Notables

A few trinkets, past present and to come

A few All Saints’ Day tidbits

J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Death of St. Brendan”

St. Therese of Lisieux’s “To Joan of Arc” (the Maid was not canonized until after St. Therese’s death” has these lovely lines:

But that was only a fleeting glory.

Your name needed a Saint's halo.

So the Beloved offered you his bitter cup,

And, like Him, you were spurned by men.

—

I am preparing for a poetry workshop that runs November/December (if you’re a student or recent grad, ping me—we still have two spots!), and will open with this from David Jones’ Preface to The Anathemata (the quotation is from Browning’s “A Grammarian’s Funeral”):

“‘He said “What’s Time? Leave Now for dogs and apes!

Man has For ever”.’

True, but the words of man, unless they are of ‘now’ and ‘this place’, can have no ‘for ever’.”

A difficult saying, but true. Infinity, at least in art, is made up of many “nows” and “heres,” or perhaps a better way to put it is: for the artist, infinity is within every “now” and “here,” not without it.

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In more Jones’ news, I’m tasked with reviewing Dr. Elizabeth Powell’s splendid David Jones and The Craft of Theology, which gives a remarkable close reading of Jones’ taxing little poem “A a a DOMINUS DEUS”. Poetry by visual artists is intriguing to me; the line breaks must adhere to the laws of poetic craft, but the poet/artist obeys other laws as well. Some of Claude Wilkinson’s poems come to mind as other examples (I’m thinking specifically about his poem about a snake dropping from a tree in Reading the Earth); the poems are not quite “shape poems,” but neither are their shapes passive on the page. It’s as if the “now” and “here” the poem inhabits includes the page—something I do not think of very often, because of the way most poems appear in online formats (even printed poems often have their online versions). Online, space does not feel like a thing to be treasured; there is less of a sense of the space itself being treasured up and shaped through art into something beautiful.

I saw “less of a sense” because my husband works in web development, and I’ve come to realize that there is more of a craft element there than I previously thought. The Internet is shaped, and our experience of it is crafted, but the experience, however sensory, is so distant from the sensual experience of the material world that I am not sure whether it counts as the same kind of experience at all, or whether it is something new. Danielle Rose certainly has thoughts on this, as on many other topics.

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Tessa Carman and I had the joy of speaking with Dr. Jennifer Frey on the Sacred and Profane Love podcast last week (coming out this week, I think) about our translation of “The Dream of the Rood” in The Lamp Magazine last Easter. I cherished the whole conversation, but one thing stood out in particular; I have not felt like I have had much literary community or much time for deep work for the past year, but this translation project was a profoundly collaborative process that was only possible because of friendships and relationships across years and years. Some of the people I keep in close contact with, like Tessa; others I don’t speak to very often, but when we do meet (like at a wedding last summer, where I saw many old friends), we fall right back into closeness.

Many of us desire something like “The Inklings” famously had: a close-knit literary community where we work out our ideas with dear friends (and rivals) over decades. Most of us do not have it, of course, and for a long time I felt like it was impossible; but I am beginning to think that more of us are closer to it than we think.

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I’ll be in D.C. November 15-17 for a panel talk at Catholic University. “Is the Catholic Novel Dead?” Come and find out!

A most blessed Hallowtide to you all.

~Jane