Zach Czaia

Zach Czaia is a Minneapolis poet with two collections available: Saint Paul Lives Here (in Minnesota) (2015, Wipf & Stock) and his recent Knucklehead: poems (2021, Nodin Press). He has been teaching high school English for several years.

In Knucklehead, Czaia speaks honestly of his life ― at one point looking back to his first year of teaching high school down in Belize, where the boys called him Dante since he was leading the group of seventeen-year-olds through Inferno ― at another time reflecting self-deprecatingly on himself as a husband ― at yet another being overwhelmed by the murder of George Floyd, in part, because it happened in his own backyard.

He hosts a new poetry podcast called “Open Your Hands” where he reads a contemporary poem, and interacts with it. One recent episode features Mark Jarman’s poem “Questions For Ecclesiastes.”

The following Zach Czaia poem first appeared in Ekstasis and is from Knucklehead.

Saint Paul Talks Strategy

So I went down to a potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. Whenever the vessel he was making went wrong, as clay is apt to do in a potter’s hand, he would remake it in a different shape, such as he thought suitable. — Jeremiah 18:3-4

It’s a go-to, I’ll admit it,
the potter at his wheel. I say,
“I’m the stuff in his hands, the clay—
a pot gone wrong, he remade it,
remade me, my life.” The prophet
knows more than I do. Hearts don’t change
that much from age to age, the range
of feelings the same now as then.
We’re all still waiting for the moment when
these hearts we carry don’t feel so strange.

Posted with permission of the poet.

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.

Mark Jarman*

Mark Jarman has now published eleven books of poetry, the most recent of which is Heronry (2017, Sarabande Books). It is his first since his retrospective collection, Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems (2011). Jarman has written extensively about poetry — particularly expressing his support for both narrative poetry, and poems written in traditional forms. His new collection of essays about poetry, called Dailiness, is forthcoming in 2020 from Paul Dry Books.

William Thompson calls Mark Jarman “the leading Chrsitian poet in the United States,” in The Literary Encyclopedia (2006) and says, “even [Jarman’s] most explicitly Christian poems are marked by a consistently surprising temperament that Jarman himself describes as heterodox,” and that in recent years, his “poems have focused intensely on matters of belief and disbelief, and on the mysteries of love and suffering.”

Jarman served as Elector for the American Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City from 2009 to 2012. He received the Balcones Poetry Prize in 2013.

The following poem first appeared in Tiferet Journal, and is from Heronry.

Walking on Water

-----Matthew 14

-----Always the same message out of Matthew.
The water Jesus walks on is life’s turbulence.
-----He calms our trouble and lifts us up again.

To walk on water? That’s what’s puzzling –
-----that feat of anti-matter, defeat of physics,
those beautiful unshod feet of cosmic truth

-----for whom the whole performance is child’s play.
And unless one becomes as a little child
-----the kingdom’s inaccessible by any route.

That water, then, its broken surface tension,
-----collision of fracturing waves, apparent chaos,
its fractals turning infinite and weaving

-----the netted skin between worlds, that web
of light and gravity which underpins our faith –
-----water, a substance, stormy or pacific,

we know a myriad ways to get across it.
-----But simply walking on it? Literally?
How far do you think you’d go before you fell

-----through that convergence between time and space?
The water Jesus walked on wasn’t water
-----only. It was the storm that made it rock.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Mark Jarman: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

Denise Levertov*

Denise Levertov (1923—1997) was born in England. Her father was raised a Hasidic Jew, but had become a Christian and an Anglican parson. She, herself, became an agnostic. Her first book, The Double Image, appeared in 1946. She married an American and moved with him to New York City after WWII.

The process of Levertov coming to Christian faith was a long one, and so it should not be surprising to find glimpses of that process coming through in her earlier books. The following poem is from her 1964 collection, O Taste and See. This poem was selected by Mark Jarman, for his list of "Original and unorthodox poems about theology", for Poetry Magazine.

The Secret

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Denise Levertov: first post, third post, fourth post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Jeanne Murray Walker*

Jeanne Murray Walker is a poet who writes of the everyday, and yet is able to make it all brand new. Her new poetry collection is Helping the Morning: New and Selected Poems (2014, WordFarm), which draws on her previous seven poetry books. Luci Shaw has written of it, "What a world this is, that arouses a poet to write ordinary things into gifts for the spirit!" Mark Jarman has similarly said of her new book, "I have always admired Jeanne Murray Walker's gift for finding the poetry in the everyday, the song in the mundane, the epiphany in the moment..."

Walker has also recently had The Geography of Memory: A Pilgrimage through Alzheimer's appear from Center Street Books (2013). This memoir is primarily about the decade she and her sister spent, caring for their aging mother. It encourages caregivers to connect with Alzheimer's patients by knowing and recounting their past.

The following is one of the new poems in Helping the Morning.

Miniature Psalm of Complaint

You claim you've weighed the mountains
in your scales. But have you noticed smaller

chunks of the world are flaking off?
I sweep leaves from the walk. The oak,

like the mainmast of a warship, towers
above me, sending down its brown hands,

which hardly weigh a thing. So many friends
sick now. As for me? A bit of bone and hair.

My arteries ordinary as the pipes and spigots
that bring us water. Your thunder shakes my teeth.

On our hillside, your fingers of drizzle pick the final
chrysanthemums to pieces. I don't bear a grudge,

mind you, only wonder if you would step closer,
say something smaller. Back in the house,

wiping my feet, I hear a scratching. A dentist
with his pick. Or maybe a mouse. Two brilliant eyes,

cowlicky fur, in her genetic coding, years
of wiles. As she helps herself to our birdseed,

I hear her tiny breathing. Okay, I think,
okay. What she is, can't help, didn't ask for,

and is doomed to love—herself. I flick on
the porch light to keep her safe from owls.

I can almost see us from the road, our tiny house,
hanging like one last gold leaf in the oak tree.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Jeanne Murray Walker: first post

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His new poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Mark Jarman

Mark Jarman is a poet associated with the new formalism — a movement of contemporary poets who have returned to the use of many elements from poetry’s past; their poems often include metre, rhyme and symmetrical stanzas — but don’t use archaic language, or awkward inverted sentence structures in order to make a poem rhyme. Like Richard Wilbur, who continued writing with formal rhythm and rhyme when others were exclusively writing free verse, newer poets such as Dana Gioia and Mark Jarman seek to maintain that tradition. Jarman co-edited the influential 1996 anthology Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism.

He has taught at Vanderbilt University in Nashville since 1983, where he is the Centennial Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing. His ninth and most recent collection, Epistles was published by Sarabande Books in 2007.

As the journal Image has said, Jarman is courageous, in that he is not only “a champion of the formalist tradition in poetry” which is diametrically opposed to the prevailing trends of recent decades, but he is “unafraid to place [his] religious faith and doubt at the center of his work”. His collection Unholy Sonnets (an uneasy echo of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets), from which the following poem is taken, respects the traditional sonnet structure, and yet is open to its potential variations.

Sonnet #16

And if when he returned he found his mother
Behind the stone that rolled away for him,
Her muscles limp, her memory grown dim,
Unable to respond when he said, “Mother?”
And if he even recognized his mother,
Her outer light and inner light both dim,
Would he do for her what had been done for him?
Would God’s son give a new life to his mother?

I think he would balk. And I know why.
And I know this will sound unorthodox,
For she, like any mother, would have given
A kidney if she could have or an eye
To see her boy alive. The paradox
Is that he’d rather see her safe in heaven.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Mark Jarman: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca