Category Archives: Writer and Reader

Trust Your Imaginary Friends, and Don’t Scare the Horses


As a fiction writer and a person of faith, I can be stymied by worries over what is “real” versus “in my head”. Where is the line that separates fictional archetypes and imaginative projections from a genuine encounter with an unseen deity, and what distinguishes both of those experiences from the voices heard by the mentally ill?

I’ve never forgotten a Buddhist workshop I took a decade ago, which gave me a refreshing perspective on the question. The Western philosophical model, especially in its post-Enlightenment form, draws a sharp distinction between subjective and objective, self and world, which is foreign to Eastern thought. In Buddhism, the instructor said, the interpersonal realm of consensus reality and the interior landscape of the individual are both equally real, in the sense that they are part of our experience, and both equally illusory, because these transient specific manifestations are not the ultimate form of pure Being.

So what is sanity? Western rationalist psychology tries to diminish your involvement with the voices in your mind, and to refocus your attention toward external interactions. By contrast, a spiritual or artistic ideal of mental health might emphasize mindfulness about which realm you are in, and equanimity or non-attachment so that you don’t get lost in one dimension and lose touch with the others.

Sometimes it seems to me that religion, like writing a novel, is an attempt to introduce other people to your imaginary friends. If enough of them also develop a relationship with Jesus (or Captain Kirk), your inner world becomes the consensus reality, and you’ve just shifted the reference point of sanity in your direction. Conversely, what we call mental illness may be a real inner experience that the patient can’t get others to believe, or can’t express in consensus language because she confuses literal facts with metaphors. (For more on this point, see Gail Hornstein’s groundbreaking book Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness.)

And then something happens that really does feel like a message from the Beyond. While undertaking the Great Book Purge of my office this week, I discovered one of my notebooks from 2000-2001. (My inner child must have bought this one, since the cover art is a wistful dragon on a bed of petunias, gazing at the moon.) In it I found my notes from the Buddhist workshop I mentioned above, as well as the teacher’s name and the workshop theme, which I’d been unable to recall: “The Spiritual Problem of Giving Yourself Away” by Polly Young-Eisendrath, April 29, 2001, at Tibet House.

Here are some excerpts from those notes. It appears that this was a workshop for women about boundaries and self-realization versus selflessness in our spiritual practice. Any errors in reproducing the original presentation are my own.

…Many religious teachings focus on letting go of the individual self, particularly in meditation. But women who read that often feel, mistakenly, that they should stop working on self-development. But what’s meant by letting go is that you give up a certain attitude towards the self — not that you give up functioning as a self.

The religious language of letting go presumes that you already have a secure personal sovereignty over yourself — that you have been acting on your free will and are conscious of your intentions. Self-determination is part of a spiritual life, not something you want to give up…Self-determination means that you know you can live with the consequences of what you do…

****

…Buddhism involves ethical practice, wisdom practice, and meditation practice. You need all three. After a certain point, you can’t do it alone. If you go too deeply into meditation practice, you may have powerful mental experiences that you can’t understand or cope with by yourself.

Impermanence, change, limitation, interdependence, and compassion are the conditions of reality. Also mystery — the uniqueness of every moment, every being, inspires awe. Learning to cope with these conditions is the goal of all religions.

A meditative state dissolves the sense of consensual reality (the agreed-on world of ordinary perceptions), which can be dangerous. You may get lost in the other mental realm of images and forces, the archetypes [Young-Eisendrath is a Jungian], etc. Shamans can go into that realm and draw power from it. The goal is to push beyond that to experience the transcendent source. You don’t want to be attached to that realm, because then you get distracted or go nuts.

People kill each other over religion because they identify with some image in that realm, and then say “my entity kicks your entity’s ass”. They’re not experiencing the oneness of things, but are stuck on the images or manifestations without having clarity in observing them…

The realm of the archetypes is real, though it isn’t the ultimate reality. That’s because Buddhism doesn’t make the distinction between self and object. The angel is in your head and is real. You just have to know which realm a thing belongs to! Your goal, in this life, is not to stay in the transcendent source, but to be more mindful in every realm, including the ordinary one where we spend most of our time…

Other gems in this notebook include a career self-assessment questionnaire from 2000, when I quit the legal profession:

“If I had six months to live, I would: Get baptized. Eat fattening food whenever I wanted it. Finish my damn novel already. Write nasty letters to any influential person I’m currently pissed at. Write a short inspirational book about why I came to Jesus.”

“Write a description of myself: My personal style is intellectually rigorous but emotionally nurturing…Outside work, my interests are poetry, spirituality, dolls, cooking, fashion, and a lot of other girly shit.”

And who can argue with this bit of wisdom from my 2002 New York State driver’s ed class: “When can you use a horn? Not when passing a horse — you might scare it.”

I got my license (in Massachusetts) on the fifth try. The horse was not to blame.

Thoughts from the Great Book Purge of 2014


This year, I resolved to lose 200 pounds. Of books.

We are surgically attached to our iPhones in this house, so much so that Shane’s first instance of imaginative play was holding a block up to his ear and pretending to talk to it. However, I haven’t been able to warm up to reading e-books. Reading screen-by-screen feels like driving at night, with no way to see what’s outside the small range of my headlights. I like to be able to orient myself, at a glance, about what came before and how far along I am. If a book isn’t lying on my bedside table, kitchen table, bathroom shelf, dining room table, or desk, I forget that I’m reading it. As a result, my ever-growing collection is shelved in archaeological strata rather than any thematic order.

Last summer, I undertook the Great Closet Purge. Out went the uncomfortable lawyer shoes and matronly satin blouses, the miniskirts from my single year of stress-induced slenderness, and the flowery print dresses that had served my mother’s fantasy of molding a 1980s teenager into a Victorian ingenue. Something had shifted inside me, letting me understand that I could release these past selves while still honoring them.

The Great Book Purge has a similar intention. Besides de-cluttering my space, I’m seizing this opportunity to face and accept the changes in my worldview over the past two decades.

It’s making me very uncomfortable.

How did my idea of a good book go from Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education to Richard Labonte’s Best of Best Gay Erotica 2? Why do I no longer have the patience to read sentences like, “This is a form of postmodern liberationist hermeneutics in which the non-relativist convictions of a liberation ethic stand in uneasy tension with the assumption that hermeneutics has no critical-objective element”?[1]

When I was first drawn to Christianity as a teenager, the elegant complexity and logical coherence of Christian theology comprised a big part of the appeal. Right now, I happen to be in a stage of development where those same features feel like intellectual defenses against the direct apprehension of God in my heart and my body. I believe that head and heart will come into greater equilibrium down the line, so I’m not tossing all my academic books. The other night I opened to a random page in Paul Hessert’s Christ and the End of Meaning, a book I’ve owned for two decades and never read, and wrestled with a passage about the gap between “God” as a religious concept and THE LORD as an actually experienced Presence.[2] That’s what I’m talking about — or not talking about!

Rather than the accessibility of the writing style, the weightiest factor in my book purge is whether the author is conscious of the limitations and privileges of his subject position, as Hessert appears to be. Because I’m bringing the personal and empathetic aspects of religion into the foreground as never before, I have to feel a relationship of trust toward an author, and that requires a certain measure of political self-awareness and psychological transparency on his part. (I’m deliberately using the male pronoun.)

Thus, I have trouble getting past a passage like this one, although the rest of the book seems reasonably progressive and egalitarian for a Baptist professor. The author is posing a hypothetical to illustrate how a pastor might apply the Biblical rule against divorce when a parishioner is being beaten by her husband:

“I must (among other things) make at least some tentative moral judgment about what levels and kinds of spousal violence warrant divorcing a violent spouse…I can analogize from my presumptive rule against divorce only if I can establish for myself the kinds of cases of spousal violence under which the rule against divorce ought to be observed.”[3]

I’ll make it easy for you, Chuck: NONE OF THEM.

To me, this quote reveals an unexamined sense of entitlement to pass judgment on a survivor’s determination of her own safety, in the name of “Biblical rules”. Christianity has a big problem with this, both because of its history of patriarchal leadership and because the Cross is a tricky symbol that can be misunderstood to encourage non-redemptive suffering. I believe a person has an absolute right to escape abuse, and we grossly misconceive religious morality when we treat it as a source of competing interests to “balance” against her survival.

Because of my greater understanding of trauma and the false beliefs it induces, most of my heavily Calvinist-evangelical books are also destined for a new home. That sense of pervasive badness and helplessness, in myself and humanity generally, now seems like an artifact of my unsafe upbringing. The further I get from that self-concept, the more I feel clear, energized, compassionate, creative, and loved by God. But I honor that worldview as a transitional resting place on the way to where I am now. Liberals, if you know a Calvinist, be nice to her. Someone probably messed with her pretty badly. Don’t brush her off with the feel-good foolishness that “sin is just an illusion”. That’s why Who Told You That You Were Naked? is also on the discard pile (despite its enticing title), with my margin notes from the 1990s saying “No, abuse is real!”[4]

And while we’re on the subject of wishful thinking, my newfound determination to dispel all psychological illusions is making me generally suspicious of theology, and even of faith itself. Both liberal and conservative religious books seem united in pushing people’s attention away from themselves and out toward some more-worthy “other”, either a morally superior deity or the unfortunate neighbor in need of our charity. From an Alice Miller perspective, this looks like a concerted effort to avoid feeling our own trauma and caring for the neglected child inside. Mainstream theology tells us: “We are bad but God is good…we are helpless but God is in control…we are selfish but others deserve the sacrifice of our lives.” What is that except a collective elaboration of the protective denial that forced us to idealize our abusive parents?

Truth be told, my magical-thinking machine hasn’t worked right since 2009, when I underwent a painful break with my evangelical friends over “the Gay Issue” at the same time as a longed-for adoption match fell through. Bitterly, I saw in retrospect how I’d ignored the warning signs in both situations, taking at face value the selective facts that supported my longing for love and connection.

And now that I do have a child at last, I’m even less sure what to make of God’s role in all this. Like the Psalmist, I want to thank and praise God for fulfilling God’s promises–but while I was wandering in the wilderness, it wasn’t apparent that anything had been promised to me. I wasn’t Sarai, Hannah, Elizabeth or Mary. I received no prophecy, no guarantees. When friends would say, “I believe God will send you the child who’s meant to be yours,” I wanted to scream, How do you know anything about it? The folks in my life who had slung God-talk most confidently were also the ones whose God was cruel and arbitrary toward non-heteronormative love. Why shouldn’t I fear that my infertility, like a same-sex attraction, made me one of God’s cast-offs? My subsequent good fortune feels equally random, unless I can find the error in this whole way of thinking about God’s sovereignty and human suffering.

Hessert’s distinction between “God”-as-concept and THE LORD suggests a way out of dead-end theodicies. We can’t think our way through the problem of pain, but we can recognize the struggle as the holy ground where we encounter God. He writes:

“LORD,” then, is not synonymous with “God” in the language of order or “Supreme Being” (or some other concept) of Western philosophy. We are likely to misinterpret “The LORD works vindication and justice for all who are oppressed” (Ps. 103:6) as “There is a Supreme Being who controls history providentially so that social justice is divinely assured, whatever people may do.” This is patently not the case…

[W]e can avoid begging the question as to whether or not there is a “Supreme Being” and to what extent this Being controls history. We can say simply that the working of social justice, vindicating the oppressed, is one of those contexts in which “the LORD” is to be named. We may not always see vindication and justice where we should like to. But where they are evident, the awe attending the mystery bordering our experience is called forth.[5]

That’s the kind of faith that attracts me now: A practiced readiness to notice the in-breaking of God’s presence, but without any required conceptual filters or compulsory emotions (optimism, self-abasement) that interfere with clear perception of what is actually happening in my world.

Bauckham & Hart’s Hope Against Hope (which I also haven’t read yet) is on the keeper pile because of this passage:

Not all hopelessness is bad for us, let alone dehumanizing. Hopelessness can be a perfectly healthy condition and, correspondingly, hope can be pathological…Hope has its legitimate limits, and it is vital that we identify them correctly lest we mistakenly invest ourselves in a dead end, an option with no future…

[H]ope is no mere heroic subjective disposition of the individual, an attitude which, regardless of what faces it, soldiers on, refusing to accept defeat long after the battle has been lost, convinced that through its striving and contrivance things may yet be turned around. Real hope is far less focused on its own capabilities. It is not concerned with some supposed right or capacity to choose and to create for itself the reality which it desires. Real hope is essentially rooted in the qualities and capacities of otherness, of that which lies beyond itself in other people, in the ‘real world’. It is, in [Jesuit writer William] Lynch’s words, ‘an interior sense that there is help on the outside of us’…In [George] Steiner’s sense it is a wager on transcendence, on something which lies beyond us, as yet unseen but, we believe, real enough.[6]

You had me at George Steiner.

“When the word of the poet ceases, a great light begins.”

****
[1] Charles H. Cosgrove, Appealing to Scripture in Moral Debate: Five Hermeneutical Rules (Eerdmans, 2002), p.164.
[2] Paul Hessert, Christ and the End of Meaning: The Theology of Passion (Element, 1993), pp.68-75.
[3] Cosgrove, p.71.
[4] John Jacob Raub, Who Told You That You Were Naked? (Crossroad, 1992).
[5] Hessert, pp.73-74.
[6] Richard Bauckham & Trevor Hart, Hope Against Hope: Christian Eschatology at the Turn of the Millennium (Eerdmans, 1999), p.62.

Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2013

It’s time once again for our annual roundup of the books, blog posts, and discoveries that made the most impact on me this year. Thanks for your loyal readership. Feel free to share your own favorite reads and revelations from 2013 in the comments. Books need not have been published in the current year.

Most Self-Esteem You Can Buy for $25:

Right now, it’s only a Halloween wig, but it’s inspiring me to fulfill a lifelong dream. Go ginger in 2014!

Strangest Discovery at a Church Tag Sale:

My astute husband spotted this planter at the Christmas fair at First Churches in Northampton, which was Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards’s church during the First Great Awakening. Edwards was kicked out of the pulpit eventually because he made too much fuss about teen boys reading dirty books. One can only imagine how he’d feel about this porcelain beauty, who has succulents growing out of her pelvis and right breast. My friends who remember pre-feminist kitsch have informed me that she was originally an ashtray: the matches go in the boob-hole and the cigarettes go, uh, down there. Which is even more disturbing.

Runner-up for Previous Award:

My church is nothing if not broad-minded. Thanks, St. John’s Christmas Fair. I’m looking forward to learning all about the Holy Foreskin.

Best Poetry Books:

So many this year, I can’t pick just one.

Natalie Diaz, When My Brother Was an Aztec (2012)
With furious beauty and Promethean boldness, Diaz rewrites our cultural myths to speak her truth as a Mojave woman, a lover, an activist, and a sister bereaved by addiction.

Minnie Bruce Pratt, Crime Against Nature (2013)
This groundbreaking book recounts how the author lost custody of her sons when she came out as a lesbian, then forged a beautifully honest relationship with them later in life. First published in 1989, it was reissued this year by A Midsummer Night’s Press in collaboration with the journal Sinister Wisdom.
Read my full review and excerpt here.

Jamaal May, Hum (2013)
This electric debut collection explores what it means to be an African-American man in Detroit, finding beauty in the ruins of the machine age. Read my full review and excerpt here.

Best Novel:

Susan Stinson, Spider in a Tree (2013)
Set in Western Massachusetts in the 18th century, during the religious revival known as the First Great Awakening, this luminous novel re-creates the domestic life and spiritual development of the theologian Jonathan Edwards. Stinson allows the complexity of the Puritan worldview to speak for itself, setting Edwards’s mystical delight in nature and his deep compassion alongside his severe views of God’s judgment and his defense of slave-owning.

Best Nonfiction Book/Best Parenting Book:

Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries (1991)
With bracing clarity, this maverick psychoanalyst explains how all kinds of cruelty, from child abuse to genocide, has its roots in traumatic and oppressive child-rearing practices. The child had to identify with the perpetrator’s perspective in order to survive, but is then at risk for revisiting this pain on the next generation. Healing comes when you finally stand on the side of the child you once were, validating her innocent needs and feelings, instead of continuing to internalize the judgments your parents projected onto you. Warning: this book may expose many of your religious beliefs as denial mechanisms…but that’s a subject for another post.

Favorite Posts on the Block:

The Gorgon’s Head: Mothers and “Selfishness”
I’ve come to believe that mothers trigger perceptions of “selfishness” in so many people, regardless of which choices the mother is making, because people are unconsciously angry about their own unmet childhood needs. Someone who had distant and unfeeling parents may view working mothers harshly, while someone who had smothering and needy parents may have a similar disdain for stay-at-home mothers.

National Child Abuse Prevention Month: Why It’s Personal
I don’t know how you’d put this on a flag, but my version of awareness would be more radical. It would emphasize what survivors have in common–with each other, across different kinds of abuse, and with everyone who breathes in abuse-enabling myths in the air of our culture. We may not all be in a position to identify abused children and find services for them, but we can all ask ourselves: What do I believe–about God, power, knowledge, sexuality–that contributes to the silencing and minimizing of abuse? What might I be telling myself to silence myself?

Abuse and the Limits of the Welcoming Church
Overreacting against fundamentalist divisiveness, our churches minimize genuine distinctions of culpability and power within the community we are creating. If inclusion is our only defining value, where is the conversation about accountability and transformation?

Belonging, Believing: A Tension at the Heart of Church
What happens when we have developed close personal ties to a community, but discover that we can’t accept what they believe? The peer pressure to maintain those ties can distort or suppress our search to know God’s will for ourselves.

And finally, the most important award of them all…

World’s Best Toddler:



Happy New Year from Shane!

Image Journal’s Gregory Wolfe on Change and Eternity in Art

The literary journal Image: Art, Faith, Mystery celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, prompting some insightful reflections by founding editor Gregory Wolfe on the magazine’s Good Letters blog. Image publishes poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and contemporary artwork that engage with the great Western religious traditions in fresh and authentic ways. I appreciate how Wolfe harmonizes the aspects of art and religion that in my life have sometimes been at odds: the creative journey into the unknown, versus the safeguarding of revealed truths. He writes:

Art’s method is precisely to search out a new form to help us see the content we already know as if for the first time. Art thrives on shocks of recognition. Some are truly shocking, with an immediate effect. Most are subtle, time-delayed fuses that detonate deep in our subconscious and move something that needs dislodging.

In a sense, every encounter with a great work of art is a conversion experience. Yes, of course, that’s how the world is. I knew that. But I’d forgotten. I will return to the true way, the way I’d strayed from. I won’t forget again.

Artistic styles change when they fail to reveal something new.

A rounded arch speaks of eternity, solidity, and stability. A pointed arch speaks of aspiration, a hunger for light, and matter’s permeation by spirit.

Both arches speak the truth. The newness isn’t necessarily an improvement. The newness is, in part, in the contrast itself, the revelation that there is always more to see. Reality is fractal that way.

In the early church, Jesus was depicted as the Good Shepherd. Then he became the Pantocrator, emperor of the cosmos. Then he was shown on the cross and became the Suffering Servant. In a postmodern context he may perhaps be present by way of his absence; felt rather than seen. Who knows? There are a thousand options.

When religious faith isn’t made new, it becomes ideology, detached from reality. It either becomes toxic or it simply ceases to be credible.

Read the whole essay, subscribe, and donate to their annual appeal.

Writing the Other with Empathy

From the outset of my novel-in-progress about a gay man’s spiritual journey, I have wrestled with the question of my right to represent this character in his own voice. (It doesn’t help that some gay male writers, not exempt from the deformations of patriarchy, occasionally snipe about “middle-aged housewives” who intrude on their literary turf.) How to explain, without reenforcing straight privilege to interpret queer experience, that on some level I feel that my protagonist is me, and that I write not so much as an ally but as an autobiographer of an alternate life? Writers of persona poems and historical fiction face the same challenge of entering another’s perspective with empathy rather than self-centered appropriation.

Karla Kelsey’s latest review at The Constant Critic expresses well the philosophical nuances of literary empathy, which she says is made possible by the multiplicity of the self. Our conscious experience already exceeds the first-person “I”. Discussing Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s new collection, Hello, the Roses, Kelsey writes:

Inhabiting another’s first-person perspective in the same way that he, she, or it, does, not only seems psychologically impossible, but also would efface the very thing that ensures the existence of all that is not-me in the world. As Husserl among others points out, had I the same access to the consciousness of another as I have to my own, that other would cease being another and instead become part of myself.

Thus the bind: one cannot inhabit anyone else’s first-person experience, and it is precisely this limit that makes another other to me. At the same time, we don’t want to say that we have completely no access to another’s first-person perspective. We want to say that what we feel in affective, empathetic moments is not merely a solipsistic self-projection.

While studies on the problem of mind hash these problems out via the discipline of philosophy, worries over the lyric I reflect the way these problems circulate in the language of poetry. As we know, the lyric I is the poster-child for the expression of first-person experience. And while we might grow tired of the limits of this perspective—of the hemming and hawing of these I’s, aching through their embodiments, bemoaning the fleeting nature of relational connection—we balk at lyric expression that “feels into” the first person experience of another. The ethical risks of such attempts at empathy include the effacement of fundamental difference with fantasy—and passing fantasy off as some sort of emotional truth.

But this need not lock us into a Cartesian box, for “Je est un autre” (Rimbaud). Or, if you prefer philosophy, “The other can be evident to me because I am not transparent for myself, and because my subjectivity draws its body in its wake” (Merleau-Ponty). We can open the box from a trap door built into its bottom: there are many ways that we experience ourselves as other to our first-person experience of the world, for we exceed our pronouns. And this first-person experience of excess, of self-as-other is kin to an experience of the otherness of that which is not the self. The otherness of other humans, animals, nature, and objects.

Perhaps we first recognize otherness because it is a fundamental relationship that we have to ourselves. Simply touch your right hand with your left and you are both touching and touched. Catch your image in a mirror unexpectedly and who is that, for a moment, you wonder. Leafing back through old poems—through a poem you wrote yesterday—you have the distinct feeling that you did not write what is on the page. As such, one way to think about empathy is along the self’s subject/object edge, considering the fact of the self as simultaneously occupying a subject and object position and exploring the object-self’s relationship with other objects.

Read the whole essay here.

Poetry by Ruth Hill: “Cast in Bronze” and “Wild Celery”

A loyal subscriber to our Winning Writers website, Canadian poet Ruth Hill has been among our most-awarded poets since she began her career only a few years ago. This year she counts 24 wins and placements in journals (so far), following 36 last year. She kindly shares two recent poems below. “Cast in Bronze” appeared in Rose & Thorn Journal (May 2012) and Silver Bow Publishing (November 2013). “Wild Celery” appears in the debut issue of Perfume River Poetry Review.

Cast in Bronze

Afternoon storms
having opened their black velvet pouches
and thrown down their burden of diamonds
often give way to evenings of magnificent
   bronze
Come out and see the hibiscus brazing
pigeon necklaces burnished with maize
brass bells tinkling off glittering leaves
yellow sequined arches in the village square
Evenings whose warm respites of joy
are made brief by the longitudinal shadow
We are spinning away from the sun
as it appears to be spinning away from us
Newborn bees share our view through
   topaz honey
hive’s hum a kazoo, dripping raindrops
   a xylophone
amber windows everywhere
Rocks and roads and trees all trimmed
   in tortoiseshell
are strewn with chestnuts and chrysoberyl
Citrine evening with soap bubbles in the air
mist of bronze others see as not there
freckles on thrush, blush on the pear

Like well-oiled athletes, golden hills flex
   their muscles
A single robin’s silver flute calls the universe
   to order

****

Wild Celery

…and didn’t God layer it nice, twice,
first in its Spring Fling,
then for this Fall Ball,
with doilies of lace
and dollops of diamonds and pearls,
embroidered popcorn silk,
and braided cord
dripping with tassels of icicle dough,
spiraled peaks of whip cream snow,
with sun to warm and melt,
and sprinkle sparkles to twinkle so,
white under blue for a bride like you.

Someday lay me down to die
under wild celery, heaving its
exploding fireworks into the sky,
toes in the mud, musing,
sweet compost effusing,
second bloom from the tomb,
this glory the story of
what’s already gone by.
 

Poetry by Lynne Constantine: “Confiteor”

Lynne Constantine is on the faculty of the School of Art at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. An interdisciplinary artist and writer, she has, in other moments of her varied career, taught medieval English literature; headed two nonprofits; freelanced as a journalist, speechwriter, ghostwriter and book reviewer; co-authored a book on migraine; and co-founded a communications consulting firm.

I met Lynne earlier this month at the Ollom Art Festival in Northampton, where she gave a lecture on aesthetics that concluded with the wise and funny poem below. In her lecture, Lynne described the shift from classical aesthetics, with its idealized representations and universal theories of beauty, to modern aesthetics, which honors wabi-sabi, “the perfection of imperfection”. With the advent of photography and film, we no longer need art to establish a consensus on how things look or should look. Art can turn inward to express the artist’s psychological response to her environment, without having to hold up that response as the sole correct one.

This lecture reminded me of my own turn towards experience-based theology, and away from the arguments over the one “right” interpretation of doctrine. So it seemed fitting that Lynne ended with this creative reworking of her Catholic upbringing. Rituals and images remain stubbornly embedded in our subconscious despite our conscious rejection of the belief system where they originated. Perhaps this unresolved tension is one of the imperfections that our art must express, accepting that the rift between these parts of ourselves may never heal.

Confiteor
by Lynne Constantine

Confiteor deo omnipotenti
I am here to confess

I do not know how long it has been
Since my last confession
But I’m here now
And I’m hoping for absolution
For whatever can be absolved

I confess
that I am not the person I want to be

I confess
That I have made up statistics
In the heat of an argument
Which have turned out to be true
Because so much of this shit is predictable

I confess
To pretending not to understand
what the homeless vet in the street asks
   me for
and for that I am grievously sorry
and for the fact that he’s in the street I am
   grievously sorry
mea culpa

I confess
To making up sins when I went to confession
   as a teen:
“I laughed and talked in church six times,
I took the Lord’s name in vain two hundred
   times.”
I made them up so I could get absolution for
   all the other sins
That I wasn’t going to be telling the priest,
   that old pervert.
For this one I’m not really sorry
But I probably need forgiveness anyway
For something
Mea culpa

Absolution is a beautiful concept
But I confess
That I am not very forgiving
Especially when forgiveness is not followed
By a sincere effort to amend your life…

…Congress
…the Federal Reserve
…AIG
…Fannie Mae
…banks too big to fail
Are you making a sincere effort to amend
   your lives
After screwing the entire world
And then getting paid?
Do they make a penance for that?

I confess
That as a child I cried for hours
when I found out
that people don’t really turn the other cheek
I am noisy when I am inconsolable
I may cry right now
Mea culpa

I confess
That I want to believe in hell
For racists
I confess that I would like to pick their
   punishment

I confess
That I want to believe in heaven for
   the poor
And for my dogs

I confess that I hate the concept of
   purgatory
It’s a do-over for mean, petty people
Who should have turned the goddamn
   other cheek
And amended their lives
While it could have done somebody
   some good.
But that’s just me.
Mea culpa.

I confess that I am stubborn and proud.
I confess that I cry at stupid capitalist
   manipulative commercials.
Damn you Hallmark.
I confess that I can have a nasty mouth.
I confess that I am not as kind as people think
Nor as generous as I could be
Nor as ready to forgive
As I would like to be forgiven.

And yes, I would like to be forgiven.

For these and all the sins of my past life
And all the sins I will be committing
And repenting
And committing
And repenting
I ask absolution.
I promise to go forth and amend my life.
Amen.

Celebrate Poetry and Dance at Ollom Art Festival Aug. 9-10 in Northampton

This weekend in Northampton, I’m hosting a literary reading as part of the Ollom Art Festival, an interdisciplinary event on the theme of Body, Mind & Heart. Please join us!

Choreographer John Ollom and Ollom Movement Art celebrate the release of his new book, Internal Landscapes, with the Ollom Art Festival on August 9-10 in Northampton, MA. This multimedia event includes the premiere of his show “Prisoner of My Projection” at the Academy of Music Theatre, short films, visual and performance art installations, and a literary reading hosted by Winning Writers.

Come to the Neilson Library Browsing Room at Smith College at 4 PM on August 10 for an hour of poetry and prose by Jendi Reiter, Diana Holdsworth, Ellen LaFleche, Lesléa Newman, Charlie Bondhus, Robert F. Gross, and an excerpt from Internal Landscapes. Proceeds from the festival benefit Diabetes Education. Purchase tickets from the Academy of Music website.

John has been a great influence on my creative process. Inspired by Jungian depth psychology and ancient myths, his work centers on finding one’s inner truth and overcoming shame.

For a glimpse of his teaching style and Internal Landscapes, his original method of “archetypal movement that leads to art creation”, watch this 5-minute video by Emma McCagg, whose work will also be on display at the festival.


Talkback to Sinatra: My Poem “I Wish I Were in Love Again”


My poems “I Wish I Were in Love Again” and “third day” have just been published as contest semifinalists in Issue #7 of OSA Enizagam, the magazine (get it?) of Oakland School for the Arts. “I Wish…” is a critical gloss on Frank Sinatra’s ballad of the same name, which romanticized a violent conflict between lovers. This poem originally appeared in Atlanta Review. (That’s right, OSA E will take previously published work. How cool are they?)

“third day” is a collage poem using phrases from a news story about the desecration of a gay man’s corpse in Senegal. The formatting can’t be reproduced in this blog template, so you’ll just have to go buy this great magazine, which features work by Donna Steiner, Anneliese Schultz, Linda Leedy Schneider, and many other accomplished poets and storytellers.

I Wish I Were in Love Again

When Sinatra sings,
I wish I were in love again,
I imagine Love is the name
of a violent town in Texas
where the one stoplight
took a bullet long ago,
dusting the dry street with ruby glass.

Where the sheriff,
big-bellied as Cupid,
didn’t see the evidence
of the split rope, the double-smudged lipstick,
the blacksnake-cold gun under the belt.

Sinatra’s voice pours the golden
whiskey of nostalgia to shimmer
over the icy rocks, like the foothills
outside Love where nothing
lives but tumbleweeds and chicken thieves.
He misses the spat of cat and cur,
the flying fur, the sparks
that burned down Love’s one church
when the preacher’s daughter
fell asleep smoking.

Lucky in Love
is the man who didn’t miss the train
in or out of town.

Love is a Many-Splendored Thing,
the mayor says,
hoping to attract
a branch of the Houston bank,
a brassworks factory or even a circus
to settle in Love,
create jobs for the men
and scarcer women who lie
in saloon alleys all night clutching
souvenirs of Love to their hearts:
a postcard, a clump of red dirt.
Who wouldn’t want such a loyal workforce?

Love is just around the corner,
if you’ve got a first-class horse.

City-trippers in the mood
for the blackened eyes
Sinatra sighs for
take the spur line to Love
en route to Laredo or Dallas.
Fanning themselves with transfer tickets,
the ladies breathe,
I’ve never been in Love before,
mistaking the crash of plates
for an emphatic whorehouse piano.

The general store hawks banjos
with one string, plasters for the knees
of old folks who fall in Love too easily,
and of course, bullets.
If you break a hip in Love
you know what happens.

Despite the weather,
Love’s no place to retire.
The all-you-can-eat buffet closes at five.
When the moon climbs the sky again
like a drunk husband going upstairs,
the city ladies take their seats
in the second-class carriage,
each with a purple bloom
aching under her blouse, or against her cheek.
It won’t fade for days.
It’s almost like being in Love.


My Poem “Robot Deer Shot 1,000 Times” at New Millennium Writings


I was privileged this spring to receive publication in New Millennium Writings, one of my favorite literary journals. My poem “Robot Deer Shot 1,000 Times” won an honorable mention in their Winter 2011-12 contest. The winners of the shared first prize included my dear friend Ellen LaFleche. Read more poetry from the current issue here. (“Robot Deer” is on page 146 of the issue, page 28 of the PDF.) The current contest, with prizes of $1,000 for poetry, fiction, flash fiction, and essays, is open through June 17; this deadline is typically extended to July 31.

This poem was inspired by one of those “News of the Weird” wire stories about a mechanical deer that cops deployed to trap poachers. The hunter’s backstory, however, simply emerged on its own as soon as I put pencil to page. You never know what your imaginary friends will tell you over a few drinks.

Robot Deer Shot 1,000 Times

Some buckshot-toting boys can’t resist
that hat-rack head lofting into view
in the sweep of the pickup’s dusty headlights,
a come-on like the barmaid’s at the Blue Note
when she slaps your hand but you know she means maybe
by how her tail switches away.
It’s poaching to shoot from the road
at night, one of those rules
on the same page as don’t drink with a married woman
or drive a locked van to Mexico,
even if your brother asks.
Maybe the barmaid can tell a pro tattoo
from the tic-tac-cross your cellie carved with a pen filler.
But you believe the buck is real
and that its brown eyes, glassy
with trust, are the worn-down night’s gift to you,
even when you shoot and shoot but it won’t fall,
clicking its proud head slowly round
like the barmaid’s heels when she glides
her tray of foaming mugs over to the college boys.
Then the Staties roll up with their toy-car lights
joking Bambi sure can take a beating,
and cuffed on the hood you’re forced into a close-up
of the felted frame, pocked with pellets,
and it looks like your brother’s skin after the last radiation.
Tomorrow you’ll be more of a fool
at the Blue Note than you were today,
not because of the deer but the white envelopes
the cops found stuffed in your glove compartment
with poems inked on them, that some joker will shout out
during a lull in the jukebox,
and you’ll think the barmaid, brown eyes soft, is listening.