A 21st Century Plague: Poetry from a Pandemic

 

When University Professors Press added the anthology A 21^st Century Plague: Poetry from a Pandemic to their “Poetry, Healing, and Growth Series,” I happily received a writer’s copy as one of the fifty-three poets whose poems comprise this remarkable collection.

 

In the Introduction, editor Elayne Clift gives us a glimpse of the goal:

 

“International in scope, this collection offers validation, comfort, and support to those who have struggled with pandemic restrictions, sometimes with humor and always with compassion. Poems address coping with mundane acts of daily life, profound emotions inherent in the challenges we have been called upon to face during a frightening time, isolation, lack of physical intimacy, and ever-present anxieties. Offering perspectives derived from personal experience, poets from various cultures and age groups contribute to the literature of healthcare crises in deeply meaningful ways.”

 

But don’t just take her word and mine! See for yourself the richness of these selected poems:

 

In “Daily News,” for instance, poet Barbara Crooker writes:

 

“And so this day is like every other,
beginning with coffee and ending
with wine. But with nowhere
to go, and nothing to do, I’m
going to take my time, sit
in the morning sun and savor
the darkness, black and bitter.
In the larger world, terrible
things continue to happen.
Here, the only action
is the hummingbird zipping
and sipping sugar water,
jazzed on sweetness, in love
with the sun….”

“The End of Summer 2020” brings us these poignant lines by Judith Adams:

 

“Call for a convention of wild animals
So you can listen to their sorrow.
Ask forgiveness for history.
If you don’t know what you are here for,
sleep on the edge of the sea and let it
Breath for you.
One day you will be able
To kiss again….”

 

Free verse and traditional poems give voice to what we’ve been thinking, feeling, and doing for many months, and yet this very time of uncertainty and, often chaos, has also brought reminders to reassess our priorities and acknowledge what’s truly important. i.e., Enjoy the NOW of things. Pray and watch without ceasing for good to come from hard times.

Brother Richard Hendrick opens the door to praise in these uplifting lines from “Lockdown”:

 

“They say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise
You can hear the birds sing again.
They say that after just a few weeks of quiet
The sky is no longer thick with fumes
But blue and grey and clear.
They say that in the streets of Assisi
People are singing to each other
Across the empty squares,
keeping their windows open
So that those who are alone
May hear the sounds of family….”

 

And look at these lines in “Face Mask” by Paul Hostovsky:

 

“Have you noticed
how beautiful
everyone looks 

when all you can see
are their eyes?”

 

The pandemic also encourages us to open our eyes to perspectives other than our own and relevant issues such as “Covid Times in Prison” by Tony Vick.

 

“God has been good to me, despite my bout with Covid. He brought people into my life when I needed them. But maybe the Mexican folktale holds some truth. God doesn’t need to photograph the poor and disenfranchised. He resides in their midst, loving them, knowing that we all must be free to seek a kinder, more compassionate world.

Without that, COVID-19 will be the least of our worries.”

 

May this excellent anthology help us to express our own fears and worries while reawakening us to beauty, joy, and the marvelous versatility of peoples and poetry.

©2021, Mary Harwell Sayler, poet and writer in all genres, including A Gathering of Poems

 

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Find poems to love in anthologies

Every now and then, poets who are ready to step up their level of poetry-writing ask me to recommend poems they might study and emulate. No, not to mimic someone else’s voice or style, but to discover their own preferences and improve their use of technique.

Art students do this all the time. i.e. They typically study and copy the masters in order to find out what works and why. Then, having discovered a wide assortment of useful tools and techniques, they go on to find their own creative methods of working.

Conversely, I’ve found that many poets give little thought to poetry forms, styles, techniques, tips for revision, or precision in their choices of words. Worse, many poets don’t read poems by other poets, which handicaps them without their knowing it as they have few options except for what comes to mind.

Since we have centuries and centuries of beautifully expressed poetry to draw from, you can find all sorts of anthologies that collect poems around a central theme, subject, or form. Also, The Norton Anthology of Poetry aims to put together as many poems in English as possible.

To give you other anthologies I recommend with poems worth studying and enjoying, here’s a list of ones I’ve reviewed in the order shown:

The Seashell Anthology of Great Poetry 

The Paraclete Poetry Anthology 

Saint Peter’s B List 

Villanelles anthology 

Joy: 100 Poems 

The Soul in Paraphrase 

As publishers send me new copies of poetry books and anthologies to review, I’ll let you know of engaging poems and anthologies I’ve found that connect well with readers - including you and me!

Remember: We're first readers of poetry. Then, Lord willing, we become poets prepared to write poems that other people will want to read.

Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2019, poet-writer

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Joy: 100 poems

If you’re looking for sweet little verses or helium-filled poems, this may not be the book for you. But, if you’d like a collection of literary poems expressing an important life-lifting theme, you’ll be delighted to discover the works of some of the most highly acclaimed poets of the last hundred years or so, including many, many of my favorites.

Edited by award-winning poet Christian Wiman and published by Yale University Press, who kindly sent me a copy to review, Joy: 100 poems is a slender anthology of poetry written, as Emily Dickinson might say, “slant.” Instead of trying to capture the ever-elusive joy straight on, the book presents a collage of joy, eclectically illustrated by snow, sex, nature, children, bodily functions, music, religion, and ways of writing poetry. 

As the poetic introduction “Still Wilderness” declares, “…this entire book is aimed against whatever glitch in us or whim of God has made our most transcendent moments resistant to description.” That particular page also uses these lines by Lisel Mueller to describe joy that’s indescribable:

“It has nothing to do with the passing of time.

It’s not about loss. It’s about

two seemingly parallel lines

suddenly coming together

inside us, in some place

that is still wilderness”

With that last apt phrase as the introduction’s title, Editor Wiman goes on to say:

“Joy is what keeps reality real, since in this world of multiverses and quantum weirdness, where ninety-five percent of matter and energy we know only to name as ‘dark,’ it is obvious that reality extends far beyond what our senses can perceive. So what in the world, or what beyond the world, is calling to us when we are called to joy?”

This is not, as Wiman points out, to be confused with happiness, which is “a disposition or evaluation: we are happy when we experience pleasure, when things go our way, and so on. Joy, by contrast, is an emotion: there is always an element of having been seized,” often in, “some loss of self.”

In one poetic example, Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai contrasts the descriptions of pain with the imprecision of joy as these lines, translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfield, show:

“The blurriness of joy and the precision of pain –

I want to describe, with a sharp pain’s precision, happiness

and blurry joy. I learn to speak among the pains.”

At other times, poets speak of unexpected moments of delight, such as happened when Elizabeth Bishop memorialized “The Moose,” who wandered into the middle of the road:

“Taking her time,

she looks the bus over,

grand, otherworldly.

Why, why do we feel

(we all feel) this sweet

sensation of joy?”

Or, as Derek Walcott explained in “The Elegist”:

“Happiness is for the Declaration of Independence, a political

condition, and also for the ending of movies. Joy, by contrast,

is an illumination, as in Blake and Wordsworth and Rilke,

a benediction, a visitation. In the twentieth century, it required

nothing less than a belief in angels.”

Spanish poet Pablo Medina translated his “A Poem For The Epiphany” into English in these closing lines:

“It snows because light and dark

are making love in a field where old age

has no meaning, where colors blur,

silence covers sound, sleep covers sorrow,

everything is death, everything is joy.”

And, in The Luminous Web, Barbara Brown Taylor, writes:

“There is a living hum that might be coming from my neurons

but might just as well be coming from the furnace of the stars.

When I look up at them there is a small commotion in my bones,

as the ashes of dead stars that house my marrow rise up like metal

filings toward the magnet of their living kin.”

Throughout this collection of poems by poets, whose individual works also happen to fill five bookshelves in my home, the surprises of life and death merge into a single theme, which, after reading this highly recommended anthology, I, too, cannot help but address:

Joy

On the road

from Arimathea

to Jerusalem,

Jesus and I

turned cartwheels,

not minding the muck

on our hands or

the pebbles pressing

into our palms.

We felt unfettered,

knowing

no one could ever

kill Us again.

by Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2019, all rights reserved.

Joy: 100 poems, hardback, edited by Christian Wiman and published by Yale University Press

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The Soul in Paraphrase

Edited by Leland Ryken and published by Crossway, who kindly sent me a tastefully designed hardback copy to review, The Soul in Paraphrase offers exactly what the subtitle says: “A Treasury of Classic Devotional Poems.” This anthology of works by Christian poets “begins with the oldest surviving poem in the English language and ends with the modern era.”

From Caedmon to T.S. Eliott and Robert Frost with the famous “Anonymous” in between, Leland Ryken not only selected some of the most treasured poems in English from a Christian perspective, but he included his “Notes on selected words” and insightful mystery-solving “Commentary” on each poem.

These features mean even more, coming as they do from a college English professor of almost 50 years and author of over 50 books on literature and/or God’s Word. Over the years, many of those books helped me to develop as a poet and person of faith, so, as you can imagine, I received this review copy with Christmas glee!

To give you an idea of the delight awaiting the serious poet or poetry lover, take a look at the opening verse of “Caedmon’s Hymn” – the oldest poem known to be written in English.

“Now we must praise the Keeper of Heaven’s Kingdom,
The might of the Maker and his wisdom,
The work of the Glory-Father, when he of every wonder,
The eternal Lord, the beginning established.”

After Professor Ryken updated the original poem into the contemporary English version shown, his “Notes on selected words” tell us interesting aspects of the key words or phrases that might otherwise be foreign to our ears. For example:

“Wisdom: ‘mind-plans’ in the original Old English, with the implication of thoughtful purpose and careful planning.”

The “Commentary” then gives us a peek behind the poem by telling us the story of an illiterate farmhand, who regularly wiggled out of his turn to sing as part of the nightly after-dinner routine at the abbey where he lived.

“On one of these occasions, Caedmon went to the barn and fell asleep. In a dream, he heard someone telling him to sing something. Caedmon replied that he did not know how to sing. ‘Sing about creation,’ the visitor replied. Thereupon Caedmon sang the song known as ‘Caedmon’s Hymn.’ The new poetic gift never left Caedmon. English poetry thus began with a miracle of the word.”

Professor Ryken then goes on to analyze the whole poem, saying:

“The poem does three things that praise psalms typically do: (1) It begins with a formal call to praise God (the first stanza); (2) it provides a list or catalog of God’s praiseworthy acts; and (3) it rounds off the praise with a note of closure in the last line. This simplicity is played off against two pleasing forms of stylistic formality and artistry,” as found in the poet’s use of “phrases and clauses that name the same phenomena with different words, a technique influenced by the biblical verse form of parallelism. Second, our spirit is elevated by exalted titles for God, a technique known as epithets. For example, the first epithet in the poem is the Keeper of Heaven’s Kingdom.”

Throughout this book, Professor Ryken introduces readers to the works of the most skilled Christian poets, who would probably be appalled by the “greeting card verse” too common in “Christian verse” today. Indeed, the “Editor’s Introduction” defines some desirable qualities for devotional poets to consider. This not only includes spiritually-minded content but the poem’s effect on the reader – something I urge Christian poets to think about before publishing poems that go on and on, generally to show off a clever clanging of rhyme without saying anything new. Or, worse, expressing gall over Christianity or “religion” in general with no hope in sight and no concern over the effect this might have by leaving Christians who are struggling with their faith stuck in the mire!

As I read through the poems selected for this collection, I found favorites whose work I, too, highly recommend. Inevitably, their poems give us thoughtful, insightful, well-written works that point to God rather than the poet’s cleverness. I noticed a timely but timeless embrace of nature and the environment, too, as well as skillful ways to praise.

Although the “Journey of the Magi” by T.S. Eliott remains one of my favorite poems ever (and, yes, is included in this book), readers today often exclaim over the work of Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose brilliant and beautiful poetry can be elusive to some and downright deafening to others! What a joy, then, to read Professor’s Ryken’s notes and comments that give us access to poems which may be familiar to us and even loved, yet still perplexing.

And, so, Dr. Ryken has succeeded in presenting us with a book that provides a sweeping view of the best of the best while naming and explaining numerous techniques these classical poets used – techniques that, over many centuries, have become time-proven methods for elevating the literary quality of poetry of faith.

Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2018, poet-writer
The Soul in Paraphrase, hardback, Crossway



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Review of St. Peter’s B-List

Recently I reviewed Seeing Beauty and Saying Beautifully on my blog, In a Christian Writer’s Life as the book includes essays on three major poets and writers who wrote from a strong perspective of faith in Jesus Christ: George Herbert, George Whitefield, and C.S. Lewis. So, when I received a review copy of St. Peter’s B-List, I expected to review this highly recommended anthology on that blog too. However, these “Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints” fit better here as written by creative seekers whose views occasionally come across as bleak.

Besides making this collection a sign of our religious and literary times, the darker overtones contrast well with the approach taken in the previous review, showing poets and readers the wide range found in religious poetry. As stated in the Introduction, “For a work of art, be it a novel, drama, or poem, to be a ‘good’ work does not mean that the characters are drawn to be morally good but that their speech and actions follow the laws of probability in the human, or natural, world. Good works of literature have intrinsic artistic merit because they avoid sentimentality – the depiction of moral innocence at the expense of qualities of character that remind us of our need for redemption.”

While I see sentimental poems akin to greeting card verse at one extreme end of the spectrum, these poems approach the opposite end, which my poems sometimes do too. As the Introduction explains, such poems “remind us of our need for Christ, regardless of whether the poets themselves explicitly profess this concept in their poems.”

Edited by Mary Ann B. Miller and published by Ava Maria Press, each of the poems in St. Peter's B-List deals honestly with problems and concerns most of us can recognize in ourselves or relate to readily. From homemaking and mothering to showering or lying supine in prayer, the poems speak of a lifetime of topics with words that soothe, shock, amuse, or “put my foot on that first step” in “Desert Ascent.”

Equally commendable is the consistently high quality of the poems, whether written by people I’ve never heard of or by such acclaimed names as Pulitzer poet, Franz Wright, whose poem “Say My Name” ends with the uplifting word of the “Word that means you are loved.”

Ironically, the very quality of the poems keeps me from wanting to single out examples of the situations described, metaphors used, and fresh perspectives found. So, I’ll skip to the back where James Martin, S. J. , wrote an “Afterword,” I wish I’d read initially.

As he says, “The lives of the saints are poems./ In other words, one cannot fully understand a saint’s life from a purely rationalistic point of view. Strictly speaking, they do not make ‘sense’.” He goes on to explain how Mother Theresa, St. Damien, St. Francis, and others responded to God in mysterious ways that often seemed foolish. Or, as Rev. Martin puts it, “The saint’ lives shock….” He then ends with this challenge: “The most important truths about God are not reached with definitions and proofs but by poems and stories…. You are called to be a saint, too. What will your poem be?”


© 2014, Mary Harwell Sayler


St. Peter’s B-list: Contemporary Poems Inspired by the Saints, paperback


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Interview with best-selling anthologist June Cotner

Welcome to this interview with June Cotner, a well-known anthologist, speaker, and author whose 27 books include the best-selling anthologies Graces, Bedside Prayers, and Dog Blessings.

The Poetry Editor: June, you have compiled an amazing number of successful anthologies. How did you get started with this type of project?

June: When my children were young, instead of using standard graces, I wanted to find inspiring ways to express gratitude around the dinner table. My agent saw my binder for Graces and thought it would make a perfect book but suggested I include pieces from lesser known poets and writers as well as famous authors.

Poetry Ed.: Great idea! But what if you receive a poem or devotional that fits your anthology topic yet needs improving? Do you turn down the piece, make suggestions, or edit with the writer’s permission?

June: If the poem or prayer is in need of small improvements, I’ll let the author know why the poem doesn’t quite work for the book I’m compiling and see if the person is willing to make a revision. Sometimes I offer a specific recommendation. Other times, I’ll say “Here’s the problem. What can you offer?”

Poetry Ed.: At what point do you seek a publisher for a new book idea - before or after manuscripts on the topic begin to arrive?

June: It happens both ways. Several books developed because I received lovely submissions on a topic but didn’t have a book in place. I kept putting submissions on the topic in a binder and when I had enough selections (25-30) for a book proposal, I wrote the proposal. Other times the publisher asked if I would be interested in compiling another interfaith book with the same tone as Graces.

Poetry Ed.: Some big publishers have published your anthologies! Do you place your book proposals with them yourself or through a literary representative?

June: I have a literary agent who sells my proposals. Most major publishers require representation.

Poetry Ed.: Since your publishers are usually well-established companies with marketing departments and advertising budgets, do they still ask you to contribute to book promotions?

June: It’s been estimated that 90% of a book’s success is due to author promotion. For each book, I complete a comprehensive Author Questionnaire, and I work in partnership with the publisher. I recognize that my book is only one on a publisher’s front list and I must do everything I can to make the book successful.

Since publishing has changed so drastically, author tours are rare, and publishers expect active author participation on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media sites.

Poetry Ed.: Are you exploring other ideas because of the changes in publishing?

June: I have about 50 books “in the works.” Sadly, very few of them will see the light of day as a print book. I want to find a way to bring the lovely pieces filed in my 50 binders to the marketplace.

The best direction seems to be electronic publishing with books distributed across such book platforms as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple. One problem in creating an e-book, however, is investing money upfront on top of providing a complete manuscript and a marketing plan.

Poetry Ed.: What suggestions can you give poets ready to submit their poems?

June: When submitting for an anthology, look at previous books by the anthologist so you understand the type of work the anthologist seeks. Writers should make sure the poems they submit are specific to the project needs.

Follow specific instructions. For example, odd as it may seem, I find it easier to process submissions sent via USPS with a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE.) Also, don’t get fancy with your fonts or colors. I prefer receiving submissions that are double-spaced in Times New Roman 12 font. Each submission should include all of your contact info too.

Do your best to match up your work with the anthologist’s needs. I love receiving submissions that are specifically targeted for one of my projects.

When reviewing submissions, I look for fresh language in easily understood, universal pieces. Anthologists do love discovering new writers!

Poetry Ed.: I’m sure poets and writers love being discovered too! Thanks, June, for helping them to do just that - in your anthologies and also in this interview.

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If you would like to contribute to one of June’s upcoming anthologies, visit her website for guidelines and more information about the topics needed.

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© 2012, Mary Sayler

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