Kathleen Norris

Kathleen Norris is an essayist and poet. She is well-known for her bestselling non-fiction books, which bring Christian spirituality and everyday life together — the most recent of which is Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life (2008). She has also written seven volumes of poetry, including Journey: New and Selected Poems (2001).

She grew up in Hawaii, and attended Bennington College in Vermont, where she continued her drift from the faith of her childhood. In 1971 her first book of poetry, Falling Off, won the Big Table Younger Poets Award. Three years later, she and her husband inherited her grandparents’ South Dakota farm; they moved there and decided to become part of the community by attending the local Presbyterian church. This changed her life, and inspired her first non-fiction book, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (1993), which became a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

In 1986 she also became an oblate of a Benedictine monastery in North Dakota, which led to her book The Cloister Walk (1996). Her husband of more than 25 years, the poet David Dwyer, died in 2003.

The following poem first appeared in Cross Currents.

Luke 14, a Commentary

He is there like Clouseau
at the odd moment,
just right: when he climbs
out of the fish pond
into which he has spectacularly
fallen, and says condescendingly
to his hosts, the owners
of the estate: "I fail
where others succeed." You know
this is truth. You know
he'll solve the mystery.
Unprepossessing
as he is, the last
of the great detectives.
He'll blend again into the scenery, and
more than once he'll be taken
for the gardener.
"Come now," he says, taking us
for all we're worth, "Sit
in the low place."
Why not? We ask. So easy
to fall for a man
who makes us laugh. "Invite those
you do not want to have, people
you'd hardly notice." He puts
us on, we put him on; another
of his jokes. "There's
room," he says. The meal is
good, absurdly
salty, but delicious.
Charlie Chaplin put it this way: "I want to play
the role of Jesus. I look the part.
I'm a Jew.
And I'm a comedian."

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Kathleen Norris: 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

Vachel Lindsay

Vachel Lindsay (1879—1931) devoted his life to preaching what he called the “Gospel of Beauty”. In 1904 he began to experience mystical visions, whose images surface in many of his poems. After trying pre-med studies, and then art school in Chicago and New York, in 1906 Lindsay tramped from Florida to Kentucky by foot, idealistically seeking to exchange his poetry booklet The Tree of Laughing Bells for a meal and a night’s lodging along the way. Such tramping and travel became his life.

His breakthrough came with the poem “General William Booth Enters into Heaven”, a tribute to the founder of the Salvation Army, which appeared as the lead piece in Poetry in January 1913. His brief romance with poet Sara Teasdale ended when she refused to marry him, in favour of a wealthy shoe manufacturer in 1914.

Although Lindsay was one of the best-known poets in the United States during the last twenty years of his life, he had long struggled with financial troubles and with physical and mental health issues. He could not support his family without heading out on reading tours. On December 5, 1931, a disheartened Vachel Lindsay committed suicide by drinking a bottle of lye.

In performance, Lindsay would sing or chant his poems; he championed musical qualities in poetry, which became less popular with the rise of modernism after his death.

Heart of God

O great heart of God,
Once vague and lost to me,
Why do I throb with your throb tonight,
In this land, eternity?

O little heart of God,
Sweet intruding stranger,
You are laughing in my human breast,
A Christ-child in a manger.

Heart, dear heart of God,
Beside you now I kneel,
Strong heart of faith. O heart not mine,
Where God has set His seal.

Wild thundering heart of God
Out of my doubt I come,
And my foolish feet with prophets' feet,
March with the prophets' drum.

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

Philip C. Kolin

Philip C. Kolin is the author of five books of poetry. His most recent collection is Reading God's Handwriting (Kaufmann Publishing, 2012). He has taught in the English Department of the University of Southern Mississippi since 1974, and was recently made the Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Letters. Kolin is a Shakespeare scholar, is a significant authority on Tennessee Williams, and has written extensively about modern American playwrights. He has published more than forty books.

In a recent interview he said, "In many ways, my poetry marks my own spiritual autobiography, my encounters with God on the peaks, the plateaus, and the deep valleys." He is the founding editor of the Christian poetry journal Vineyards.

Read my review for Ruminate of Reading God's Handwriting here.

Faith

It's the love affair
between your soul and God's will,

the unflickering oil in your lamp
waiting for the bridegroom

to arrive after so many dark midnights,
listening for his footsteps.

It's looking for pearls,
a missing drachma,

that stray sheep who's wandered off
beyond the pasture.

It's planting a mustard seed in the deep
valley that grows trees towering

over montains to provide
a sanctuary for doves.

It's the joyous breaking of
bread and finding a star inside

and the martyr's kiss
imprinted on the chalice.

It's sprinkling blood on your doorposts
with holy writing embedded in the frame.

It's God's spirit healing your withered flesh.
It's finding your name in His blazing
Book of Life.

Posted with permission of the poet.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Philip C. Kolin: 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

Narayan Vaman Tilak

Narayan Vaman Tilak (1861—1919) is a Brahman poet of the Marathi language in India. While travelling by train in 1893 he met a Christian missionary who gave him a Bible. Tilak, who had felt dissatisfied with Hinduism’s ritualism and its caste system, felt very attracted to Christianity. He was particularly drawn to the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.

Because of the distance of father-figures and the closeness of mothers, in Indian culture, Tilak chose to describe Jesus from a more Indian perspective:

------"Tenderest Mother-Guru mine,

------Saviour, where is love like Thine?..."

Professor Richard Fox Young of Princeton Theological Seminary wrote that “to discover his real voice and to put a recognizably Indian face on Christianity, Tilak felt compelled to reject the worship forms in the American mission churches...In a famously subversive poem of protest, he complained that in those churches ‘we dance as puppets, while [missionaries] hold the strings.’ In Tilak’s heart, only Christ could strike the right chords.”

I Have Called You Friends

One who is all unfit to count

----As scholar in Thy school,

Thou of Thy love hast named a friend —

----O kindness wonderful!

So weak am I, O gracious Lord,

----So all unworthy Thee,

That e’en the dust upon Thy feet

----Outweighs me utterly.

Thou dwellest in unshadowed light,

----All sin and shame above —

That Thou shouldst bear our sin and shame

----How can I tell such love?

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

Robert Bridges

Robert Bridges (1844—1930) wanted to be a poet when he was young, but instead became a doctor. At age 37 he retired, due to illness, and dedicated himself to writing. He was a formalist in style, with great skill in his use of meter. Despite not being well known, he became Britain’s poet laureate in 1913.

In 1899 he published the Yattendon Hymnal, for the purpose of preserving early hymn tunes; this led him to translate many of the hymns himself from Latin, Greek and German.

Perhaps his greatest contribution to poetry, was presenting the work of his friend Gerard Manley Hopkins. He arranged for a posthumous collection of Hopkins’ work in 1918. Ironically, as Hopkins’ biographer Paul Mariani makes plain, Bridges didn’t really understand his friend’s poetics, and stumbled on his Catholicism.

Robert Bridges’ own masterpiece is Testament of Beauty (1929). Just prior to his death, it led to great popularity for a poet who had spent much of his life in quiet seclusion.

I Love all Beauteous Things

I love all beauteous things,
---I seek and adore them;
God hath no better praise,
And man in his hasty days
---Is honoured for them.

I too will something make
---And joy in the making;
Altho’ to-morrow it seem
Like the empty words of a dream
---Remembered on waking.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Robert Bridges: 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

Madeline DeFrees

Madeline DeFrees was born in Ontario, Oregon in 1919. She is the author of eight full-length poetry collections, including Blue Dusk, which received the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and Spectral Waves (2006) both from Copper Canyon Press. Both of these books were awarded Washington State Book Awards.

She spent 38 years as a Catholic Nun, until 1973 when she requested a release to enable her to focus more on her poetry. She has taught at many colleges including: Univerisity of Montana and University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Psalm for a New Nun

My life was rescued like a bird from the fowler's snare.
It comes back singing tonight in my loosened hair

as I bend to the mirror in this contracted room
lit by the electric music of the comb.

With hair cropped close as a boy's, contained in a coif,
I let years make me forget what I had cut off.

Now the glass cannot compass my dark halo
and the frame censors the dense life it cannot follow.

Like strength restored in the temple this sweetness wells
quietly into tissues of abandoned cells;

better by as much as it is better
to be a woman, I feel this gradual urgency

till the comb snaps, the mirror widens, and the walls recede.
With head uncovered I am no longer afraid.

Broken is the snare and I am freed.
My help is in the Lord who made
heaven and earth. Yes, earth.

This poem is from Madeline DeFrees' collection Blue Dusk: New & Selected Poems, 1951-2001, which is available here.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Madeline DeFrees: 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

Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard of Bingen (1098—1179) is a German mystic, known today for her writings and musical compositions. She founded monasteries in Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165. Her writings include poems, liturgical plays, songs, and books on medicine, theology and botany. She also wrote three books of visions, including Scivias, which she dedicated ten years of her life to write.

She told her story, once, as follows: "Listen: there was once a king sitting on his throne. Around him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honour. Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, not because of anything in itself but because the air bore it along. Thus am I 'A feather on the breath of God.'"

Interest today in medieval women of the church has led to extensive reading of Hildegard’s writings, and interest in her life. Her music has been extensively recorded. The ensemble Sequentia has made Hildegard a particular focus, having now recorded her complete works on seven CDs. The following poem was translated by Barbara Newman.

Song to the Creator

You, all-accomplishing
Word of the Father
are the light of primordial
daybreak over the spheres.
You, the foreknowing
mind of divinity,
foresaw all your works
as you willed them,
your prescience hidden
in the heart of your power,
your power like a wheel around the world,
whose circling never began
and never slides to an end.

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Hildegard of Bingen: 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