Articles by Guest Author

Ann Patchett’s new novel, Whistler, is centered on its own “probable impossibility,” one quieter, subtler than those in previous novels, but which proves arguably more powerful. This latest novel is astonishing not for the surprise of protagonist Daphne Fuller reuniting with her estranged stepfather, Eddie Triplett, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but for the novel’s affirmation of the endurance of gentle love through decades of absence, for its celebration of the probable impossibilities life sometimes deals us.

In his tenth volume of poetry to date—titled Sing Me a Song, She Said—acclaimed poet and biographer extraordinaire Paul Mariani (born 1940) delves into his childhood and youth in a working-class family in New York City, his evolving relationship with reading and writing, often with spiritual resonance, and—with arresting candor—the tribulations of old age.

I recently went to a group exhibition put on by New York City’s Arthouse 2B, a Catholic artist collective. Now I need to admit that, as a Catholic, I have reservations about self-consciously Catholic art. I do not object to it per se; it just seems that whenever we get together like this the results are… lame. So I was delighted and surprised when my favorite work in the exhibit was a piece of straightforward devotional art: Yukiyo Nagata’s “Offering.”

In The Death of Rabelais, her recent verse play, J.C. Scharl has created something rare: an excellent comedy about death. It is, moreover, not only a comedy about death, but a comedy about comedy’s relationship with it. But the most impressive thing is that the play manages to take death seriously and, at the same time, be very funny.

The work of both W. G. Sebald and Edmund de Waal is the result of a never-ending curiosity, steeped in years of craft, whether (for de Waal) at the potter’s wheel making porcelain vessels, or (for Sebald) pen to paper endlessly revising paragraphs. Both strike a similar chord; one of tenderness, of loss, estrangement and displacement.

Many people get introduced to the Jewish writer and Holocaust victim Anne Frank via her “Diary of a Young Girl” in a middle school literature class. But my own first impression of Anne came from her less well-known “Tales from the Secret Annex,” which deviates from the tone and material of her Diary in that it is a collection of mostly fictitious anecdotes and sketches.

If you polled every last person in the world, I’m sure you’d find that, at one point or another, they’ve written a poem. Not the Haiku assigned in third grade. I’m thinking of the visceral thing composed on the edge of love. Maybe it’s never written down but goes on shaking about, caged in a dusty corner of the mind.

Cervantes played with the tradition of chivalric romances, just as Shakespeare echoed (on at least one occasion, in Hamlet, mockingly) the Latin plays of Seneca. These authors reveal a paradoxical pattern in literature so consistent as to approach the status of a law: We go forward by looking back. The new literary experience is founded in literary memory.

Flannery O’Connor’s 1948 short story “The Barber” opens with this line: “It is trying on liberals in Dilton.” The fictional town of Dilton is set in O’Connor’s native state, Georgia, where the conservative party—with its Jim Crow segregation laws—was very popular with white Southerners in the mid-twentieth century. As the story continues, we witness a political confrontation between Rayber, a college instructor in the town, and his barber.

Reading the poems in Betsy K. Brown’s debut collection, City Nave, feels like exploring a city with train stations, deserts, and cathedrals made of words. The book is filled with descriptions of buildings, cities, and landscapes—even those poems that don’t describe the urban give architecture to abstractions and people and wildernesses through her command of form and fascination with space.

A few years ago, I stepped back and wondered why I liked reading so much. There have always been some standard answers—usually with some buzz words or ideas pulled from someone else—but I’ve wanted to make an answer of my own, or at least one pertaining to my interests, habits, and loves. When I started a consistent, daily writing habit about a year ago, I felt the need to understand why I loved reading, stories, characters, novels, and any literature.

According to Sartre, sharing the world together, interacting with others, and having relations with our fellow-creatures is a necessity in the world. We all live in ecologies where our interactions with each other, with animals, and with plants shape the world around us. But “our critics” have chosen to interact only with those creatures who no longer exist. They want to reside in a ghostly ecology where the spirits of the dead roam.

Richard Wright, the Black American author most known for the novel Native Son, once contributed an introduction to Black Metropolis, a famous sociological study of black life conducted by St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton Jr. in Chicago circa 1945. In many ways, his introduction is still worth revisiting, as it tackles the racial strife between Americans, warfare among the socioeconomic classes, and America’s place on the tumultuous world stage.

William James said belief is what we actually attend to, as opposed to what we simply profess. On those terms, I must be the world’s most devout follower of Cees Nooteboom’s novel Rituals (1980), which I read again recently on a long flight home. I’m haunted by these languid, philosophical pages. I keep going back to try to understand the haunting.

“The stations of the cross” is a Roman Catholic devotion in which fourteen scenes depicting Christ on his way to crucifixion are recalled and pondered: his scourging, for instance, or his encounter with Pilate. Morrissey’s poem is titled Stations of the Cross (no “the”), suggesting parallel sites where “the cross” may be found. In addition to the immediate reference to Jesus’ historical suffering one may also read an implied immediate environment of school violence and beyond that innumerable instances of scapegoats and victimization in the wider world.

I suggest a sub-genre of dead-cat-in-a-well poems, even though I have only discovered two instances so far. In both poems, a grandfather lowers his young grandson down into a well to clean it, dredging up a dead cat in the process. The recently deceased North Carolinian Fred Chappell, may he rest in peace, provides our first instance, titled “Cleaning the Well,” published in his 1975 collection River . The Alabama-born Paul Ruffin offers a second instance. His poem, also named “Cleaning the Well,” appears in his 1980 collection Lighting the Furnace Pilot.

Our mouths, our words, can be used for good or ill, to liberate or enslave, to bless or curse or encourage, to ask difficult questions. We share our stories, so others might be invited to tell their stories in turn, allowing us to not simply scream at and past each other but to see what values we might hold in common, to perhaps one day even arrive at a place of mutual understanding and esteem.

The poetic bookends which span thirty years of Robert Lowell’s life’s work, the first poem of Lord Weary’s Castle, “The Exile’s Return,” and the last poem of Day by Day, “Epilogue,” have a lot to say to us today. Considered together, they shed light not only on Lowell’s development as a poet, but also on what it means to be possessed by a religious-artistic vision.

The “impulse” of the title is everything. The wife’s breaking of the branch echoes Dante’s breaking of a branch in Inferno’s Forest of the Suicides. This hints that the wife’s impulsive divorce—a finality “besides the grave”—is a kind of suicide, the marital bond slit like a wrist. Frost knew instinctively what psychiatry research has established: Most people who commit suicide think about it for ten minutes or less beforehand. It is an impulse.

Enter Frederick Buechner’s Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, which explores the Christian gospel through the lenses of three literary genres: tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale. In essence, Buechner suggests that serious matters of the gospel are first matters of a human life well lived before they are a logical problem to be solved and systematized.