By Amaris Cole The award-winning writer and director, Murray Watts, recently showcased two of his plays at The King’s Head Theatre. Here, the man who brought us The Miracle Maker speaks of Mr Darwin’s Tree and First Light, as well as taking us back to where it all began. Your work has won many awards [...]
In the early 1960s, John Byron came to faith after playing Hamlet on British television. Joining up with an established London church, one of its members asked what he did for a living. When he replied that he was an actor, the member told him, “You cannot be an actor and a Christian”. When he [...]
It’s not immediately apparent from his appearance that Chris Gidney is in showbiz. Without doubt there’s a twinkle in his eye, but he’s equally at home wearing smart suits or sparkly Lycra trousers! (You can see we’ve met in at least two very different circumstances!). Chris certainly comes from a showbusiness family and at age [...]
Thirty-two year old UK athletics Phillips Idowu (who was born in 1978, in the London Borough of Hackney) feels that he is ready to do his best at the London Games next year. The British triple jumper has learned about his mistakes in past Olympics and Competitions and says his faith in God is going [...]
Pop-princess and gospel singer Amy Grant has had a remarkable life. The radiologist’s daughter became famous in the late 1970s as a teenager for singing gospel hits and hymns. In the following years she would become the first Christian artist to produce a platinum-selling album as well as becoming a household name. But the 30-million-album-selling [...]
Another in the series of ongoing interviews with American poets. This interview with University of Delaware Professor Jeanne Walker is part of the special subset in this series called American Anglican poets. This writer talked by phone in June, 2011 with Jeanne from his home office north of San Francisco to Jeanne, who was in that morning time at her home in the Philadelphia, PA area. We spoke for an hour, and the poet was forthcoming about her work as a poet, and as an experienced University Professor of English (35 years).
1.1. Your email note of this week to me says,” At my most recent poetry reading I went back to read from older books–a decade old. Then I read some poems I had been working on in the last several months. It was a very sympathetic audience. I always find out something about the poems by reading them to an audience.” In looking over your University of Delaware notices regarding you as Professor and poet, I see you will be giving a poetry reading at the University in September (the 29th, in fact). Intrigued as I am by the artistic and creative process, talk to us some about how a reading is done. For example, when reading before students and faculty mostly, do you choose different works than other readings? Tell us what you may read in September, and if you work on a specific oral style that you can describe when reading?
I choose poems that mean something to the group I’m reading for. I usually don’t decide what I’m reading until several hours before, because then I generally have a better idea of whose going to be in the audience. I’ve read my own poems often enough so that I don’t need rehearsal. Above all, I think a poem should be clear to the audience. Getting the music into their ears involves reading slowly, pausing frequently, and annunciating clearly.
I’ve…to tell the truth…I’ve learned a great deal from the actors I work with in the theatre. I usually introduce each of the poems with a story, or an explanation of some kind. That gives the audience time to reflect between poems. It also gives them a sense of who wrote the poem and why. Poetry reading should be fun…not fun…but they should give pleasure. You want to connect with the audience, so they know it’s as human…they know there’s a connection to you. A poetry reading should give the audience time to ponder the great truths like: love, death, redemption, the mysteries of time and eternity. Because we live such fast lives, we don’t get much time to reflect on what we’re doing or why we’re doing it. In the end what’s more important than that kind of reflection?
Let me give you an example of a reading I did on Whidbey Island, (off the coast of Seattle, WA USA). I was reading to students and faculty in the Seattle Pacific Masters of Fine Arts Program, which is the low residency program where I teach. We know each other very well. It’s a small elite program with about 7 faculty members, and about 50 students. So I read poems that I had recently been working on. I told the audience that they’re new. That’s unusual. I don’t read new poems to a general audience, but I sometimes do read them to my students. I’m always reading and commenting on what they’re writing and they get a kick out of hearing and commenting on what their mentors are doing.
Here’s one of the poems I read, which may not, even now, be in its final draft:
FAULTS
Then my mother became my child.
I’d felt so light on the teeter-totter
that I was surprised by sudden power,
holding someone so important
in the sky with nothing but my weight
on the other side. It was kind of thrilling,
kind of strange. And I noticed the earth
is jagged with faults and fractures.
Grass staggers in uneven dirt and
the shoreline zigs and zags. You
can never glue the two uneven pieces
of a broken teacup perfectly together.
When she died, I worried about her
as if I’d driven her to her first day
of school and left her there alone.
For weeks I wondered, did she find
her class room? Is she making friends
in heaven? I’m trying to glue pieces
of the cup together. Heaven is roughly
what I mean. If God ever used that word,
he spoke in Hebrew. Nothing, it turns out,
has a simple surface. Maybe it’s the
missing and the faults we have to love.
1.2. In our conversation by phone this week in June, 2011, we talked a little about the business of poetry. After all, poetry books are written to be published, and published to be read, but also to be sold. You mentioned some of the general numbers various poetry books of kinds sell. Tell us a little about that, and do mention some of your own successes with their titles? Mostly, though, explain if poetry is a business to you, or if it is a business of writing and as in the book you worked on by Abilene Christian University Press, is the business of literature and poetry for the writer like you a matter of, “Shadow & Light: Literature and the Life of Faith?”
Poetry doesn’t make any business sense in this culture. Most books of poetry are published in small press runs usually not over 3,000 copies. There’s no mass market for poetry. Most small presses that publish poetry don’t even have marketing departments. And the trade presses that publish poetry don’t pitch it to the public, even if they have big marketing budgets. Although children natural use metaphors and they love wordplay, by the time they get to junior high, that’s mostly been educated out of them. We tend to think of English as a practical affair. In hip hop that kind of razzle-dazzle wordplay has come back, but basically English in this country is for ordering pizza.
In places like Romania, and Iran, and even in Sweden, vast numbers of normal people read poetry. And they memorize it. There is a saying in Romania: Every Romanian is a poet.
Shadow & Light: Literature and the Life of Faith, is an anthology of spiritual literature written between the English renaissance and about the year 2000. I agreed to help edit that volume, because a collection like that didn’t exist. We’re working on a third edition now. I believe we need that kind of collection in our culture. It reveals the quest for God in a number of cultures and religious traditions. It’s startling to read John Donne, for example, writing in the early 17th century about his very problematic faith, sounding almost like a contemporary.
1.3. You say in an email to me, “I’ve taught for my whole career at The University of Delaware. That’s 35 years.” When it comes to teaching University students, what advice have you both for your students and for younger poets on the practice and the writing of poetry? Please offer something tangible when answering, like “create a chapbook” and what a chapbook means to you as an artist. If not a chapbook, how a book in its development has meaning for you, and what is some process of its beginning work.
The most important advice I give my students is to read, to read everything they can get their hands on. I tell them to go back to the Anglo Saxon poets. Read Beowulf, and move forward through the tradition. Once you finish the English and American traditions and poetry from Canada, start reading in other languages. If you can’t read in the other languages, then read in translation. Read poems aloud. Think about the sounds and the rhythms and be aware of the metaphors. Take the poems you love apart, to see how they’re made. Use them as models to sit down and write from. Work seriously, and revise.
I would say, the same kind of work goes into a poem as goes into a musician’s performance of a violin concerto. Like a musician, a poet needs to practice her scales. Then in the middle of all that work, the muse might show up and you can move toward a real poem. The books come later. That’s not so difficult. It’s the writing that’s the real work. A lot of poets want to skip that part. You work hard and you practice, then you hide all the work and make it look effortless.
1.4. This writer notes that you’ve a number of poetry books published, and the usual question for a writer can be, “What is your favorite of the lot?” Have you a particular poem in that book you’d like to tell us about, as it is an expression of the creative spirit, the Holy Spirit, and shows how it as literature reflects the poets life?
I don’t have a favorite book. They’re all my children. This summer and fall I will be putting together a new and selected volume which will be brought out by WordFarm Press next year. It’s a small press whose editors have all worked at other presses. They knew one another and liked each other and decided to start this press to fill a niche. They have a wonderful taste and the work they publish is good. They make beautiful books.
Yes, I do feel dependent on something when I am writing well. Like Milton and Spenser, I think of it as the Holy Spirit. But I am not sure the mystery is much different for poetry than for anything we do. How do our ideas spin out? How do the words keep materializing from nowhere? How do we keep breathing, even when we’re not thinking about it? The fact that we can name the parts of our brains that are doing the work doesn’t mean we can control them. The fact that we’re here at all is a mystery. God is perpetually engaged in the act of creation.
I believe everyday events are sacramental. It isn’t just the bread we eat on Sunday or the ashes on Ash Wednesday. The world is full of objects that are signs: Like signposts that point to meaning beyond themselves.
I remember with sitting with a senior chemistry major in my office at the University of Delaware, where I teach. He gestured at a very big tree on the mall; it’s not solid he told me. It’s made of rapidly moving atoms. In the end, poetry and chemistry may come down to the same thing—the mystery that lies at the center of our existence. It makes you believe there’s got to be a creator, doesn’t it?
THERE’S NO ‘S’ in Townend,” says Yorkshire-born Stuart, who is perhaps a little tired of journalists confusing him with the famous movie director and actor. However, in Christian circles he is just as well known, perhaps more so, for his work as a contemporary hymn writer, whose songs are being sung increasingly in churches. Townend [...]
Graham Kendrick, author of Shine Jesus Shine, Meekness and Majesty and the Servant King has just brought out his 30th studio-recorded album: Banquet. As the original poster-boy of ‘lively church’ music Kendrick, who now attends an Anglican Church in Tunbridge Wells, says he has no plans to stop writing Christian music. He cites pop singer [...]
STUART PENDRED said he entered the Salvation Army in a Moses basket and owes the organisation both his faith and much of his music. An established baritone, who has just released his second album, Agnus Dei, Stuart is a big believer in the Salvation Army. “I am still a third-generation Salvationist, my mum was an [...]
By Steve Morris Harvey Thomas was blown up in Brighton bombing, but has turned tragedy into triumph and lived out a life of Christian forgiveness. Steve Morris listens and learns about a difficult road… Are there any of the teachings of Jesus that is more difficult than that of forgiving our [...]
