Friday Links
November 8, 2024
Shemaiah Gonzalez: Undaunted Joy
Dana Gioia on Becoming a Catholic Writer
Daylight Moon by Daniel Patrick Sheehan
How the West Chester University Poetry Conference saved American verse
George Herbert on the BBC
Steven Delay: What Is Contemplation?
Fr. Michael on John Keats’ epitaph
Shemaiah Gonzalez: Undaunted Joy
Thank you to my friend Shemaiah who is letting me use her photo of this stunningly gorgeous tree. The photo was taken on one of her walks through Seattle. Behold all that fractaled beauty. God is good!
Dana Gioia on Becoming a Catholic Writer
This is Dana’s keynote lecture and reading at the de Nicola Center/Biennial Catholic Imagination conference held this past weekend on the beautiful campus of Notre Dame. It’s so good—Dana at his charming best.
Daylight Moon by Daniel Patrick Sheehan
My friend Dan wrote a beautiful poem that was featured on Autumn Sky Poetry. Here are stanzas 2 and 3, but please take a look at the whole thing:
I discern my father’s presence on the moon,
Just at the line between dark and light
On the grayscale plain of Mare Obscuritas,
Neither rebuffing nor welcoming meWhen I sidle close to him in daydreams.
I might as well be back at his bedside,
Unable even to read from scripture
Or otherwise comfort that fine old man.
How the West Chester University Poetry Conference saved American verse
Matthew Kirby writes:
The West Chester University Poetry Conference, first held in 1995, was for nearly 20 years the country’s largest summer poetry conference. But that superlative doesn’t begin to account for it. A good description of the event was written by poet April Lindner in an essay commemorating the conference’s 10th year:
“Wherever poets gather, one might expect to find passion about poetry—its pleasures and its value in a well-lived life—and one generally does. But the quality of the passion at the West Chester Poetry Conference is different, more intense, fueled by a desire to save poetry from obscurity and mediocrity.”
George Herbert on the BBC
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the author of 'the most beautiful poem in the world' whose works on his relationship with God offered comfort to Charles I when he faced execution.
Steven Delay: What Is Contemplation?
What is contemplation? To be sure, the ordinary use and everyday understanding of the term would suggest that here there is no real mystery to ponder. For as Kevin Hart observes in Contemplation: The Movements of the Soul, “These days we are likely to think of contemplation as the lowest of cognitive modes, as a free-floating state close to daydreaming” (CP 44). Inasmuch as contemplation does not offer the kind of “intellectual security” (CP 44) that natural scientific and mathematical analysis makes available to us, today our ordinary language reflects the modern deflation that the classical and medieval understanding of the term has undergone since the seventeenth century, it now having come banally to signify little more than, as Gertrude Stein, for one, put it, “mulling over a situation” (LL 162).
Fr. Michael on John Keats’ epitaph
All his life, Keats had been surrounded by death. His entire family had been afflicted with consumption, which in the 19th century had no cure, and they had preceded him in death. When he began to cough up blood, he knew his time was coming and determined to live out his last days in Rome, writing poetry and taking in the last precious days of beauty that were left to him.
