Poetry
And I Was Alive (With a Shard of Glass in the Gut): A Week with Christian Wiman
Art / Death / Literature / Poetry / Religion / Suffering / Theology

And I Was Alive (With a Shard of Glass in the Gut): A Week with Christian Wiman

by David Zahl on May 21, 2013 • 1 Comment

What a rare and inspiring privilege it was to be with poet and author Christian Wiman last week. I for one am still reeling–don’t know how it could have possibly been any richer. Thankfully, like his poetry in Every Riven Thing and his prose in My Bright Abyss, the talks he gave here in Charlottesville defy distillation. They require real attention–and while one might expect as much from an artist of his caliber and quality, still, the anticipation of poetic brilliance doesn’t make it any less arresting when you actually experience it.

Which is not to imply that a portion of…

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Poetry

From a Window – Christian Wiman

by David Zahl on May 13, 2013 • 2 Comments

In honor of the beginning of “Wiman Week” here in Charlottesville, here is a doozie from Every Riven Thing, originally published in The Atlantic:

the-tree-of-life_3Incurable and unbelieving
in any truth but the truth of grieving,

I saw a tree inside a tree
rise kaleidoscopically

as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.
I pressed my face as close

to the pane as I could get
to watch that fitful, fluent spirit

that seemed a single being undefined
or countless beings of one mind

haul its strange cohesion
beyond the limits of my vision

over the house heavenwards.
Of course I knew those leaves were birds.

Of course that old tree stood
exactly as it had and would

(but why should it seem fuller now?)
and though a man’s mind might endow

even a tree with some excess
of life to which a man seems witness,

that life is not the life of men.
And that is where the joy came in.

To listen to Christian doing an astounding reading of an astounding poem, go here.

Another Week Ends: Underconfidence, Kate Middleton’s Picnics, Unreported Medical Advice, D.H. Lawrence’s Christian Wonder, the Double-Bind of Summer Movies, More Christian Wiman, and (Way) Too Much Sociology
America / Books / Film / Humor / Identity / Interviews / Poetry / Psychology / Suffering / Theology / Week In Review

Another Week Ends: Underconfidence, Kate Middleton’s Picnics, Unreported Medical Advice, D.H. Lawrence’s Christian Wonder, the Double-Bind of Summer Movies, More Christian Wiman, and (Way) Too Much Sociology

by WB on May 3, 2013 • 2 Comments

1. How confident are you? Over at The New York Times, David Brooks surveyed his readers to get a sense for self-confidence, lack thereof, and the ways males and females experience confidence differently. While the word itself is a bit vague and murky, and Brooks found few trends in the survey data, the individual responses are definitely worth a look:

But it was really hard to see consistent correlations and trends. The essays were highly idiosyncratic, and I don’t want to impose a false order on them that isn’t there. Let me just string together some of the interesting points…

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Addiction / Church / Literature / Poetry / Prayer / Religion / Suffering

The Unlikely Believer: How a Smart-Assed Intellectual Crossed the Secular/Religious Divide – Mary Karr

by Mockingbird on Apr 30, 2013 • 4 Comments

What an absolute delight and honor it was to meet and listen to the one and only Mary Karr at last week’s conference in NYC. Buckle your seat-belts indeed – just don’t leave the cake out in the rain:

You may download this recording by clicking here.

2013 NYC Conference Recordings: Good News That Never Gets Old
Addiction / Art / Church / Conferences / Death / Everyday / Grace in Practice / Law / Literature / Poetry / Religion / Sports / Theology / TV

2013 NYC Conference Recordings: Good News That Never Gets Old

by Mockingbird on Apr 26, 2013 • 9 Comments

Another heartfelt thank-you to everyone who helped put on this year’s Mockingbird Conference in NYC, especially our friends at Calvary St. George’s Church. It’s a good thing most of the presentations below have to do with grace, as the very thought of trying to top it is incredibly scary…! Speaking of freebies, though, we are once again making the recordings available at no charge; we only ask that those who were not able to attend this year *consider* making a donation to help cover the cost of the event. Download links are followed by an in-line player for each recording.…

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Poetry

Shakespeare Thursday: Sonnet 98

by Ethan Richardson on Apr 11, 2013 • No Comments

SquareDance47bFor you have I been absent in the spring
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,
That heavy Saturn laughed and leapt with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue
Could make me any summer’s story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew;
Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose.
They were but sweet, but figures of delight
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those;
Yet seemed it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.

Poetry

Descending Theology: The Resurrection by Mary Karr

by David Zahl on Apr 9, 2013 • No Comments
Vasiliy Kandinsky's "Great Resurrection (Grosse Auferstehung)"

Vasiliy Kandinsky’s “Great Resurrection (Grosse Auferstehung)”

From the far star points of his pinned extremities,
cold inched in—black ice and squid ink—
till the hung flesh was empty. Lonely in that void
even for pain, he missed his splintered feet,
the human stare buried in his face.
He ached for two hands made of meat
he could reach to the end of.
In the corpse’s core, the stone fist of his heart

began to bang on the stiff chest’s door,
and breath spilled back into that battered shape. Now
it’s your limbs he long to flow into–
from the sunflower center in your chest
outward–as warm water
shatters at birth, rivering every way.

 

Originally published in Poetry, January 2006, the revised version above was collected in Sinners Welcome: Poems.

Death / Literature / Poetry / Religion

“And Death Shall Have No Dominion” by Dylan Thomas

by Jeff Hual on Apr 1, 2013 • No Comments

Dylan ThomasAnd death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Baby, You Can Drive My Karr: Conversion and the Poetry of Mary Karr (Breakout Preview)
Conferences / Poetry

Baby, You Can Drive My Karr: Conversion and the Poetry of Mary Karr (Breakout Preview)

by Mockingbird on Mar 19, 2013 • 3 Comments

Kicking off our series of previews of the breakout sessions at the upcoming NYC conference, this one comes from the inestimable Brad Davis, an established poet himself, who will be leading his breakout on Friday afternoon, April 19th. 

Some of us have believed since we awoke into sentience. Others of us started out with our confidence invested elsewhere and only later were (or have yet to be) won over to the faith. Maybe because I am of the latter group, I think that, in a volleyball game, the johnny-come-latelies would crush the goody two-shoes. In any case, whether it’s fiction, nonfiction,…

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Eliot’s Vaccine and The First Snapped Shoelace (According to Mary Karr)
Literature / Poetry / Suffering

Eliot’s Vaccine and The First Snapped Shoelace (According to Mary Karr)

by David Zahl on Mar 12, 2013 • 4 Comments

The final paragraphs of Mary Karr’s introduction to the Modern Library paperback edition of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” are too stunning not to reproduce here, especially in anticipation of a conference where Mary will be speaking and Eliot’s plays will be explored:

But why read something so darkly despairing? And repeatedly? I mentioned its beauty before. But the poem acts for me as a sort of vaccine against the horror it describes by injecting a nonlethal dose of it. One can’t get the same immunity by abstractly, willfully constructing a theory about the world and one’s place in it. Theories…

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Poetry

He Acts – Adam Zagajewski

by David Zahl on Mar 12, 2013 • 1 Comment

He acts, in splendor and in darkness,
in the roar of waterfalls and in the silence of sleep,
but not as your well-protected shepherds
would have it. He looks for the longest line,
the road so circuitous
it is barely visible, and fades away
in suffering. Only blind men, only
owls feel sometimes its dwindling trace
under their eyelids.

The Language of Love: On Christian Wiman’s Ambition and Survival
Art / Literature / Philosophy / Poetry / Relationships / Religion / Suffering

The Language of Love: On Christian Wiman’s Ambition and Survival

by Mockingbird on Mar 1, 2013 • 1 Comment

Update: On May 15th in Charlottesville, VA, Mockingbird is honored to be co-hosting an evening with poet and author Christian Wiman. Details can be found on the Christ Church website. Our good friend and Fall conference speaker (and literary editor of The Dish!) Matthew Sitman has been kind enough to offer some thoughts on what makes Wiman such a rare and wonderful beast:

 

Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols, “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” Faith in language and faith God, then, seem to go together for the German philosopher,…

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Death / Poetry

The Province of the Saved – Emily Dickinson

by Ethan Richardson on Feb 20, 2013 • No Comments

3151430248_55033bb3c0The Province of the Saved
Should be the Art – To Save -
Through Skill obtained in Themselves -
The Science of the Grave

No Man can understand
But He that hath endured
The Dissolution – in Himself -
That Man – be qualified

To qualify Despair
To Those who failing new -
Mistake Defeat for Death – Each time -
Till acclimated – to -

Poetry

2047 Grace Street – Christian Wiman

by David Zahl on Feb 12, 2013 • 1 Comment

7940354But the world is more often refuge
than evidence, comfort and covert
for the flinching will, rather than the sharp
particulate instants through which God’s being burns
into ours. I say God and mean more
than the bright abyss that opens in that word.
I say world and mean less
than the abstract oblivion of atoms
out of which every intact thing finally goes.
I do not know how to come closer to God
except by standing where a world is ending
for one man. It is still dark,
and for an hour I have listened
to the breathing of the woman I love beyond
my ability to love. Praise to the pain
scalding us toward each other, the grief
beyond which, please God, she will live
and thrive. And praise to the light that is not
yet, the dawn in which one bird believes,
crying not as if there had been no night
but as if there were no night in which it had not been.

 

The above can be found in the collection, Every Riven Thing. Again, we are so excited to be hosting Christian here in Charlottesville on Weds evening March 6th. The updated title of his talk is, “And I Was Alive: Faith in a Faithless Time.” We hope you can join us!

Poetry / Prayer / Suffering

This Mind of Dying – Christian Wiman

by David Zahl on Jan 23, 2013 • No Comments

God let me give you now this mind of dying
fevering me back
into consciousness of all I lack
and of that consciousness becoming proud:

There are keener griefs than God.
They come quietly, and in plain daylight,
leaving us with nothing, and the means to feel it.

My God my grief forgive my grief tamed in language
to a fear that I can bear.
Make of my anguish
more than I can make. Lord, hear my prayer.

 

From the collection Every Riven Thing. Mbird is sponsoring an evening with Christian on Weds, March 6th in Charlottesville, VA. More details coming soon.