Blog Hop: The Next Big Thing

My sincere thanks to Andrew Shattuck McBride and Tsena Paulson for “tagging” me to participate in the Blog Hop, in which I get to detail “The Next Big Thing” I’m working on in my writing.

Here, I respond to a standard set of interview questions about my writing projects. Please bear with  my unusual numbering. I mostly do know how to count; it’s just that my “poetic” logic occasionally supersedes rigid numerical sequencing.

1. What is the title of your book? Is it a working title? / 5. What genre does your book fall under?

My book is titled Impossible Lessons: Poems. It’s due out this April from MoonPath Press. Working titles for my manuscript included “About the Food Chain, and Other Pointed Questions for the Deities,” “The Logic of Leaves,” and “Myths of Origin, Falling Away.” My publisher, Lana Hechtman Ayers, came up with several more idea for titles, including “Impossible Lesson,” and Andy McBride suggested ending “-s” to the end of that. I’m delighted with the resulting title, Impossible Lessons. It implies that the poems ask challenging questions, and that the answers I receive through them are equally challenging.

2. Where did the idea for your book come from? / 3. Who and/or what inspired you to write your book?

The poems in this book are inspired by hikes in the Pacific Northwest and England; by my struggle to reconcile my experiences of a loving God with the violence I observe in nature and among humans; and by my search beyond Judeo-Christianity and Western philosophy, into the realm of other ancient mythologies, for explanations. My inspirations also included my horses, a cat, and several wayward chickens.

4. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

The poems in the manuscript span thirteen years of writing and revising. One of the earliest poems I drafted, “Strange Bird,” is from 2000, whereas others, such as “Eve Reflects” and “Cover Letter from the Goddess,” I wrote within this past year. I’ve been submitting various iterations of the manuscript to first-book competitions for the past nine years.

6. What books would you compare yours to in your chosen genre?

While I wouldn’t presume to compare my book to theirs, I can say that my writing in it is strongly influenced by the poems of Mary Oliver and Luci Shaw, and by the lyric prose essays of Annie Dillard. I also frame some of my poems as responses to William Stafford, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens.

7. What is a one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Alder, appetite, campfire, cedar, sorrel horse, goldfinch, grasses, cantaloupe, quantum, boulder, backbone, blame, molar, altar, swallow, snakeskin, suffering, farewell, whiskey-jack, allure, sparrow, cattle, blood cell, thistle, cosmos, alfalfa, spindle, impermanence, chemo, woodpecker, salmon, heron, flaring, huckleberry, gratitude, granite, fir, world, blade, feather, unfolding, holy.

Yes, I think that about covers it.

8. Do you have a publisher, or will you self-publish your book or seek representation?

Lana Hechtman Ayers at MoonPath Press, which publishes poetry by writers from the Pacific Northwest, is the editor and publisher of the book. I am terrifically indebted to Lana, who invited me to submit my manuscript–and then hand-selected and arranged the poems for the volume! I’m outrageously pleased with the result: the collection she has compiled is essentially a “best of” representation of my writing from the past thirteen years.

10. What else about your book might pique readers’ interest?

It uses the F-word just once, and that’s quoting Philip Larkin, so it’s really okay.

9. What actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie or to read your work for a recording?

Ah, now we’re getting to the next Next Big Thing I’m working on. That would be a manuscript of persona poems with the working title “Impersonations,” for which I’m seeking a publisher. My poems in this collection are voiced by various Old-Testament figures, Greek goddesses, and two characters of my own invention: emerging poet Amanda Bubble and her imperious, mercurial, epistle-penning aunt, Fabiana. I wouldn’t know how to wrangle all these personae into a film with a plot, but if I were to stage the poems as a dramatic reading, with the characters writing letter-poems to each other, I could envision the following cast:

Mia Farrow as Eve
James Earl Jones as Abraham
Carol Kane as Noah’s Wife
Lucy Lawless as Artemis
My completely awesome local FedEx delivery lady as Aphrodite
Zachary Quinto as George Clooney–wait, no: George Clooney as George Clooney
Zachary Quinto as Amanda Bubble’s imaginary boyfriend (but I digress…)
Gwyneth Paltrow as Amanda Bubble
Joanna Lumley–wait, no: Helena Bonham-Carter–wait, no: Carla Bruni as Fabiana

But I digress again. The next next Next Big Thing I’ve recently begun writing is a lyric essay, inspired by Terry Tempest Williams’s When Women Were Birds and Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being and Holy the Firm. It’s an autobiographical meditation that interbraids topics of adoption, horses, forgiveness, walking, place, and becoming a mother.

And now, I’m very pleased to tell you about the four writers I’m “tagging” to respond the interview questions next:

Marilyn Cavicchia lives in Chicago, where she is an editor at the American Bar Association and a freelance editor at home. She received a bachelor’s in English and a master’s in journalism, both from Ohio University. For about 15 years after college, she wrote hardly any poetry. Since resuming in 2009, she has had about a dozen poems published in literary journals. Her next challenge: chapbooks. She blogs at http://MarilynCavicchiaEditorPoet.wordpress.com/ and will post on February 12.

Bethany Reid, while earning her MFA and PhD at the University of Washington, authored a chapbook, The Coyotes and My Mom (Bellowing Ark Press) and became an editor for The Seattle Review. She has won the Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize at Calyx and, in 2012, the Gell Prize for her poetry collection Sparrow. She lives with her family in Edmonds, Washington, and teaches at Everett Community College. She blogs at http://AWritersAlchemy.wordpress.com/and will post on February 15.

Amy Shouse is an L.A. native who lives with her husband and dog. Her childhood had just the right amount of unwieldy dysfunction to make her a hopeful reader looking for safety as well as a writer who loves to hear the reverberation that comes back when she throws words out into the world. She is the author of the poetry collection Underway–Looking Aft and blogs as Cupcake Murphy at http://OddGoodTrue.com. She will post on February 24.

Caitlin Elizabeth Thomson is a Canadian who married an American. She resides in Bellingham, Washington. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous places, including The Literary Review of Canada, The Liner, EDGE, Echolocation, and the anthology Killer Verse. She blogs at http://www.CaitlinThomson.com/wp/ and will post on February 26.

Many thanks to these writers for agreeing to carry the Blog Hop forward. I’ll post links to each of their blogs on the days they post their responses to the interview questions, so that you can see what The Next Big Thing is for each of them!

Thank you for reading!

Cheers,
Jennifer

NaPoWriMo, Day 20 (Day 27 for Everyone Else): A Bit of Levity after Elegy Day

Hello! Today’s poem is prompted by Rachel McKibbens’s Writing Exercise #81 from April 24: “Write a big juicy mythology of someone.”  Ahem:

HEAD LIBRARIAN

When The Adonis walks to the Reference Desk
the fingers of the intern flutter to her neck.
Like the fly suddenly prostrate on the sill,
she cannot even pretend to look busy.

He is Apollo gliding into Circulation,
where the bar-code scanners beep faster
and the Christmas cactus on the counter
shudders instantly into bloom.

When he whisks upstairs to Special Collections,
one archivist looks up, drops his pencil;
the other blinks while her ovaries clench.

The mothers down in Children’s wish
he would just go all Zeus on them.
When he enters, the children flock:
Daddy, Daddy, book me next!

NaPoWriMo Day 18 (Day 25 for Everyone Else)

This poem has been simmering for a couple of weeks now, ever since I used the persona-poem prompt to write about Abraham. Today, seeing a magnificent poem in the voice of Hagar, by Catherine Pritchard Childress at Vince Gotera’s blog, sent me back to work on the new poem, this time from Sarah’s point of view:

SARAH BREAKS HER SILENCE

Some time later I tested Abraham
by bidding him to lie with my servant-woman, Hagar.
It had been many years since The Speaking
granting us a land for our descendants–
and my husband was feeling keenly his dearth
of descendants. I suspected that his trust
in The Speaker was growing shaky (imperceptibly
to all but me), like both of our wrinkling hands.

I myself had never doubted
that the promised child was far off.
I knew that for a time, The Speaker was just keeping
His word to Himself. And often,
in the hot afternoons when the tent grew quiet
and the livestock slept, faintly I could hear
the approaching child’s laughter fluttering
around my body like a gossamer cloak.

Besides, I remembered clearly
my own Speaking vision, given when my father
gave me in marriage to his brother:
I half heard, half saw, fully knew my husband’s destiny
would be to try to carve a blade into our future son’s lean neck
the way his own father had sliced and gouged
temple idols out of oak. In this way I knew
my husband, in consenting to turn upon our son,
would turn away from me and from every deity of trees.

Thus at Mamre, it was not just my laughter
but my own cracking bark I heard
upon the visitors’ Speech announcing
our next-year baby. That, and the chopping fall
of all the oak Asherah poles outside His future temples–
and my betrayal by a Deity without roots.

NaPoWriMo, Day Whatever (Day 14 for Everybody Else): A List Poem

One of the things I’m enjoying most about participating in  NaPoWriMo–in addition to generating a bunch of new poems–is crossing paths with so many other poets who are busily scurrying around the Web this month. One new e-acquaintance I’ve made is with Los Angeles poet Danielle Mitchell at Cult.Bomb, “a blast of contemporary letters assembled to emphasize literary news, discoveries, oddities, events, ideas, and damn fine writing.”

To get going on today’s poem, I followed one of her writing prompts, which borrows the structure of Richard Jackson’s list poem “Ten Things.”  I had a lot of fun generating lines according to the specific, well thought-out steps Danielle Mitchell provides, and what I ended up with is either weirdly irreverent, or reverently weird. You decide:

APRIL CREDO

Jesus loves me, this I’m pretty sure of.
Also, that he will mess me up if I cross him.
And after, peace me back down.

It’s true that he will bring to justice those responsible,
especially himself.
Maybe he came down here just to share the contents

of his vast pocket of lonely.
Maybe he wanted to wear a body unbearable in all
its knowing. Or maybe not,

since in April, even the fir trees raise their green
middle fingers to the sky.
It’s lucky I noticed this in time.

O, the beautiful miles sprint and wheel–
how many times can a universe spin
without wobbling?

Meanwhile, the birch trees are knocking
each other up right here in the park.
That doesn’t matter to most, but my nose

is embarrassed.
The difference is something else.
The difference is that God is good,

and apparently he is doing this for my own.
Meanwhile, I wonder who let the money out.
Again and again, I marvel at the green.

NaPoWriMo, Day 4: Discovering the Benefits of a Short Deadline

Greetings! Today’s prompt is to write a persona poem:  to adopt the voice of a person from myth or history and write a poem that “speaks” in that person’s voice. I’ve been wanting for several months to write something different about the story of Abraham and Isaac, and this prompt was just the nudge I needed to embark on a new line of thinking about this vexing narrative I’m obsessed with. NaPoWriMo’s imperative to write it TODAY jolted me into coming up with this unusual twist on the story from The Book of Genesis:

ABRAHAM REFLECTS

When Sarah and I came into this land
after all our journeying, we set about searching
for a god to call our own.
Having grown up watching my father carve
oaken idols for the homes and temples
of Ur and Haran, I knew a bit about how to coax
a wild deity down from the trees.
This one spoke to us at first
as a puff of smoke or a shrub a-smolder.
Once I taught him to say his name,
I was able to claim him for our language.
Thus was I able, later, to talk him out of
destroying all the inhabitants
of the cities on which he breathed
his fire. Over time, as he came to trust me,
he gained in temperance and restraint.
We even permitted him to gift us
with the child we’d long wanted;
even Sarah laughed to see this god delight
in his own generosity. Many years on,
when our son had grown near to manhood
and the god had become our close companion,
we agreed it was time at last to pose
his final test. He’d seen our joy
in being parents, felt our love for Isaac;
we could sense this god’s jealous hunger
growing, as hunger usually does
in a deity proud of its growing power.
So when the day arrived that he gave me
the instruction I’d awaited,
I took firewood and my son up Mt. Moriah
to see if this carnivorous god,
unlike several of his nearby rivals,
would settle for mutton in place of the flesh
of a youthful human. Waiting for him
to recall his training, I slowly built
the altar, then laid the firewood, then
bound my son, then drew my knife–
and finally the strong hand restrained mine
in remembering to restrain himself.
Sarah rejoiced again when Isaac and I returned:
she, too, knew then that our wild-caught god
was nearly tamed and just about gentled
and ready for public use.

NaPoWriMo, Day 2 (Day 7 for Everybody Else)

Today’s prompt is to choose a color and then to “dye” the poem with that color.

Also, not uncoincidentally, Happy Easter.

Red

Easter week, post-mastectomy,
my mother asks me to check
the bandage over her incision.
Below her ribs I see the tube
draining fluid and blood
from higher up, where
her left breast used to be.
I hesitate because this is her body,
broken for R.J. Reynolds. This is
her blood, shed for Philip Morris.
Fifty years they pierced her inside.
Fifty more it will take me
to forgive them. Still,
she is up and around again,
just three days after
her surgery. Surgeon says
when the flow of blood
and fluid drops, he will pull
the drainage tube and she
will be free and whole, ready
for the rest of her life.

Mythology on (and off) My Bookshelf, Part 3: Thoughts on Ethics by way of BigThink.com and Jacques Derrida’s “The Gift of Death”

Seems I’m not the only person currently pondering the story of Abraham and Isaac.

Three weeks ago, Adam Lee, author of the blog Daylight Atheism at BigThink.com, posted an essay titled “The Abraham Test,” in which he summarizes the story of Genesis 22 and explores the ethical contradictions at its heart. Specifically, Lee poses the story as a test to modern believers: “I have a question for every religious believer, based on the Abraham episode: Do you believe that violence in God’s name is wrong, or do you merely believe he hasn’t personally told you to do violence? If God appeared to you and spoke to you, commanding you to commit a violent act – to murder a child, say – how would you respond?”

My impression is that Lee is attempting not just to promote critical thinking here, but to point out the inherent absurdities of the impossible position that Abraham is placed in–and by extension, all people of faith are placed in–by a divine command to kill another person. Lee concludes this post by saying, “The Abraham test may be a useful way to highlight the chasm between the morality of the Bible and the better, less violent and more humanistic morality espoused by most citizens of the modern world.”

Two weeks later, after his first post had elicited 225 responses from readers, Adam Lee followed up with “Replies to the Abraham Test,” in which he sums up some of those responses and draws an even more pointed conclusion: “There’s a profound disconnect in the morality of most religious believers, and I think the Abraham test highlights that. When you press at the join, you can see exactly where it is: even though they mostly hew to the more enlightened morality of the modern age, they still worship and revere a dark-age text that treats bloody, even murderous obedience to a primitive war god’s command as the highest virtue. (I use the term ‘war god’ advisedly, since one of the Bible’s most common titles for God is ‘Lord of Hosts’, or in more modern language, ‘Lord of Armies’).”

And the discussion there continues:  as of yesterday, Lee’s follow-up post has garnered 172 more comments. His blog’s agenda becomes more apparent not only via the vitriolic tone of most of the commenters who agree with him, but also in that post’s closing exhortation: “It’s evidence like this that atheists ought to put forward as our Exhibit A in showing that faith is far from a harmless or beneficial personality trait: it can be profoundly immoral and dangerous, which just goes to show why our rhetorical attacks on it have never been more necessary.”

For the record, I should say here that even though for much of my life I shared Adam Lee’s atheism–albeit without the impulse to proselytize–I currently find the view much more interesting from my perch on the fence, where I lean just to the opposite side. To be honest, I still have to agree with popular atheists’ claims that the Bible does a mostly terrible PR job for God. (I’d add that if God wants to convey a message of love and forgiveness more effectively, He should fire those committees who’ve been bollixing the job for the past 2,700 years and contract with the geniuses over at ICanHasCheezburger to write His pitches.) My own faith is characterized by doubt, wrestling, and constant questioning–and is energized by my struggle to square the God who’s loved me up with the actions attributed to God in much of the Bible.

But I’m getting distracted here. Let’s return to the cheerful subject of Abraham and ethics, shall we?

I’ve just finished re-reading the first, and longer, part of Jacques Derrida’s two-part book, The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret (second ed., trans. by David Wills, University of Chicago Press, 2008). I can’t remember what source, exactly, steered me toward Derrida, whom I’d managed to avoid entirely in grad school. But at some point in early 2009, at the height of my first round of obsession with the story of Abraham and Isaac, I ordered this book and began reading it. I returned to it this winter having forgotten its usefulness, and wondering whether it has any explanatory power for this story that both fascinates and horrifies me.

The bulk of The Gift of Death consists of Derrida’s detailed readings of Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, Lithuanian philosopher Emmanual Lévinas, Martin Heidegger, Søren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Derrida summarizes their efforts in search of a basis for an ethics  in the narrative of Abraham and Isaac (in part, to advance the philosophical discussion of ethics in Europe subsequent to the Holocaust and the devastating wars of the 20th century). This Biblical narrative makes an appropriately knotty case study, given, as Derrida’s analysis of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling emphasizes, the utterly unethical actions–by all human measures–of Abraham towards Isaac and Sarah. Derrida traces the notion of “responsibility” through these philosophers, examining, for example, (in the pun-rich language characteristic of French high academic style) how Abraham “responds” to God’s summonings, how Abraham’s “irresponsibility” to his family violates all human standards of justice, and what “responsibility” might mean when a culture’s concept of individuality is in flux.

A key principle I take from this essay concerns the recurrence, though hidden, of beliefs and practices from the past. Following Patočka, Derrida asserts that when a culture replaces an old narrative, myth, or ritual with a new one, a trace of the old narrative/myth/ritual remains embedded in the new: “the mystery that is incorporated then repressed is never destroyed. This genealogy has an axiom, namely that history never effaces what it buries; it always keeps within itself the secret of whatever it encrypts, the secret of its secret” (23). This secrecy is the essence of the mystery of Christianity, a belief system centered on a sacrifice that mimics and suppresses the earlier, almost-sacrifice from which dawned Judaism, which itself replaced multiple local religions based on human sacrifice.

Suffocating under all these layers yet? I feel like I am, but this analysis also seems to be helping me edge closer to the important weirdnesses at the heart of these religions.

Derrida returns to this idea–of the past’s suppressed rituals appearing as open secrets in the rituals and narratives that replace them–later in the essay, when he brings in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality. Derrida quotes Nietzsche at length in this section, interpolating his own explanations and responses. In one of these exchanges, Derrida quotes Nietzsche thus: “Justice, which began by saying, ‘Everything can be paid off, everything must be paid off,’ ends by turning a blind eye and letting off those unable to pay,–it ends, like every good thing on earth, by sublimating itself … by raising itself or by substituting for itself” (114-15), and Derrida elaborates: “Christian justice denies itself and so conserves itself in what seems to exceed it; it remains what it ceases to be, a cruel economy, a commerce, a contract involving debt and credit, sacrifice and vengeance” (115).

You may notice that Derrida is moving pretty freely between Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac and God’s sacrifice of Christ. By this point in the essay, he has already established a close parallel between them by arguing that Abraham is sacrificing himself (via his legacy) in consenting to sacrifice Isaac, and that God is sacrificing himself in sacrificing Christ (who is also God). As well, Derrida is following the lead of Kierkegaard, who in Fear and Trembling shifts from the earlier story to the latter, and to a guiding metaphor of economics, which provides a further connection to Nietzsche here.

Derrida again: “[W]hat Nietzsche calls ‘Christianity’s stroke of genius’ … is what takes this economy to its excess in the sacrifice of Christ for love of the debtor; it involves the same economy of sacrifice, the same sacrifice of sacrifice” (115). With this, Derrida prefaces another quote from Nietzsche, whose repetitions and  metaphors convey the surprising reversal enacted by Christianity’s central sacrifice: “Christianity’s stroke of genius … [is] none other than God sacrificing himself for man’s guilt, none other than God paying himself back, God as the only one able to redeem man from what, to man himself, has become irredeemable–the creditor sacrificing himself for his debtor, out of love … out of love for the debtor!” (115-16).

Derrida’s interpretation–that in Christianity God cancels out sacrifice by sacrificing sacrifice itself–intrigues me. Certainly, it echoes explanations I’ve heard from the pulpit regarding Abraham and Isaac, in that the earlier, interrupted sacrifice is meant to signal the end of human sacrifice in a region where it was common among many other, older religions. It implies that in removing all human guilt onto himself, God collapses the distinction between judge and sacrificial victim, and thus, via this sacrifice of himself to himself, is changing the very nature of his relationship to humans.

Thanks to Derrida, though, I’m able to articulate why I can’t help but read this sequence in the other direction:  the earlier sacrifice of Isaac, though superseded and canceled out by the later sacrifice of Christ, resonates through that later sacrifice, leaving a residue upon it that I can’t ignore.

To be continued soon, with thoughts on the second part of Derrida’s book, Literature in Secret.

Recap of Poet As Art Reading and Workshop, Jan. 27-28

Last weekend was poetry bliss here in Bellingham. On Friday evening, Megan Snyder-Camp and Christopher Howell gave  stellar readings at the first installment of the 2012 Poet As Art series. The Lucia Douglas Gallery in Fairhaven was packed to capacity with lovers of poetry. Each poet read engagingly for two segments. Christopher Howell divided his material about evenly between poems from such earlier books as Light’s Ladder and Memory and Heaven, and new pieces included in the 2010 collection Dreamless and Possible:  Poems New and Selected.  Megan Snyder-Camp read mostly from her volume The Forest of Sure Things, which won the Tupelo Press/Crazyhorse First Book award in 2010. She concluded, though, with a set of new poems relating to the myth of Demeter and Persephone, placing these figures in contemporary circumstances. Reader, I swooned. Snyder-Camp told me she is still working on this series and hasn’t published them anywhere yet.  I have to be patient, but I’ll be keeping an eager eye open for them to start appearing in journals.

On Saturday, I was one of a dozen lucky writers to attend the workshop led by Christopher Howell. He introduced his topic–the relationship between “image” and “voice” in poetry–with remarks on the dramatic features that image and voice can create in a poem.  For instance, within any poem the speaker’s voice is inherently dramatic because it is a presentation, and gestures that the speaker makes can be played up to heighten the distinctiveness of the voice. The dramatic nature of the poem increases when the voice contends with the literal meaning of the poem, or when voice pulls against the poem’s images, creating irony.

This attention to dramatic elements within a poem interests me because they help me understand, also, some interesting ways to tell a story within a poem. Though a good proportion of my poems have some story-like aspects, I rarely attempt to write fiction, since I can’t seem to narrate my way out of a paper bag. This is probably because I shy away from conflict, which is the primary engine of a story’s plot development. What Howell’s analysis suggests to me is that useful narrative conflict can derive not only from characters and setting, but from tensions between the subtler elements of image and voice. If dramatic irony counts as conflict, and therefore as a way of moving a narrative forward, I can approach writing narrative poems with more courage. (Don’t hold your breath for any fiction from me, though–I still have no idea how to construct a plot.) And, Howell assured us, we don’t even need to think of a poem as a complete narrative; it’s sufficient, even desirable, to envision a poem as an excerpt from a story.

Though I’ve reflected on these points at length, during the workshop itself Howell moved on quickly from these remarks to show us examples of poems that demonstrate these techniques of image and voice. He took us through a thick packet of published poems by a variety of poets, and gave us a second packet to study, imitate, and enjoy.

And early on, he had us begin writing. To help us generate poems using new, unexpected voices and images, Howell provided us with prompts using repetitions, word salads, and provocative first lines. These were very productive for me, but my absolute favorite exercise was based on the poem “Spar” by Tomas Transtromer–in the original Swedish. After verifying that none of us knew Swedish, he instructed us to make an impressionistic translation of the poem. I got one full draft and a second start out of this exercise, and both took me into poetic spaces I’d never have sought intentionally. Here, for instance, is the start  of the second poem I drafted using this exercise:

Spare

The knowing clock it all:  the men gone. Grief has stood
within each doorway bloodied.
Long the rememberers bear those lintels
in their satchels of doubt,
at once always losing their beloveds again
and promising themselves it never happened.
One night in the year,         [and then  the time ran out]

I don’t even know what the subject of this poem is. The Passover? A war or raid? These images–really, all of this material–completely surprised me. I’m eager to get back into this draft and continue my “translation” to see where it ends up.

This was one of five new drafts and starts I left the workshop with:  a full and superbly productive day. I thank Christopher Howell sincerely for his wisdom, his keen perception of how a poem works, and his tremendous generosity as a teacher. He made the workshop terrifically worthwhile.

THEN, Saturday night, since I was too exhausted to write but not to read, I sat down with Megan Snyder-Camp’s book and read it cover to cover. Not only did I get to re-experience the pleasures of the poems that I’d heard her read Friday evening or that I’d read previously on her attractive and informative web site; I also learned a great deal from it as to how to tell a story over the span of a book of poems. I discovered, through her gradual assemblage of narrative elements, that poems do not need to be arranged chronologically in order to convey a story, nor does the poet need to use up space within the poems to provide explicit exposition. Rather, I found I was able to piece together the bits of narrative more impressionistically–and with even greater attentiveness, once I became aware that there was a story to discover. By the end the book, I’d experienced a felt connection to a place (a small town on the Olympic Peninsula) and to at least two families who’ve lived there. The poems’ light touch with such subjects as grief and motherhood actually creates a powerful emotional impact. I suspect that Snyder-Camp’s frequent playfulness with language and syntax slips these effects past our accustomed emotional defenses, and they affect us all the more strongly as they accumulate. I look forward to reading The Forest of Sure Things again to discover what further illumination and enjoyment it offers.

Call Me, Ishmael (A Current and Proposed Reading List) (Mythology On, and Off, My Bookshelf, Part 2)

Rembrandt, "Abraham and Isaac," 1634

Lately, I find myself in the familiar territory of Genesis 22.  This is the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac, the beginning point, say theologians, of monotheism.  It’s the story of God “testing” Abraham’s faith by commanding him to make a burnt offering of his beloved son Isaac, and of Abraham obeying. At the last moment, an angel stops Abraham, Isaac is untied, and a ram shows up to be used as an alternative sacrificial victim.

I’ve been obsessed with this story for many years, and for a number of reasons. Most viscerally, it speaks to the small child in me who was sufficiently terrified of her own father’s rage that she feared he would kill her. Intellectually, it makes me burningly curious as to the antecedents of the three major religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) whose adherents consider this their foundational narrative. And spiritually, it provides a way of tip-toeing closer to the abhorrent, parallel sacrifice at the heart of Christianity, the one in which the all-powerful Father actually goes through with the sacrifice of his beloved Son.  I suppose that by trying to understand the originating moment of the three Abrahamic faiths, I can gain some understanding of the crucial moment of the particular Abrahamic faith that I camp out in.

In fact, it was these related questions that initially propelled me, starting last year, to begin searching the ancient narratives, and the works of those who study them,  for clues as to…

• Why God would “test” Abraham by asking him to “make a burnt offering” of Isaac
• Why Abraham would consent to do so
• Why Isaac would consent to be killed
• Why God (or an angel representing Him) would stop Abraham at the last moment
• Why a sacrificial victim (the ram) was still required to die after Isaac had been unbound
• Why Scripture records nothing about Abraham or Isaac telling Sarah about this
• Why Jews (who trace their heritage to Abraham through Isaac) and Muslims (who trace their heritage to Abraham through Ishmael, Abraham’s son by Hagar, Sarah’s servant-woman) dispute which son Abraham actually offered up, competing for the honor of being the first victim sacrificed to The Lord
• Why any person, ancient or modern, provided with a whole Mediterranean region full of other options, would choose this particular Lord to sacrifice one’s child to
• Why this Lord must have been considered by some to be an improvement over the other deities already worshiped in the region
• Why Christian theologians emphasize the many parallels between Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac and Jesus’s sacrifice of himself, yet get themselves into astonishing doctrinal contortions attempting to explain why a just, loving God would require such sacrifice in the first place
• Whether, given His apparently bloodthirsty and volatile nature, I can trust this God character who acts so generously towards me
• Which of the charges on God’s rap sheet are historically accurate, and which are paranoid projections of human nature, and which are politically motivated alterations to the official record, and how I can tell the difference.

As you can see, I have a lot riding on possible answers to these questions.

As well, I’m eager to write more poetry about this fascinating, disturbing material and my conflicted relationship to it, and I’m looking for a different way in than my usual I-can’t-believe-we-believe-this-stuff approach. I’ve written numerous poems about the story of Abraham and Isaac (and Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael) before, enough to make into a chapbook manuscript a couple of years ago.  This time around, I’m trying for a way to de-familiarize this story that I became so immersed in. Finding out more about what came before Yahweh (and the people who chose, momentously, to follow Him)–the gods and goddesses, their worshipers and their religious practices–is giving me a little bit of insight into the religious impulse in general, and into the specific cultures and beliefs (regarding, for example, sacrifice) that the nascent Abrahamic religions emerged from and reacted against.

I took the first steps in this project last winter, finding preliminary tidbits in Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, which I wrote about here. Now that the holidays are over and my son is back in school, I’m pulling some more myth theorists off my bookshelf (and the bookshelves of some generous friends–you know who you are, and thanks!) and carrying them along as I circle back around through this thicket of questions.  In the coming weeks and months, I’ll be finishing up the three books I’ve been reading since last fall:  Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God, Volume I; Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret; and Leonard Schlein’s The Alphabet Versus the Goddess:  The Conflict Between Word and Image. I’ll post summaries about my eureka moments and perplexities as I continue reading each one.

If I can possibly restrain myself long enough to complete those three, the next readings I’d like to dig into are a couple of books by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire:  Reflections on Genesis and The Murmuring Deep:  Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious.  Apparently, Zornberg uses psychoanalytic theories, which warm my geek heart and stir my lit-crit soul, to interpret stories from the Hebrew Bible.

Then, I’ll move on to a couple of books I read long ago, Elaine Pagels’s Adam, Eve, and The Serpent and Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, looking at their explanations about the origins of monotheism. (Eventually, I hope to get to Volumes II and III of Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God, though it’s possible I may lose patience with his agenda of universalizing every local myth and practice by the time I reach the end of Volume I).

In the meantime, can you recommend any resources to add to my list? I’ll be grateful for suggestions on any books, articles, commentaries, poems, midrash, etc. you can point me toward that offer further interpretations or perspectives–especially very ancient or very current ones–on these many questions.

On Knowing versus Being “Baffled,” and Which One Is More Productive, with Sincere Thanks to Wendell Berry

I enjoy not being certain about most things. But on one burning issue, I’m impatient for clarity.  Last fall, a recurring preoccupation of mine re-recurred.  (It has to do with being horrified by the foundational narrative of monotheism; I’ll post more on this soon.) This resurfacing of an earlier issue sent me to some fascinating books on psychoanalysis, theology, language, and myth–a couple of which I’d read before, and one new to me–for some solid, or at least plausible, answers.

But then, I had the poetry reading to prepare for, and after that, the holidays were suddenly demanding my attention, and then, a visiting family member treacherously introduced me to the crime series Lie to Me, and I put my reading on hold. Consequently, having stalled in my quest for answers, I put writing about everything on hold.

Then, today, I happened on this tasty morsel from a poem by one of my favorite nature writers, Wendell Berry, that a friend had emailed me months ago:

THE REAL WORK

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

(From Wendell Berry, Collected Poems)

This lovely passage got me started again. Not on the reading–that will happen when it happens, in the slivers of time between everything else–but on writing, and particularly, blogging. I’d somehow, subliminally, talked myself into the perception that until I’ve untangled the whole knotty theological problem I’m confronting, I won’t have anything to write about it.  However, as I told my first-year writing students over and over for twenty-odd years, having everything figured out comes at the end of a writing project (if ever), not at the beginning of it. It’s in the process of writing that I can discover what I think and what I have to say.

This is, naturally, the first thing I learned in graduate school about how to teach writing:   writing is a means of discovery. How easy this principle is to forget, though, when what I’m after is an answer, an explanation, a nice, hefty chunk of certainty. But if I attain that certainty, what then? I’ll need to find a new problem to be “baffled” by, since, as Berry says, “The mind that is not baffled is not employed.”

As WordPress is reminding me in the lower right-hand corner of this page I’m drafting (and revising and editing and re-arranging and re-reading), “Just write.” Okay, I will.

More, and right soon,
Jennifer