Eugene Warren

Eugene Warren (1941―2015) is a poet, and former chair of English and Technical Communication at Missouri S&T, where he taught for 42 years. He served as Poetry Editor for Christianity and Literature, and authored seven poetry collections, including: Christographia, Geometries of Light, and Fishing at Easter. His fascination with World Literature manifest itself in his teaching, in his promotion of many non-western poetic forms ― particularly the ghazal ― and in his own poetry.

Eugene Warren is the name he was known by until 1988 ― Warren being his adoptive father’s family name. After this he took on his birth father’s surname and became known as Gene Doty. To delightfully confuse matters further he used the pseudonym, “gino peregrini” for some of his publishing and editing activities.

Victoria Emily Jones, who blogs frequently and informatively at Art & Theology, reports that Eugene Warren’s Christographia is ― “a chapbook of thirty-two numbered poems that ‘attempt to express personal views of, & perspectives on, Christ.’ The book’s title comes from a series of sermons by the Puritan poet and preacher Edward Taylor.” The above link brings you to a poem, which Jones featured, from Christographia.

Christographia XXIV

now I come back
now I press on
now I descend
now I rise
-------------remaining
--------at the center
----------of the lovely abyss
hearing the pocket watch
tick itself mad

now I am silent
now I shout
now I sleep
now I wake
-------------spelling
--------a sentence
----------longer than time
forming words
----------that vanish into ink

the diagrams we invent
or discover,
at the mind’s edge
or core
-----------that what is inner
-----------is the form of what is outer,
-----------dream & world keys
-----------to the same lock

the charts
of word, color, number
tone
that graph precisely
the contours of mind
which are the shapes
of life
-----------its tensions, desires
-----------its silence & absence

-----------as when the stars turn
-----------at once
--------------on two axes

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Sydney Lea*

Sydney Lea served as Poet Laureate of Vermont from 2011 to 2015, and won the 2021 Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts from the Vermont Arts Council. His poetry collections include: To the Bone which was co-winner of the Poets' Prize in 1998, and Six Sundays Toward a Seventh (2012) the inaugural collection in the Poiema Poetry Series.

Poet Jane Hirshfield said of his thirteenth poetry collection ― Here (2019, Four Ways Books) ― “Sydney Lea has always been a poet equally eloquent and wide-eyed before reality. This self-aware book of experience, stock-taking, and memory finds him just now, just here, a person still hopeful in the face of it all, a poet at the height of his powers.”

The following poem first appeared in AGNI and is from the collection No Doubt the Nameless (2016, Four Ways Books).

Milton’s Satan

Diabolical heat for this time of year.
There’s the whir and hiss of my fan.
A digital clock blinks on its table.
Self-will is pulsing:
I ache to fly off and find the last of our children,
gone too far away to college.
The nest is empty. It’s burned. The ceiling

of her room still shows her poster for Some Like It Hot.
It’s shriveling after long years
when Monroe looked down on a herd of plush deer
and other mild creatures
now ragged with age. I imagine imagination
might cool my soul: I wrestle to mind
a gentle meadow dotted with flowers,

the checkered shade of a hardwood stand in fall,
a small brook’s ice-jeweled pools,
and last, an unmarred quilt of snow
on our cellar bulkhead.
Such willful visions won’t hold. The meadow is scorched
and tunneled by rodents, parasites thrive
in the trees, mosquitoes will hatch from the streambed.

The snow looks pure. Mercury laces its flakes.
Her absence is bodily ache.
It throbs. It scalds. There are reasons to think of Satan,
his imperious will,
its ruinous conflagrations. Which way I fly,
the poet’s devil claims, is hell.
Satan says, Myself am hell.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Sydney Lea: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Marjorie Stelmach*

Marjorie Stelmach is the former director of the Howard Nemerov Writing Scholars Program at Washington University in St. Louis. Her seventh collection The Angel of Absolute Zero has just appeared from Cascade Books’ Poiema Poetry Series. This is the second of her books from that series, which is edited by (yours truly) D.S. Martin. Another recent book, Walking the Mist appeared from the Ashland Poetry Press.

Poet Jane O. Wayne says of Stelmach’s new book: “In The Angel of Absolute Zero, Marjorie Stelmach leads us into a quiet realm arising out of both personal experience and reading. Whether she ponders a loon’s call or the secret origins of the cobalt blue in Chartres Cathedral’s windows, her discoveries and wise observations enrich the poems. Every image apt, every word in place, Stelmach’s beautiful book gives us the pure pleasure of her music and insights.”

Every one of these poems has previously found a home in such literary journals as, Beloit Poetry Review, The Cresset, Hudson Review, and Prairie Schooner.

The following poem first appeared in Terrene and is also from The Angel of Absolute Zero.

The Psalm of the Luna Moth

-----After a Luna moth egg hatches, the caterpillar moves
-----through five instars, eating constantly, then weaves
-----a cocoon from which it emerges mouthless. As an adult,
-----it flies only at night, and lives only long enough to mate―
-----a few days at most.

Those innumerable feet
seemed so useful
in my youth,

but looking back, I see
it was a life spent crawling,
chewing.

Then, you called me.

-----Here am I.

You freed me, first, from hunger
and the sorrow of my plodding,
and now,

in fields of luminous dusk,
beneath a silken beckoning
of stars,

you have given me wings

and coupled my heart
to the moon.

Lord of Light, I have felt
my wings beset
by the forces

of your suddenness,
your swerves and lifts, your
sheer drops.

And now,
having come into the fullness
of my longing, once again

I hear your voice.

-----Here am I.

Eagerly, I spread my wings
and all my previous lives
before you

to ask what you,
in the sweep of your reckless love,
will make of me next.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Marjorie Stelmach: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Ursula Bethell*

Ursula Bethell (1874—1945) is a New Zealand poet whose legacy lives on. She was born in England, moved to Christchurch in her childhood, and seemed to alternate her residence between New Zealand and England every few years. This was before such journeys were simplified by air travel. In the late 1890s she studied music and painting in Geneva, but chose instead a career in social work, particularly with the Anglican church.

Her poetry didn’t arise until her years of settled life beginning in 1924, when she and a friend bought a bungalow together, and she worked to establish its garden. She wrote a total of only three collections ― although for several years the work of another poet had been thought to be the early writing of Ursula Bethell.

Bethell’s poetry does live on. One of her clearer faith-declarations “At the Lighting of the Lamps” has been set to music by the “Ursula Bethell writer in residence at the University of Canterbury” Philip Norman for the Christchurch City Choir.
-----“Were you not wont, early illumined Christians,
-----To sing, at the time of lamp-lighting, hymns of confident praise?...
-----Because the All-wise, All-merciful, All-compassionate
-----Father of Lights, in whom is no shadow of turning,
-----Has laid the foundations of all universes secure…”

The following poem, which expresses her generation’s attitude concerning appropriate Sunday behaviour, appeared in From a Garden in the Antipodes (1929, Sidgwick & Jackson).

Sabbath

A fine day, but one for reasoned abstention.
Tempt me not sturdy mattock, nor you, cunning trowel,
Nor you, keen-edged secateurs!
Perhaps with finger and thumb one might venture?
But no! desist now, you scheming brain-cells,
And rest, hand, primeval tool.
Rather, recumbent on this sunny grass-slope,
My mind shall meditate upon divine husbandry,
And ponder emblems, allegories, parables —
The vine, the scattered seed, the threshing flail.
And think of peace flowing like that mighty river
And justice, standing fast like those great mountains,
And for similitude of the soft blue above me
Pitifulness. Tender mercy.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Ursula Bethell: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Charlotte Brontë*

Charlotte Brontë (1816—1855) is a Victorian poet, who — although the third of six children — is remembered as the eldest of the three Brontë sisters. Along with Emily and Anne, she released a collection of poetry in 1846. Charlotte’s poems in this collection are primarily narrative.

After the success of her novel Jane Eyre (1847), she shifted her full attention to writing fiction. Most writers will focus their efforts where they are finding success; Charlotte’s shift toward fiction also parallels the changing interests of the reading public during the 1830s and ‘40s.

Although Jane Eyre was criticized by the religious in Victorian England, Brontë responded in the preface to the second edition: “Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.”

Literary scholar Karen Swallow Prior says, “As she strives to create a sense of self within a set of conditions in which almost nothing is a given, Jane does so as a committed Christian… Even the heavy Romantic influences are transformed by Brontë’s Christian faith.”

Charlotte Brontë’s other novels are Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853). Her posthumously published fiction includes the earlier novel The Professor, and her story Emma, (not to be confused with the Jane Austen novel) which Charlotte had barely started, yet has been completed at various times by other writers.

Evening Solace

The human heart has hidden treasures,
In secret kept, in silence sealed;—
The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures,
Whose charms were broken if revealed.
And days may pass in gay confusion,
And nights in rosy riot fly,
While, lost in Fame's or Wealth's illusion,
The memory of the Past may die.

But there are hours of lonely musing,
Such as in evening silence come,
When, soft as birds their pinions closing,
The heart's best feelings gather home.
Then in our souls there seems to languish
A tender grief that is not woe;
And thoughts that once wrung groans of anguish
Now cause but some mild tears to flow.

And feelings, once as strong as passions,
Float softly back—a faded dream;
Our own sharp griefs and wild sensations,
The tale of others' sufferings seem.
Oh! when the heart is freshly bleeding,
How longs it for that time to be,
When, through the mist of years receding,
Its woes but live in reverie!

And it can dwell on moonlight glimmer,
On evening shade and loneliness;
And, while the sky grows dim and dimmer,
Feel no untold and strange distress—
Only a deeper impulse given
By lonely hour and darkened room,
To solemn thoughts that soar to heaven
Seeking a life and world to come.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Charlotte Brontë: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.