Like most good poets, great or minor, Dante wrote better than he had meant to do. Allen Tate. “The Symbolic Imagination.” Essays of Four Decades. p. 440. Third Edition, ISI Books.

Published in The Curator

One of my poems was published today at The Curator. You can read it by following this excerpt:  An Horologist Returns to Work after His Wife’s Diagnosis.  Here hear the clock: the tick the tock the tickThe swing of pendule swung by gear-dinked chimes,Or quartz hum the pulse that clicked the quickEscape of the wheel […]

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfuwVnggIKM?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=375] Christian Wiman delivers the commencement address at North Central College in Illinois. It’s disheartening watching peoples’ expressions as the best speech they’ve ever heard flies over their heads. Unfortunately, I probably would have ignored it as a 22-year-old college graduate, too. More unfortunately, in ten years, I’ll probably regret the things I ignored […]

Jacob Recalls the Fight at Peniel

by John Paisley (Click the author’s name for his biography) Upon that night the others were away – Wives, children, all the troubled world And I was there alone and quiet until he came Unheralded, mysterious. As one awaking from a dream I knew, at first, only that I struggled, then slowly Grew aware of my […]

poetrysince1912: The poet Christian Wiman is giving voice to the hunger for faith — and the challenges of faith — for people living now. After a Texas upbringing soaked in a history of violence and a charismatic Christian culture, he was agnostic until he became actively religious again in his late 30s. Then he was […]

Horae Canonicae – Sext

W.H. Auden I You need not see what someone is doingto know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes:a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision,a clerk completing a bill of lading, wear the same rapt expression,forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is,that eye-on-the-object look. […]

Horae Canonicae – Terce

W.H. Auden After shaking paws with his dog,(Whose bark would tell the world that he is always kind,)The hangman sets off briskly over the heath;He does not know yet who will be providedTo do the high works of Justice with:Gently closing the door of his wife’s bedroom,(Today she has one of her headaches)With a sigh […]

Horae Canonicae – Prime

W.H. Auden Simultaneously, as soundlessly,Spontaneously, suddenlyAs, at the vaunt of the dawn, the kindGates of the body fly openTo its world beyond, the gates of the mind,The horn gate and the ivory gateSwing to, swing shut, instantaneouslyQuell the nocturnal rummageOf its rebellious fronde, ill-favored,Ill-natured and second-rate,Disenfranchised, widowed and orphanedBy an historical mistake:Recalled from the shades […]

I do not find, on the whole, that evangelicals are prone to unaffected removal from the world. Their world-loving God calls loudly. […] I find a great deal of intense, honest, and communal introspection—a passionate and persistent ambivalence toward the self that is of a piece with their passionate and persistent ambivalence toward their world. […]

Tennyson seems to have reached the end of his spiritual development with “In Memoriam”; there followed no reconciliation, no resolution. “And now no sacred staff shall break in blossom,/ No choral salutation lure to light/ A spirit sick with perfume and sweet night,”/ or rather with twilight, for Tennyson faced neither the darkness nor the […]