“oh, i don’t know what to do — about this dream and you.”

I had the most fascinating discussions recently with several people about poetry. Professor Perrin and I discussed Milosz’s idea of poems as thing-moments — devoted to and embodied in things, evoking, eternalizing, memorializing a certain moment in time. This, she says, is what I privilege and do naturally in my poems. “It’s a simple thing, but it’s beautiful. Don’t be afraid of that.” Lately Professor Perrin has been encouraging me not to be afraid; I should lay claim to more things in my poems, be more declarative and less obscure.

At the end of last week I decided that poetry and art are commitments to the concrete things, at base level, commitments to the concrete, detailed world. So now I am obsessed with the idea of art (any art) as a composite of thing-moments. Also at the end of last week, I decided in my head that when Dad said (once upon a time) that his art is about things that are right in nature, maybe he was talking about this love and awareness and commitment and devotion to the concrete physical world. I say that, but when I talk about love and devotion, I’m also talking about the way in which the physical embodies something - the way it locates the image of God himself.

And last night, after dinner, Liz said “I like the physical because when I move it means something. It’s not something symbolizing something else — it’s action.” That struck me as absurdly powerful. Art should mean something as an action, not simply as a symbol or allegory or metaphor. In itself as a physical object or motion it has meaning and worth, beyond what it symbolizes or means or implies.

And then I’m looking at my wall, and I see this picture that Greg gave me for my birthday. It says “Like a moment so overly abundant that it spills from your mind, through your hand, to the page.” And yes, that’s poetry. Thing-moments. A moment overly abundant and spilling from things through your hand to the page.

Also, I learned something today. Apparently addressing the beloved, an apostrophe to the beloved, began the lyric poetry tradition. I find it strange that any poem of mine is addressing the beloved in any sense — but I am pleased to find out that when my poems do address the beloved, Professor Perrin thinks that they are very strong.

This is what I love about critique: people tell me what I am doing, and then from there I can strengthen it to go where I want it to go. Otherwise I find it impossible to step outside my head and understand what is weak and what is strong. But I am learning, through critiques, to ask the questions that may tell me the answers when I am alone and trying to still work. What is at stake in this poem? That is my primary question, the one she is always asking me.

Well. I am not always sure, but I will do my best to find out. But now I kind of wonder. What is at stake in this blog?

Let me know if you find out.

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and if i knew the answers, i would tell you now

Chris Fennell recently came to Messiah College to install a sculpture outside Boyer Hall. Known for his wooden waves, doorways, and of course his bicycle cyclone, Chris Fennell created this on the terrace outside Howe Atrium.

I love this sculpture. When Chris spoke to our senior art seminar class, he mentioned that it was inspired by looking at a pine cone. Now, it is not a new idea to take something small which gives you awe and make it large in order to share that awe with someone else. But to also make it a doorway? That, to me, is intellectually stimulating and emotionally satisfying. Chris calls this particular sculpture “Tree Passage.” In walking through it and looking upward at the pattern of wood and sky, I fell in love with the idea of awe as a passageway.

Even more than that, because it is poised on the top of a slope, leading between the natural world (the tree-covered slope leading down to Climenhaga) and the educational world (Boyer), I fell in love with the idea of awe as a passageway from the concrete and natural into the intellectual and back again. I can really only speak for myslf as an artist, but I know that my visual vocabulary is natural, and it is in an effort to more skillfully understand and articulate this natural, concrete visual vocabulary that I move into the academic/intellectual realm. And it is what I learn in the intellectual realm that sends me back into the natural world to see things again, see them new, and re-articulate, to actually make new objects couched in the concrete but enriched by the intellectual.

So now, in my head, I am seeing awe as a balancing point between the academic and the concrete, the thinking and the making. And I am seeing this balancing point as a doorway, in fact, this sculpture of Chis Fennell’s.

I feel in need of a balancing point between the intellectual and the making of things. Some portion of me, let’s call it the maker part of my personality, rejects attempts to label or pick apart a piece of work to understand why it is an emotional trigger for a viewer or reader. It especially rejects attempts to contextualize a work in terms of the creator’s personal lives or historical/social context. It wants simply to let the piece be what it is, enjoyed or not by viewers, on a level separate from explication or readings-into. Yet another part of me delights in explicating texts (whether visual or verbal) and understanding on every possible level its meanings, social context, and world-view leanings.

I am very postmodern, and perhaps this leads to my confusion. My response to “Tree Passage” could be nothing like what Chris Fennell intended, but I would still believe my interpretation is merited according to the observable formal content of the work. But as I am writing this, I am also telling myself that it is unfair and inadequate (maybe even silly?) to intellectualize such a beautiful object.

But maybe awe is, after all, a passageway or balancing point between these two impulses (the impulse to make and the impulse to intellectualize). Plain and simply put, if an intellectual understanding of the work heightens the awe with which we approach the work or the world post-viewing of the work, then it is worthwhile. And if it does not, then intellectualism is inadequate and should be abandoned in this case. Traditional wisdom, at least what I have encountered in art history classes, is that if a work cannot be aided by intellectual discussion, it is the work which is lacking. I utterly reject that. A piece can be beautiful and strong and amazing and simply too internal for us to intellectualize, but that does not lessen its worth as visual art, at least not in my mind. In my mind, it is the application of the intellectual which is often at fault.

Maybe this is a conclusion someone else reached a lot time ago. But I am just getting around to it. But I guess since I am just now being a senior in college, I have an excuse for only starting to formulate some of these thinkings now. = )

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“ptolemy may have a difficult name, but he was no dummy.”

– my world views professor

I think early-morning classes make even professors a little bit punchy. I never, for instance, thought I would hear the word “dummy” coming out of a professor’s mouth, let alone a professor teaching an honors course about diverse and intellectually challenging world views.

World views is a fun class, but not because of the course’s content (frankly, I am only interested in dismantling the parts of my world view which relate directly to the production of poetry or art; philosophy classes and theology classes have thorougly exhausted my general-dismantling-of-views energy). It is fun because I am close friends with four people in that class and know most of the other 9-9:50 a.m. inhabitants of Boyer 136 through first-year seminar or other honors classes. We have great discussions because we are already acquainted — and I experience an astounding sense of well-being when I walk into that classroom with coffee cup in hand (lo, caffeine is indeed the nectar of the gods) and see people that I love arrayed around the classroom.

Matt, one of my close friends since freshman year, mentioned to me yesterday that he is graduating early from Messiah; he will be done this December. It made me realize: this semester is the last time we will all be together, for sure, everyone.

Maybe I take this sense of well-being for granted?

I am most emphatically of the opinion that one should be at college to work, and not to goof off or find a spouse. But I am also formulating to myself this fact: it is in the realm of relationships that one is able to internalize and apply the material one is learning so assiduously in class. If it does not apply to these, the community — maybe I will even go so far as to say the kingdom of God? — then is it really of use?

It is going to storm tonight — but I am so all about going to get sushi with my boyfriend that it will not even bother me if ten tons of water dump to earth.

I hope you have a lovely Friday afternoon.

Filed under general, random quotes, fish-eating, agape | Comment (1)

the verb ‘to hymn’

“Come with me to the akathist if you’re missing liturgy,” Professor Perrin said, her Wednesday afternoon punctuated precisely by liturgical leanings. “It’s a service to commemorate the beheading of John the Baptist.” Christine Perrin, lecturer in English, taught my first-year seminar and now advises my senior honors project. She also remembers Italy with me, Italian mass and vespers and the Istituto San Ludovico where we lived in Orvieto.

Today I am having my first meeting with Professor Perrin about this senior honors project: a cohesive body of 20 poems before finals week next spring, followed by a reading of the work. “Bring a mug,” she said, “and a recent poem, and we’ll talk.”

For me, it is the idea of disciplined daydreaming, as introduced into my mind by Professor Perrin’s first-year seminar (she introducted us, tentative first-year students, to Elizabeth Bishop, William Carlos Williams, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Rainer Maria Rilke: minds on fire with the surrounding world), that bridges the gap between liturgy and poetry. Both are rhythmic and require discipline, both are bathed in verbal play. And, as so often my struggles to face God are the subject of my poems, my liturgical understanding is the subtext, propelling my search with the belief that metaphor or symbol or simile can be as much an answer as usual church dogma.

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition every service is sung. Even though I’m Mennonite, when I participate in an Eastern Orthodox service I’m engaging a centuries-old attempt to hymn the shape of God. It’s the same attempt that permeates my poetry work. I am creating (according to tradition I’m not sure I understand but which I love) a ritual structure, a rhythm and trying to imbue it with some lively, vibrant narrative.

I’m trying to hymn the shape of God and my own life, too.

After Italy (that phrase seems to find its way into every waking hour of my day; I am defined sometimes solely by being post-Italy), I find that I delight in participating in outward liturgy that reflects my attempts at inward poetic energy.

I especially love participating now that the services are all in English and I am able to clearly see how this narrative liturgy is forceful.

Yes. It works that there is correlation here, between liturgy and poetry. But in the case of poetry, I’ll decline to say “amen,” for the simple reason that I am not done working out this hymn yet.

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