The House with No Floors
Laurie Granieri
There’s a lot that no one ever tells you. No one ever told me how despair can get physical, muscle in and sprawl heavy across the chest.
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Silence's Volume
Jayne English
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.”
— John Keats
In a September post, I wrote about how artists like John Muth, John Cage, and Suzanne Cleary open doors for us to explore what inhabits silence: movement in John Muth’s brushstrokes; sounds coming to life in Cage’s silent concert halls; or the feeling of suspended time in Suzanne Cleary’s poem “Elm Street.” Again, silence draws me back, this time, into its depths.
Read MoreReading as Moral Formation
Stephen Lamb
I am sometimes embarrassed when I remember how important a certain book was to me five years ago. Amplify that embarrassment exponentially for each year closer to high school. The embarrassment comes partly, I think, from what the earth-shattering import I gave to this or that book says about what I had read up to that point in my life.
Read MoreAn Odd Apprenticeship: A Belated Mother's Day Reflection
Joy and Matthew Steem
For many trades, the practice of apprenticing has been an established method of imparting instruction from expert to apprentice. The learned takes the initiate under her or his wing, and over a period of time, something is imparted to the apprentice. Whether this is knowledge about gardening, mechanics, pottery or something else, the apprenticing system has proven successful when a skill has been imparted.
Read MoreThe Theology of Illness
Jean Hoefling
Through illness, man comes back to himself.
— St. Serpahim of Sarov
Very recently, a three-day illness sent me to the wall. Suffice it to say there were woes and throes and flues and vertigo aplenty, of an intensity I’d never before experienced. For once, I don’t need to resort to hyperbole when I claim that I didn’t move. If I tried to, I immediately checked into another dimension where the ceiling spun above me like time-lapse footage of star trails on steroids. Every minute was an hour, or no time at all, and the slightest noise devolved to cacophony and new frontiers of vertigo. Trying to imagine life outside my closed bedroom door was akin to planning a tea party on the backside of Jupiter. In short, I was completely disoriented.
Read MorePoetry Out Loud
William Coleman
"I stood upon the edge where the mist ascended" . . . "Light! more light!" . . . "I've lived the parting hour to see / Of one I would have died to save." . . . "I found the arrow, still unbroke." ...
I watched and heard my students say these lines, and so many more, one day in January. They were embodying poems they'd learned by heart, each one saying two: one of 25 lines or fewer, and one composed before the twentieth century was. We were following the rules of Poetry Out Loud, the national poetry recitation contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Read MoreT.S. Eliot: A Thought on Liberalism
Joy and Matthew Steem
The trouble with T.S Eliot’s reputation, many writers have said, is that his early work has been explored (think “The Wasteland”) while the later has been ignored. This has changed somewhat lately, but it’s still fairly pervasive. For example, in many poetry anthologies – the place where students get their first taste of poetry – it will be the younger, non-believing rather nihilistic Eliot they are introduced to. It’s not too often that something like the Four Quartets will be provided. Nope, the concluding sentiment received will be, likely, from “The Hollow Men”:
“This is the way the world ends (x3)
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
The Surrealist’s Storm
Jayne English
"I come into the peace of wild things." — Wendell Berry
Have you ever listened to an instrumental version of a song that’s familiar to you and realized, while you’re humming along, singing the words in your head, that a younger person, hearing the same version, would have no idea that there are words to it? You would be experiencing the same song, but at different levels.
Read MoreOur Subordinate Clauses
Jessica Brown
When I think of metaphors for our identity—the prismatic, shifting, layered, being-becoming self—I sometimes think of landscapes with peaks and valleys, or three-dimensional stained-glass kaleidoscopes, or even the deep expanse of space.
Read MoreMidwinter Spring
William Coleman
A few years ago, my school brought a young man named Liam Robinson to America. He hails from Lincolnshire, England, and makes his way by teaching English longsword dancing and performing folk songs he's gathered from his home country and from every country in which he's found a home in song.
Read MorePain and Petition
Briana Meade
Today, I sit on the bed, looking at the piles of laundry. There is a pile on my right. There is a pile on my left, and there is a pile on the bed. Afternoon happens to be when I am at my weakest. The pain is like a splinter I can’t get out of my thumb, but in this case, that splinter is wedged deep in the space between my condyles and my skull. The diagnosis I’ve been given is idiopathic condylar resorption—in other words, my jaw joint is disintegrating, along with the condyles. “Idiopathic” simply means no one knows why.
Read MoreSub[urban] Creation
Jayne English
“A box without hinges, key, or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid.”
—J.R.R. Tolkien
I grew up in the suburbs. Those places where you could only see distance if you looked up, because the houses and yards and hedges of your neighbors and their neighbors became the extent of your horizon. These views were vastly different from the ones that inspired Coleridge and Wordsworth on their walking tour through moorland and woodland, and along the coast of Bristol Channel. They weren’t like Emily Dickinson’s views at the Homestead, where she wandered through orchard and gardens, tending the flowers that thrived in her poetry. And they’re not the English countryside Tolkien knew as a child that charmed his Hobbits’ Shire.
Read MoreThe Grace of Graham Greene
Joy and Matthew Steem
For a long while—years—an exceedingly good friend pestered me to read Graham Greene, specifically The Power and The Glory. When I finally made the right choice, I had a sense of loss—grief that had I read the work earlier, I may have been a more replete and insightful person. I now personally know why he has been called one of the better writers (and a Catholic to boot) of the century.
Read MoreEmail From a Young Poet
Howard Schaap
“I like the poem ‘Purity’ by Billy Collins as a way to think about writing poetry,” a poetry student wrote to me recently. She also had some profound questions about the poem, beginning with, “As Christians, while writing poetry, are we still Christians after we’ve stripped ourselves pure as Billy Collins says?”
Read MoreThe Brothers Lionheart
Jessica Brown
When little, bed-bound Rusky Lionheart realizes he is going to die, he talks with his beloved older brother Jonathan, and Jonathan comforts Rusky with strange, magnificent words: “It’s only your shell that lies there, you know? You yourself fly away somewhere quite different.”
Read MoreOn Attending
Briana Meade
We are driving. My three year old daughter says cute things in the car. She says she is dreaming about brownies and milk. I want to kiss her cheeks every time she pipes up. I love her strangely and fiercely for the cute things she says at three.
Read MoreFormal Feeling
William Coleman
I’ve been mentoring a student in a senior project on poetics. Recently we read this wrenching instance of the sestina, a form that calls for the same six words, in differing orders, to end the lines of six consecutive stanzas, then for the sudden yoking of those words into a three-line envoy.
Read MoreCut by Coleridge
Joy and Matthew Steem
While writing on such a grandiose personage, it’s hard to not aspire to touch on a great many magnificent things. And what numerous numbers there are! Ashamedly, I have not read much Coleridge before. I knew of him historically speaking, and what he was known for and with whom he hob-knobbed, but I had read little past “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and a few others. Then I landed his Aids to Reflection.
Read MoreA Poet in Pursuit of Freedom
Jessica Brown
George Moses Horton wrote poems, and for a very long time he attempted to sell these poems to purchase his freedom from slavery.
Read MoreThe Romance of Grief
Jean Hoefling
My mother died on a snowless January morning high in a hospital room from whose window one could see pretty much into forever. Sudden failings in her body’s systems had taken hold—imbalances of blood and bone and lung. Frailty won the day. Fresh in our shock we gathered, reeling from the cruel slap of this impossibility.
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