jeanette winterson: on poetry

A poem is an act of memory. Poetry was first forged out of the need to remember what would otherwise be forgotten – in an oral tradition record-keeping is an art, not an act of administration.

You can read the whole piece here.

in praise of written sermons (and more)

My father always preached from notes, and I wrote my sermons out word for word. There are boxes of them in the attic....For me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn't writing prayers, as I was often enough. You feel that you are with someone. I feel I am with you now, whatever that can mean, considering that you're only a little fellow now and when you're a man you might find these letters of no interest. Or they might never reach you, for any of a number of reasons. Well, but how deeply I regret any sadness you have suffered and how grateful I am in anticipation of any good you have enjoyed. That is to say, I pray for you. And there's an intimacy in it. That's the truth....

...I wrote almost all of [the sermons] in the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true. And I'll tell you frankly, that was wonderful. I'm grateful for all those dark years, even though in retrospect they seem like a long, bitter prayer that was answered finally. Your mother walked into church in the middle of a prayer - to get out of the weather, I thought at the time, because it was pouring. And she watched me with eyes so serious I was embarrassed to be preaching to her. As Boughton would say, I felt the poverty of my remarks.

Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life. All it needs from you is that you take care not to trample on it. And that was such a quiet day, rain on the roof, rain against the windows, and everyone grateful, since it seems we never do have quite enough rain. At times like that I might not care particularly whether people are listening to whatever I have to say, because I know what their thoughts are. Then if some stranger comes in, that very same peace can seem like somnolence and like dull habit, because that is how you're afraid it seems to her.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, pp.21-23

Leithart on Marilynne Robinson's Literary Calvinism

With Home amongst the Best Books list on this blog, here's an interesting addition: an essay by Peter Leithart on the Literary Calvinism of Marilynne Robinson.

Worth a gander.

marilynne robinson: home (i)

For her, church was an airy white room with tall windows, looking out on God's good world, with God's good sunlight pouring in those windows and falling across the pulpit where her father stood, straight and strong, parsing the broken heart of humankind and praising the loving heart of Christ. That was church.

Marilynne Robinson, Home, p.52 (my emphasis).

the young gatsby's struggles

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy's wing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p.79

meeting gatsby

He smiled understandingly - much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced - or seemed to face - the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favour. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished - and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I'd got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p.40

Mary Oliver: Thirst

For some time, the volume 'Thirst' by Mary Oliver has been on my Amazon wish list. I don't remember how I first read about these poems but whatever I read made me wish for them, in that Amazonian way. I searched online and found her poem 'A Visitor' and felt this was a poet I could happily spend time with.

Well, today, I bought the slim volume of poems (in Borders, not Amazon) and have been astonished at my good fortune: seldom, if ever, have I felt such immediate rapport with a poet and with poetry.

Drinking good coffee in the Borders' Starbucks, reading the first poem or two, was an absolute delight, a luxuriating moment.

Here are poems to savour slowly.

the shame of sin

We read Graham Greene's The Power and The Glory for 'A' level English Literature. I just picked it up again today at the library, in readiness for a week's holiday. Skimming through it briefly, this passage caught my eye and made me glad for the opportunity to re-read this book about the compromised whiskey priest and the calloused lietenant. Greene's sense of the struggle that sin is was acute.

He lifted little pink eyes like those of a pig conscious of the slaughter-room. A high child's voice said, 'Jose.' He stared in a bewildered way around the patio. At a barred window opposite three children watched him with deep gravity. He turned his back and took a step or two towards his door, moving very slowly because of his bulk. 'Jose,' somebody squeaked again. 'Jose.' He looked back over his shoulder and caught the faces out in expressions of wild glee; his little pink eyes showed no anger - he had no right to be angry: he moved his mouth into a ragged, baffled, disintegrated smile, and as if that sign of weakness gave them all the licence they needed, they squealed back at him without disguise, 'Jose, Jose. Come to bed, Jose.' Their little shameless voices filled the patio, and he smiled humbly and sketched small gestures for silence, and there was no respect anywhere left for him in his home, in the town, in the whole abandoned star.