James Brock: “Upon Hearing That My Grant Application Was Passed Over…”


“Your poem should touch God in places only Emily Dickinson has dared touch….Your poem cannot save anyone. Your poem must be seven words or fewer, or two thousand lines or more. Entry fee: all of your boss’s money,” James Brock directs in his witty prose-poem “The Jim Brock Poetry Contest: Guidelines”, which appears in his new collection Gods & Money (WordTech Editions, 2010).

The poem below is reprinted by permission from his previous poetry collection, Pictures That Got Small (WordTech Editions, 2005). Denise Duhamel calls this book “a lush, sexy, nostalgic (in the best sense of the word) look at old Hollywood, the experimental films of Matthew Barney, and home movies of southern Florida. Irreverent and unpredictable, intelligent and haunting, deadpan and dead serious, these poems are buoyant and felicitous.”

Upon Hearing That My Grant Application Was Passed Over and the Winner Was a Bio-Tech Professor Who Has Designed Genetically-Altered Protein for Buckwheat Seed

      —for Denise

Okay, call me Tallulah Bankhead. I wanted that award,
the crystal glass eagle, the pendant, the certificate,
the lapel pin, the thousand bucks, and the parking space
next to the university president’s spot—the whole
platinum and sapphire tiara. I knew I should have
written that poem on the manipulations
of amino acid balance in buckwheat seed proteins.
I knew I should have named that new genetic
strand Omicron-Brockide-32, should have brokered
the patent rights to Monsanto, let them spread the seed
of my pumped-up, high-octane, drought-tolerant,
American-can-do-know-how buckwheat
to sub-Sahara Africa and southern Mongolia.

One year later, then, I would have written
the grant report, presented it to the committee
on PowerPoint, and finished off my presentation
with a streaming video clip, showing some adolescent
boy, from Gambia, say, and he would be eating
my buckwheat flat bread, and there he would be,
digitalized, smiling, full, and muscular. Yes,
and at that moment, vindicated and wise,
teary-eyed and generous, the grant committee
would gather and lift me on their shoulders, laughing
and singing, joyful for all the corporate sponsorships that
would follow me and bless our humble home
institution. For me, dare I dream further confirmations?
O, to be Nationally Endowed, Guggenheimed, MacArthured!

Of course, in Gambia, and other geographies
beneath the sweep and hoozah of fellowships
and announcements in The Chronicle of Higher Education,
the newly nourished could be striking the flint
of their first syllables of their first poems, poems
whose phrases—under the most subdued of flames—would
coolly scorch and burn our best American intention.

****

Read more poems from this book here.

Jesus, Word of the God Beyond Words


Corporations’ legal staff constantly patrol the Internet, searching for disparaging parodies and unauthorized YouTube videos that threaten their ability to control the discourse around their brand name. Proving that no target is too small, the Mattel Corp. last month denied my request to use the name “Barbie” in the title of my forthcoming poetry chapbook, which will now be called Anatomically Impossible Commercialized White Female Body Image Icon at 50. Or The Happy Endings Support Group. We’re still working out the details.

If God were as protective of His trademark as Coca-Cola, we’d all be in trouble.

“What right, really, do we have to talk about God?” asks Mark Galli in “God Talk is Dangerous“, an article on the Christianity Today blog. Normally we’d hesitate to pronounce on an issue that we didn’t know much about. But we often sling around opinions about God’s will and God’s attributes, even though “if there ever was a ‘topic’ beyond our comprehension, it is the infinite, immortal, and all powerful God!” Biblical and theological metaphors are always mere approximations. Galli writes:

This is the genius of apophatic theology, about which our brothers and sisters in the Orthodox tradition have taught us so much. Apophatic theology talks about God in terms of what he is not. God is uncreated, not bound by time and space, and in one sense is unknowable—that is, because he is infinite and we are finite, we can never know God as he is. From the perspective of apophatic theology, we can even say that God does not “exist.” We use that word to talk about people, plants, animals, and rocks. But how and why these created things “exist” cannot be compared to the way a transcendent, immortal deity “exists.”

…[But] the Incarnation and Jesus’ talk about God suggest that there is more than one way to blaspheme—that is, to be irreverent and impious. That would be to so exalt the transcendence of God that there is no room left in the imagination for the scandalous Emmanuel, God with us.

As early church theologian Irenaeus put it, Jesus Christ “gathered together all things into himself … he took up man into himself, the invisible becoming the visible, the incomprehensible being made comprehensible, the impassible becoming capable of suffering, and the Word being made man, thus summing up all things in himself.”

Today there are many who strive to protect the reputation of God. They are, so to speak, on “blasphemy alert.” At their best, they remind us whenever we suggest that God is anything but holy, immortal, and almighty. In an age such as ours—which can be so casual about things divine—I’m glad there are such people around.

But the interesting thing is that God does not seem all that concerned about his reputation. He is the one who inspired people to think of him as an inert rock (Deut. 32) or a common shepherd (Ps. 23), and who came to us not in a flashy show of glory and power but as a baby in a trough wrapped in rags. He apparently isn’t offended when he is mistaken for a simple gardener (John 20).

The incarnation is God’s permission to talk about that which, really, we don’t know that much about—God Almighty! He’s even willing for us to tread on the border of blasphemy if it will communicate something true about him.

To be sure, we are wise to not transgress that border. But that job is made easier when we realize that all our talk about God is partial, that there is no word picture that can do full justice to his being, that there is always something greater than the arresting image we might fashion—and that there is a divine source that can keep us both humble and balanced in our God-talk.


Reading this piece, I had the thought that the Incarnation points to a resolution of the postmodernist paralysis that follows from the inadequacy of language. Rather than revive the failed modernist project of searching for fixed, objective meanings that perfectly contain reality, we can speak knowing that we will fail, knowing also that we are forgiven for our failure to “get it right”. God-in-Jesus would rather that we took a halting step toward communication with him, than that we hung back out of false scrupulousness.

Ted Olson Defends Prop 8 Victory on FOX News


In this 7-minute video, constitutional lawyer extraordinaire Ted Olson eloquently rebuts FOX News commentator Chris Wallace’s effort to pin the “judicial activist” label on him. A longtime hero of the libertarian Right, Olson gives our cause a bipartisan face. Olson argues that in overturning California’s gay marriage ban, the district court did not create new rights, but rather ensured that a well-established fundamental right was equally extended to all citizens. Send him a thank-you note at the Courage Campaign website.


Northampton Celebrates the Prop 8 Decision


(From left: Princess Queerpants, Ericka Soto, transgender activist Trystan Dean, & Rev. Tinker Donnelly. Photo by Adam Cohen.)

Northampton yesterday celebrated the overturning of California’s gay marriage ban at a rally organized by Gary Lapon from the W. Mass. chapter of Equality Across America. Joyful, tearful speeches marked how far we’ve come, yet also reminded us not to forget other ongoing civil rights battles, for GLBT folks and others. It can be hard for an embattled minority to avoid tunnel vision, focusing on one’s own struggles without making the leap to the broader realization that everyone is affected when anyone is oppressed. I always appreciate how Gary, a socialist, connects the dots between issues like gay marriage and employment discrimination, transgender issues, racism, and immigrants’ rights.

Enjoy this half-hour video, recorded by Adam Cohen. Speakers include Gary, Trystan, Tinker, Michael Fiorentino, Kate Losey, Ben Taylor, and yours truly (around the 27-minute mark).



Federal Court Rules “Proposition 8” Gay Marriage Ban Unconstitutional!


Hooray!

U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker of San Francisco has issued a landmark ruling in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, overturning California’s Proposition 8 gay marriage ban as a violation of the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the U.S. Constitution.

The Courage Campaign’s Prop 8 Trial Tracker has posted a thorough analysis of the 138-page decision (read the full text here).
Go send them a donation; they’ve worked hard to inform the public about
this historic legal battle, despite the other side’s efforts to keep
the proceedings secret.

Judge Walker ruled that there is no rational basis for the government to impose gender-based restrictions on the fundamental human right of marriage (boldface emphasis mine):

The evidence shows that the movement of marriage away
from a gendered institution and toward an institution free from
state-mandated gender roles reflects an evolution in the understanding
of gender rather than a change in marriage. The evidence did not show
any historical purpose for excluding same-sex couples from marriage, as
states have never required spouses to have an ability or willingness to
procreate in order to marry….Rather, the exclusion exists as an
artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles
in society and in marriage. That time has passed.

The right to marry has been historically and remains the right to
choose a spouse and, with mutual consent, join together and form a
household….Race and gender restrictions shaped marriage
during eras of race and gender inequality, but such restrictions were
never part of the historical core of the institution of marriage….Today, gender is not relevant to the state in determining spouses’
obligations to each other and to their dependents. Relative gender
composition aside, same-sex couples are situated identically to
opposite-sex couples in terms of their ability to perform the rights and
obligations of marriage under California law….Gender no longer
forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of
equals.

[…]

Plaintiffs do not seek recognition of a new right. To characterize
plaintiffs’ objective as “the right to same-sex marriage” would suggest
that plaintiffs seek something different from what opposite-sex couples
across the state enjoy —— namely, marriage. Rather, plaintiffs ask
California to recognize their relationships for what they are:
marriages.

(And that, folks, is why gay marriage is a feminist issue.)

The court concluded that the ban was purely motivated by anti-gay animosity: “Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California
Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to
same-sex couples.”

Though the decision was immediately appealed and is likely to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, a trial judge’s factual findings are entitled to great deference on appeal. Thus, it’s significant that Judge Walker devoted 100+ pages to a thorough examination and rejection of the other side’s factual claims that gay marriage harmed children, straight marriages, and society as a whole.

Watch this space for video of tomorrow’s celebratory rally and kiss-in on the steps of Northampton City Hall. I’d better go iron my rainbow-striped pants.

Chinese Poetry in Translation by Kenneth Rexroth


Winning Writers subscriber Wesley Willis recently discovered Kenneth Rexroth‘s translations of ancient Chinese poetry and was so enamored of them that he shared these poems with me. They’re taken from Rexroth’s anthology Love and the Turning Year: 100 More Poems from the Chinese (New Directions, 1970). I was moved by their meditative quality; each moment is simply observed, each feeling simply described, so that the reader naturally slows down and becomes immersed in the poet’s present experience. Read more selections on the Bureau of Public Secrets website.

Sorrow
by the Poetess Chu Shu Chen (late Sung Dynasty, 13th c.)

The white moon gleams through scudding
Clouds in the cold sky of the Ninth
Month. The white frost weighs down the
Leaves and the branches bend low
Over the freezing water.
All alone I sit by my
Window. The crushing burden
Of the passing days never
Grows lighter for an instant
I write poems, change and correct them,
And finally throw them away.
Gold crysanthemums wither
Along the balcony. Hard
Cries of migrating storks fall
Heavily from the icy sky.
All alone by my window
Hidden in my empty room,
All alone, I burn incense,
And dream in the smoke, all alone.

****

Amongst the Cliffs
by Han Yu (768-824 AD)

The path up the mountain is hard
to follow through the tumbled rocks.
When I reach the monastery
the bats are already flying.
I go to the guest room and sit
on the steps. The rain is over.
The banana leaves are broad.
The gardenias are in bloom.
The old guest master tells me
there are ancient paintings on the
walls. He goes and gets a light.
I see they are incomparably
beautiful. He spreads my bed
and sweeps the mat. He serves me
soup and rice. It is simple
food but nourishing. The night
goes on as I lie and listen
to the great peace. Insects chirp
and click in the stillness. The
pure moon rises over the ridge
and shines in my door. At daybreak
I get up alone. I saddle
my horse myself and go my way.
The trails are all washed out.
I go up and down, picking my
way through storm clouds on the mountain.
Red cliffs, green waterfalls, all
sparkle in the morning light.
I pass pines and oaks ten men
could not reach around. I cross
flooded streams. My bare feet stumble
on the cobbles. The water roars.
My clothes whip in the wind. This
is the only life where a man
can find happiness. Why do I
spend my days bridled like a horse
with a cruel bit in his mouth?
If I only had a few friends
who agreed with me we’d retire
to the mountains and stay till our lives end.

Peter Everwine: “Rain”


I love it when a work of literature captures a feeling of mine that is so specific yet so hard to name, particularly when it involves glimpses of the transcendent. I grew up in a more urban environment than the narrator of the poem below, so for me, that distinct blend of nostalgia, longing, and mystery often arose when I looked out of my apartment window at dusk, as the outlines of high-rises turned lavender and misty on the horizon.

The text below is reprinted by permission from American Life in Poetry , a project of The Poetry Foundation.

American Life in Poetry: Column 278

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Peter Everwine is a California poet whose work I have admired for almost as long as I have been writing. Here he beautifully captures a quiet moment of reflection.

Rain

Toward evening, as the light failed
and the pear tree at my window darkened,
I put down my book and stood at the open door,
the first raindrops gusting in the eaves,
a smell of wet clay in the wind.
Sixty years ago, lying beside my father,
half asleep, on a bed of pine boughs as rain
drummed against our tent, I heard
for the first time a loon’s sudden wail
drifting across that remote lake—
a loneliness like no other,
though what I heard as inconsolable
may have been only the sound of something
untamed and nameless
singing itself to the wilderness around it
and to us until we slept. And thinking of my father
and of good companions gone
into oblivion, I heard the steady sound of rain
and the soft lapping of water, and did not know
whether it was grief or joy or something other
that surged against my heart
and held me listening there so long and late.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2008 by Peter Everwine, whose most recent book of poems is From the Meadow: Selected and New Poems, Pitt Poetry Series, Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. Reprinted from Ploughshares, Vol. 34, no. 1, Spring 2008, by permission of Peter Everwine and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©2010 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Nicole Nicholson: “Gulf Song”


Poets for Living Waters is a new online anthology of writings in response to the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico begun on April 20, 2010, one of the most profound human-made ecological catastrophes in history. This piece by Nicole Nicholson is reprinted by permission of the author. Read more of Nicole’s work at her website Raven’s Wing Poetry .

Gulf Song

There is an artery in the coastline, fingers spread,
bayou beckoning to the sea to come in
and travel up my arm. Gulf trajectories: seagulls
fly overhead, following the fringe of my
   fingertips
inland. The ocean climbs up inside my palm,
reuniting with river at the mouth of my life,
   which is
made out of little veins. Water: it is how
I live, how I came to you as a cloaked land
with veils of trees, wildflowers, and tribes
   traversing
the backs of my hands, up my veins, into
   my breasts
and belly. My womb has seen
millions of red men and women exit,
hug close to earth and feel me breathe,
and call me home.

I have billions, trillions, a galaxy of creatures
living just beneath the whorl of fingerprints.
   Crocodiles
in my teeth, turtles in my jaw,
pelicans and people in my pulse.
At an intersection in my wrist of unoxidized
   blue and bone
there sits an egret, white with sorrow, white with
   the sea foam
that I baptize my forehead with. He is
oil christened, stained with brown, feathers
   slicked down. You birth
dead dinosaur bones from the trenches in
   my knees,
caverns in my colon, light your fires and
   call them
Viet Nam’s children, little tragedies lit
when my eyes grow dark each night.

Candles do not burn in the ocean,
and boats cannot swim in God’s acre.
   There is
a necropolis of expired lives, scaffolding
   and chasses
of iron and bone coughed up and vacant
   on the ocean floor. It will
lie beneath this shroud of oil that burns
   and congeals
within the reach of my fingers. Let the poison
travel up my arm, hope that venom can
   be sucked out
by a kindly mouth and a bittersweet
   tongue. My wrist
is still knitting itself together,
bone halves seeking solace with
   each other
after being shattered apart by a hurricane
   hammer. And there is

no prayer for this, except for the cry in
   your own throat,
except for the children of mine that you wash
   the oil off of
like they were your own babies,
except for the sickness like tar balls resting
in the hollow behind your navel,
except for the fire launched from the
  soft beds
of your own tongues. If you find that prayer,
say it for me. I will need it to survive.

Leslea Newman: “Poem for Two Dogs, Hanged in Salem, 1692”


Lesléa Newman is the author of more than 50 books for children and adults, including the poetry collection Nobody’s Mother (Orchard House Books, 2008). The poem below, reprinted by permission, won second runner-up for poetry in the 2010 Solstice Literary Contest . Read all the winners here .

Poem for Two Dogs, Hanged in Salem, 1692

Did they hang

their heads

as good dogs do

when someone

slips beside them

to loop

a collar

or a rope

around their furry necks

Did they prance

along proudly

as happy dogs do

when trotting

alongside a friend

or stranger

who’s taking them

away

for a nice long walk

Did they give

sloppy kisses

as loving dogs do

when a kind man

or gruff man

kneels

down beside them

and says sit

and stay

Did they shake

all over

as frightened dogs do

when startled by thunder

or lightning

or black hoods

placed over their heads

making everything too quiet

and dark

Did they swing

their tails

as innocent dogs do

when they’re puzzled

or confused

but still

trusting those near

will bring them

no harm

Or did they bare

their teeth

growl and leap

snapping at the Hangman

before he strung them up

and they rose

to Heaven

leaving bodies behind

to be buried like bones

David Woo: “Divine Fire”


Prizewinning poet David Woo and the editors of the Asian American Literary Review have kindly granted me permission to reprint Woo’s poem “Divine Fire” below. The poem’s formal cadences and intellectual vocabulary seem to hold up a corrective to the apocalypse-fervor that he finds so dangerously inadequate.

“How to be good if a caul covers the prospect of your faith?” he asks, getting to the core of our temptation to “create an image, any image,” whose rules are easier to understand than the truly mysterious God. Hating the world in the name of our imagined divinity, we wind up trapped in our own imaginings, vulnerable to the skeptics’ jibe that God is only a projection of human ideals or neuroses.

Read Woo’s thoughts on the genesis of this poem here .

Divine Fire

“No more apocalypses!” the fanatics never cry. Extinction
is bliss for those who resent human life. We mocked
the fizzle of New Year’s 2000. We mock the wingnuts
who let the icecaps melt because the Rapture is nigh.

How to be good if a caul covers the prospect of your faith?
Create an image, any image, haloed, scimitared, thrust it
through Time’s wasp-waisted birth canal, let it emerge
bearded, lank, rebarbative. Tell yourself he’s the Man.

Now sit back as He pries the world apart. This is the end,
you’ll surmise, the end of dalliance, of amity, the last gasp
of afflatus, of consequent sorrow. Watch as He scythes
the last wheat, which flies like the severed heads of infidels.

Then why does the bread we break savor of no body
but the embodied ghosts of ancient grass? What infinity lives
in the turning leaves but a vaulted vision of our bonhomie?
What life basks at this homely fire but sees Saoshyant’s flame?

The embers will hold an American absence, ashes that leave
no mark of ankh or enso on him who frees critical mass
from a suitcase bomb. The last cloud will rain fire on flesh
that chars to faithless marrow. Even now the soul is fugitive.

****
(Editor’s note: Saoshyant is the World Savior figure in Zoroastrianism.)