In reading C. Lee McKenzie’s Wednesday fiction post (Click here), which she said was inspired by a recent book review of mine on Chasing the Powhatan Arrow, I recalled this poem I wrote in November 2005. I wrote this poem after having written the funeral homily for Howard, a man who was a member of First Presbyterian Church of Hastings. At the end of the poem, I’ll say a bit more about Howard and give some clues to the ideas behind the poem.
I am out-of-the-pulpit for the next two Sundays. The next sermon will be posted, God willing, on October 11.
A Soliloquy for Howard
Meticulous and proud, Howard bragged they’d never been an auction in the 133 years the family had the farm His grandfather, Caleb Dean, a driver on the Battle Creek stage line, facing competition from newly laid track, purchased the property back in ’73. At first, they lived in town, driving the cows out to pasture each morning ‘till they finished the house that still stands upon the hill, with hand-hewed floor joists, bark left on one side, still visible in the Michigan basement he’d dug.
Much has changed in 89 years. when the world was young and more innocent before the Great War, the Depression and more wars. In the Spring of ’16, his mother brought forth life in the house on the hill overlooking the lower fields, the road to Grand Rapids and the Michigan Central with its coal-fired hogs pulling freight and passengers along the banks of the Thornapple. For those holding the reigns of a mule, the train served as a siren, its whistle reminding them of a larger world luring some, but not all.
Though he traveled around the globe, following the lines of the highway, the whistle of the train and the contrail of jets off to India, Africa, New Zealand with winters in Arizona Howard never really left Rutland Township. He lived in the same house, attending a one room school until high school, when he went into town where he met his wife Kathryn, who commuted to school each morning from Shultz, on the old C, K & S, christened the Chicago, Kalamazoo & Saginaw (though it never made it to either end) and locally dubbed the Cuss, Kick and Swear.
After marriage, he continued with his daddy, farming the high ground south of the Thornapple: milking Guernsey, raising beef, growing corn and always tending a large garden whose bounty, sealed in Mason Jars, were saved for winter. Together, he and his dad brought one of the first tractors in these parts, a ‘39 General, made at the Cleveland Tractor works. As the seasons came and went he dabbled in politics and farmed less, but always kept his equipment as good as new and for anyone who’d stop by, he’d tell stories about working with oxen or plowing behind a mule.
Each fall, Howard harvested black walnuts, primarily because they were there and that’s what you do, when the Good Lord gives you a harvest. As the years wore on, he came to depend upon others, but with an eye to detail, he demanded that those who assisted follow his instructions precisely: husking the nuts through a corn shucker, washing ‘em in an old cement mixer and drying ‘em in racks in the barn, then a keeping ‘em a week or so in the basement by the furnace ‘till the nuts neatly cracked open and the meat fell into a cake or a batch of homemade ice cream.
In November, 2005, with walnuts drying in the basement, harnesses and an oxen yoke still hanging in the barn, Howard called his son to come quick and donned a fresh shirt, for a trip to the hospital. Heading toward the highway, where the two-track end, out by the grape-vines, he heard the distant wail of a train long pasted. Kathryn had gone on ahead, but he knew the whistle, and could hear the engine chugging through the swamps south of town, as before, carrying the girl he loved and who become his wife, Listening, Howard gasped and breathed his last, in sight of the house in which he was born on the land he loved where his family farmed for 133 years.
Insights into the poem
Howard Ferris lived in the house his grandfather built late in the 19th Century. The farm sat in the northeast corner of the junction of Michigan Highways 37 and 43. Until his death, the big red barn stood proud while the house remained somewhat hidden behind white pines. The two track which ran up to his house paralleled the grape vines which grew down by the highway. In the photo, which was taken a few years after his death, the two-track is covered with snow. The house and barn have both been removed since that photo was taken in 2008.
One day, a few weeks after I arrived in Michigan, Willard Curtis, a retired pastor from the church who lived outside of Kalamazoo, came up. We spent the day riding around, as he showed me where people lived. I knew at the time the church, which sat on less than an acre of land in Hastings, needed to expand. We passed this farm, and I asked Willard who owned it, saying it’d be a wonderful place for a new church. “You might be in luck,” Willard said. “It’s owned by Howard Ferris and he’s a member of your church. You haven’t met him yet, because he’s in Arizona for the winter. Before Howard came home that spring, I learned he’d already sold his property to the hospital, but retained a lifetime lease.
Over the next two years, I learned a lot from Howard about the community. Everything in the poem comes from things he told me. Early in the Depression, as they were building Highway 37 toward Grand Rapids, Howard’s father hired him and a team of oxen out to help grade the road. That road runs by the new church which now sits about half a mile north of Ferris’ home (he died before we purchased the property). Howard’s son gave the yoke to the church, where it is on display in the entry way.. Not only did it help grade the road in front of the church, it’s a reminder of Jesus’ call for us to share his yoke (Matthew 11:28-30).
A Michigan basement indicates a dirt basement (no solid walls) and the floor joist were often logs squared off on one side, with the rest of the log left with its bark on.
Sadly, Hastings no longer has a railroad. The CK&S went bankrupt during the Depression (I think 1937). However, in downtown Hastings, its trestle across the Thornapple remains as a walking bridge. The Michigan Central was later sold and resold, but continued to serve as a railroad in the 1980s. Today, much of the track is enjoyed by bicyclists, walkers and runners as a rail trail.
Howard did travel to the places listed. In addition to farming and county politics, he was active in Farm Bureau and with the Agriculture program at Michigan State. Most of these travels were to learn or to share agricultural knowledge.
Great Blue Heron takes flight over the Thornapple River during the fall of the year.
I have been fairly busy the past few weeks and behind on my writing. But I did scratch out this poem as I watched September pass by, mostly from our back deck. I hope you enjoy the poem and the photos (but for some reason I should have taken more photos of the various flowers)..
Buffalo Mountain just before sunrise
September from My Back Deck
Queen Anne rolls up her lace early as the chicory and black-eyed susans fade, replaced by golden rods and the limby yellow wingstem growing along the ditch banks with an occasional bunch of purple ironweed.
The leaves on the walnuts and hickories remain green but much paler than at midsummer Occasionally I jump, as if being shot, when a hickory nut pings off the barn’s metal roof.
Only a handful of birds now sing at dawn, and the sound of insects at night are softer than a month ago. The lightning bugs disappeared and the last of the yellow finches’ head south but wooly bear caterpillars show up, some say, forecasting a bad winter.
The bears are less active than in the spring, and it’s easier to see groundhogs now the hay has been cut. The deer move in large herds, as the fawns lose their spots and the bucks grow antlers.
After dark, which comes earlier as the month progresses, I watch Cygnus the swan fly higher followed by his fellow aviator, Pegasus, the flying horse, and if I stay up late, I’ll see the fall constellations rise.
The days remain warm, but some mornings feel chilly, the rain feels colder, and the morning fog denser than just a month ago. A whiff of smoke rises from a burning field or maybe a brush pile, but it’ll soon to be replaced by woodsmoke.
In the last few months of this past year, I read three books of poetry of which I’m providing brief reviews. To those who enjoy poetry or to play with words, I recommend each collection. They’re all delightful and very different.
Holly Haworth, The Way The Moon, poems
(Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004), 71 pages.
Drawing on the 13th moon cycles a year (every 28 days), Haworth has written 13 poems, each in four parts representing the four stages of the moon. In each section, she explores the natural world around the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southern Virginia. Haworth captures not only the cycles of life, but also how fleeting it can be. She writes with a naturalist eye, capturing and recording sightings in nature. I enjoyed her collection and reread it, but my one criticism is that at times her poetry seemed more of a list without a perceivable narrative other than the changes of the moon’s phase.
Among the wildflowers which Haworth is enchanted with are chicory and Queen Anne’s Lace, two plants in which I have written a few poems about. (To read one of my poems titled “Chicory and Lace,” click here.) I read this book in late summer/early fall, as the last of the chicory appeared and the Queen Anne’s Lace was balling up tight, as stockings stored in a drawer for another year.
Wayne Caldwell, Woodsmoke, poems
(Durham, NC, Blair, 2021), 81 pages.
Caldwell employs two voices in these poems which are all set around Mt. Pisgah in Western North Carolina. The main voice is Posey, a widower who misses his late-wife, Birdie. Posey lives alone and shuns most things modern. He still heats his home with wood, has a mule name Maud and a dog named Tomcat. According to his poems, he has learned to slow down with age. He doesn’t go to church, but his poetry is filled with Biblical allusions. While he burns most trees in his woodstove, the one exception is dogwood, because of the myth that Jesus’ cross was a dogwood. Posey shares the history of the area as well as his family and his interest in his new neighbor, Susan McFall.
There are a few poems written by Susan McFall, whose husband had run off with a younger woman. She builds a house above Posey’s, where she explores nature and looks out for Posey.
These are wonderful poems whose narrative captures the heart of Southern Appalachia.
Christian Wiman, Hammer is the Prayer: Selected Poems
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 207 pages.
I heard Wiman speak last years at Calvin University’s Festival of Faith and Writing. While I had heard of him before and had read a few of his poems in journals, I found myself wanting to read more of his work. Unlike the other two books of poetry above, which have a unifying theme, this collection of selected poetry is more complex. The pieces are drawn from several Wiman’s works. If there is a unifying theme, it would be around illness and death, as many of the poems deal with Wiman’s battle with cancer.
While many of these poems stand alone, some build upon each other. The longest poem, “Being Serious,” contains 20 parts and an epilogue, 35 pages, that captures the life of “Serious,” from his birth to death and to God. While this collection is not at all “preachy,” God is another theme that reoccurs frequently. In addition to his own poetry, there is a section of poetry by Osip Mandelstam which Wiman translated. Mandelstam was a Polish/Russian who died during Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s.
This is a deep collection of poetry that will be worthy to be read many times.
I started this post two weeks ago, when I was in Detour Village in Michigan’s UP. Today, I am in Wilmington, NC, , as my father is recovering from four bowel surgeries… I know this is a long post. If you find what I say about one author boring, just skip to the next. In a way, this massive data dump is my way of summarizing what’s in my journal. I placed photos of the books which I came away with from the festival.
Pre-Conference Workshop on Wednesday
Northern Red Oak “I am the vine, you are the branches,” Jesus said. “Cut off from me you can do nothing.” Yet, the heavy oak branch, sheared from its life source, fallen from the empyrean, decomposes slowly on the forest floor in a bed of rotten leaves from which trout lilies sprout.
Wednesday at the Festival
I scratched out the above poem in a workshop by Paul Willis, a poet I first met at the festival nearly 20 years ago. He gathered us into groups of four and set us free in the nature preserve behind the Prince Conference Center at Calvin University. We were to quietly make our way through the preserve, taking turns leading and then pointing out something of interest. We would each make notes, and another person would lead the group. After 45 of so minutes of silence, we discussed what we saw. Then he gave us just a few minutes to take one of the things we’d written about and to create a poem. Hence, the poem I wrote about a large branch of an oak tree resting on the forest floor.
New moon, a day after the eclipse
After seeing the eclipse in South Charleston, Ohio on April 8, I attended the Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing. This is my fifth time at this festival, which is held every other year. The last festival I attended was in 2012. And, because of COVID, this year’s festival is the first in-person gathering since 2018. Over the years I have heard a many great authors speak about writing and faith including Salman Rushdie, Wally Lamb, Scott Russell Sanders, Eugene Peterson, Kathleen Dean Moore, Thomas Lynch, Parker Palmer, Mary Karr, Debra Dean, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Craig Barnes, and Ann Lamott. Each year, the festival draws in around sixty authors and a couple thousand participants. While almost all the authors are Christians, the only requirement is that they write about faith. In addition to Christian authors, there have been Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and even atheists.
Here are the authors I heard. There’s no way one can hear all the authors in three days. I tried to capture a bit of what I learned from them. I have listed the authors in order that I first heard them at the conference (in some cases I heard them speak twice):
Thursday at the Festival
Margaret Feinberg is a podcaster (The Joycast) and author of Scouting the Divine: Fight Back with Joy, Taste, a See. Feinberg spoke on sustaining a writing life. She detailed two practices and drew from her own life and her book for examples:
Cultivate a life of Adventure (or live a compelling life). She drew on her parents’ examples as well as on those who grow grapes.
Cultivate a life of healing. Here, she drew on the work of olive growers.
Ruth Graham Born in an evangelical family, Graham now serves as a religious writer for the New York Times. Thankfully, she noted, the job of a religious reporter today isn’t focused on denominational meetings. She’s more interested in getting to the heartbeat of religious experiences. She told of a story she wrote for Slate, about a man from Dalton, Georgia, whose Bible leaked oil. She tried to tell the story, which she suggested was about a man who had a religious experience which got out of hand, in a way that is fair to all sides.
Sara Horwitz Born in a secular Jewish family, Horwitz rediscovered the faith of her ancestors in her mid-30s working in the Obama White House. She first was on a team of writers for the President, and later became the speech writer for Michelle Obama, the first lady. Horwitz spoke about how encouraging everyone in the White House was to her desire to practice her faith (including turning off her cell phone on the Sabbath). She gave up an opportunity to help Michelle Obama with her memoir to write a book on her journey into Judaism. Religion, she said, should draw us out from ourselves and into something larger. She found freedom in the Jewish law which she interprets as a system of maintaining dignity in others.
Marilyn McEntyre A popular podcaster and Bible teacher, Feinberg titled her talk, “Writing Through a Fog of Fear: Finding Life, Giving Words in an Alarming Time.” Acknowledging the challenges facing writers today, she spoke of our context while providing questions for discernment and strategies for publicly presenting our work. She began with two epitaphs: “Be not afraid,” -Jesus. And “Be afraid, very afraid.” -Mel Brooks. Discerning questions:
From where does my energy or sense of urgency come?
Who would I most like to read this? If only one reader, who?
Who will take offense or be troubled? How can I address their concerns?
In writing this, what does it mean to me to be as wise as serpents and innocent as doves?
We bring our own association to every word. But the same works for others. What words of ours will be their triggers?
Strategies for speaking into fear:
Study your favorite risk takers (suggest reading Gaza Writes Back)
Have meta-conversations where you can. Talk about language behind our words to help people better connect.
Listen to the call of the moment.
What does it mean to be faithful? Do you put a name to what you are faithful to?
You don’t have to go into anger. You can model debate, hope. Let your style be modelling.
Be responsible to speak to the complication of the issue. What do we want people to hear? Honor complexity of beliefs.
Don’t under-estimate the power of beauty.
Be surprising. Change up our writings with exhortation, humor, lament in the same piece.
Change genres. Try out new genres.
Offer authentic antidotes. Try following Jesus’ example and speak into issues.
Stories are important. Stories help disarm.
Acknowledge the emotional weight (Susan Sontag writing on the pain of others)
Play with paradox. Be a gentle alarmist, a light-hearted doomsayer.
Be a prophetic trickster, a Riddler.
When you have the privilege from writing with safety, remember those being killed for their speech. We can speak because they can’t.
Write with others.
Pray for clarity, for when and to whom to write, for obedience, courage, and passion.
Tracy Smith (keynote). Smith provided the Thursday night keynote address. A graduate of Harvard and Columbia, she also was a Stenger Fellow at Stanford. She has served as nation’s poet laurate (2017-2019), has been awarded the Pulitzer-Prize and has published poetry, a memoir, and non-fiction. Currently, she teaches at Harvard, and has recently published To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul.
Her speak focused on reading certain poems and reflecting on how they came about and how they might be interpreted. In her introduction, her work was described like “Jacob wrestling with God” and how our “paradoxical wounds can heal.” The poems she read and reflected on included: “Hill Country,” Weather in Space,” “We all Go Chasing All We Will Lose,” “Political Poem,” “The United States Welcomes You,” “The Fright of our Shared History,” and “Wade in the Water.”
Sadly, all her books of poetry had sold out, but I came away with a signed copy of To Free the Captives and look forward to exploring her vision of a better world.
Friday at the Festival:
Mary DeMuth spoke on “stories as healing.” Telling the truth, she proclaimed, is the key too both good writing and good living. She provided six things to consider if we fear sharing a story:
Discern timing. “Don’t vomit on the reader.” A story never told can never heal, but we should remember that our call is to first write, not necessarily publish.
Exactness is not the same as truth. We must remember that it is our story and no one else can tell the story in the same way as we can. Storytelling is an effective truth delivery vehicle.
Expect opposition. While we should welcome helpful feedback, we also take a risk of putting our work out there. Sometimes, when you tell the truth, you engage is spiritual warfare. She finds having a prayer team helpful as they both pray against attacks but also help keep her humble.
Name our fear.
Expose evil but love your readers.
See the benefits (God gives us glory in our weakness).
If we don’t tell the truth, we misrepresent people. Our job is not to enlarge villains but to enlarge Jesus.
Matthew Dickerson and Fred Bahnson titled their conversation, “Ecology Imagination and why stories matter.” Dickerson part of the conversation was often based on Tolkien. I haven’t read Tolkien since college. Bahnson (I’ve read his book Soil and Sacrament), drew more from Wendell Berry and Barry Lopez, two authors I continue to read. Bahnson described how the richest life is found where rivers meet oceans, and how writers need to put themselves in such uncomfortable and risky settings to best flourish.
Diane Mehtu spoke about Dante and Virgil (Dante’s guide through hell). This was a fascination lecture even though the presenter read from a paper. She uses powerful language. She presented the idea of the friendship of the two poets, who lived over a Millenia apart, and what she’s learned from repeatedly reading the Divine Comedy. What made the lecture even more interesting to me is that I had been listening to an unabridged reading of Augustine’s City of God and had just heard Augustine dealing with Virgil.
Karen Swallow Prior titled the lecture I attended, “Imagination: It’s not just Hobbits and Hobby Horses.” She questioned how we often consider imagination as something playful within our childhood and mostly individualist. This she challenged, suggesting that we often inherit language structures (language is based on imagination) without understanding how it came about. This she applied to evangelicalism, of which she was critiquing and suggests needs to embrace imagination to work its way out of its crisis. Another criticism of evangelism is that it tends to draw more on American ideals than the Christian faith and is a product of modernity and late-stage capitalism. She also critiqued evangelism’s emphasis on the end times, suggesting that we don’t need stories about the end but about how to get there. The early Christians, who called themselves “people of the way” understood this.
Yaa Gyasi (Friday evening keynote) This “conversation” between Gyasi and Jane Zwart focused on her two novels and how they deal with grief and loss. Gyasi was born in Ghana, but grew up in Huntsville, Alabama. Her experiences seem to provide her a unique perspective even though I haven’t read her books. Quote: “Prayer and writing comes from the same place. From your pen to God’s ear.”
Saturday at the Festival
Christian Wiman is a professor of communication arts at Yale Divinity School (and former editor of Poetry). I attended his lecture titled “The Art of Faith, The Faith of Art.” Wiman read several of his poems and reflected on the faith and art within them. Sadly, I was running late and missed part of this lecture.
Danielle Chapman I heard Chapman speak twice. The first session was a discussion with Jim Dahlman on Southern literature. While both have published books which I came away with, I questioned their representation as a Southern writer. But her poetry is engaging as is her memoir, which I have already started and will review.
I later heard her talk on memory in non-fiction and poetry.
Sonya Bilocerkowyez gave the best lecture I attended outside of the keynotes. Sadly, it was also one of the least attended lectures. An American-Ukrainian, she’s the granddaughter of Ukrainians who were displaced during the Second World War. She happened to be teaching in Ukraine in 2014, when the Maidan Revolution kicked out the Russian puppet government and Russia invaded the Dobast and Crimea. Afterwards, she published a collection of essays titled, On Our Way Home from the Revolution: Reflections on Ukraine.
Her lecture was titled, “Whose Manuscripts to Burn? On the Role of the Writer during Wartime. Drawing on “cancel cultural” and “imperialistic language,” she spoke passionately about how Russia once again attempts to cancel Ukrainian identity. She credited her grandmother for teaching her an 1840 poem against Czarist imperialism.
She made four points on the role of the writer in war:
The role begins before the war.
The role is to document.
The role is to save lives.
The role is to free the land (Decolonization cannot be a metaphor).
Throughout her lecture, she drew on Ukrainian writers (such as Oksana Zabuzhko and Victoria Amelina, as well as those from Bosnia and Gaza.
Stacie Longwell Sadowski lead a lunch circle dealing with the use of social media for writers. As she and her husband maintain a site that encourages people to explore the outdoors, I joined her group and learned a bit more about what I am doing wrong . Actually, I did learn a lot from the luncheon circle. However, since I am not into monetizing my site, I’m not changing much. Check out her website, \Two Weeks in a hammock.
Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr (closing keynote) Doerr was the reason I decided to make the trek to Grand Rapids for the conference this year. I am still amazed five years after reading his breakout novel, All the Light We Cannot See. He began the final keynote of the conference, before a packed house, speaking about similes. Doerr questioned if the age of similes is over. quoting polls and exposing outrageous similes he’d come across in his reading. He drew upon Homer and Superheroes and made fun of the mistakes he’d made in his slides.
Doerr was by far the funniest speaker I had heard at the festival. He was very free in his presentation which was given in Calvin’s fieldhouse. At one point, he pauses and looks up at the banners hanging around and says, “Calvin’s girls volleyball team must have really been good.” At another point, in this long diatribe on similes and metaphors, he pauses and looks around at the crowd and says what many were thinking, “You thought you were going to hear the bald guy talk about All the Light We Cannot See, didn’t you?”
Then Doerr made a serious turn. His talk about similes was to point to the interconnectedness of our violent and conflicted world. He suggested reading as a way for us to get beyond our self-centeredness and to make connections with the larger world. Next, he called for leaders who could make such connections. Then he encouraged writers, who have the advantage of metaphors, to bring these connections out in our writing. He advised us to tell stories, which are needed to bring our world together. It was a simple message that extended to 45 minutes through his humorous antidotes. When he was over, he received a standing ovation.
After the lecture was over, I met Bob, a friend of mine from Hastings, and the two of us drove up to Detour Village in the UP, arriving a little after midnight on April 14th. More about that later…
I became acquainted with Jarman’s poetry through poems published in the Reformed Journal. Dailiness consists of a series of long essays on various aspects of poetry. Originally, I thought I would use this as evening reading, but the essays were too long and deep for that. I found myself falling asleep. They required more attention, so I began to read them in the morning with better success. Not only do these essays need to be read, but they also need to be pondered. As they are independent of each other, I recommend reading one per sitting. In each essay, Jarman muses about aspects of poetry as he reflects on a concept (like dailiness) while engaging in a conversation with poems throughout the ages.
After opening with a reflection of the epic Gilgamesh, the author explores the role of metaphor and repetition in poetry. He insists on the need for one to write daily with two essays (dailiness) and devotes essays to poetry as devotion and as part of the religious life. Here, he attempts to save the George Herbert (the parson poet) from critiques of T. S. Eliot and Samuel Johnson. However, to Herbert’s credit, Coolridge appreciated his poetry and Simone Weil credits one of his poems for her Christian conversion. Jarman (as with Malcolm Guite who I review below) explores the work of Seamus Heaney. I found his concluding essay on the pronoun “Something” inspiring. Reading this essay after church on Palm Sunday, which lead me to write the poem below.
I liked the book but would only recommend it to those serious about poetry. In a good way I found myself often looking up words (not in a dictionary, but with google on my phone). Like many books I read this one provided me with another book to check out, John Drury, Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (University of Chicago, 2014).
Now here is my poem:
Palm Sunday 2022
Something is happening and will happen this week. Something so dark and terrible we can barely comprehend over the noise of this day filled with excitement and expectation as the Messiah rides into Jerusalem to the cheers of the crowd. For evil lurks behind these walls and in the minds of those in power, and soon, the expectation of the crowd will melt into the excitement of a spectacle as the innocence one dies and the guilty go free.
Something is happening and will happen this week. Something so wonderful and hopeful we can barely comprehend over the noise of this day filled with excitement and expectation as the Messiah rides into Jerusalem to the cheers of the crowd. For the goodness of God prevails over evil and in the deep darkness of the week, on the stillness of the morning of the third day a light will burst from a tomb as the innocent one rises and the guilty pardoned.
-Jeff Garrison, April 10, 2022
Malcolm Guite, In Every Corner Sing: A Poet’s Corner Collection
(Norwich, UK: Canterbury Press, 2018), 196 pages.
I had not read Guite when I heard him speak at the HopeWords Writing Conference in Bluefield earlier this month. While there, I purchased and had him sign this collection of his columns which appeared in Church Times, a British magazine. Each article is about 500 words or two to two and a half pages in length. Although English, Guite spent part of his years growing up in Canada. As I read this book, I enjoyed getting to know him better. Each article draws on poetry, from ancient to modern poets including a few from his own hand.
In them, he muses about poetry and the natural world. We learn of a man who enjoys many things, from smoking a pipe to walking his dogs. We also learn of his deep faith in Christ, his delight at the natural world, and how we are connected to those who came before us. Most of these essays have a nice twist at the end. In one story, he marvels at an old bridge as he canoes “Willow” on a river through the bridge. The last two arches in the bridge are “new.” They were rebuilt after having been destroyed Cromwell’s era (17th Century) to prevent an army from taking a town. After flirting with the bridge, the poetry of Tennyson and Eliot, he ends marveling at the bridge God has built through Christ that cannot be destroyed.
This was a perfect wind-down book for the evening as I could read through four or five of the seventy-three columns, before closing the book, turning out the light, and going to bed.
Peter Yang, The Art of Writing: Four Principles for Great Writing that Everyone Needs to Know
(TCK Publishing, 2019), 89 pages.
Yang distills the writing process into four principles: Economy, Transparency, Variety, and Harmony. And, with homage to “economy”, he does this in 89 pages. A lot of people could benefit from these principles to help clarify their thoughts on paper. This is the value of this small volume. While this may not be on par with William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, few people will wade through Zinsser’s more detailed prose. What Yang provides are simple ideas, each backed up with a couple of stories and examples. For the person just wanting to learn some basic techniques to make their writing appeal to more audiences, The Art of Writing would be a good place to begin. Disclaimer: I received this book in exchange for an honest review of the work.
My eyes have feasted on a beautiful colored landscape for the past month. Slowly the trees turned color. But with last week’s heavy frost, the trees are now mostly brown or their leaves have fallen to the earth, to rot into the soil and nourish another season.
I thought I would share some of my favorite photos from this color season, along with two poems. One I wrote on Sunday evening, having done my 4 1/2 mile hike to Laurel Fork and back. Once I climbed my way up out of the hollow and the forest gave way to the hayfields, I was treated to a perfect ecliptic in the sky with four heavenly bodies (a crescent moon, Venus, Saturn, and Jupiter) visible. The other poem was written while taking Amtrak’s Crescent (formerly Southern Railroads “Southern Crescent”) from Danville, VA to Atlanta.
Mayberry Church Road in late afternoon
Ecliptic
The young moon, just above the horizon, flirts with Venus as darkness descends. The red of sunset has faded except a thin line just above the trees to the west, as Saturn and Jupiter, the only other objects visible look on with approval.
Venus and the new moon. Saturn and Jupiter would be to the left, behind the oak still clinging to its leaves. Photo taken with an iPhone, handheld. Laurel Fork early in October, with just a hint of color.
Bear Creek Road in late October
Nursery Road in late afternoon
Asleep on the Southern Crescent
Maturing moon high overhead fills my compartment with light as the blowing whistle up front announces our fleeting presence, followed by clanging bells and the flashing red lights of the crossing guards.
The train snakes into the Carolinas, with stops, I’m told, in Greensboro, High Point, Salisbury, Charlotte, Gastonia, Spartanburg, Greenville, and Clemson. But I sleep soundly and wake up in Toccoa, Georgia.
At breakfast, I’ve learned we lost a bit of time in Charlotte, as they worked on a toilet, but I never knew anything had happened.
My compartment at daybreak, on my return trip from Atlanta.
Mia, my frequent hiking companion (for short hikes)
The leaves may be gone, but there is still beauty to observe. Early November, behind Nester’s Cemetery.
Richard Lischer, Open Secrets: A Memoir of Faith and Discovery
(NY: Random House, 2001), 242 pages, no illustrations.
A delightful collection of essays that describes Lischer’s first three years as a pastor in Southern Illinois, just east of St. Louis, Missouri. He arrives driving a Ford Pinto. Fresh out of school, he finds his church in the middle of a cornfield. It takes time for this well-educated pastor to relate to his congregation, but he gradually begins to love these people. Nationwide, Civil Rights and Vietnam are in the news, but this little church seems to be far from the headlines. Lischer fights over the American flag in the sanctuary and the gossip that seems to spread so fast that the pastor is the last to know. Providing marital counseling to a couple dealing with adultery, Lischer lets a “shit” slip out. To his amazement, considering their issues, this offends the couple. He conducts a graveside funeral with military honors and learns, at the last minute, that the honor guard made up of local veterans, are firing live bulletins. He deals with greedy funeral directors trying to upsell fancy caskets that are beyond what the beavered can pay. In telling this story, Fischer also shars the quirks of this congregation which publishes everyone’s giving in their annual report.
While Lischer claims to be a Lutheran, he doesn’t indicate which synod he belongs. But in the essays, he writes about taking on a teaching position at an exile group from Concordia seminary. This would put him on the “liberal” wing of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. I know this because in my first church, there was a small Missouri Synod church in town. The pastor had been in seminary at this time of a fundamentalist take-over. He left the seminary to attend and graduate from the “seminary in exile.” Many in the church wasn’t happy with him being cozy with those who supported women’s leadership roles in the church.
The stories in this collection can be funny and sad. As I was reading them, I thought a lot about my own first pastorate and how many similar stories we shared. This book might be paired with Craig Barnes’ book, Diary of a Pastor’s Soul, which I read last year. Barnes writes about a pastor’s last year before retirement. It would be beneficial for a seminarian or someone considering the ministry to read both both books.
Gregory Orr, A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry
(New York: Norton, 2018), 325 pages.
What an incredible book. While I’m no expert on poetry, or literature about writing poetry, I found this book helpful, interesting, and easy to read. The only other book I’ve read writing poetry was Mary Oliver’s, A Poetry Handbook. I feel Orr’s book to be superior. Unlike Oliver, he doesn’t spend a lot of time discussing meter and some of the more technical issues of poetry. While it has been years since I read Oliver, from what I remember Orr goes much deeper into the use of metaphors and of how words in poetry brings understanding through naming, singing, saying, and imagining. While not spending as much time on meter, Orr does dedicate many pages to how words sound when place together in the process of creating a poem. I found Orr’s writing to be helpful not just for the understanding of poetry, but also for the understanding of life. In this way, the book reads like a gift. While this book could be used as a textbook, with many helpful exercises, it was not dry as one might expect a textbook to be.
Drawing from his vast bank of knowledge from poetry, literature, mythology, the Bible, philosophy, education, and other fields, Orr sees poetry residing in the paradox of a chaotic world and a desire for order. It takes both to create poetry. Just as God speaks above the chaos in Genesis 1, and creates the cosmos, poetry attempts to bring order to the chaotic. Poetry helps us understand the world in which we live. Drawing from Greek mythology (and from the writings of Nietzsche), he recalls the interplay between Dionysus (the god of chaos and ecstasy) and Apollos (the god of beauty and harmony). Art requires both.
Poetry allows us to image a better world as we cross the “threshold” between chaos and order. In this manner, poetry can be political and used by the powerless to challenge their oppression.
Orr sees two ways of our ordering the world, that lead to two types of poems: lyric and narrative. The lyric describes something in the moment, bringing intensity to a landscape or an emotion. Orr sees such poetry as being more dominate in America today. Narrative poetry is more story based. Of course, poems don’t always fall into one of these two camps. Many (if not most) poems are somewhere in between the two camps, maybe closer to one form or the other. For my own poetry, while I see some of both, most of what I have attempted to write falls into (or close to) the narrative camp.
This book is “illustrated” with many poems drawn from different times in history. While there could have been more poetry from cultures other than the West (there are some), I think this is excusable as he writes for an English-speaking audience. For both the poet and the reader of poetry, he suggests keeping a notebook of our favorite poems, so that we can go back an examine them and learn their meanings. This exercise seemed to be a good idea, but I have yet to do it.
There is also a very helpful glossary of poetry terms at the end of the book. I would love to reread this book with friends and hear what others think.
Despite the threat of rain on the last day of summer I take an evening walk down Laurel Fork Road noticing the seasonal changes. along the edge of the hayfield where the staghorn sumac and dogwoods have turned red.
The green leaves of the maples and oaks in the forest beyond have already lost their luster, while golden rods brighten the ditch banks next to Queen Anne, who has rolled her lace into a ball ready to stow in the drawer for winter.
At the cemetery by the Primitive Baptist Church an eight-point buck stops in the middle of the road, looking at me for the longest time as if wondering what I am doing out in this mess before jumping off the road and over the gravestones.
The drizzle becomes a rain shortly after passing the church, but as I leave the payment for gravel, the hayfields for the dense woods, the rain is not as noticeable until a breeze shakes the trees shedding its accumulated moisture on me.
I continue, zipping up my rain jacket, but return earlier than I’d like, in the fading gray, for there will be no full harvest moon to guide me tonight as tears now pour from the sky, each drop pinging off my jacket and into my ears.
Yet, I’m delighted when I get close enough to my lane, with water running down my bare legs, to be greeted by cheerful Halloween faces painted on the sides of three round haybales in front of my neighbor’s field.
My neighbor’s “jack-o-lanterns” taken today in the rain
For some reason, this post didn’t make it over from the transfer from my old thepulpitandthepen.com blog. So I decided to “resurrect” it and add a few photos of the river from which this journey begins.
Resurrection
There is a section in the Hastings Cemetery in Michigan where children who died during or before birth are buried. It’s at the back corner of the cemetery, on a ledge overlooking the Thornapple River. Years ago, during a spring flood, some of the graves were lost to the river which flows into the Grand and then on into Lake Michigan as the waters make their way to the sea. While tragic, I try to make the best of the situation.
Bury me with the children who died prematurely and planted in simple graves, at the back of the cemetery, far from the gaze of the mourner, ‘cept broken-hearted parents.
Bury me under a huge sycamore, whose broad leaves shade the ground in summer and white bark appears ghostly on a foggy morn.
Bury me where the river makes its sharp bend its swift waters carving into the bank. There, I can hear the river call as it rushes past.
Bury me close to the ledge where in a few years or maybe a century, a spring flood will free me and those kids and I’ll lead them on a grand adventure.
In our box boats we’ll shoot through the gates of the Middleville and Irving dams, forgetting the dangers for it no longer matters to the dead. We’ll laugh as we catch an eddy below and float in circles.
At Alaska, the village-not the state, we’ll shoot the rapids and when we meet the Grand, we’ll chat with those fishing for salmon and wave to the pedestrians on the bridges at Grand Rapids.
I hope it is night, with waves breaking over the piercing lighthouse, when we leave the river at Holland, for the lake. We’ll then float more slowly watching the lights on shore fade from sight as we navigate by the North Star.
Time will slow as we slip from one lake to another and over those falls at Niagara that terrify all but the dead, before making our way into Canada and down that great waterway.
And years later, if our wooden boats hold, we’ll slip out the St. Lawrence and into the cold waters of the North Atlantic along with ice bergs, riding the Gulf Stream as it heads north and then east and back south.
We’ll bed down with wintering puffins and watch whales play as they ply the sea, while we pass Iceland and the Faroes, Scotland and Ireland, and on beyond the Azores.
Bury me with the children, in the back of the cemetery, and in time the river will call, and we’ll float to where peaceful waters gather.
-jg September 2017
Left to right photos of the Thornapple: 1. My daughter, niece & brother after portaging around the Middleville Dam in 2008, 2. with Jim on a winter paddle in 2012, 3. my daughter kayaking during the fall of 2008, 4. my brother and niece in a spring paddle in 2008, 5. reflections in the fall showing the white bark of a sycamore tree, 6. me paddling solo in the winter of 2011.
The creek paralleling Laurel Fork Road (take a few weeks ago)
The sun drops below the hills. It’s time to leave the broad waters of Laurel Fork and follow the sounds of rushing water paralleling the muddy dirt road lined with mountain laurel.
Reaching Hereford Road, the mare in the pasture looks up from her hay and gaits over to the fence. I rub her head and she presses tight against my hand,
but only for moment as the first stars appear. I lengthen my stride, and pass the intersection with Dusty Trail. I start the steep climb,
following hairpin curves out of the darken hollow. where shadows of bare tree limbs illuminated by a waxing gibbous moon, slouch across the road like arthritic fingers.
my attempt to capture a moon shadow
The afternoon wind has somewhat settled, yet I hear the squeak of a widow maker in the woods, and a truck in the distance, grinding gears as it climbs Highway 58
Halfway up, the enchanting sound of water Setting out on a journey propelled by gravity, That begins in the hillside springs, and destined, eventually, for the Gulf, disappears.
Then the road levels and the canopy opens Bright Sirius of Canis Major appear high overhead, the dog of the winter sky, jumping with joy, as he follows his master, Orion, into spring.
To the west, just a tinge of red remains of the fading day. Along the horizon, the lights of homes perched on hills, appear to twinkle like stars when watched through the trees while walking.
Picking up my pace, I pass the Primitive Baptist Church, the old one room school, Bear Creek Road and the cemeteries.
A few minutes later, I’m home. Opening the door, into the light and warmth, my own dog, despite nursing a sore leg, jumps with joy. jg 2-23-2021
