, you ask? Well, I've reviewed it in two parts at A Motley Vision, so you can get a taste of what the anthology offers there. Or, if you don't want to wade through my prose, as beautiful as it is *mmm-hmm*, just check out the Peculiar Pages site, where the publishers have included a brief description. Better yet, just download the thing.* It's free. And a great read to boot.

What have you got to lose?

*Any donations you may decide to make (see the site) will go to LDS Humanitarian services. Same goes for any author royalties on hard copy sales of the book.

Listorious

2010-03-09T08:14:00.001-07:00

The six-year-old is into list-making. Here's one she created last night.

Take from it what you will, but note the third item especially, which is directly related to the second item. And I'm confident the last item has to do with the onset of bedtime, though I'm sure adolesecence with this one will be a treat.

- Tyler-at-large: chasing clouds, blogging live

Series Interruptus

2010-03-04T18:10:00.002-07:00

I only got halfway to Beyond Prescription? Part 4 this week. So come and see Beyond Prescription? Part 3.5, a post in two parts: i) a theory and ii) my reading list for a (potential) course in Mormon lit.

Jacob Gives Me a Shove; or, Stop (Over-)Deliberating!

2010-03-03T10:13:00.001-07:00

Jacob caught me off-guard today.

For a couple of weeks now, I've been pondering over some choices that need to be made, but I've realized my ponderment has really just been directed at giving God counsel. And that maybe He doesn't care so much what option I pursue, so long as it's for my good. Or alternately, that He's already offered His counsel and I'm just afeared/hesitant/nervous to act on it without fleshing out all the options.

I know, right: O ye of little faith. Stop (over-)deliberating and just go out and do it.

Thanks for the "get off your butt!", Jacob. I owe you one.

- Tyler-at-large: chasing clouds, blogging live

AML Presidential Adress: Boyd Peterson

2010-02-27T16:56:00.001-07:00

Boyd Petersen: presidential address

(Woops. No pic.)

One last motivator for donating to AML: Boyd and Eric contemplated doing AML shirtless, beefcake calendar.

Conf. Title: Mormon Literature: Past, Present, and Future

Do I really want to live my life over and over?

Recursion fairly common literary device. Moves through various examples: Harry Potter, Kurt Vonnegut, Star Trek movie, Groundhog's Day. What if there is no tomorrow? Phil Connors asks. Finally uses the recursion to better himself, the world.

What might a Mormon Groundhog's Day look light? What might it look like for God? And how does He feel about it?

Endless repetitons in Mormon lit:

Anti-Mormon tracts: derivative, banal, stock, cliched.

Didactic literature: suffers from much of the same. XR Eugene England's "Danger on the Left, Danger on the Right. Anthologies he discusses fail due to vein repetitons. Away with sterotyped Mormons!

Mormon writers must dedicate selves to devloping talents and must be charitable.

As do this, leave cycle of mundane repetition, enter eternal repetitons.

Renaissance coming from "spooky place" of radical middle: new themes, issues being explored. BP wants to celebrate these movements.

"Given God's love, there's no boredom" in what he does round after eternal round: Neal A Maxwell.

(Notes taken during Boyd's address.)

- Tyler-at-large: chasing clouds, blogging live

AML Announcements & Awards

2010-02-27T16:53:00.001-07:00

(Sounds like a sacrament mtg releasing/calling & sustaining of church officers)

Eric Samuelson (past-president): Boyd and I decided AML wouldn't die on our watch. Kept it healthy through difficult times. Revamped website; Irreantum in good hands; new blog, etc.

Margaret Blair Young, new prez: won't die on my watch either. Mormon letters on the cusp of great things.

Ask not what AML can do for you, but what you can do for AML.

Support options:
1. $10 contribution for next year's conf.
2. $25 sustaining member of AML (gets membership in AML + Irresntum subscription)
3. $50 honor contribution, helps fund mtgs
4. $100 makes AML contests possible
5. $200+ allowing movement beyond AML's present boarders

Part of vision for AML: go international. Forge connections beyond present boundaries.

Scott Bronson: awards

*Award for online writing: Sandra Taylor, onecobble.com

one cobble at a time, blog

Collection of/connections b/w entries

*Humor: wit leads to wisdom

Elna Baker: New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance

*Short Fiction: Larry Menlove, Path of Antelope, Pelican, and ??? (published in Irreantum)

*Memoir: Kathryn Lynard Soper, The Year My Son and I Were Born

*YA Lit: Carol Lynch Williams, The Chosen One

Struggle against polygamy. Williams' heart is in every word of this book.

*Poetry: Lance Larsen, Backyard Alchemy

Speaks softly and leads our poems where they yearn to wander. Awakens in our minds subtle new insights into what we've taken for granted. He draws us toward the Divine.

*Publishing: Chris Bigelow, Zarahemla Books

Critically acclaimed and culturally relevant books for the Mormon market. Serving with diligence and conviction.

*Film: Dennis Packer/Packard (?), et al., Fire Creek,

Compelling exploration of being fallen, then raised up. Commitment to redemption through Christ. "This film aspires to great things."

*Drama: Melissa Leilani Larson, Little Happy Secrets

Dark and dangerous spaces where the political and personal crash, choosing to light a candle. Compassionate, compelling.

*Honorable Mention: Jamie Ford, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

Romance b/w Japanese-American girl and Chinese-American boy. Chance to heal.

*Novel: Todd Petersen, Rift

Get out of Jens Thorsen's way. Each sentence artfully crafted, cajoling readers on. Great sense of humor. Explores rift b/w two men in small community.

*Special Award—Service to AML: Kathleen Dalton Woodbury

*Smith-Petit Lifetime Achievement Award: Levi Petersen

Gifted, ironic, pressing. Found grace in unsuspecting places. Mormon-others are always in God's hands. (No sure what I think of that term: Mormon-others.)

*Contribution for the study of Mormon Film: James D'Arc

The giant upon whose shoulders we all stand when studying Mormon Film.

(Notes taken during the changing of the guard and the awards "ceremony")

- Tyler-at-large: chasing clouds, blogging live

AML Session: Patricia Karamesines

2010-02-27T16:35:00.002-07:00

Patricia Karamesines: “When is a Platonic Friendship Not Platonic? Husbands, Wives, and Significant Others in Shannon Hale's The Actor and the Housewife”

(Got here late: missed her opening.)

Uses Hale's text to explore trans-gender relationships. Friendships that cross gender boundaries.

Becky making ripples through her community. And thriving because of it. Acting hero's role of crossing established boundaries. That she's open about it forces others to question such limits, to shake off rhetorical limits.

Becky: being forced to find new words to explain her experience. Invoking rhetorical power of puns, metaphors in order to negotiate space b/w the pair for the existence of the relationship.

Expanding previous experience to make such space. Taking up language to change the world. Novel taking a good run at confronting the lack of lang. for such relationships as those b/w the actor and the housewife.

How to deal with the discomfort the lack of lang. for such experiences?

Thus we see, that through the actor and the housewife, some men and some women can work through the intricate complexities of attraction and build space in their lives for the intimacies of "platonic love," whatever that means—

(Notes taken during the session.)

(Product placement: The Fob Bible, courtesy of Eric and MoJo of Peculiar Pages Press and B10 Mediaworx.)

- Tyler-at-large: chasing clouds, blogging live

AML Session: Gideon Burton

2010-02-27T15:45:00.003-07:00

Gideon Burton: Avatars for Latter-day Expression

Avatar: manifestations of higher forms, Hindu gods

Have made way into online culture. FB, Second Life, etc. Avatars have moved into the mainstream. Adults are avatar-ing now.

Defers to David A. Bednar's remarks on the body and the digital world.

Of course: Avatar comes up. (GB seen it six times in theaters.) Generates real interest in what it means to be embodied beings. Takes us more closely into understanding how the body mediates our experience in the world. Pro. allowed a fuller range of being through the avatar.

In Mormon Doctrine, as if our bodies are the avatars for our spirits. Allowing us to transcend certain limits.

In Avatar: There is joyousness to the body. Learns to tame the body. Jake: I'm learning to enjoy my body. (Reading Avatar through the lens of Mormon experience.)

Mormons: temporarily embodied to the end of permanent embodiment. Our glory: that by which our bodies are quickened.

Challenge of this life: learning to deal with the temporal/corporeal demands of relationships.

Personal body => social body. Formation of identity.

Avatar; Richness of Pandora lays not in it's ore, but in it's connections. A people at once corporeal and spiritual. Jake's body becomes a mode of existence. A station on the way to a more exalted station, to full authenticity.

Perhaps this life is the ultimate avatar state. Our technologies can best be used to help us into higher understandings of ourselves.

When and how must our experience be mediated, unmediated, or re-mediated?

If we don't take the leap into new media, we may miss something of our embodied experience.

(Notes taken during the session.)

- Tyler-at-large: chasing clouds, blogging live

AML Session: Stephen Carter

2010-02-27T11:12:00.001-07:00

Stephen Carter: “Channeling the Muse: Using Outlines to Strengthen Literary Fiction”

(No pic again: sorry!)

Feels like Oliver Cowdery: wanting to translate, hadn't prepared himself

SC not a natural born writer, but "I'm a persistent cuss!"

Presentation: the musings of a high-fxning-autistic writer (son high-fxning-autistic, learned to read emotions on a person's face, just as SC learned to write effective stories)

Of the idea that planning is an essential part of putting a story together. Writing a story like literary architecture.

Using this basic idea more consciously could improve their work

Base of every story: character arc
"these are the basic bones of how I put together a story"

1: give character a goal

2: make something to oppose that goal: antagonist/antagonism

First two things: essentially plan of salvation: antagonism in all things

3: kick the conflict up a notch: test the protagonist in larger and larger conflicts

We want to see increasing levels of conflict: once past level one, don't want that level again; increase intensity

4: Need dramatic need; goals transitory, but dramatic need is in opposition to goal: dramatic need: change the protagonist needs to make inside: interior spiritual need

Getting dramatic need to work is key to making story work, to get character to change, even to make reader change

The Sopranos is a good example of this model

Tony Soprano afraid of losing family b/c of his job as mob boss, but can't leave the job b/c made an oath, won't break his oath

Constant larger and larger conflicts

Structure of tragedy: pro. gets goal at expense of dramatic need

Structure of drama: pro. gets dramatic need at expense of goal

Ideal: stretching pro. b/w dramatic need and goal

Another ex: Avatar

Disappointed w/movie: pro. only had a goal, no dramatic need

Conclusion: Increase tension b/w goal and dramatic need: stretch it, make them almost mutually exclusive

(Notes taken on my iPhone Notes app during the session.)

- Tyler-at-large: chasing clouds, blogging live

AML Session: Marilyn Brown

2010-02-27T11:01:00.001-07:00

Marilyn Brown: "Bones and Buns: Growing the Body of Mormon Literature"

(Should've taken her pic to include, but didn't: my bad)

Off-the-cuff, shares her experiences with woman Mormon writers

Drawing connections: bones, muscles connected with tendons, metaphor for her presentation

George Eliot, Adam Bead (?) read by MB as a ten-year-old: thought, This is the kind of book I want Mormons to write, but where is it? Wrote first novel in a 100 page notebook

Read Nephi Anderson, Maureen Whipple: okay, but not the best that could be done.

Mormon audience rejected Whipple because "we knew better"

Wanted inspiring Mormon lit: that portrays us in a positive light?

(Veda Hale: biography of MW abt to be published)

MB did not want to be like Maureen: "good Mormon girl that I am"

Virginia Sorensen: another writer she admired: "I liked Virginia Sorensen, but she still wasn't what I wanted"—something really Mormon

Then Clinton Larson then Carol Lynn Pearson (Beginnings)
MB published Rain Flowers then Head/Heart book w/Elaine someone (on own printing press)

Doug Thayer and Doug Marshall: thought, Finally here we have truly Mormon writers

Considers Wallace Stegner: wrote abt Mormons, but as an outsider, and I could tell (couldn't you?)

Continued her impossible dream
Wrote book; almost published in NY; reworked now, made it "more Mormon"

Then another prize winner in UT that Mormons wouldn't buy

Then Earthkeepers

Mentions Brady Udall, likes what he did; various YA writers

Still waiting for the national Mormon literary novel

What abt a best selling woman artist from DB?

Arianne Cope, John Bennion, Todd Petersen, (good novel, despite dead space in the middle), Jeanine Justin (sister of Linda Sillitoe), Marilyn Arnold, Levi Petersen (just not happy with his Mormonism)

Lance Larsen is good

Anybody who's successful I bow at your feet! (Mentions Tolkien's success at 74: she's 73, says there's still hope)

(Notes taken on my iPhone Notes app during the session.)

- Tyler-at-large: chasing clouds, blogging live

Tyler-at-large: Chasing Clouds, Blogging Live

2010-02-27T10:47:00.002-07:00

I've been looking for a new approach here, and Adam has inspired me. So I give you: Tyler-at-large: Chasing Clouds, Blogging Live—my variation on Adam's theme. I'll be using it in conjunction with Twitter to stay connected, to make better use of this space.

Right now I'm in Orem, Utah with my bride attending the AML AML Annual Meeting.

The picture was taken using BlogPress Lite on my iPhone as I walked back to the hotel from UVU after this morning's session.

More to come.

- Tyler-at-large: chasing clouds, blogging live

Just posted:

2010-02-25T11:08:00.000-07:00

Beyond Prescription, Pt 3: Liberating Paradox(i)es: Nodes, Networks, and Timothy Liu's "Tree"

Oh, and This

2010-02-20T12:10:00.001-07:00

Part Two of my "Beyond Prescription?" series is up at AMV. Has been since Thursday. Forgot to post the link here.

Oops.

Egoist that I Am; or My Life in Three Twilight Links

2010-02-20T11:39:00.006-07:00

I occasionally Google myself to find out it if anything I've written has made it beyond my diminutive rhetorical garden. Mostly I get circled back to Chasing or A Motley Vision, but sometimes I find that someone has responded to something I've written. And then I think I'm really cool a few minutes before I realize that I'm really not.

Yesterday I put myself at the mercy of Google Search and found a couple of interesting links, both relating to my "Where Twilight Studies Meets Mormon Studies" post at AMV.

One from Bookish Blather (a review of Spotlight by John Granger, in which I am labeled "an actual Mormon"; and how cool is that, huh?).

And one from Green Flame (a collection of links on religion and vampires).

Earlier this week, I also mentioned that a revised version of the Twilight paper I wrote last year is being published in Sunstone Magazine, but I've also been invited to give a short presentation related to the paper at the magazine's launch party for their "Twilight and Mormonism" issue (in which both Eric [a.k.a., Th.] and I appear). So if you're in Salt Lake Friday, February 26, come join the fun. Oh, and listen to me stumble through a short presentation. But mostly, just come join the Twilight-induced fun.

Brought To You By...

2010-02-16T16:23:00.004-07:00

Either Dr. Pepper. Or A Motley Vision. Or, even better, both.

(Speaking of AMV: I'm on stage today with part one of a serialized essay in/on Mormon literature and criticism. Come join the fun, though the first part reads, first, like a teaser: I'm trying to seduce people away from the continuing hullabaloo over Mormon Shakespeares and Miltons; and second, like an award acceptance speech: "Yes, thanks to all of my supporters." Anyway.)

My life has taken an interesting turn over the past couple of years. Once I had realized there was such a thing as Mormon lit, I started looking for inroads into the culture of Mormon lit/crit. It took some time, but I feel like I've finally got a foot in the door. And most of that, really, is thanks to AMV, through which I started engaging in discussions of Mormon culture and expanded my reading base in the field of Mormon lit (though I still feel like I've got lots of catching up to do).

I mention this not simply to plug AMV again, but to do some ego inflating. Because isn't that what blogging's really all about?

So, without further ado, three recent/forthcoming achievements I owe to my roots in AMV:

1) I'll be reading a paper on The FOB Bible (a slightly revised version of the two part review I posted at AMV: here and here) at the Association for Mormon Letters annual meeting on February 27, 2010. What's The FOB Bible you ask? Well, check out my review and you'll see.

2) A revised version of my essay on Twilight, which I probably wouldn't have written had I not been involved in Twilight discussion on AMV, is being published in Sunstone Magazine.

3) And my participation on AMV has given me confidence and the grounding to propose a dissertation on Mormon poetry. This is a rough preliminary outline of my potential focus:

I'd like to approach the work of several poets writing out of a Mormon cultural/religious tradition--including Clinton F. Larson, May Swenson, Alex Caldiero, Susan Elizabeth Howe, Lance Larsen, Timothy Liu, and Kimberly Johnson--in terms of how each engages human embodiment. By reading their work:

a) against a general American poetics of embodiment, informed by body studies scholarship and the work of such poets as Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Galway Kinnell, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds, Louise Gluck, Jay Hopler, and Paisley Rekdal (among, perhaps, others);

b) in conjunction, as a response to a field of tensions inherent in many cultures, yet deepened and revised by Mormonism as a "new religious tradition," as historian Jan Shipps calls it; these tensions include the strain between an unprecedented--at least in modern Christianity---ecclesiastical authoritarianism and a pronounced theological and cultural emphasis on/veneration for the principle of individual moral agency; Mormonism's radical juxtaposition of the sacred and the banal; the strain facilitated by the general organizational tendency toward assimilation into mainstream culture and efforts made by contemporary LDS church leaders to retrench the organization in its historical peculiarity; and the ambiguity born of a cultural/theological emphasis on epistemological certainty in the face of Mormon belief in life and learning beyond mortality and the prospect of what intellectual historian Terryl Givens calls "abject smallness before the magnitude of an almost unquenchable ignorance" about the physical and moral universe (these tensions are adapted from Givens' book People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture); I'm particularly concerned with what these contradictions might mean for a Mormon poetics of embodiment;

and c) against each other as well as against LDS cultural/historical texts that have been central to the development of mainstream LDS church policy and thought on gender and family relationships and human embodiment (especially the church's 1995 proclamation on the family, which reiterates historical church teachings on traditional family values)---

I hope to illuminate how each poet has uniquely engaged---even subverted and revised---the general poetics of embodiment of a) as well as the tensions and texts in b) and c) in his/her development of an embodied poetics and a poetic and gender identity at once distinctive from yet bound up in a Mormon religious and cultural tradition.

After hearing back from one potential dissertation committee member, who called this "ambitious," I'm thinking I potentially need to pare something back in order to streamline this whole dissertation process so I can be done with school by the end of 2011. (Any suggestions in this regard from my oh-so-large audience of readers would be appreciated.)

So, anyway: three cheers for AMV. And Dr. Pepper. Because that's what's keeping me awake at this point.

Kimberly Johnson: "Marking the Lambs"

2010-01-27T12:46:00.002-07:00

On the 15th, William's Payday Poetry post at AMV was "Marking the Lambs" by Kimberly Johnson. Because the comment I left fits under the aegis of my Mormon Poetry Project, I'm reposting it here and filing it with my other discussion of Johnson's poetry ("Ode on My Episiotomy".

Oh, and here's a link to the poem on Slate (it's accompanied by an audio recording of the poet reading the poem).

* * * * *

It’s been a while since I’ve listened to/read this one and revisiting it today brought a new experience. One thing that stuck with me this go-around: though unrhymed and informal, the structure of “Marking” is a sonnet. The opening eight lines (the octet) focus on the lamb and on the communal act of gathering the “ram lambs” for marking (signaled by the poet’s use of “we”), a physical “trespass” that alters the animal’s disposition in, as I understand it, dramatic ways. (I find an interesting correlation here between gathering and marking lambs and the gathering and marking—i.e., naming—of God’s people. Also between this marking process and the marking of Christ.)

Amidst the struggle between human and animal captured in these lines; amidst the conflict taking place within the poet, she who must “turn / the mind away” from the act by focusing step-by-step, almost medically, on the castration process, the poem’s focus turns (in the last six lines—the sestet) to the speaker. Indeed, the grittiness literally “spit[s]” on the poet and, in turn, on the reader: on the poet because, it seems, she is overcome with the physicality of the experience, though she does “try not to taste” the flying fluid (to no avail); and on the reader through the “pop” of the poem’s language (as Wm. aptly points out), something we experience physically in the mouth, in the pulsing of the flesh, as we read it aloud and word unites with (physical) sense.

The focus on the poet in the sestet, marked by the repetition of “I” (five times) and “my” (two times), points to humanity’s sometimes strained relationship with the non-human animal and, by extension, with language. She is tasting and hearing things she’s not accustomed to and, in the process, is compelled to experience her own physicality, her own attempts to explain that physicality, in startling, even uncomfortable, ways. And she enters into the lamb’s experience so much so that she becomes marked by her own “words,” by the structure of her language: as she tries to speak the lamb’s “name” (if the “your” in the final line is indeed the lamb; or even the Lamb), the only thing she can pronounce is “elegy.” The only words she can produce are a form of mourning. For the lamb. For the Lamb. For herself.

A paradoxically simple, yet intricate poem, bound together (in a sense) by the form, even as it spins beyond resolve into something, perhaps, transcendent. And, for now, I’ll leave it at that.

Seeking Means of a More Full Persuasion (Svithe)

2010-01-24T10:42:00.003-07:00

Notes 1.18-1.24

1 Nephi 19
Loving kindness and long-suffering: ironic (though mostly for those who reject him based on these things) that the attributes he's mocked and ultimately crucified for possessing here are the very things the redeemed will mention about him/praise him for in the end. The consistency of his character wins people over or pisses them off, though eventually every knee will bow and every tongue will confess his Messiahship.

Why the combination of "loving" and "kindness"? What might the opposite be? False kindness? Manipulation? Feigned love? Loving kindness, to me, suggests that the kindness has no pretense. That he extends his love without expecting anything in return, though he hopes we'll offer our souls in return. Also that the love isn't simply an abstract emotion, but that it's manifest in (small) acts of kindness. I wonder if God has been extending such small and simple things to me lately and I haven't noticed them? Perhaps I should ponder on that, should be more aware of God's little mercies, his acts of loving kindness towards me.

"Workings in the spirit, which doth weary me": mental exertion, the work of faith, is wearying. For though the spirit has infinite stores of energy and strength, the body has only so much and must be replenished. It must have rest lest it breakdown from being overextended.

"That I might MORE FULLY persuade them": a more full persuasion--not simply centered in the use of rhetoric as a means of persuasion, in language; but in an effective use of rhetoric combined with the backing of the spirit, which can make up for the gaps and failures in language use and convey meaning to the hearts of those who have tuned themselves in to the interaction. But just because the spirit can make up for our rhetorical failings/weaknesses, doesn't mean we shouldn't seek to improve/to be responsible with our rhetoric. Should do our best to perfect both factors on our side of this rhetorical situation: 1) our connection/communion with the spirit, who can, through grace and as we yield ourselves to God, perfect our natures and purify our intentions; and 2) our language, being responsible with the way we present ourselves rhetorically to the world. Both of these combine to give us power and authority as speakers/leaders/teachers such that we can more fully persuade our audience to believe in the cause we espouse.

1 Nephi 20
They swear not in truth or in righteousness: have perhaps neglected the making and keeping of sacred covenants, oaths made in both truth and righteousness.

1 Nephi 21
"It is a light thing": the things of God are light, they originate in places of light, emanate from a Being of light (one who has purged himself of darkness by continually confronting and overcoming that darkness), shed light on his children as they honor the light of Christ, the spirit of light and truth within them. Our spirits, I'm convinced, are constructed of light matter; our eternal intelligence, I believe, is in part refined light; we are beings of light and can illuminate dark places as we honor that light heritage by honoring God.

"The Lord that is faithful": God is loyal to his own. He is a being of faith and can be trusted perfectly.

"Palms of my hands": hands symbolic of power. If we have been engraved into the palms of his hands them, he has yielded some of that power to us through his sacrifice

Kings nursing fathers: one of my favorite scriptural images. Evokes a powerful man willing to nurture others into greater awareness and existence.

1 Nephi 22
Temporal AND spiritual: can't have one without the other. All things have both components. Wasn't it God who said, "All things are spiritual"?

Already lost, scattered to and fro, hated: why hated? Because the people of God are different, peculiar. Because they move against the currents of the world.

"All the kindreds": plural stands out here: God is mindful of groups as well as individuals. He understands the group dynamics and can work to offer the groups as well as the individuals salvation through means/experiences tailored to that group's needs and the needs of all the individuals therein.

Blood, fire, vapor of smoke MUST come: why must? And why these things? Symbols of the utter destruction of the wicked, a state they will bring upon themselves because of their failure/refusal to repent, to follow God. And this MUST come not only because of this continued refusal, but because God is a just God. He must allow justice to run its course, undeterred by mercy--unless the offending party seeks that mercy through repentance

Churches built up to get gain, power over the flesh, to become popular: religion a popularity game, a means to riches, power?

"Led up as calves of the stall"; IN him they shall find pasture. He is the pasture, the field of glory.

2 Nephi 1
The promised land a place of refuge set apart "above all other lands" for those people whom God shall send.

As Lehi talks with his sons, he ratifies Nephi's position as prophet, bearing witness that Nephi has been and will continue to be sustained by "the power of God." So obey him, and you'll be blessed. How might that have felt for Laman and Lemuel, to have it come straight from Dad's mouth that when he was gone, Nephi would really be taking his father's place as prophet?

May not his daughters also have been present during this family meeting? If so, why are they not mentioned? And if not, why? Were they not allowed to hear, to be taught by their father? Why is Sariah the only woman named from Lehi's family? Why do we only know of his daughters from some passing reference made by Nephi about his sisters? Why must the scriptures be so patriarchal, so reflective of/centered on the male experience? Up to this point, the only times the women are mentioned is when Sariah comes up; in reference to childbirth and nursing (they gave plenty of suck even though they had to eat raw meat), their women having been made strong, like unto the men, enough so that they stopped complaining about the journey through the wilderness and just endured it--like the men; or on the ship when Nephi's wife is begging for L and L to untie him. Not really the most flattering references, including Sariah's grand appearance when Nephi writes how she complained about Lehi being "a visionary man" and that her sons were surely lost in the wilderness. Sure, she ends up doing a 180 and stops complaining, only to testify of HER HUSBAND'S faith.

Could some of this be due to Nephi's lack of concern for the affairs/experience of the women? To a cultural favoring of the male experience? To the notion that God works through his priesthood and the assumption that that's where we should keep our focus? Because it reflects the phallocentrism of all ancient scripture. Perhaps a combination of these factors.

Talker (Poem)

2010-01-21T09:17:00.004-07:00

I've had this one done for a bit, but I thought I'd let it age before I posted for feedback. And any you're willing to offer is welcome.

* * * *

Talker
(On Self Portrait at 33 [One Good Eye])

Face raucous enough in your canvas ballyhoo
to provoke a double-take--first look, you're
Dorian Gray; second, Adam intent on counting
his steps from the Fall, adding Eve, then
dividing by desire--you've solicited my sympathies.

So I slip you two bits, slip into your carnival
of flesh. But that's a bit redundant, isn't it?
Add carne (meat, flesh) to levare (lift, raise).
And I slip into your raising of flesh of
flesh. Doubled flesh. Flesh multiplied

in the yeasty cones of your one good eye as you
watch me slide into etymology's tent. Watch me
work my tongue from my aisle seat, feet raised
on the anapest's back, meter running in this cab
of a tent of a portrait of a poem

as you mime a forgettable death center stage. But
let's lay theatrics aside. Leave the carnival.
Go nurse back desire with a pint of oils and ink
in that pub of a future down the way. Let the flesh
slip slowly away like the sight in your other eye.

The one I can't help staring at, though that must
make you uncomfortable. So you insert
an awkward pause while you blink/I blink/you blink
and my fate wells up in your awkward bulb, then falls.
Past Dorian's sins. Adam's OCD. Past the folds of your

canvas skin. Into the spirits you poured today to keep
your brushes clear as they wave like seer-stones
across your Ouija board of a palette, conjuring Eve
from the rib you have buried beneath that gaze.
From the solace of scars raised like ballyhoo

from the serpent's garden carnival.

Just Found This

2010-01-20T09:49:00.002-07:00

At present, I'm featured on Black Rock and Sage's "Back Issues" page as the Ford Swetnam Prize Winner. They offer a teaser of my poem with a link to "Read More" that leads to the PDF version of 2009's journal. Here you can read the entirety of my brilliant (*cough*) poem; and if you skip back two pages from where the link takes you, you'll find "The Lull" then Paul Lindholdt's comment on "Submerged." Skip forward one page from the end of "Submerged," and you'll find "Siren."

Y'know. Just so you know. And because I'm all about self-promotion.

[/ego trip]

I Feel Almost Bohemian Now

2010-01-19T13:46:00.002-07:00

I've been asked to read some poems at a grad student literary reading this Friday. If any of my expansive readership lives in or near Pocatello or if you'd like to make the journey to Pocatello (yeah right, Tyler; you're not that important), I'm sure they wouldn't turn you away if you showed up to hear me read (along with the two other readers, of course: one a fiction writer, the other a non-fiction writer).

Here's the info in case you feel like stopping by:

WHAT: Idaho State Graduate Student Literary Reading
WHEN: Friday, January 22, 2010 @ 5:00 PM
WHERE: Held at the Kinport Coffee Company (Located inside the Kinport Junction on 1st street)

I've got 15-20 minutes to read and I'm trying to put my set list together (as it were). I plan on reading at least a few poems from my Browns and Rusts series, accompanied, in one way or another, by images from JKR's website. Any suggestions on must-reads?

Of Visions, Brotherhood, and Building Ships (Svithe)

2010-01-19T13:33:00.002-07:00

A day late and a dollar short, but here are my notes for last week. Feel free to discuss at will.

Notes on reading: 1.11-1.17

1.11 (1 Nephi 13)
Word changes between editions: 1840: "foundation of a great church"; 1990s: "formation of a great church." Interesting emendation considering the foundationlessness of the great and spacious building in Lehi's dream/Nephi's vision. The change suggests an attempt to unify the imagery, to make the angel's words consistent with the things he's asked Nephi to behold.

1840: "devil [...] was the foundation of it"; 1990s: "devil [...] was the founder of it." Ditto here. Though the institution has no foundation, it can---indeed, must---have a founder: one who establishes the guiding principles, or, more appropriately here, the lack thereof.

Desires of the great and abominable church: the desires/things/lusts of the world. Desiring the lusts if the world, endlessly seeking pleasure. How can a church claim to unite people with God while its vision is occupied/weighed down by/with the things of the world? In contrast, Joseph Smith authorized this vision: "a religion that does not REQUIRE the sacrifice of all things NEVER has the power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation." But I guess if the institution is great in its own eyes, distracted by and preoccupied with its own vain imaginations, become an abomination to God because of pride, it's not particularly concerned with the life and salvation of its members. It simply becomes a self-feeding and self-consuming ego-machine bent on relieving others of their will, their moral agency.

Reminder of conversation in class today: Columbus not the first European to set foot on American soil. Others before him. But was he the first "wrought upon" by the Spirit of God?

"They were white, and exceedingly fair and beautiful, like unto my people, before they were slain": might this reveal something of Nephi's prejudice, his bias towards his people, his seed? Implications?

1840: "plainness of the gospel of the Lord"; 1990s: "fullness of the gospel of the Lord"

"Mixture of thy seed" and "The seed of thy father": Essentially the same thing?

"I will bring forth unto them in mine own power, MUCH of my gospel": what about the fullness? Where is the fullness contained? Can we possess a fullness here and now?

Wonder if this section, where Nephi discusses the restoration of plain and precious gospel truths to the Gentiles, then to the seed of Lehi; and the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, was Moroni's source/inspiration for the title page. Much of the language is the same: gift and power of God, contain the covenants of the Lord, convincing of the Gentiles, and the remnant of the seed of my brethren, and also the Jews. Would make sense: the first great Nephite prophet inspirng the last. Implications?

1.12 (1 Nephi 14)
"Numbered among the house of Israel": adoption, inclusion. Assimilating the Other such that binary oppositions are swallowed up in Christ. Unites us under His common banner. Initiates us into the commune of Deity, the assembly of heaven, the Church of the Firstborn. Gives us one name, one label. Makes us His.

Irony: pit "digged for the destruction" of humanity to "be filled by those who digged it." God is an ironic Being---appreciative of irony. Uses irony to teach, to punish, even to strengthen. To expand our appreciation of paradox, perhaps?

Why the "whore of all the earth"? What implications does this image carry?

One of my favorite scriptures: 14:12-14: the power of God descending upon the saints, upon the few. The few a means of redemption for the many?

John and Nephi: partners in prophecy. Prophetic partners.

1.13 (1 Nephi 15)
"Carried away IN the spirit"; "caught away IN the Spirit of the Lord, yea, into an exceedingly high mountain" (11:1). Why not say "BY the spirit"? How is one carried away IN the spirit? Was this an actual, temporal displacement initiated/carried out by the spirit? Was Nephi physically carried away or was he wisped away in vision? Taken mentally, emotionally, spiritually, sensually to this sacred place? I suppose either is possible, but Nephi's language (IN the spirit and this: "after I had SEEN all these things," as in a vision or dream) suggests the latter: that his journey was made in spirit. This doesn't make it any less real or affective (for him or for us). It's simply another---perhaps more powerful (?)---means of experience: The Holy Spirit communing with the human spirit in a moving, real, meaningful, soul-searing way (the images imprinted on Nephi's mind and spirit).

"Hard to be understood": just because hard, doesn't mean inaccessible. Such understanding can only come through extended mental exertion: the means of working by faith.

"We CANNOT understand": no, you CAN. You just won't put forth the effort required to do so. Mental laziness an impediment to faith.

1840: "by the spirit of the Lord which was in our fathers"; 1990s: "in our father." One letter can make a significant difference in the meaning of a word. Here the difference is encapsulated in a single man's experience with the spirit, Lehi's, versus the experience of an entire lineage, the patriarchs of the House of Israel. Which entity are Laman and Lemuel more likely to believe and follow: the immediate experience of their own father, whom they dismiss as a mere visionary, an overzealous mystic, or the more distant experience of their ancestors? In either case, the 's' was removed in the recent revision, though either reading is supported by the context.

How effective/affective is Nephi's expository technique? He's very pointed, very specific; from what the record illustrates, he offers very little latitude to his brothers: "THIS is what out father meaneth"

"So much was his mind swallowed up in other things": overwhelmed to distraction from fundamental details. This is much how I've been feeling lately: swallowed up in too many things. How to strike a balance...

As Nephi conveys the things he spoke to his brothers, he addresses us directly: "I say unto you." Right in the middle of the paragraph. A layering of narrative. A reminder that Nephi was aware, perhaps acutely so, of his audience.

1.14 (1 Nephi 16)
Laman and Lemuel as opportunists (?): they repent when it's a matter of self-preservation, as when Nephi comes down on them for their disbelief or when the sons' bows fail and the only way for the family to get food is for everyone to stop murmuring so the Liahona will work. But when the opportunity arises that they might (possibly) be able to do away with Lehi and Nephi, they take it back. They forget/deny their own experiences with God (e.g. the angel coming to visit them, the voice of God speaking to them in various other manifestations) and try to appropriate a position of power. Yet, if they were really leaders---something they claim to want when they assert their birthright (WE are the "elder brethren"; and Nephi's just a power grabber)---instead of opportunitists, when their first hunting trip failed because all the bows broke down, they would have stepped up and found a way to get food (like Nephi did), instead of blaming Nephi for something that was just as much their failure. Their repentance is never genuine, never truly efficacious (as in able to change their natures, to turn them to God), because they keep returning to their sins. They don't take the process (or much else that really matters) seriously. I get the sense that perhaps one of the only things that kept them from killing Lehi and Nephi was Sariah's presence. They come across, at times, as having a mother fixation (symptoms?) and I'm convinced (though there's not much textual evidence to support this) that they did respect their mom or at least were concerned about what she thought. (She's never included in their threats, at least; and that might just be significant.) Hence, when she and Lehi (who they didn't respect at all, it seems) were gone, they could finally act on their desire to kill Nephi, a desire that may have been subordinate to their love for mom. But with her out of the picture, they could give place for the (formerly) lesser desires and move to act out their brother-killing fantasies, something God foiled by warning Nephi and that subsequently launched a centuries-long sibling rivalry and the almost-destruction of a race.

1.15-16 (1 Nephi 17)
"Arise, and get thee into the mountain": a sacred place, a place of greater, clarified communion with God. A place above the cares of the world, a refuge. A natural temple, a temple of Nature. Where nature meets God, where pantheism sidles up/yields to monotheism. A place to witness how God has ordered the space, both above and below. Must make time in my life to worship in such a place more frequently.

"Whither shall I go, that I may find ore to molten": not only a witness of Nephi's faith (he's always a step ahead). Also a suggestion (along with his awe over the workmanship of Laban's sword and the Liahona) of the family (or at least Nephi's) profession: metalworkers. I remember An institute class I attended with my brother-in-law where the instructor, Jeffrey R. Chadwick, suggested as much. It makes sense in light of Nephi's fascination with how Laban's sword and the Liahona were constructed and with Nephi's understanding of how to make tools: the only thing he initially asks (according to the record) is where to find ore. Not, uh, where do I begin? Or, how am I supposed to do that?He knows he has to get the metal, then make and keep a fire hotter than normal with the use of a bellows, then how to make the tools. Not things, I imagine, that are everyday knowledge. And withe the detail he gives about God instructing him to build the ship, how he went into the mount oft to be instructed, I think if he needed help with the making of tools, he would have recorded the process. But, again, the only inquiry here is, so where do I find the ore I need to make tools?

"The Lord esteemeth all flesh in one; he that is righteous is favored of God"; seems contradictory. How can God consider us all equally yet still favor some over others? Exactly because he can consider us all equally. His omniscience cuts through the superficial, straight to the marrow, into our character, ou basic nature. Thus he can weigh us all equally against the standards we've received, without bias. And those who live according to the standards they know are blessed and favored. He lets righteousness speak for itself, in terms of intent, attitude, and action. "Esteem" as "honor": so even though God honors all flesh, all the embodied as his own, as his heirs, those who strive toward a more perfect union between spirit and flesh, who purify the flesh by developing their spirituality, by favoring the things of God over the things of this world, are more blessed/favored by God than those who do not.

1.17 (1 Nephi 18)
The Lord knows how to build ships. How sweet is that? Does he have a crew of angels who know how to build awesome ships that he sent to inspire Nephi, to whisper instructions in his ear?

Nephi's obedience made Laman and Lemuel eat their words: "Um, so, yeah, Nephi. Remember before, how we said you were a nutter for thinking you could build a ship? Well, um, sorry, little brother. The ship's awesome. You did a great job. We'll sail in it without murmuring...too much." Right...

The family brought seeds. A means for them to conquer, to colonize, to order, to familiarize the promised land. A way for them to make it home by bringing along old world seeds.

Once on the ship, Laman and Lemuel "did forget by what power they had been brought thither." Big surprise. The real surprise would've been if they'd remembered. Instead, they simply fall into old rhythms. It's just easier that way: to do things like they've always been done. But Nephi's teaching a different lesson here. When his brothers drink themselves to stupidity and hostility, tying him up and making the Liahona stop working because of their more violent than usual disobedience, they've denied themselves the birthright, which has fallen to Nephi, something they can't stand because tradition dictates otherwise, Nephi sticks close to God and thus facilitates their deliverance from the storm by God's power. One moral: don't hold too tightly to traditional ways of seeing the world because that can limit the possibility for miracles (no matter how small), for deliverance from human limitation.

Laman and Lemuel have devolved enough in matters if faith that the only thing that can change their minds from their determined course here is the threat of drowning, of a terrible death and a watery grave. Because of the thickness of their skin, their lack of attention to God, nothing less could get through.

Mother & Child (Poem)

2010-01-14T09:26:00.005-07:00

With the last poem I posted, I mentioned I've been working on a short series inspired by older sister's struggle with infertility. Here's another of those poems (which I plan to surprise her with sometime in the near future. Shh! Don't tell! Though I'm pretty sure she doesn't follow my blog and that she's pretty busy taking care of her new baby, so I think the surprise is safe), spurred on by J. Kirk Richards' Mother and Child (Yellow).

Any feedback you care to offer is more than welcome. Because, though I had my sister in mind as the primary audience when I wrote, then rewrote it (then rewrote it again), I was also trying to reach beyond that. And you, my faithful reader(s), are one indication I have of my poetry's strengths and weaknesses.

Anyway. Here it is.

* * * * *

Mother & Child

1.
A matter of geometry, these two:
mother and son bisecting desire,
trilling between syllables of miracle
on the insatiate tip of God's tongue,
plotting points of spirit-cum-body-cum-
solitude across the palate of this
Cartesian life.
                        Like Euclid pictured
space, cropped it tight, then pinned it
to his wall. Dressed the plane's blank stare
with theorems intersecting as bodies
at birth, flesh strung on strands
of one point six one eight: golden ratio
flung, lasso-like, from Gabriel's tongue
around Mary's vestal flame. Around
Elizabeth's reproach:
                              a woman
kneeling bedside, telling tissues
wrung dry as a rosary run out of beads.
As her uterus chapped like a mid-drought
riverbed: no rain to replenish
the abyss. No rain to bed dust stirred
by mourning doves’ grief. No rain to
tune her divining rod to God’s promises.

2. After the in vitro fell through
still, she prayed. Laughed with Sarah,
patron saint of laughing at God’s vows,
through deprivation’s bearing down.
Birthed one grand guffaw as Sarah
brushed hope like dust from
a ninety-year womb, strung motes
of desire on golden strands, then
willed her the rosary. Suggested
she hold tight the umbilical, telling
its folds until God gave in, said He’d
trade her maternity for that altar of a laugh
she'd knelt at ten years, stained month
after month with grief’s insatiate memory.

3.
The morning she rang with her adoption news—
late-teenage birth-mother, boy due in a month,
and her: without crib, clothes, blankets;
her guestroom of a nursery barely
broken in beyond a few days’ hospitality—
the annunciation half-raptured, half-
stalled through the line. As if she
thought the angel divining her son
from that womb of a crystal ball
would say, “He’s yours,” fingers crossed
behind the vow.
                        Not that I blame
her hesitation: Subtract seven years from
that minor denouement and you've got
the elegy she hyphenated upon hearing
we were pregnant: "That-makes-me-so-mad."
Meaning, "Cruel logic, this: sibling mathematics.
Three years I've squared flesh
by my husband's flesh. Primed numbers
with an actuary’s acumen. And
all I get? Endometriosis divided by
infertility’s stigma in the State
of 'So, How Many Kids?' While they
slipped out of contraception a month
and, voilà, fruit the size of my desire.
God? That-makes-me-so-mad."

I never told her I heard her post-benediction
more-petition-than-expletive. Never
confessed that her brooding slipped
through as she turned from my call
to refuge in wrath equals grief equals
me, holding the dial-tone seven years.
Counting the absence beneath her words
like abacus beads. Keeping track
of the meter until she could shape
her next line around, "He's mine."
Breath compressed, released, caressed
across the palate to relief:
                                    Zackary.
Zackary. Name moist enough to tame
the cowlick thick, like hers,
across his pate. Enough to swaddle him
to sleep the first night—and the second,
third, fourth, fifth—he cozied into the hollow
worn beneath her breast by infertility’s slow
drip (gnawing constant as incontinent pipes
up ten years with the pinch) and slept. Slipped
in and out of infancy while she traced his
fingers tight as rosary beads across
his palm, Amen-ed, counted again. More
slowly then, as she timed her body to his:
his rise, fall, rise against her slight repose.
As she mapped his subtle topography
into the golden bloom of dawn.

Dreams, Visions, Prophecy, Family, Narrative, Vanity (Svithe)

2010-01-11T15:09:00.004-07:00

My reading notes for the week. Any discussion is welcome.

1.4 (1 Nephi 5)
Two things stand out here: 1) Lehi as a visionary man, a prophet, one blessed with the spirit of prophecy ("would God that all the Lord's people were prophets"); 2) the power of genealogy, of knowing one's family ties/bonds. Nephi (through his narrative about Lehi) connects the two ideas: prophecy and genealogy; situates his father, and thus his family, himself, and his narrative, in terms of an ongoing dialogue with God and with his genetic & ethnic heritage---the tradition of faith passed from Joseph to his posterity. Suggests Nephi's understanding of/connection to the Abrahamic covenant, as passed through Jacob and his seed, a covenant that would bring Lehi and his seed out of captivity and that would allow them to deliver others from captivity (just as Joseph preserved Jacob's seed from famine with his position in the house of Pharaoh). How might this relate to me and my position in life? If I am faithful, God promises to make me a major influence on those around me. So I must be more faithful.

1.5 (1 Nephi 6-7)
"The fullness of mine intent": the author's intent matters, especially here; by aligning my reading with Nephi's intent (that he may "persuade [wo/]men to come unto the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and be saved") I participate with him in the work of redemption. I allow him to influence my thinking about God. I must look beyond the places where his language betrays weakness and ask, What might Nephi have meant by this? I must seek the spirit, which can carry/bear witness of intention from soul to soul, mind to mind. I must remain open to shades of meaning, where the literal blends with the figurative, the figurative with the literal. I must realize some meaning is lost in translation but trust that the translator left much meaning intact, that he was likely tutored by Nephi, if not at the time of translation, but later, and that Nephi approved of the new language and any revisions. I must also realize that my intention as a reader matters, that my own reading of Nephi's words will draw upon my own experience, my own context and the union of my world with Nephi's world can spark new meanings and enhance the things Nephi meant to say such that the language takes on deeper, personal meanings with each reading. And that such interpretive movements are allowed for by Nephi's suggestion that to get the "fullness" of his language, I must be vulnerable to his rhetoric, his attempts to persuade; I must approach his narrative with faith that it can bring me closer to God ("than any other book"), that its language as recorded by inspired and faithful men, however it may fail, is a means to salvation. In other words, to get the most out of the book, I must engage it with the desire, with the intent to be saved. Because in things spiritual, intention matters.

The family unit is central to Nephi's narrative, to his theology. With this focus, he suggests that the family is central to salvation, even that it is the main forum in which we are to work out our salvation. Even amidst dysfunction. No, especially amidst dysfunction, since, after all, we're all human, all just a little bit dysfunctional. The family is the site of the highest AND the most mundane of our redemptive rituals.

1.6 (1 Nephi 8)
Dreams, visions, prophecy: the language of revelation, the language of metaphor, of collective meaning.

Desire central to Lehi's dream: his desire to partake, to share. The desire of other wanderers to cleave to the rod. Fruit pure, white, desirous above all other fruit.

Family also central to the dream: Lehi is very aware throughout where his family is in relation to himself, what they are doing/aren't doing, where they should be headed. And after waking: shares the dream with all the feeling of a tender parent: com/passionate, inspired, conscientious storytelling. Infusing narrative---and through narrative, audience---with life.

"Lost from his view": narrative told from Lehi's perpective, as mediated by/through Nephi's perspective and intent (see chapter 6). Does this necessarily mean these people were completely lost? Or just "lost from his view"? Also: implies some bias in the account. What's left out (see chapter 11)? Exaggerated? Emphasized? Lehi's worried about Laman and Lemuel and Nephi's remembering the narrative thirty years and a personal pronoun removed (not his experience---at least this time---but his father's). How might Nephi's later vision of the same thing and the interpretation he's given by the angel inform this retelling of his father's dream? Or might he simply be copying the narrative straight over from his father's plates? He does say he can't write all of his father's words, then he abridges them some before returning fully to his own language (in chapter one, he states outright that he is abridging the record of his father first). But the act of abridging is also an act of narrative. Piecing together someone else's words is just as much an act of storytelling as is piecing your own words together. What has he decided to cut, then? Just more of the same? May have to ask them both some eternity...

1.7 (1 Nephi 9)
See. Hear. Speak. The obligation of a prophet, of a minister for God/a minister to God's people: to pursue and to relate---with all the senses, with the while soul, the entire being---the stories of God and his tender mercies over his children. To show what he has done, what he can/will do, for the faithful in all ages and throughout eternity.

If language is a central concern of the book, so is the purpose and power of narrative. Might this be one of the "special purpose[s]," the "wise purpose[s]" for the book as a whole? To explore/engage narratives of faith? Seems part of Nephi's purpose for writing: he's very explicit in the opening chapter that he intends to "show," by telling stories, "that the tender mercies of the Lord are over all those whom he hath chosen, because of their faith, to make them mighty even unto the power of deliverance." Might narrative itself be a power of deliverance, a means to salvation? Faith is, after all, a function of words and imagination. Of mental exertion on the words of God as mediated through the words of His prophets. Words upon words upon words. Faith as an act of literary criticism, of interpreting and re-visioning the narratives of human experience with the divine.

1.8 (1 Nephi 10)
Nephi's story naturally blends with the stories of this around him: in this case, his father and his brothers, those his mind is constantly occupied with---as he tries to live up to his father's example and to be an example, a teacher, leader for his wayward brothers. This illustrates for me the notion that our lives are intertextual, that our stories cannot be removed from their communal base. Indeed they SHOULD NOT be removed from their place at the intersection of lives. Otherwise they lose their power and their promise.

Desire to see, to hear, to know. Desire makes the difference. And it has to come from within. The desired results won't come from posturing, from trying to appear worthy of the blessing. The faith, the desire has to be real. Or God (and others) will see right through it.

1.9 (1 Nephi 11)
Desire. Belief. Knowledge. Nephi pondered on his desire. Desire generally an indefinite feeling the deserves elaboration, articulation, something that can't happen unless I define the feeling by first exploring it. Following it to its depths. There I'll discover if the desire is good, real; or otherwise. If it is expanding or contracting my faith, what kind of knowledge it's leading to, and how to best act on it. Because unless acted upon, the desire really is wasted(?)/can't be experienced to its fullness.

Faith a manifestation of desire? Maybe more rightly a function of desire. Leading to manifestations that deepen desire, that expand faith, that sharpen my vision of eternal realities.

Neph's vision of the tree of life: look, behold, see/seen/saw. A sensual witness: one literally based in/come through the senses: sight, smell, touch. To desire is to believe is to see is to desire is to believe is to see (and on).

Why the focus here on sight? Not just any type of sight: spiritual sight. Discernment. Available to me if I will but desire and seek as Nephi.

But where does doubt fit in all of this? For my faith to increase, I must doubt. I must ask questions and look for the answers. Could it be that I must learn to desire the questions as much, if not more, than the amswers?

1.10 (1 Nephi 12)
The 12 Nephite disciples are "righteous forever": the angel says this centuries before they're even born. Suggests not only their foreordination to serve, but that righteousness in mortality is an extension of righteousness in premortality. And that such continued righteousness can be sealed upon the individual before their passage beyond mortality. And that this seal, the reception of the second Comforter, the second anointing (at the hand of Christ) was set in place, but not formalized, well before birth and was only formalized because they'd followed the course of faith in premortality, then again in mortality. Does God know us so well that He can gauge our reactions in mortality so as to be able to judge us, to ordain a reward BEFORE we've made the choice, as in this case? I believe He does, that after eons of observation He knows our temperaments well enough to not be surprised at our choices and to be confident in foreordaining us to certain positions (not necessarily ALL positions within the Church) according to those temperaments, our faith, and our needs for progression. Indeed, because of his omniscience, He can see the end from the beginning, can see our place in the eternal scheme, and set our lives in motion so that we best fulfill the measure of our creation. (At least that's my present understanding.) But what place does this make for those not included in the "righteous forever" category? Has God allowed for the free exercise of agency in His foreordinations? I have to believe He has, since agency was the principle at the core of the premortal conflict between God and his followers and Lucifer and his angels. But what of those who fail to fulfill their ordination? What of those who fall away from their faith? What of those who don't live up to their promises? Is there allowance made for them in God's plans? I think the different degrees of postmortal glory provide a good indication of this allowance: there are bodies telestial, bodies terrestrial, bodies celestial, each ordered according to the light they've recieved during their existence. Each rewarded according to their conformity to eternal law, to the transformative power they've allowed these laws to have on their being. But are such bodies ordered so (celestial/terrestrial/telestial) from the beginning? I want to say no, but must settle for now with, I don't know. I believe that, since God is no respecter of persons, we were all organized from the same substance, all given an equal opportunity to succeed. And that some advanced more than others in premortality, earning certain privileges and responsibilities in mortality. And that that may account for some of the inequality here and now. But I'm loathe to say that all inequality is the result of premortal faith or the lack thereof. Some may result from the natural course of the universe, some from the choices of those who came before us. But I can't account for all of it. And I have to settle my seeking enough, for now, to leave some questions unanswered and to reach for the celestial order to the best of my ability. To worry about my faith and my efforts toward charity (as in Ether 12:37).

Nephi's vision provides a good overview of the entire Book of Mormon, as he watches his seed and his brothers' seed venture across the promised land, move in and out of God's favor, and, eventually, meet their untimely end.

"Vain imaginations": vain meaning both 1) conceited/having an exaggerated sense of self-importance AND 2) fruitless. The imaginations, the dreams of those in the great and spacious building are 1) centered on the self, on promoting the self, gratifying personal desires, satisfying lusts, with no concern for how such vanity, such egotistical visions might influence/impose on others. Because we act upon and shape our lives according to that which we think about, such vain imaginations draw us inward, inflate the ego, insulate us from and blind us to the needs of those around us and how we might use our unique gifts and talents to meet those needs. As such, these imaginations are 2) fruitless. They bear no fruit in our own lives and in the lives of those around us. They offer nothing to sustain us when challenges come. They are not wholesome, they do not increase strength or the power to do good. Such mental exertion is not, then, a means to faith. It is a preoccupation, a distraction, drawing the mind away from the things of God. A stark contrast here between those focused on the fruit of the Tree of Life and those focused on fruitless fantasies.

Uncertain Repast (Poem)

2010-01-05T17:30:00.010-07:00

Thought I'd try something different and post a poem in various stages of revision. So a poem-more-in-process-than-usual. Here's what I started with:

Legion

...because she was barren...
-Genesis 25:21

longing loss uncertain memory solitude loss repose
repast replenish multiply multiply hunger wait conceive
conflate design repeat design desire loss reproach
undone desire promised promises laughter laughter laugh

repast replenish multiply multiply hunger wait conceive
uncertain wounded blood-let fallen weary weary blood
undone desire promised promises laughter laughter laugh
to laugh to pray to bleed to be forsaken God forget-me-not

uncertain wounded blood-let fallen weary weary blood
remember memory silent silence silence wait design
to laugh to pray to bleed to be forsaken God forget-me-not
undone desire repeat undone legion desire undone

remember memory silent silence silence wait design
conflate design repeat design desire loss reproach
undone desire repeat undone legion desire undone
uncertain memory longing solitude longing loss because

I've been working on some poems lately inspired by my sister's long battle with infertility, a venture ten years in the making that culminated in her and her husband's recent adoption of a little boy. One night a few weeks ago as I was trying to re-work a poem I was stuck on, the first line of this poem came into my head. And I just kept going with it, shaping the lines into a pantoum as I cataloged words.

As I worked to focus and compress the language, I came up with this:

repast: replenish multiply: conflate
conceive desire design divine divide
reproach: divided by: hunger 
undone desire promised promises laughter laughter laugh

But I only got a stanza into it before I realized that wasn't where I wanted to go. Before I realized that approach wasn't quite giving me what I wanted.

So I started over and worked it into this:

Uncertain Repast: A Psalm

...because she was barren...
-Genesis 25:21

come Sarah Rebekah
            Rachel come come
                                    multiply come
desire design conflate conceive divine divide
at the body's uncertain repast
                                                come eat come
replenish come wounded blood-let weary

come desire design conflate conceive divine divide
come forget forgotten
                                    forsaken
                                                God forget-me-not
come replenish come wounded blood-let weary
undone fallen
                        trailing crimson promise
                                                            come to laughter to

forget
            forgotten
                                    forsaken God forget-me-not
my wilderness-deep appetite
undone fallen trailing crimson promise
                                                            come to laughter to
laugh to pray to bleed to birth to verb to come to

wilderness-deep appetite to
the body's uncertain repast come eat
                                                            come
laugh pray bleed birth verb
                                                come
multiply come

You'll notice some of the language remains from version one and you can still find the pantoum-ic repetitions, but I decided to explode the lines a bit, a choice I made because I didn't want punctuation in the poem, but I did want to separate ideas in places (though in others I wanted them to stay more ambiguous) and to highlight certain words.

The form's a bit of a departure from my norm, but I wanted to try something different in hopes that the form would jibe with the content. And that's where I'll leave you for now. As always, feedback is welcome and appreciated.

(Svithe) Resolve:

2010-01-04T13:41:00.006-07:00

I'm making no resolutions this year. I'm just going to refocus on the resolves I made in October during General Conference, things I've let slip through the cracks for any number of reasons (but mainly because I'm by nature a slacker, as evidenced by my complete lack of presence here in the past couple of weeks).

In line with with Resolve 3 (Cultivate greater spiritual discernment by recommitting to the small and simple things), I'm engaging the Book of Mormon differently. Last year, I purchased the Penguin Classics Edition to see if reading the text without footnotes would facilitate a different reading experience. And while it didn't do so much at first, I just recently decided to put my iPhone to a more spiritual use: by downloading a Book of Mormon podcast to iTunes and listening as I follow along in my hard copy, then taking notes in between chapters using my "Notes" application, which I plan to post here for your svithing enjoyment.

And so far, so good.

Here are my notes from the first three days of twenty-ten:

* * * * *

Notes on reading: 1.1-1.3
1.1 (1 Nephi 1)

Language a central issue/focus of the book.

Ministry: teaching, pattern of prophetic ministry (struck more and more by the similarity between Joseph's First Vision and Nephi's version of Lehi's vision: pillar of fire, visitation, receiving a book, call to ministry, persecution, etc.), ministering (of) angels (continually struck with Sherem's deathbed confession: the Christ, the Holy Ghost, and the ministering of angels)

"They came down and went forth": Earth filled with hosts of ministers

"The redemption of THE WORLD": the Earth itself and its inhabitants

1.2 (1 Nephi 2-3)
"To leave the land of their inheritance": sacrifice ("a religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has the power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation" [ref]; the neccesity and power of sacrifice; what am I willing to sacrifice for the good of my family?) and wandering in the wilderness ("We shall not cease from exploration. / And the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started / and know the place for the first time" [ref]; BOM highlights the redemptive journey into the wilderness, where, at the mercy of God and Nature, one becomes wholly dependent on God, learns to rely on Him for life and salvation, and thus gains power)

Theme throughout book: the single righteous person speaking with power against many: Lehi to the Jews/Laman and Lemuel, Nephi to Laman/Lemuel, Abinadi, Nephi (in 3 Nephi), Alma and Amulek, Mormon, Moroni, Abish, etc., all given power/strength/words by the Holy Ghost; magnified by the Godhead to accomplish their work

Pattern: gaining God's favor through obedience in action as well as attitude

Human language, language of God, language of revelation: the latter is one medium that bridges the gap between the former two and can be the means for perfecting(?) human language, of making up for some of the failures of human language

Laban (and Laman and Lemuel): The dangers of materiality, of lusting after, of coveting, worldly goods; of allowing them to supersede communion with God/things spiritual ("Spirituality is the consciousness of victory over self and communion with the Infinite" David O. McKay)

1.3 (1 Nephi 4)
Persistence: Nephi won't give up, finds another way in, even after two failures---like Alma taking the back way into Ammonihah or Samuel into/over Zarahemla; constrained by the Spirit with the best course of action. I need to be more sensitive to this course, to the spirit's whispering as to what course might be best/do the most good in/for the world in all aspects of my life (digital included: blogging [AMV and Chasing] and Twitter especially)

The power of promises and personal integrity; I need to be more integrated around moral principles; musn't toss to and fro; must be strong, covenant-oriented in word and deed, in faith and works.

Me, In print; or, Another Shameless RUD Plug

2010-01-04T13:35:00.004-07:00

So I've made it into ISU's Department Newsletter two semesters in a row now: Spring and Fall '09. Yay for me, huh?

Terresa Wellborn: "Shedding"

2009-12-22T12:14:00.004-07:00

(It's been a while since my last "Mormon Poetry Project" reading, so I thought I'd drop at least one more on you before the end of the year. Enjoy.)

Yesterday, in my continuing quest to track down Mormon poets, I happened upon Terresa Wellborn's blog, "The Chocolate Chip Waffle [Eating Words and Drinking Poetry]" and was struck by the quality of her poetry. Many of the blog poets I've come across have (how shall I say this?) good intentions, but their poetry suffers from sentimentality, which I define as unearned emotion. But I didn't find that here. Terresa's voice is distinctive, clear, and strong and her phrasing is often striking.

In Terresa's poem "Shedding," which is about just that: shedding old "skin," I see places where her language could easily turn cliche, but she keeps it fresh by introducing a fresh comparison, as here: "a bone dry grandmother / who can't be mulched, replanted." Here: "friend's voices rasping like / shells against sand." Here: "I shudder, spent as a marigold / dropping its petals." And here: "iridescent skin / listening to the sun." I especially like how she uses "listening" in a place where many might have said "glistening." The parallel between the words surely acknowledges the latter, but she says a lot more about hearing corporeal experience by leaving off the "g."

I think these are the real bright spots in this poem and I felt them worth highlighting in terms of my present project, especially because such textual moments as these leave me rethinking my own language and my own experience.

Anyway, more of Terresa's poems can be found here, if you're interested in further reading. I think they're well-worth at least a few minutes engagement, if not more.

Done. And. Done.

2009-12-18T11:13:00.003-07:00

I submitted my last paper early this morning. Too early, really, to remember the exact time. But it's submitted.

And I'm officially on winter break.

Time to dive into the projects I've been playing at for a couple of months. Here's the first of three somewhat related enterprises on which I would love your feedback:

*Drafting a course in Mormon literature for a program internship.

I'm tentatively calling this "Reading the Mormon Experience: Contemporary Latter-day Saint Fiction, Poetry, and Drama." (That's the l-o-n-g title). I've considered making this a survey of Mormon literary history, starting with four weeks spent wading through Mormon lit's beginnings (the first century: 1830-1930)---reading early sermons, histories, auto/biographies, letters/journals/diaries, fiction, and poetry. But I don't know if I can justify spending---then spending the rest of the semester with more contemporary texts, but I'm not sure if I want to justify reading things from the first century when there are sources I could turn to that provide a fairly good review of this period, its significance for later Mormon lit, and the main concerns undertaken by Mormon lit. I'm thinking especially of Terryl Givens' People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture and Eugene England's "Dawning of a Brighter Day." Can you think of any others?

I wonder especially about justifying the first century stuff since this would be for a Idaho State and would constitute the first course of its kind in the department (as far as I know). I'm thinking, for the time being, that I should stick with texts that would be considered quality literature from the department's perspective (if that makes any sense). Or am I just glossing over a part of Mormon literary history that's needed to contextualize later work?

Aside from those concerns, I'm really interested in exploring the contemporary Mormon experience through contemporary Mormon fiction, poetry, and drama. And there's plenty of high quality stuff to occupy a semester (and beyond). I've started a list, but before I post that, I wonder what texts you informed readers of Mormon literature would like to see explored in such a course. Thoughts?

(More to come.)

Didn't Expect That...

2009-12-12T12:05:00.002-07:00

Last week when I posted "When Twilight Studies Meets Mormon Studies" on AMV, I didn't expect the conversation to extend past the day. But, as of last night, it's still going strong. Part of the continued discussion, I think, has to do with appearance of an AMV newbie who has asked some great questions. And AMV's community of readers has responded with great respect that's moved the discussion, at least this is how I see it, onto common rhetorical ground. It's been a great example for me of the possibilities of responsible, respectful dialogue between people of different backgrounds, different faiths.

On another note, it has also shown me the worth of discussing Twilight in terms of its cultural presence (worldwide: the commenter, Sharon, is from Australia) and its unique grounding in Meyer's Mormonism. Last night I stumbled upon a comment about the uselessness of such efforts on the Mormon Apologetic and Discussion Board. And, imagine this: my recent Dialogue review is at the center of the brief discussion. How fun for me.

I also stumbled across another brief discussion of my review at Caitlyn's "Book Scoop" Blog. This one is much more positive, however. It begins by positing a young woman, a BYU-I student, sitting at a table reading *gasp* Twilight. Then Caitlyn moves into discussing the "why" of the book's popularity, specifically within Mormon circles of young adults. And, imagine this (again): she uses something from my review for justification.

And one final note: A revised version of my review (and of the revision of that review, "Toward a Mormon Gothic") will be published in the forthcoming issue of Sunstone.

As if my ego needed more inflating, but...yes! Validation! My meager Twilight studies efforts aren't wholly useless. Someone's finding merit in them, despite the objections some have to serious study of such "minor" literature.

The Big Three-oh (Plus a Revision)

2009-12-05T09:40:00.003-07:00

In honor of the blessed occasion, a revision of "After Winter Nursing" in which I attempt to clarify and unify the poem's imagery and (per Luisa's request) give readers the chance for a mental breath via periods.

All the usuals apply.

Oh, and Happy Birthday to me.

*

After Winter Nursing

I imagine myself newborn. Mouth
dripping with nipple and milk
warm as the rest between breaths

when the flesh goes lax against
death. Stutters between syllables
of desire. Cozies up to the grave

as to memories nursed
over the mourning dove's elegy
the winter Keats slipped beneath

my skin. Nestled into the swaddling
mother knit around my soul
before she raised me to breasts

heavy as temptation. Latched me on
to her heritage, Eve calling come
eat from the kitchen as she filled

an eight by three by six basin
with desire enough to top off
the abyss. To trigger the contraction

of God's womb, Eden's walls bearing
down on my hunger. Birthing stars
like purled bodies

sweating as snow down a window
fogged by childhood wanting in.
Panting its catechism.

Asking what it means when
the mourning dove sings even though
winter’s come. Even though

the dove’s coo may just be a coo.
Even though I’ve been asking
since Keats came in from the cold

when a bird’s just a bird. Snow just snow.
Flesh just flesh. Death just death. God
just breath on a memory, marking

where I buried placenta and soul
in this landscape suddenly blank
as DNA the moment of conception.

Base pairs copulating like voices
singing back-up in a dream. The one
where I'm Adam. Or is it Eve? Keats?

My mother? God? Me? Sitting opposite
winter. Watching question marks
punctuate a garden: sprouts turned

fruit-bearing trees, branches heavy
with burial urns heavy with milk
still warm as the rest between breaths.

So Proud

2009-12-03T10:38:00.004-07:00

The six-year-old wrote her first poem last night and it's worth blockquoting:

I jab a crab and
land flat on sand.

I love how she disrupts the iamb by throwing "flat" in there. I sense a master poet in the making...

Today on AMV

2009-12-02T11:53:00.001-07:00

Where Twilight Studies meets Mormon Studies: Setting the Record Straight. Come join in the fun.

Mormon Artist and Me: My Honorable Mention

2009-11-30T10:03:00.003-07:00

Earlier this year (March 30, to be specific), I extolled my own virtues as a poet by apprising the world (or at least the three or four of you who follow my blog) that one of my poems had taken an honorable mention in Mormon Artist's inaugural literature contest (for writer's under thirty). Well, Ben Crowder and crew have finally released the magazine's Special Contest Issue. And there I am: poem, interview, essay on my poem (by Ty Campbell), and all.

Ah---it's nice to be recognized every once in a while.

But more importantly, it's great to see what other young Mormon writers are doing right now. There's some good stuff on the other end of this link, so I encourage you to do some exploring---to read Davey Morrison Dillard's poem and play, Sarah Page's poem, Eliza Campbell's essay, James Goldberg's stories, and the interviews and essays associated with each writer. It's a pleasure to be included in this crowd.

And because I can and because the magazine had only limited space for the interviews, I'm going to post more of the Q/A I had with Ty Campbell.

Enjoy as you bask in the light of my brilliance---or at least in the back light from your computer screen. Because let's face it: that's likely far more brilliant than my dim wits.

* * * *

My Interview with Mormon Artist: Extended Edition

1. [Part II of this question didn't make the final cut. Part I was "What was your process for writing 'For the Man in the Red Jacket'?", answered here.] How long did you work on [the poem]? What if any revisions did you make? How did you decide on the three line stanzas?

Running and writing---writing as I run---has been a successful combination for me, with this poem as with other texts I've written. As is the case with "For the Man in the Red Jacket," I started writing with feet to pavement, transcribed my thoughts onto my laptop as soon as I got home, then hit a dead end. So I shelved the poem to give the experience time to ripen. Some months later, I picked it up again---I think at this time it was titled "Grace"---and was able to dredge up the more lasting details of the experience. After I'd tinkered with it for a few more days, I re-shelved it because I wasn't comfortable with the ending. I think at that point it made direct reference to me being Mormon and of course I've made time for grace---something along those lines. But, for some reason, that just didn't sit right. Chalk it up to feeling that approach was somewhat self-righteous, somewhat self-serving, but I couldn't leave it at that and feel like I was being true to the man's question.

Again, some months later, I picked up the poem and was pleased with much of what I'd written, though the ending still bothered me. Endings are difficult beasts to handle: tame them too much and, like the oversized, excessively slobbery family dog, they may just leave the reader with a big, sloppy kiss on the way out the door; yet leave them wild and they may turn rabid, biting the reader a bit too hard during play, so much so that the visitor leaves offended or hurt and never returns. (The analogy's a bit rough, but I think the idea behind it works.) So I reworked the final two stanzas to include imagery that ties back into the epigraph and to the religious uses and symbolism of water. I also renamed the poem to let the man in the red jacket know (though I'm certain he'll never read the poem) that his words didn't go unheard and to remind myself that maybe my words do things beyond their immediate purpose, sinking in some way into another soul, helping them, perhaps, become more as they'd like to be.

As for the three-line stanzas, it was more an aesthetic decision than anything; that is, I like how the three-line stanza looks on the page, how it ties the lines, the words, the ideas together.

[...]

4. I sense a note of sardonic commentary in the poem; is this something that comes out only in your writing, or is this part of your personality? Are you more likely to write in a more ironic tone than you speak? Why or why not?

My patriarchal blessing reminds me that I have an alert and inquiring mind, which to me implies the ability (among other things) to observe closely and think critically about the varieties of human experience, an ability refined further by my academic training as a literary scholar. This tendency to view things with a critical eye (something I've come to consider as both blessing and curse) makes me sensitive, I think, to what's going on beneath the surface. As I see it, the skillful use of irony (something I'm continually working on developing) is one way of getting at and commenting on these subterranean movements and of poking a little fun at ourselves in the process (as I do in the poem).

Having said that, I don't necessarily claim to be an ironic person. (Maybe that's the irony, though---am I being ironic if I claim to be or not to be ironic?) I'm critical, yes; sarcastic, at times; definitely interested in the workings of paradox; and I try to be witty (though I probably fail more than I succeed here). And all of these seem to part of what it means to be ironic. So maybe irony is more a part of my personality than I thought, though it probably comes out in my writing more pointedly than in my everyday expressions, simply because the written word is by far more focused and compressed than the quotidian.

5. What do you think of the current opportunities available to Mormon creative artists? Do you feel that you are limited by people's perceptions of your faith? What have you done with your writing in order to reach a larger audience?

Though I'm not as apprised as I'd like to be about the numerous opportunities available to Mormon artists worldwide, I'm encouraged by many of the current directions in Mormon arts and letters, especially those that move toward the creation of an expansive community of Mormon artists, one that increasingly includes voices from beyond the Intermountain West and that makes some effort to incorporate artists from outside the United States in their dialogue (though we still have a ways to go in this regard). I'm convinced that the networking capabilities of the Internet play (and will continue to play) a significant role in this community shaping and expansion, as illustrated in the numbers participating in the various Mormon arts and culture blogs and other online forums, such as this magazine.

Such movement across the World Wide Web has further opened opportunities for us to alter our own and other people's perceptions of our faith and our culture, including our arts and letters. I know my own participation on the group blog A Motley Vision and on my personal blog, Chasing the Long White Cloud, have been instrumental in helping me find a way into Mormon letters, giving me an increased audience for my work, providing me with a community of artist saints to work alongside in the continuing development of Mormon culture, and encouraging me to free and condense my creative and critical expressions (as I discuss above) and my understanding of Mormonism itself. In this sense, I don't feel limited by how others perceive my faith; rather I feel encouraged to reach out and to find ways of entering into dialogue with them such that, together, we can come to greater understandings of one another and God.

After Winter Nursing (Poem)

2009-11-16T17:07:00.007-07:00

In honor of the snow we got in my neck of the woods over the weekend, here's a poem I've been turning lately (another for my Browns and Rusts sequence). All the usuals apply: suggestions, readability, praise, further discussion, whatever. After the poem, the floor's yours.

* * * *

After Winter Nursing

I imagine myself newborn, mouth
dripping with nipple and milk
warm as the rest between breaths
when the flesh goes lax against

death, cozies up to the grave
as to memories nursed
over the mourning dove's elegy
the winter hope slipped beneath my skin:

the first blanket mother used
to swaddle my soul
as she raised me to the breast,
latched me on to her heritage,

filled an eight by three by six basin
with desire enough to top off
the abyss, to trigger the contraction
of God's womb, heaven's walls

bearing down on my hunger, birthing
stars like purled bodies, edges
lost in the eddy of questions swirling
between mother and son,

dripping off the unleashed nipple
as snow fogs the window, asking
permission to enter, asking
what it means

when the mourning dove sings
even though winter’s come, even though
the dove’s coo may just be a coo,
even though I’ve been asking since birth

when a bird’s just a bird, snow just snow,
flesh just flesh, death just death, God just
God, not a question
fogging the window like childhood

wanting in, asking where I buried placenta and soul
in this landscape suddenly blank as DNA
the moment of conception, base pairs
copulating like question marks,

asking, asking, asking what the sex,
what color the eyes/skin/hair, how narrow
the fingers/lips/tongue, how dominant
the longing for solitude sealed in a mouth

once dripping with nipple and milk
warm as the rest between breaths.

Lance Larsen: The Great Mormon Poet?

2009-11-09T16:03:00.004-07:00

There's been a lot of talk in the past about the Great Mormon Novel, but we don't hear much---if anything---about the Great Mormon Poet (or Mormon poetry or poetry in general, for that matter). I've accepted the fact that I'm practitioner of an art that's fallen on hard times, if it was ever not on hard times, that is, but I'm doing my best to work that system and to broaden the (Mormon) audience for poetry in whatever nominal way I can---a task I find as necessary as love.

Hence, I've decided (finally!) to do my dissertation (pending approval) on the poetry/poetics of Lance Larsen. Of all the verse I've read over the past however many years, his has stuck with me most. It doesn't wallow in the postmodern condition, doesn't refuse tradition and values and the strength of community (especially the family). It doesn't flounder in self-pity over the failures of language (though Larsen is aware of that trend) and, by extension, it's not mere wordplay. On the other hand, it doesn't reach for some type of transcendence beyond this world, refusing to engage the ordinary, the mundane, the familiar in some attempt to move beyond the immediate. Rather, it's firmly rooted in mortality, in the family, in the possibilities of communities and the "small disturbances" that cumulatively make up a life and that bind humans of all stripes in lasting connections, including those made possible through language.

As I see it, the strength of Larsen's poetry makes him one of Mormonism's best---if not the best poet currently writing in/from the Mormon tradition. And though he doesn't specifically write for a Mormon audience, his Mormonism permeates and grounds his verse in, dare I say it?, hope for a better world. That and he can turn a beautiful, even sublime, line, something that places him among America's best poets (as I've just discovered, though the preceding link's a month old).

And that, I think, is an achievement worth applauding.

(Cross-posted at AMV.)

Pocatello Part VI: We. Have. Arrived.

2009-11-07T10:11:00.003-07:00

So after my nine day hiatus from blogging (a side-effect of, well, my laziness plus lack of internet service plus settling in at a new place plus an increasingly scattered mind), I'm back. And the great news (not that Tyler blogging isn't great news. I mean, c'mon...)? After a year of commuting to school from one place or another, we're finally in Pocatello. Now instead of driving an hour plus to class and work, it takes just five or so minutes to get to campus. And if I'm feeling green, I can even ride my bike (which I plan on doing as frequently as the weather permits). Sure this house is smaller than our last. Sure Pocatello's a bit strange (but, hey, so are we). But it was either this or life on the street because our last rental got sold out from under us and we had to leave. So why, we figured, not make our way south?

Now we're calling free (though I'm sure that won't last for long *knocks on wood*), the girls have new friends just next door and potential friends in the ward/neighborhood, and we're closer to our Utah families. Oh, and? I won't have to commute anymore...and just as winter sneaks up on us. Happy, happy day.

If a Tree Falls in the Wilderness Interface Zone...

2009-10-29T08:27:00.005-06:00

...will you hear about it while Chasing the Long White Cloud?

Well, today you will.

The poem I posted here last week, "On Stand of Trees (by J. Kirk Richards)," is making an appearance on WIZ today as part of "Poems of Biblical Proportions Week"---well, fortnight, really. (Follow that link for more info.) It takes it place beside work from some excellent poets and poetic prose artists: Mark Bennion (which reminds me: I still need to review his first collection, Psalm and Selah), Danny Nelson, Eric W Jepson (also known as Th.), Nani Lii S. Furse, William Morris (AMV's Benevolent Dictator), Patricia Karamesines (the heart behind WIZ), and Karen Kelsay (from the week before Poems of Biblical Proportions Week, but still; she's a great poet).

Now that I've dropped the link bomb, I think I'll leave you to contemplate the wonderful world of Mormon poetry. And more importantly, ask you to high-tail it over to WIZ for ver(s)ifiable fun.

Go on now.

RUD Update On AMV

2009-10-26T11:43:00.003-06:00

I just posted a Reading Until Dawn update on AMV. Link over for more info. C'mon. You know you want to.

Let me tell you 'bout the birds and the bees and the flowers and the trees

2009-10-23T09:50:00.006-06:00

This past Sunday we had the sex talk in our Marriage and Family Relations class (link to the Marriage and Family Relations manual). I'm sure those of you who've had the sex talk in any mainstream Mormon Sunday School class can venture a guess as to how it went. Here's the usual scene: the teacher, barely looking up from the lesson manual, speeds through the material (this section is particularly loaded with quotations from the prophets and apostles---in other words, as I'm sure many read it, stick to the script), nary asking a question of students in order to avoid any awkward conversations about, you know, the "s-e-c-k-s" word, and deferring any questions about said act to the prophets and apostles, who often, in turn (at least this is how many may read their comments) defer discussions to the bedroom, to be kept between husband and wife. Of course, many things about sex should be kept between husband and wife. But there's also much about sex that we can and should be open and candid about.

And this was the approach I took Sunday because, yes, I was the one in front of the classroom. I contextualized the discussion by opening with Moroni 7:45-47 and comparing the Gospel vision of charity laid out here to the world's take on love. Then we moved into the list of quotations offered in the manual, which we explored openly and candidly and with an eye toward what they really convey about sex.

We started with Richard G. Scott on "the purposes of physical intimacy in marriage":

Within the enduring covenant of marriage, the Lord permits husband and wife the expression of the sacred procreative powers in all their loveliness and beauty within the bounds He has set. One purpose of this private, sacred, intimate experience is to provide the physical bodies for the spirits Father in Heaven wants to experience mortality. Another reason for these powerful and beautiful feelings of love is to bind husband and wife together in loyalty, fidelity, consideration of each other, and common purpose.

One purpose, as Elder Scott defines it: procreation in all its loveliness and beauty. So sex is lovely. Sex is beautiful. Why be afraid of it, that is, when properly contextualized and directed? I mean, how else are we going to create bodies for the brood of spirit kids running around heaven, waiting for their chance at mortality?

Another purpose, as Elder Scott defines it: to bind husband and wife together, to facilitate greater loyalty, fidelity, consideration of each other, and common purpose. One common purpose, obviously, hearkens back to purpose one; but, and this came up in class, another refers to the mutual pursuit of pleasure, which can only happen when husband and wife trust each other enough to become vulnerable in the other's presence, to trust the other with their nekkidness, which in turn and in conjunction with consideration for the other, facilitates greater trust. Because, again, sex is lovely. Sex is beautiful. And it's not all about the kids (thank goodness).

Next we tied in Dallin H. Oaks---

The power to create mortal life is the most exalted power God has given his children. Its use was mandated in the first commandment [given to Adam and Eve], but another important commandment was given to forbid its misuse. The emphasis we place on the law of chastity is explained by our understanding of the purpose of our procreative powers in the accomplishment of God’s plan. The expression of our procreative powers is pleasing to God, but he has commanded that this be confined within the relationship of marriage.

---from which we took two laws: the law of procreation (in all its loveliness and beauty, which should be explored openly and contextually in appropriate company) and the law of chastity (which is explored heavily in Mormon culture, often at the expense of fostering an understanding of the first law; hence, our Victorian prudery). So why not talk with one another (and, when the time is right, with our kids) openly and contextually about sex?

And this led to Jeffrey R. Holland's open and contextual exploration of human intimacy, from which we considered this:

Human intimacy is reserved for a married couple because it is the ultimate symbol of total union, a totality and a union ordained and defined by God. From the Garden of Eden onward, marriage was intended to mean the complete merger of a man and a woman—their hearts, hopes, lives, love, family, future, everything. Adam said of Eve that she was bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh, and that they were to be ‘one flesh’ in their life together. This is a union of such completeness that we use the word seal to convey its eternal promise. The Prophet Joseph Smith once said we perhaps could render such a sacred bond as being ‘welded’ one to another."

Keywords we drew from Elder Holland and tied into our efforts at contextualization: total(ity), union, complete(ness), merger, seal, bond, weld. A brother in the class, an engineer, honed in on "weld," pointing out that the strongest point between two pieces of metal that have been joined together is along the weld. So, if we follow the analogy, as Elder Holland suggests we should, the properly contextualized physical union between husband and wife may well be one thing that strengthens and fortifies that marriage.

And this pointed us back to our exploration of gospel love vs. worldly love (which is too often focused on the physical act of sex without any of the spiritual/emotional/psychological context made possible through a gospel vision of sex). That's pretty much where we ended, observing how the world generally views sex without context and how the gospel allows us to view it in an eternal context (and fruitfully so). (Yes, pun intended.)

Something that didn't come up, but that I've had on my mind since first reading the lesson material, was this from Howard W. Hunter:

Be faithful in your marriage covenants in thought, word, and deed. Pornography, flirtations, and unwholesome fantasies erode one’s character and strike at the foundation of a happy marriage. Unity and trust within a marriage are thereby destroyed.

After reading this, I've been asking myself, "If porn, flirtations, and unwholesome fantasies erode one's character and strike at the foundations of a happy marriage, then might sex and the body properly contextualized and discussed in art and literature constitute, in part, wholesome fantasies? And can such strengthen one's character and help build unity and trust, loveliness, beauty, and happiness in marriage? If so, and if this is justified in the prophets' words, how might we focus on these matters of eternal eros more in Mormon culture?" Obviously, I think such can be the case. And I'm trying to do my small part by being open and candid myself in various forums. But I'd also like to know what you think.

Clinton Larson: "The City of Joseph"

2009-10-17T13:42:00.003-06:00

I realized today, after reading William's Payday Poetry selection for this weekend, that I've yet to offer a reading of a poem by Clinton Larson, "a major, early figure," to steal William's words, "in the modern era of Mormon letters," someone some consider (I believe it was Karl Keller that said this, but I could be wrong) the first real Mormon poet. (But that's a discussion for another day.)

So here's my brief take on "The City of Joseph," a poem originally published in the June 1984 Ensign. This comment was first posted here in response to William's Payday Poetry prompt and I'm posting it here as a continuation of my Mormon Poetry Project.

While "The City of Joseph" is obviously meant as inspirational verse (especially considering its venue of publication), I don’t find it sentimental in anyway. In fact, the language and imagery and the way Larson binds them together in his poetic vision are quite striking, quite accomplished. In fact, I think seeing it as a tightly-crafted vision of a poet-seer is one way to make sense of the whole.

To begin with, it incorporates a sweeping sense of Mormon history (specifically) and natural history (in general), of human presence in the world and the West, of the Mormon movement from east to west as directed by the Morning and Evening Stars. It opens with what I read as an allusion to the First Vision, with Joseph and his influence on a chaotic world at the center, as represented by “light” and “whiteness” rippling outward from the “meadows” over “the places where Joseph came / To find his Zion” as moved by and “in the spell of prophecy,” beginning with the grove he knelt in that Spring morning, then moving to the city he planned and helped build, then to the Saints’ movement West, and finally to the valley where he knew they would establish themselves, could make their home and further influence the world “because,” as Margaret’s mother says, “we believe” in Joseph’s vision and words and in the “harvest” to come.

The idea that poetic seership is at work also arises in the repetition of “vision/s” (five times) and the repeated occurrence of “eyes,” “seen/saw,” and the passage of “time,” which, the poet confesses, “elides antiquity and the nearby years,” suppressing history in immediacy, something the poet strikes out to remedy by following Mormon history from “morning” to “evening” and by drawing together Earth’s glacial prehistory (ever-present in the “moraine[s]”) with a specific woman’s (archetypal) progeny, a group of “children” who stand “on a hill”—“a holy place”—and consider their ancestral path, an act that sounds very much like temple worship (”devotion”) to me.

In fact that may be another fruitful way to consider the poem: as an endowment-like ritual through which certain images and key-words are meant to bring us together as the family of God, meant to bind us together in “gray cirques of vision” that will eventually clarify in the Dawn of Christ’s return.

But I’ll cut myself off there for now and say that I like this poem and think it worthy of reading again.

On Stand of Trees (Poem)

2009-10-15T09:35:00.002-06:00

Another from Browns and Rusts. All the feedcrack usuals apply (especially in terms of how the last stanza reads). And, of course, thanks for playing.

* * * *

On Stand of Trees

I've been neglecting what it takes
to piece together dawn from old
snapshots and reminiscence faded
as the blush from Adam's skin

when God's question stunned
the garden and he slipped with Eve into
the shadow of God's voice, their shame
a stand of trees backlit by cherubim

come hounds a-bay to flush them into
death, sin, recognition, solitude,
a blood-drunk field mantle deep with sweat
and sorrow, soil thick with the afterbirth

of myth and tectonic histories, pieces
of a puzzle that shift in bed as I
try to number them one, two, three,
no, one, two... one

edges ragged as the blanket Cain has
carried since Eve weaned him from the teat
and he found his thumb to replace it,
but not enough to fill his hunger, not

enough to keep serpents from burrowing
into his need, from shedding that rag
like yesterday's skin, from slipping him
the switchblade he used to quarter the fruit

he knew had ripened in Mother's womb,
the harvest he'll never find as he works
his spittle and excrement field into bodies
with his hands red as stygian clay.

There's a lull on WIZ today

2009-10-13T08:46:00.003-06:00

And that "Lull" is all mine, though it wouldn't have been possible without the crow's help and without this by Molly Peacock to converse with and be inspired by.

This is the poem's digital premiere, so I do hope you'll lend it---and WIZ---your support. I'm even open to feedback, if you feel so compelled.

Anyway. Enjoy the lull.

On "Relief Society: Divine Organization of Women" (Svithe)

2009-10-12T01:09:00.002-06:00

I'm svithing the (slightly revised and expanded) notes I took during Elders' Quorum today. They devolve from our discussion of Lesson 39 in the Joseph Smith manual on the Relief Society. Engage me if you feel compelled.

Notes from prstd 11 Oct. 2008:

The Relief Society sisters saw a need and organized to meet that need even before the Prophet had initiated the organization. They didn't have to be asked---just proactively did what needed to be done. Questions for myself: What can you take from this? What needs have you seen in your various spheres of activity and what can you do (w/out being asked to do it) to fulfil those needs?

As Emma Smith: learn to devote increased (quality? quantity?) time, space, and attention to others. Making/giving space for others---a means of expanding the soul, the influence of the soul, of the person. Like Bella in Breaking Dawn (random association): expanding her natural gift, the "shield" of her love/concern over her friends and family in order to protect them from danger, to give them the chance to reach for their potential.

Spatial relationships and/in the Relief Society. Creating inter- & intra-personal connections and spaces through compassion, charity, and benevolence. The potential of service, passion, and adversity to create an expansive emotional space in which to engage the needs, sympathies, and potential of others. In the end, is this what the kingdom of God is all about, what it means to become possessed of pure love (see Moroni 7:47)?

Second full paragraph on p. 454: As I read it, the Prophet's language is latently erotic, in the purest sense of Eros: "Females, if they are pure and innocent, can come in the presence of God." Offering the deepest in themselves to Deity, their innocence, their purity for the benefit and service of others, of the kingdom. An unselfish pursuit/release of their passions in the presence and service of God, implying that these passions, this inherent nature can and must be directed through the proper channels and that God will accept such an offering when given in righteousness. (Tenuous reading?)

Thoughts?

Speak and Bear (T)witness: My #ldsconf Experience and Resolves

2009-10-06T14:30:00.002-06:00

Just for the hang of it Saturday morning, I jumped into my Twitter account to see what was going on in the microblogging world. I thought there might be some chatter about General Conference, but didn't expect that I'd get swept up in the collaborative hashtag project affectionately known to Mormon Tweeters as #ldsconf. Before I knew it, though, I was experiencing Conference in a way I've never experienced before: as a collaborative knowledge building exercise in which minds and hearts from around Twit-dom were engaged. Tweets ranged from direct quotations (or approximations thereof) of speakers' words to retweets of the same to personal insights gained while listening to Church leaders speak. I found that I could get the most out of each message (both the talks and the tweets) by spinning main ideas and my own insights into my own language.

In the process, I was impressed with three resolves, things that came early and were rehashed through my continuing experience with watching Conference and with following the #ldsconf stream. In the interest of committing myself to be better, I'm reporting them here now:

Resolve 1: I mustn't simply know more; I must do more.

Resolve 2: Walk and talk with greater love; act and speak with greater charity. Which dovetails nicely with what was originally Resolve 4, but is now Resolve 2.1: Cultivate a greater willingness to share: myself, my possessions, my talents, my knowledge, my Faith.

Resolve 3: Cultivate greater spiritual discernment by recommitting to the small and simple things.

Nothing grand here, but these were the things I needed to hear. And live-tweeting during Conference was one thing that helped me discover and bear (t)witness of them and, thus, erect something of a support system to help me live, serve, and speak with greater resolve.

So I'll give a few cheers for my Twitterpation and tentatively submit that, so far, its benefits outweigh its drawbacks (such as the whole time-sucking vortex that is participating in a Twitter stream).

Now, off to follow my little tweety musings...

(For more on tweeting #ldsconf live, Jeff Swift has some interesting thoughts here.)

Rain (Poem): Revisited

2009-10-01T08:35:00.002-06:00

Yesterday as I was driving home from dropping daughter number one off at school (we missed the bus) and thinking about the rain and how I haven't been writing much poetry lately---check that: haven't been writing any poetry lately---I remembered the rain poem I posted last July and thought I'd throw you back to last summer, though not because I think the poem's great (don't know if I'll take it beyond it's present state or not) and want to know what my loyal readers think (though that is always a bonus), but mostly because I feel compelled to post something and linking to a previous post (y'know, when I wasn't such a popular bloggy destination) is a simple way to do that; that, and I wanted to write this really long sentence couched with numerous parentheticals that make it sound like I'm carrying on a conversation with myself.

Yeah. That's what I meant to do.

That and autumn's here. So bring on the rain.

Tyler Comes Out of the Closet; or, On the Virtues of Reading Slow

2009-09-25T12:43:00.004-06:00

Yep. You guessed it.

I'm coming out. As a slow reader, that is.

Very slow, in fact. Sometimes painfully slow. And when I say painful, I mean it in a debilitating sense, in that I often dread picking up longer texts or texts that I know will be dense (linguistically or philosophically) because, on one hand, I'm afraid I'll miss some important aspect of the text's character and, in the process, miss out on a potential (textual) friendship.

I'm finally becoming comfortable enough with this readerly nature to admit out loud (as it were) that I'm a slow reader, but it's taken me time to sidle up to the idea, especially because it seems that the circles I run in online and at school and, more generally, as a consumer of American culture, value reading fast, for quantity over quality. I have nothing against speed reading; it has it's own virtues. In fact, I'm quite envious of those who can speed through a bookshelf like they're cruising the autobahn. And sure, my time is at a premium and I have to read some things fast (although my fast is likely someone else's very slow); but I feel most myself, most confident and content, when I can make time to explore the nooks and crannies of a text such that I can really engage it (as best I can) on its own terms; when I can build something of a relationship with it.

This admission comes in the wake of an essay I was reading this morning ("Old School") by William Monroe, professor of English at The University of Houston and once student of Wayne Booth. Exploring how Booth's rhetorical pedagogy sparked a transformation in his life, his scholarship, and his teaching, Monroe shares this moment of "blessing and validation" that came only after he'd struggled for a time to feel at home in Booth's "Interpreting Intellectual Texts" classroom at the University of Chicago. Quoting his 1978 classmate Todd Weir:

Booth brought in a Faulkner passage and asked us to read it carefully and then we would discuss it as usual. We all bowed our heads and read. I quickly scanned the passage and achieved my goal---the first one to look up. Wayne noticed. We waited as heads rose one by one, each studying the group to find his place in the scheme of speed. Finally the slow talking guy from Texas [Monroe] raised his head, dead last. Wayne asked me about the piece and I was off to the races, expounding. . . . When I was done, Wayne asked if anyone, perhaps, had a different understanding of the passage. The Texan raised his hand and Wayne simply said, “Bill.” At that point a bright sun began to shine and like Icarus, flying too high, my reading came plunging down. It was clear that I had missed the point entirely. I mean, I got it just about dead wrong. Then it was Wayne’s turn. The lesson? Good readers are not fast readers. In fact, they are slow, even the slowest. . . .(16; italics mine)

After I read this experience, I felt a rush of blessing and validation flow into my own life. Because, you see, I've struggled, really struggled, with shaping my vocational life to my intellectual nature and desires, including my tendency to read really slow. And while I've got a long way to go before these vestments fit (if they ever will), I read Weir's simple declaration---"Good readers are not fast readers. In fact, they are slow, even the slowest"---and gave myself permission to be a slow reader, to let my mind explore more fully the texts I read. To let it weigh the implications of 'this' against 'that' as I read and to take whatever notes may come, copious or spare. To grapple with the author in my attempt to understand and grasp the full measure of his/her world.

And to chew on the language no matter how long I need to masticate the full bodied flavor of each textual space.

Hokianga: February-March 2000 (Poem)

2009-09-24T09:18:00.006-06:00

From Cloudfire and a Bowl of Kauri Leaves. Because I haven't posted a poem in bit. All the same rules apply: feedback, etc.

* * * *

Hokianga: February-March 2000

crimson-honey sky
across the Hokianga*
crimson-honey tide
but no waka to pierce
the bay’s narrow hips

*

crimson-honey sand
across the Hokianga
crimson-honey sky
but only one cumulus
to lick the bay’s narrow tongue

*

crimson-honey night
across the Hokianga
two harvest moons
walk empty shores
lap cups of crimson-honey tea

* * * *

*If you enlarge that map, you'll see Opononi and Omapere near the coastal edge of the harbor. The flat I lived in was---probably still is---somewhere between the two towns.

Almost thou persuadest me; or, Curse you Wayne Booth!

2009-09-22T08:25:00.003-06:00

When I was a little kid and my parents decided to spoil us with our choice of candy, I'd hover over the candy section at the grocery store and mull over the options. "Sure Twix are good, but what about that Snickers. You like Snickers. Or, there's the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Or the nut rolls. Or, oooo, the Peanut Butter M&Ms." Etcetera. Etcetera.

Etcetera.

I feel like that kid again right now because I'm so blasted fickle when it comes to my own research, to that darn specialization and even darnder dissertation. One day I'm thinking one thing. The next I'm thinking another. And just when I think I've pinned myself down on some intellectual treat, my mind grabs hold of something else and my appetite leads me to another section of the aisle. (At least at this point, I've settled on an aisle and I'm not running through the store screaming, trying to decide. And yet, I'd hope after eight years of higher education, picking a specialization would be easier. Alas.)

Lately my appetite has been piqued by the seductions of rhetorical studies, by the prospects of a vocation (and a life with which I want to do the greatest good I can in the world, to be a good influence on those around me) centered on this from Wayne Booth, whose work I've become enamored of in the past year or so: says he in The Rhetoric of RHETORIC: The Quest for Effective Communication,

[T]he quality of our lives, especially the ethical and communal quality, depends to an astonishing degree on the quality of our rhetoric. And since the pursuit of genuine rhetorical quality is still sadly neglected except by us professional rhetoricians, it is time for a reinforcement of the flowering of rhetorical studies that has occurred in the last six or eight decades, not just in the United States but in many European countries. Unless we pay more attention to improving our communication at all levels of life, unless we study more carefully the rhetorical strategies we all depend on, consciously, unconsciously, or subconsciously, we will continue to succumb to unnecessary violence, to loss of potential friends, and to the decay of community. (xii)

And while I know I can devote myself to the personal quest for effective communication without necessarily devoting myself to the field of rhetorical studies, Booth's suggestion appeals to me on a number of levels, one of which is in my gut, which tingles whenever I think about the study of how language (or any other sign system used to communicate, including visual rhetorics such as web design, art, film, etc.) works as a transaction between bodies, even when those bodies are separated by a great distance (as you and I) and when I consider the breadth of rhetoric's reach---about how it (among other things, as the study and pursuit of effective communication) extends over all the things I've got at least some interest in: the body, narrative, poetry, critical theory, cultural/literary criticism, academic discourse, Mormon culture (arts and letters), religion, the family, teaching, online communication.

Yesterday on Twitter I wondered "How to fit a growing interest in rhetorical studies into an existing interest in lit theory and criticism," to which I got some helpful feedback from both William (on Twitter) and from Elise (on Facebook). But maybe my answer (as Gibbs from NCIS---one of our favorite shows---might suggest) is in my gut. Darlene's post reminded me the other day that, when it comes down to it, I need to be happy/pleased with what work I choose to do, with the vocational course I pursue.

And at this point, I'm almost persuaded by Booth to become a professional rhetorician.

At least that's how I'm leaning today. We'll see what tomorrow brings, huh?

So what'ya think?

2009-09-18T14:02:00.002-06:00

About the new paint job, that is (not about Kanye West)?