Category Archives: Writer and Reader

Marjorie Maddox: “How to Fit God into a Poem”


Part I

Read him.
Break him into stanzas.
Give him a pet albatross
and a bon voyage party.
Glue archetypes on his wings with Elmers,
or watch as he soars past the Slough of Despond
in a DC-10.

Draw wrinkles on his brow with eyeliner
until his beard turns as white as forgiven sin.
Explicate him.
Call him “Love.”
Translate him into Norwegian.
Examine original manuscripts
for proof of his kinship to Shakespeare.

Make him rhyme,
Cram him into iambic pentameter.
Let him read War and Peace ten times
and give a book report to third graders.
Edit out references to sin
and insert miracles.
Award him a Nobel Prize.

Then, after you’ve published him annually
in The New Yorker for thirty years,
crucify him. Proclaim it a suicide.

Part II

Let him whirl through your veins
like a hurricane
until your cells gyrate,
until you salivate at the sound of his breath.
Let him bristle your nerves like cat hairs
and laminate your limbs.
On All Saints’ Day, meditate
and wait patiently.
Then, he will come,
then, he will twist your tongue,
pucker your skin,
spew out his life on the page.


Read more selections from Maddox’s collection Weeknights at the Cathedral (WordTech Editions, 2006) here. Read a review in Arabesques Press here.

Christian Wiman on Poetry and Religion


Christian Wiman, editor of Chicago’s venerable Poetry magazine, shares some brilliant thoughts on poetry and religion in the Winter 2007 issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin. This article (unfortunately not available online, so subscribe now!) is taken from his upcoming book Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet. Some highlights:


Language can create faith but can’t sustain it. This is true of all human instruments, which can only gesture toward divinity, never apprehend it. This is why reading the Bible is so often a frustrating, even spiritually estranging, experience. Though you can feel sometimes (particularly in the Gospels) the spark that started the fire of faith in the world — and in your heart — the bulk of the book is cold ash. Thus we are by our own best creations confounded, that Creation, in which our part is integral but infinitesimal, and which we enact by imagination but cannot hold in imagination’s products, may live in us. God is not the things whereby we imagine him.

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You cannot really know a religion from the outside. That is to say, you can know everything about a religion — its history, iconography, scripture, etc. — but all of that will remain inert, mere information, so long as it is, to you, myth. To have faith in a religion, any religion, is to accept at some primary level that its particular language of words and symbols says something true about reality. This doesn’t mean that the words and symbols are reality (that’s fundamentalism), nor that you will ever master those words and symbols well enough to regard reality as some fixed thing. What it does mean, though, is that “you can no more be religious in general than you can speak language in general” (George Lindbeck)….I would say that one has to submit to symbols and language that may be inadequate in order to have those inadequacies transcended. This is true of poetry, too: I do not think you can spend your whole life questioning whether language can represent reality. At some point, you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them. You have to believe that poetry has some reach into reality itself, or you have to go silent.

(For an elegantly written book on the latter theme, check out George Steiner’s Real Presences.)

Blogging will be light this weekend because I’ll be attending the feminist anti-porn activists’ conference at Wheelock College. Of course the biggest question on my mind this afternoon is “What should I wear?” So far I’ve packed my leopard-print sequinned hat, camo pants and a crucifix. Let ’em wonder.

Walter Mosley’s Advice to Novelists (from Poets & Writers Magazine)

Best-selling author Walter Mosley lays out some strategies for the first-time novelist in the latest issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. The full article is not yet available online, but all the writers who read this blog should be subscribers anyway — what are you waiting for? Here are some highlights to whet your appetite:

The most important thing I’ve found about writing is that it is primarily an unconscious activity….I mean that a novel is larger than your head (or conscious mind). The connections, mood, metaphors, and experiences that you call up while writing will come from a place deep inside you. Sometimes you will wonder who wrote those words. Sometimes you will be swept up by a fevered passion relating a convoluted journey through your protagonist’s ragged heart. These moments are when you have connected to some deep place within you, a place that harbors the zeal that made you want to write in the first place.

The way you get to this unconscious place is by writing every day. Or not even writing. Some days you may be rewriting, rereading, or just sitting there scrolling back and forth through the text. This is enough to bring you back into the dream of your story.

What, you ask, is the dream of a story? This is a mood and a continent of thought below your conscious mind; a place that you get closer to with each foray into the words and worlds of your novel….

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Self-restraint is what makes it possible for society to exist. We refrain, most of the time, from expressing our rage and lust. Most of us do not steal or murder or rape. Many words come into our minds that we never utter — even when we’re alone. We imagine terrible deeds but push them out of our thoughts before they’ve had a chance to emerge fully….

The writer, however, must loosen the bonds that have held her back all these years. Sexual lust, hate for your own children, the desire to taste the blood of your enemy — all of these things and many more must, at times, crowd the writer’s mind….

Your characters will have ugly sides to them; they will be, at times, sexually deviant, bitter, racist, cruel.

“Sure,” you say. “The antagonists, the bad guys in my book will be like that but not the heroes and heroines.”

Not so.

The story you tell, the characters you present, will all have dark sides to them. If you want to write believable fiction, you will have to cross over the line of your self-restraint and revel in the words and ideas that you would never express in your everyday life….

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Another source of restraint for the writer is the use of personal confession and the subsequent guilt that often arises from it. Many writers use themselves, their families, and friends as models for the characters they portray….She (the writer) wades in, telling the story in all of its truth and ugliness but then, feeling guilt, backs away from it, muddying the water….

This would-be novelist has betrayed herself in order that she not tell the story that has been clawing its way out from her core. She would rather not commit herself to the truth that she has found in the rigor of writing every day….

[But] you should wait until the book is finished before making a judgment on its content. By the time you have rewritten the text twenty times the characters may have developed lives of their own, completely separate from the people you based them on in the beginning.

A whole book of writing advice from Mosley, This Year You Write Your Novel, is forthcoming from Hachette Book Group in April. (But do I have time to read it and follow his advice to write 90 minutes a day? And here I felt so proud of myself for writing once a week!)

Novel Writing Advice from Caro Clarke

When I tell people I’m writing a novel, their first question is usually, “What’s it about?” (Not “Are you a masochist or something?”, which would be the logical question for anyone who had first-hand experience of the process.) I usually dodge by saying it’s a “family saga,” because as yet I have no idea which of its several storylines is the main one.

A friend recently directed me to this very useful series of articles by Caro Clarke, originally written for the magazine NovelAdvice. Clarke’s got my number in essay #9, “Pacing Anxiety or, How to stop padding and plot!” She distinguishes between the premise of a novel (e.g. “timid Jenny moves to Alaska to open a B&B”) and the plot, which is the actual conflict that drives the action. Most beginning writers have only a premise, Clarke says, and so they find themselves without anything to say once they’ve set up the scene:


Your premise implies that Jenny, feeling stifled, heads to Alaska to improve her life. Your plot, therefore, is about a woman who creates a better life for herself by accepting challenge, and everything you write has to develop to this resolution.

Challenge implies battling something, overcoming opposition, and this is the heart of novel writing. Fiction is about the challenges that the protagonist either triumphs over or is defeated by (EMMA or MADAM BOVARY, for example). A novel must have conflict, not just in its overarching idea, but in every single scene. Your premise is merely the novel’s opening action.

So far, I have the opposite problem. My inability to choose the book’s central conflict means that I have 100+ pages of scenes that develop the characters and help me understand their voices and motivations, but I’m still very far from throwing these people together into the confrontation that I originally understood as the linchpin of the story. For pity’s sake, the character who has taken over the book was supposed to be dead before it even started!

However, this early in the game, I feel that too much writing is a better problem than too little. Maybe only a quarter of these scenes will make it into the book, but I’ll still know something about the characters that I couldn’t have discovered any other way. From essay #3, “Don’t get it right the first time,” it looks like Clarke would agree.

Simon DeDeo on Escaping the Slush Pile

Simon DeDeo, editor of the new literary journal absent and the poetry review blog rhubarb is susan, offers some invaluable advice in this post from December about how editors react to unsolicited poetry submissions. Highlights:

“Read the guidelines before submitting….Guidelines are not oppressive tools of the ruling class, they are the only thing standing between us and Bartleby’s desk of refusal.”

“Funny or wacky cover letters are really not fun. If we are reading your cover letter, we are reading your submission. A small minority of contributors I felt were adopting tactics from the marketing industry more suited to selling X-treme colas than actual poetry. I didn’t throw anything out because of a cover letter — I don’t expect poets to know how to interact with other human beings — but please: make our lives more pleasant by being brief and to the point.”

“Choose poems that spring off of each other, that generate energy from being read together. Opening your submission should be like opening a can of worms. Suddenly there are poetic worms all over my desk! Worms everywhere! I cannot get rid of them. Do not send me actual worms.”

Those of you who are concerned with the relationship between art, power and the avant-garde should also check out DeDeo’s essay “Towards an Anarchist Poetics”.

Some More Words I Shouldn’t Say

Touchstone Magazine’s blog is hosting a lively debate in its comments box on whether Christians should use dirty words. (My previous post on this topic is here.) I particularly liked Tony Esolen’s observation that “Coarseness or vulgarity is, in itself, not sinful, and in fact we can commit the sin of pride by pretending that we are too high and mighty to hear certain words; and we can commit the sin of uncharity by using certain words among those who would find them scandalous. The drill sergeant had damned well not speak like a lady; and the man addressing the PTA had damned well not speak like a drill sergeant.” Alas, I’ve been known to do both.


When I was in junior high school, I prided myself on never using profanity. Of course, I also prided myself on eating only preservative-free food, not wearing makeup, and not knowing the names of any rock bands except the Beatles. Boy, did I have a rod up my…donkey.

Essay on Jack Gilbert at Poets.org

The Academy of American Poets website has posted a fine essay by Dan Albergotti on the poetry of Jack Gilbert. Now in his 80s, this reclusive poet is equal parts Desert Father and Zorba the Greek. His work combines the spiritual purity of long solitude with an earthy, almost childlike delight in physical pleasures. Of his fourth and most recent collection, Refusing Heaven (2005), Albergotti observes:


Fittingly, there is a sense of finality to these poems. In a recent interview with John Freeman for Poets & Writers, Gilbert said multiple times as a matter of fact and without self-pity, “I am probably going to die in the next few years.” With characteristically perfect self-awareness, he understands and accepts the declining arc of this life that he has dedicated to poetry. In fact, Gilbert has always embraced his mortality in a way that recalls Keats. He believes in the inevitability and finality of our bodies’ failure, but also in the redemptive power of the heart and imagination in the time we are allowed. In “The Manger of Incidentals,” he insists, “We live the strangeness of being momentary, / and still we are exalted by being temporary.” Though we may all be doomed to ultimate failure, we can achieve momentary triumph, like Camus’s Sisyphus, with perspective and courage. Even Icarus, a character traditionally mocked for his foolishness, is rehabilitated from such a viewpoint. In “Failing and Flying,” Gilbert says, “Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.” The flying was worth the fall. The revelation was worth the hardship. At the end of the poem, Gilbert makes an assertion that I cannot help reading in the context of his refusal of literary stardom and his embracing of obscurity and poverty: “I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, / but just coming to the end of his triumph.”

I had the privilege of hearing Gilbert read at Smith College two years ago. Though wizened and frail, he still had a fire in his eyes that might well attract a sensitive young poetess. He couldn’t see the words on the page too well, and at one point, after stumbling over the words of his poem, he shrugged and smiled, and said, “Whatever.” That mix of humility and virile assurance is the basis for his unique charisma —
a word that comes from charism, an anointing, a sacred gift.

What Makes Me Important

For several years after I became a Christian, I worried a lot about my mission in life. I felt it was no longer enough to use my abilities in the way that made me happy. God had rescued me from some very dark times in my life, so I felt obligated to respond — perhaps not to “deserve” it, which would be impossible, but to show that I was grateful and to try to act like someone worth saving. This is a surefire recipe for writer’s block if one focuses on making the outcome worthwhile, as opposed to seeking God in the process, as I’m just now beginning to do.

Anyway, I used to be anxious that if God did have a secret destiny planned for me, it would either be something really unpleasant involving Third World standards of hygiene, or something that made my individuality completely irrelevant. What if all this writing, thinking, relating, etc. were beside the point, and my sole reason for being here was to drop the banana peel that the Antichrist slipped on?

Well, maybe it is, but I no longer think that would be such a bad thing. In the Old Testament, there are several troubling stories where God seems to be killing large groups of people in order to make a point to the ones left alive. Not all of these people are personally guilty of anything, such as the infants in Jericho. This sort of thing fed my fears for a long time till it suddenly occurred to me: We all have to die. It’s not as if we’re entitled to a default state of happiness or immortality. In that case, there are worse ways to go than being used by God to save others.

One of the main themes of my novel-in-progress is this often humorous, random way that people’s destinies can interact, so that our attempts at virtue may alienate us from one another, while our vices may ultimately bring us down the only road that leads to reconciliation. We can’t engineer this paradox from the outset: “Let us sin that grace may abound? Certainly not!” says St. Paul. It simply happens, and reminds us not to think we know our own or others’ worth in God’s eyes. I love the 19th-century novels that are so full of these providential coincidences (Dickens and Victor Hugo were especially fond of them); whereas in the modern secular novel, the failure of our self-made meanings often ends in despair, not grace.

A good article on this topic can be found on the Hasidic website Chabad.org here.

Walter Wangerin Jr. Cancer Update

Walter Wangerin Jr., one of the finest Christian novelists around, was tragically diagnosed with cancer last year and has been posting updates on his website about his spiritual and physical progress. Let me rephrase that. He is not only a great “Christian novelist” but the most warm-hearted, humorous, prophetic writer one could imagine, someone who transcends all boundaries of genre and subculture. I was particularly struck by these comments from his December letter:


I have never construed my cancer as my enemy.  No, I do not judge others who do (thoughtfully) choose it, for whom “fighting” may be a helpful stance and attitude.  On the other hand I am critical of the media when, without genuine thought or analysis, it routinely declares in its death notices, that so-and-so died “after a long battle with cancer.”  Why does it have to be a “battle”?  What:  are folks with cancer good fighters if they win?  Bad fighters, failing knights, if they lose?  Can they be heroic only in triumph?  It really isn’t an issue of defeat or victory.  We are all going to die:  what a terrible, terribly total annihilation such language must make of our slaughters individual and wholesale, of our universal losses to sickness, disease and death.

Why not use the imagery that acknowledges how one experiences dying?–how one behaves in the face of death?–what one has to offer those who stand by in love and relationship?  These have been forms of discussion very familiar in the church of the past.  Read Jeremy Taylor, HOLY LIVING and HOLY DYING.  Before sciences and the medical profession began (indirectly) to persuade us that cures could be possible for every disease we might diagnose, describe, explain and name; before commercials began to establish it as a principle that each affliction identified also had an antidote; before our society made “feeling good” an individual human right (setting at enmity anything that made us feel bad) we did not have so self-centered, so childish, so simplistic, so unavailing and purposeless a frame of reference for the experience of sickness-unto-death.

Why not use the imagery of the psalmists in the Hebrew Scriptures?  A human is his body or hers (note:  even my genitive language here supposes a possessor of the body, this possessor [a soul? a mind?] supposed to be the “real” person).  Never in isolation, the body/individual exists ever and only in relationships:  to elements of creation; to a people, a tribe, a family; to God.  Suffering a physical sickness, then, is to experience the effects of breakage in the body’s significant relationships.  Sickness is not an enemy.  It is a rooster’s crow, calling me to the truth of myself and to the precise condition of my relationships–God, society, nature.  Enemies?  The psalmist knows some.  Those who hate God.  Those people(s) who attack him–yes, and who hurt him in the attack, for wounding is distinguished from physical disease; but even human warfare and defeat (see the books of Joshua and Judges) are attributed to disobedience, our breaking of God’s commandments, our breaking of the divine relationship.

For my own part, I recognize cancer cells as parts of me (of Walt, the body-soul continuum), tissue which is part of all my tissue–even as my children are a parts of our family (without whom the family itself would be something else).  They (whether cells or kids) become selfish, demanding more of the resources of the family (of the body) than other members can receive.  My children are not my enemy.  And my diseases, far from acting the foe, are profound initiators of spiritual clarity, devout meditation, a faithful (a peaceful!) seeking after God, praying, shaping thanksgivings for Jesus’s re-building of the relationship between God the Father and me.  And just this (the reconciliation Jesus effected between the All-Father and all children) becomes the object of my most careful contemplations.  And these contemplations themselves are made more patient and more mature by the disease and by the convictions of mortality which the disease infused in me.

Read the whole thing here. And pray for Walt.