15 March 2011

06 May 2010

Political Poem



Today the garden gives up
one white crocus, its delicate
petaled head, and one bleeding
heart from the liberal earth,
from the compost and soil
your small hands have conserved.

Ten Years in the City

My glorious colleagues, especially Tiffany Kriner and David Hooker, threw the finest party I have ever attended on Tues. night. A house full of art, amazing food, and fine people it was a farewell bash for my final week at Wheaton College
Dubbed an "Ekphrastic Celebration" it truly was a conversation of art with art. Even the food conversed with various poems, including a fig tart that responded to a fig tree poem I wrote a number of years back, as well as a lovely tableau of bread and pottery that referred to a poem about Caravaggio's Supper at EmmausA requisite reference to sweater vests occurred in these dainty finger sandwiches.

Friend and colleague Brett Foster wrote a lovely, funny, generous vilanelle, which he read movingly after I had been given the gift of my friends' generous attentions as I read poems. The poems I read including one or two from each year I was at Wheaton, 9 years. Several have asked for me to put those pieces somewhere. This seems like a fitting spot. Some are links, others I have posted whole. Not each poem is, in my judgment, the best, but each one represents a significant kind of encounter with my colleagues, with students, and with the subjects that have marked my time at Wheaton.

2001
Explaining the Nude Scene
Silence, 11 September 2001

2002
After Bach's Air in G, Transcribed for Flute
Reasons to Avoid the Woods (After Reading the Inferno, Again)

2003
A Selfish Sonnet of Thanksgiving
Four Ways to Read a Footnote (Poem grew from a challenge given to me by former colleague Keith Jones whome I miss very much.)

2004
Inerrancy (after Jorie Graham)
Bach’s Pentecostal Fugue for Electric Organ, Choir, and Tambourine

2005
Confessions (Remembering a trip to Baylor with Steve and Christina)

2006
Sestina for Bach’s Mama
Political Poem

2007
So Here's the Thing (responding to Mark Lewis' brilliant all-female production of Hamlet)
The Devil Wears a Sweater Vest

2008
After David Hooker David made many, many beautiful cups for this gathering, and each one of us got to take one home.
Meeting the Relatively Famous Songwriter/Pop Star at Lunch

2009
Several Heads
The Pacifist Boxer Enters the Gym

2010
Agnosis of the Order of the Djembe, after Kazim Ali


Thanks to Christine and Stephanie for documenting the party. More photos to come.


14 March 2010

Allusive Poems

Translations IV
The Three Graces Unite and After Myth
Four Ways to Read a Footnote
Pathetique, after John Ruskin

Blind Willie's Wife

Broke bottlenecks for him, told him, tune to open D,
told him, Willie quit growling that gruff, fake bass,
let your sweet tenor take off and ride.

She would harmonize, then break him another
bottleneck , grind it down quick on a cement stair,
leave little glints of glass dust on his shoes.

She knew his hands, way he thumbed the bass line,
knew his voice and how he couldn't keep from crying,
how, together, they'd give over to gospel,

slide right up the string, Lord, right up the string,
smooth as Willie's finger in a bit of broken glass.

—David Wright, from A Liturgy for Stones


Blind Willie Johnson

Ars Poetica

Invoking an Elliptical Muse
Old Women in Eliot Poems

Watching Ella Trips in Her Seventies




You can believe when Ella trips,
moving on stage, she'll never get up,
this old woman with her broken hip,
her arm crooked like the handle of a cup.

Moving on stage, she'll never get up
to the top of her range again. Again,
her arm crooked like the handle of a cup,
she arcs her neck, eyes closed, no strain

to the top of her range again, again,
beyond, within this body she has left.
She arcs her neck, eyes closed, no strain
and here's the songbook she's kept

beyond, within this body she has left.
She mimics Bird, and you think of his death,
and here's the songbook she's kept,
phrases like bursts of her own breath.

She mimics Bird, and you think of his death,
This old woman and her broken, hip
phrases like bursts of her own breath.
You can believe, when Ella trips.

David Wright, originally published in The Mid-America Poetry Review. 5.2. 151

Essays

Consider the Toilets of the Field
A Capella
In the Temple of the Lark
Traveling at Home (some short essays from Smile Politely)
A Few Worries about Being a Poet
My Father's Shirt
My Mother's Lists
Reading Spiritual Memoir: A Reader's Spiritual Memoir (pdf)

Scholarly Work, Reviews and Interviews

Scholarship
Modernism and Region: Illinois Poetry and the Modern
Community, Theology and Mennonite Poetics in the Work of Jeff Gundy
The Beloved, Ambivalent Community: Mennonite Poets and the Postmodern Church

Interviews
Assembling Community: A Conversation with Carolyn Forche
Interview with Steve Burt
Interview with Julia Kasdorf

Reviews

Illinois Voices: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Poetry
Scott Cairns, Philokalia
Dan Guillory's The Lincoln Poems (pdf)
Wendell Berry's Life is a Miracle
In the Middle of the Middle West
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley's Becoming Ebony
Jon Kilroy's Torque

Primers and Excursions

Ekphrastic Excursions

Poetry Exercise on Imagery and Line

Formal Poems

A Few Sonnets
A Selfish Sonnet of Thanksgiving
Bethlehem Sonnets
Fidelities
In the Language of Dreams

And a Few Pantoums
Altar Piece
Watching Ella Trip in Her Seventies
Prairie Grass Elegy

Writing in Place



Looking at Roadside Bluestem Before Leaving Decatur
Addison Street (audio version)
Suburan Art (audio version)
For John
A Famous Artist Was Born on this Street
American Gothic, Redux
Wild Bird Feeder
Along Weaver Creek
Prairie Grass Elegy

Domestic and Family Poems

Showing a Photograph to Raymond Carver of My Father in His 31st Year
A riff on this Raymond Carver poem

A Selfish Sonnet of Thanksgiving
Love Story, after Lisel Mueller
Gammal Fäbodpsalm
Lines on Retirement, after Reading Lear
The Actuary Considers the Risk
Fidelities

Love Poems, Blues Poems

Blind Willie's Wife
Audio version of Emancipation Blues
If Poets Ruled
Love Story, after Lisel Mueller
Fidelities and Sunday Afternoon in the Universe
Seduction and Fall
Tending Gardens

Selections from A Liturgy for Stones


Like Trees Planted by Streams of Water
Altar Piece
Old Women in Eliot Poems
Blind Willie's Wife
Veni, Sancte, Spiritus and Electric Glossolalia
Sunday Afternoon in the Universe
For John
Children's Sermon and My Friend at Firestone Asks about Poems
Poems Should Not Be (click through archives to Aug 2001)
Gammal Fäbodpsalm
Looking at Roadside Bluestem Before Leaving Decatur
Church Janitor
A Map of the Kingdom and Lydia's Song
A Selfish Sonnet of Thanksgiving
Silence, September 11
After the Signing of this Sunday's Scripture
Suburan Art (audio version)

Purchase a copy of A Liturgy for Stones

Review of A Liturgy for Stones
Another review of LFS

Theological, Midrash and Liturgical Poems

Consider the Wonders We Call and Fail to Call God
Veni, Sancte, Spiritus
After Solving the Gadarene Swine, the Freudian Hermeneuts Attend to the Fig Tree
Confession II: The Collect
Confession VII: Silent Readings
A Map of the Kingdom and Lydia's Song
After the Signing of This Sunday's Scriptures
Children's Sermon
Holy Saturday, 1998
Missionary Slides
Four Ways to Read a Footnote
The Pastor Disappears Among the Meek
The Pastor Details His Hunch

Ekphrastic Poems

Two Suppers at Emmaus

Before You Read the Plaque about Turner's Slave Ship
Plague of Ladybugs, Plague of the Suburbs
A Famous Artist Was Born on this Street

Musical Ekphrastics

Blind Willie's Wife
Beethoven's Romance in G


Bach Poems
Five Sarabandes