FROM FESTIVAL HQ
Dear Readers,
We’re already deep into the work of evaluating authors for the 2018 Festival of Faith & Writing, but I’m still spending a lot of time with many of the writers who joined us at the 2016 Festival, especially the poets.
In this election year, there are excellent journalists and cultural critics working to report on and contextualize our political moment, including 2016 FFW alumni Jaweed Kaleem in his new role as the national race and justice reporter at the Los Angeles Times, Katelyn Beaty all over the place, Laura Turner on Politico, Kate Shellnut for Christianity Today, and Sarah Pulliam Bailey at the Washington Post.
My friends know I’ve been as active as anyone trading articles and lively (ahem) commentary both on and offline over the last several months. But I confess that as the election season has gotten more contentious, even ominous, poetry has been the news I can really use. I’ve read and re-read Mary Ruefle’s “Women in Labor.” I sat with Shane McCrae’s newest poem “Jim Limber the Adopted Mulatto Son of Jefferson Davis Was Another Child First.” (And shared his excitement when actor and activist Jesse Williams posted the poem to his own Tumblr.) I bought a copy of New American Writing 34 at my neighborhood coffee shop and newsstand because G. C. Waldrep’s name was on the cover. Inside I read, in part: “you see, we know the story / we know the gold ring closes on the living bone / the circuit choice makes / around the circumference of the body, the ear / reclines on the divan of the skull / drawing the disciple it most loved / to its breast (made the same, of earth & ash).”
Marilyn Chandler McEntyre recently wrote a wonderful essay called Why Read A Poem At a Time Like This? that covers territory familiar to those who attended her sessions at the Festival. In it she writes:
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“[Poems] invite and enable us to notice the precarious fissures in what we think is solid ground. They direct us toward the light at the edge of things — the horizon, the fragment of dream before dawn, the feeling that’s hard to name, and can only be accurately captured by metaphor. They take us to the edge of “what can’t be said,” and ambush us into feeling before we think, so that we can’t simply and complacently “believe everything we think.” Poetry deals in surprise and subversion and turns old words to new purposes.
One of the poet’s functions is, as Eliot put it, and Mallarmé before him, to “purify the dialect of the tribe.” That is, to retrieve words from being ground to cliché and turned to pap or propaganda by reframing them — setting them in lines like these, which I love, from Anne Sexton:
I knew a child once with the mind of a hen.
. . .
Love grew around her like crabgrass.
I know a child like that. She’s a woman now, but I think of her that way, and would never have seen her in those remarkable terms but for Anne Sexton.
My skepticism about patriotic legitimations for the atrocities of war took root early with Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” and those roots cling even in the worst of times. Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” gives me words both for the dismay I feel and the hope I try to sustain in the midst of abuses of power so normalized it becomes hard, some days, to see what atrocities fly under the banner of normalcy. Poetry gives shape to feelings I didn’t know I had, but recognize when they are named. A good poem almost always takes me by surprise — as Howard Nemerov claimed it should in his lovely essay “Bottom’s Dream: On the Similarity Between Poems and Jokes.” Poems reframe and redefine and redirect, urging you out of grooves into spacious territories of the heart, often unexplored.”
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My prayer for all of us—as individuals and as a nation—is that we’d explore those spacious territories of the heart this week, engaging the political process with generosity and kindness even in the midst of meaningful disagreements in which we all have a great deal at stake.
Looking ahead, always on my wish list of poets I’d love to host at the Festival is Mary Oliver. I’m just starting to make my way through her recently published Upstream, what one critic has called “a full-throated spiritual autobiography.” And this morning a friend posted Oliver’s poem “Messenger” to Facebook with this simple note: “On this liminal day I choose gratitude not fear.”
Grace and peace,
director, Festival of Faith & Writing
managing director, Calvin Center for Faith & Writing
PS. If you’ve got a favorite poem that is helping you get through this election season, I’d love to hear about it. Email me at ffw@calvin.edu or tweet @ffwgr.
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