Sound & Sense: An Open Thread
The third of our recurring opportunities — currently, every other Thursday — to learn what your fellow readers are reading and writing
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Two considerable poets have independently mentioned something to me in recent months — something I’m not sure what to do with. They both described overflowing with ideas for poems while they were young but lacking the technical skill to pull those ideas off. And then, in old age, possessed of endless technique, they seemed to lack much to say with that all that technical ability they had trained up in themselves over the years.
A common phenomenon, I suspect. For every poet who — like Yeats in his Last Poems or my beloved Rhina Espaillat — can explode in new verse in old age, there are probably a dozen who have little new to say beyond the fact that they are old, and death is near, and not much seems new. They do tend, however, to say it very well.
So, what are you thinking about? Reading? Writing? This is an open-mic thread, available to both free and paid subscribers, where we learn what’s in your mind these days. Sally Thomas and I have tentatively decided to keep going with the new layout of putting the poem first in our postings, but do let us know if you strongly approve or disapprove.
Sorry I missed this. But I am happy that last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday I was busy at the Summer Writers Institute put on by the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of St. Thomas, Houston.
I just recently re-read Brideshead Revisited for a Well Read Moms book club. I love it every time. Then I read the book by Paula Berg, Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead, which I started because I wanted to know more about Waugh's public school days and stayed interested enough to finish it.
For the SWI workshop, I brought fairly polished drafts of two of my poems: Dante's Daft and Holy Love, and Unsex Me Now. As you may know, James Matthew Wilson teaches that meter is essential for poetry. And I knew that even though those two pieces are acceptable as poetry in the eyes of some who are less strict in their definitions, James would probably not find them so since I have an ongoing battle with meter that I won't go into now.
For background, I am kicking around an idea that will probably be seen as almost heretical among Catholic authors (after Flannery O'Connor) that we shouldn't hide our faith, under a bushel so to speak. Why should we be forced to be subtle? Since those in control of the culture have no hesitation about shouting their belief in what I call the myth of sex without consequences, I wonder why we shouldn't shout what we believe. There is a whole generation that has never heard the truth. I think of writers living under communism who steeled themselves to say the culturally unsayable. When I said that to Bernardo Aparicio, Dappled Things founder, in a private conversation, he disagreed with the theory, indirectly, by responding that my memoir pieces are convincing because no one can argue with what I have experienced. Berni agrees with Dana Gioia who has been encouraging me to keep writing memoir pieces. Dana says, "You've had a hellofa life!"
Anyway, I ended my reading of "Unsex Me Now" with "Hat tip to Lady Macbeth," and then I added that as I read I realized I should give a hat tip to the late Allen Ginsberg— who I got to know in the 1960s—because what I was doing was a kind of a rant. If Ginsberg could rant about the poor drug taking sexually untrammeled creatures who were somehow being driven crazy by straight society ("I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, running through the angry streets at dawn, looking for an angry fix" etc.) and his words affected society, why can't I rant about the way women are expected to unsex themselves to act like the worst of men, brainwashed to think that they will only be happy if they submit to uncommitted sex, contraception, and abortion, and deny their built-in desires to love, to cherish, to have and to hold? And then I told Prof. Wilson I wanted to know how I could turn "Unsex Me Now" into a poem (by his standards). I can't stop being amused about how the topic must have inspired him, because he proceeded not to make suggestions about how to improve the poem, but he started writing a whole other poem without any of my language using some conceits of his own. . . .. (It was consoling that I got a lot of comments that readers loved the language, since I don't want to write in his words, I want to write in my own.)
So that's what I've been writing, aside from Substack posts about the winners of a Dappled Things "Sacred Art about the Sacred Heart contest," with a lot of investigation into what the Church teaches are appropriate depictions of the infinite Divine and Human Love of Jesus's Sacred Heart. Another piece I haven't published yet is about the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage that embarked on the Serra route on Pentecost after a newly composed Mass for Eucharistic Revival with a procession carrying the Eucharist into the streets of San Francisco that continued across the Golden Gate Bridge, and ended with Adoration at the vista point on the Marin County side. That thrills the heart of this former hippy who lived in the gritty city during the late sixties and is inspired by thinking of Jesus being taken through the streets and over the bridge where no procession has witnessed so openly to Him before . Even my former cocaine addict Uber driver was intrigued thinking about Jesus on the bridge where so many protests have been staged.
Currently trying to decide between a reread of King Lear or Susanna Clark’s Piranesi. Or perhaps Tolkien’s Smith of Wootton Major….
For poetry I’ve been reading a bit of Sara Teasdale here and there this week-but also this substack, which is the real reason I wanted to comment! It’s been such a lovely, spirited, delightful edition to my reading-thanks so much for writing it! :)