‘Pentecostal Passion,’ prayerful poetry from a peacemaker

May 20, 2012 by

“TO THE PENECOST” This 1902 painting by Sergei Korovin was produced under the rule of czarist Russia, yet the painting’s title echoed lines from Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin. Before his untimely death in a duel at age 37, Pushkin himself had trouble with czarist authorities for his biting commentary on the Russian ruling class. A major theme in Eugene Onegin is the selfish lack of compassion among Russian nobility for anyone who is suffering.For Pentecost 2012, we welcome back peacemaker, poet and pastor Ken Sehested, who was the founding director of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America. Ken’s story and some of Ken’s writing are included in Daniel Buttry’s new Blessed Are the Peacemakers.
Ken currently is pastor of the Circle of Mercy congregation in Ashevile, North Carolina, with his wife Nancy Sehested and Joyce Holiday.

For Pentecost this year, Ken sent us one his poems that voice Psalm-like prayers. In this case, Ken echoes Ezekiel 34:1-14, Acts 2:17 and Romans 8:22. (Care to learn more about the centuries-old Christian observance? Read Stephanie Fenton’s holiday column on Pentecost.)
And, from the poet, here is …

Pentecostal Passion

By KEN SEHESTED

Pentecostal power has little to do with
exaggerated religious emotion. But
such power, when granted,
has everything to do
with passion, with conviction.
It’s not your mind that
you lose—it’s your heart,
which falls head-over-heels
in love with the vision of dry bones
re-sinewed and aspired to life.

When such power erupts, they
probably will call you crazy.
“Have you lost your mind?!”
Yes, we will say, because
these days the mind has
become acclimated to a culture
of war; has become inured to
the ravages of poverty in a culture
of obesity; has become numb
to ecological wreckage.

When Pentecostal power erupts, all
heaven’s gonna’ break loose.
The boundaries will be compromised;
barriers will be broken; and
borders will be breached.
Economies of privilege will be fractured
and the politics of enmity will be impeached.
The revenge of the Beloved is the
reversal of Babel’s bequest.

“I will pour out my Spirit,”
says the LORD: Poured out
not for escape to another
world beyond the sky but
here, amid the dust. Poured out
not on disembodied spirits but
“upon all flesh.” It is to the
agony of abandonment that Heaven
is aroused. Queer the One Who
fashions a future for the disfavored.

The groaning of creation is both
an ache and an assurance. We
dare not insulate ourselves from
the one, lest we be deafened to
the other. Birth is at work.
Though the labor is prolonged,
provision is tendered.
Pentecostal power is the wherewithal
by which we wager our lives on
the surety of this promise.

————————

Want more on Ken, social justice and peacemaking?

Find peace in your reading—and group discussions—this summer:
Consider learning about Daniel Buttry’s Blessed Are the Peacemakers. (The book includes more about Ken Sehested and his work.)

Please help us to reach a wider audience

We welcome your Emails at [email protected]
We’re also reachable on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Huffington Post and other social-networking sites. You also can subscribe via Email or RSS feed.
Plus, there’s a free Monday Planner newsletter you may enjoy.

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.

Remembering poet Adrienne Rich’s art and empathy

April 29, 2012 by

Adrienne Rich (at right) in her prime. She loved poetry and she loved people, so it is fitting that this 1980 snapshot of famous writers at a workshop in Austin, Texas, is one of the most widely published photographs of Rich today. At left is the late Caribbean-American poet and activist Audre Lorde (1934-1992). Her early work was praised by Langston Hughes and later she wrote about the importance of recognizing diversity within feminism. In the center of the photo is the near-legendary Meridel Le Sueur (1900-1996) whose rabble-rousing writing in the ‘30s and ‘40s sang the same chorus as Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck, earning her a blacklisting in the 1950s. Her work was revived by feminists in the 1970s before her own passing. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.You may not recognize Adrienne Rich’s name, because we don’t sufficiently celebrate our poets in America. But, when she died a few weeks ago, the New York Times called her a “towering” figure both for her art and for her “unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity.”

Whatever your political or social assumptions may be, we all meet at ReadTheSpirit around a central commitment to compassion and hospitality toward the people in our communities who we often think of as “the other.” Celebrating our diversity is the path toward building healthier communities. Check out our founding Ten Principles for more on that.

When we discovered that writer Lynne Golodner had saved the text of an unpublished interview with Adrienne Rich, we invited Lynne to share it with our readers. Lynne Meredith Golodner is a widely published poet, journalist and author. (Care to learn more about Lynne’s upcoming books—and perhaps even meet her? See the note at the end of this story.)

A RICH TRADITION:

Reflecting on the art and empathy
of Adrienne Rich

By Lynne Meredith Golodner

CLICK ON the cover to visit this book’s Amazon page. This 1993 volume, at 448 pages, remains one of the most-recommended collections of Rich’s work. This Norton edition contains poems from the 1970s through early 1990s, plus some of her most important prose. Also included are essays about Rich by a dozen other writers, including W.H. Auden and Margaret Atwood.Adrienne Rich died on March 27. She was, for most of her 82 years on Earth, an inspiration, a voice to reckon with, and a voice for many who live on the margins—including Jews, women, feminists and lesbians. For half a century, Rich kept a politically poetic conversation going about equal rights for all people. The mother of three spent the latter part of her life as a proud lesbian. She wrote two dozen books of poetry and more than half a dozen prose tomes. Her poetry sold nearly 800,000 copies, according to her publisher, W.W. Norton & Company.

I met Adrienne Rich in 1995 when I was a green reporter covering Capitol Hill for trade newspapers and the Washington Jewish Week. I scored an hour-long interview with the famous poet before her sold-out reading of Dark Fields of the Republic in a packed church, where a larger-than-life crucifix hovered above her diminutive head on the altar.

She was physically tiny but vocally powerful, having fought for the rights of women, lesbians, writers and Jews for most of the 20th century. It must have been gratifying to see a sea of faces at her reading to promote yet another book of poems in an era when writers of poems often found no audience at all.

My interview was long and rich; I hung on every word. I transcribed my notes and kept them in a file through several states and nearly two decades. Upon hearing of her passing from complications of rheumatoid arthritis, I pulled out those words from two decades ago.

Adrienne Rich founded Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends, but her life’s work focused more on subjects central to the lives of all people, not just Jews or feminists. She was one of the first poets in the 1970s to write openly about being gay. She pushed limits and didn’t shy away from topics others found painful to write about. She paved the way for so many other writers.

Here is the text of our interview …

LYNNE: Has your writing voice matured over the years—become more confident, as you have?

ADRIENNE: Well, you know I published my first book when I was 21 and I might not at that point have even thought of publishing a book except that it had won this prize, the Yale Younger Poets Prize. I had been writing poetry for most of my life because I loved it so much. I was quite guarded. The first poem I ever published, “Storm Warnings,” was about protecting oneself in a world of great tumult and storms and uncontrollable forces. I wrote that poem in 1947, just after the end of World War II and the Holocaust, the nuclear bomb impinging on our consciousness. Young people in my college generation were very well aware that it was now possible to destroy the world and also that six million Jewish lives had been destroyed. My work since then has gone on to tear down the idea of protection and say we have to risk going out unprotected in order to know this world and to know ourselves.

LYNNE: What is your goal, your agenda, when writing?

ADRIENNE: To connect. To connect things that I have felt were disconnected in my life, things that were disconnected in society, in a relationship, in the transactions between the individual and the community.

Adrienne Rich on Poetry in America

Click on the cover to visit Amazon. This 112-page collection of later poems was praised by reviewers. Publishers Weekly said, “Rich’s stark, intimate voice seems to speak for a life lived at once at the margins and at the center.”LYNNE: What is the poet’s role in America? Does the poet have a role today?

ADRIENNE: There are a lot of poets and a lot of different kinds of poets. This is a magnificent time in American poetry, a fact which is not always reflected in the poems that students are reading in schools and it’s not always reflected in the mainstream treatment of poetry. As far as our poetic and literary mainstream is concerned, there’s a terrible kind of apartheid. At the grassroots, there’s never been more people going to poetry readings and reading poems. You find communities of writers all over the country and this isn’t necessarily making news but it’s happening. And it’s contributing to people’s sense of community, to people’s sense of self, to their sense of duty. Poetry renews our sense of what language can be.

LYNNE: What is the writer’s responsibility?

ADRIENNE: Not to sell the people short. Every artist who has some sense of an audience has to come to a point where they decided to do something that’s different, to keep on searching and probing.

Adrienne Rich on
Jewish Feminist Poetry

LYNNE: How do we define Jewish feminist poetry? Poems written by Jews and feminists or something deeper?

ADRIENNE: If you’re a Jew and you write a poem, is it a Jewish poem? Does it have to contain certain vocabulary, allusions, references or values? And then we have to ask, what are Jewish values? There are those values we would like to think are Jewish. It’s a never-ending conversation. (Classifying a genre of writing) limits the reading of the poem. I don’t like to see the reading of a poem proscribed by too much definition. On the other hand, I think it is very interesting to look at writing done by a group of people, in this case women, who share a common heritage. And who also are in rebellion against parts of that heritage. A lot of writing comes out of activism, contemplation, meditation.

It can be useful to say: What is the poetry that Jewish feminism has made possible? Perhaps kinds of poems that women weren’t writing before that, although there is a whole tradition of women writing in Yiddish, who were writing very powerful work, not necessarily feminist work as we would define it today, but with something of that spirit.

LYNNE: Do you think that for some people, Holocaustism has replaced Judaism as religion or identity?

ADRIENNE: This is certainly a question which for me is a big search. It’s a huge question: How do American Jews frame their identity, in terms of the Holocaust or in terms of Israel? And what is it that we need to be doing here and now? On the cusp of a new century, a whole generation born long after the end of World War II and the establishment of Israel.

In some ways, there is a kind of flailing and thrashing of the old that is still with us that is more visible almost than whatever is new. (She references the harsh rhetoric of the right-wing spewed at the late Israeli leader, Yitzhak Rabin.) This is the absolute stunting of tradition, the reduction of a very complicated and rich tradition into nothing but hate. We see it in all religions. That right-wing, doctrinaire, rigid element hanging on for dear life because God forbid literally there are going to be great changes. There have to be changes.

I’m concerned about questions in the American Jewish community, about class and what does it mean that there is now a very distinct and wealthy American Jewish community that is hostile to the Jewish left wing and progressive tradition and to those of us who are trying to work out of that tradition.

LYNNE: How does the voice and intent of Bridges differ from other Jewish publications? How does Bridges distinguish itself and why is it needed in the marketplace?

ADRIENNE: Bridges grew out of our feminist newsletter for the New Jewish Agenda and it grew bigger, attracted more subscribers. We thought there was a place for a Jewish feminist journal, which would see as part of its mission being a player in the multi-ethnic, multi-racial women’s movement and be a connector.

Adrienne Rich on Listening to the Music

LYNNE: What role does religion play in your life?

ADRIENNE: I describe myself as a secular Jew. Secular for me is not just an emptiness; it’s not a void. It’s not the absence of something. It has a very positive content, which has to do with work and love and justice and ethics in this world. With passion. And with a strong desire to see every human being fulfill themselves to the utmost of their capacity and try to create the conditions for that in this world. When I say I’m a secular Jew, it’s a way of saying that I’m most attuned to that hunger for justice which rolls down like mighty waters.

(Adrienne Rich was raised not at all in the Jewish tradition. She attended a Christian girls school, which introduced her to the Bible, and to her Jewish roots. She said her parents were so assimilated that they were determined not to give their daughter a Jewish education. “I saw the price of that isolation from any kind of community and it’s made me tend toward community.”)

LYNNE: In some ways, don’t you think religion and poetry play the same roles? Both are vehicles for people to try to make sense of their worlds, to understand their place in the world?

ADRIENNE: There is something about art, whatever one’s art may be, that if you take it seriously, which doesn’t mean humorlessly, it begins to clarify the world for you in certain ways. It also takes you into much more complicated places, perhaps, than you would have otherwise gone, but that’s important too. And sometimes you do find yourself wandering in the wilderness. And you have visions. And I guess what I feel about art, in particular the art of poetry, is that it connects people in the way that religion can.

I had a fascinating experience in Salt Lake City, where I learned a lot about the Mormons, whom I had never known much about. Somebody took me to see the Mormon Tabernacle, where the choir sings. It’s got such incredible acoustics that you can literally drop a pin and hear it. And they turned on the sound system and there was the Bach chorale being sung by hundreds of voices. And it was amazing. And the woman who was taking me around was a lapsed Mormon and she said, “You know, there are times when I feel very nostalgic for the music.”

And I said to her, “Sometimes I wonder if religions would have lasted as long as they have without music.”

And I was thinking of the High Holy Days. Something I do every year is play a tape of some old cantorial music, wherever I am. And I hear the shofar. And that’s important to me.

Adrienne Rich on a Life’s Work

Click on the cover to visit Amazon. This 180-page later collection of prose was praised by the Booklist reviewer: “Rich deep-reads poetry written in the shadow of AIDS and during tyranny and war in Iraq, and argues that we must all be ‘resistant to dogma.’ For all Rich’s shepherding us toward compassion and solidarity with those who suffer violence and injustice, she never ceases to praise the mystery intrinsic to poetry and art.”LYNNE: Where does Dark Fields of the Republic (a 1995 publication by Rich) compare/fit in the line of books you have published?

ADRIENNE: This book comes out of a succession of books. I began to increasingly feel the need to address the politics of my country, starting around 1980 with the Reagan election. I started to feel a kind of foreboding about the direction this country is taking, not only within itself but around the world. And become more aware of the extraordinary power, military and financial, that can be exerted in the name of the United States.

A lot of poetry I’ve been writing grapples with that. I was writing very consciously as a woman. And a Jew. And a lesbian. And I began to write more and more as a citizen. I began to feel that I’m not simply a marginal person here. I have a right to look at my country and say, “What the Hell is going on here?” Or to look at my country and say, “I am part of this. This is being done in my name. What is my responsibility?”

LYNNE: Tell me about your poem, “Yom Kippur 1984”? (It took a year to complete the poem.)

ADRIENNE: I had just moved to California from the East Coast, and I felt I was leaving all kinds of community behind and really striking out. That whole question of being cut off from one’s community, being forgiven by one’s community, how do we know ourselves to be part of a community if we’re also within that community in some way on the margins?

I was trying to pull all those things together and then ask the very necessary question for a poet, “How can I also have solitude, which I need, in order to do my work?” Does community mean surrendering solitude?

LYNNE: (Rich released early works later in life.) Why release early works now?

ADRIENNE: As you get older and you write more, you find yourself going back to earlier works and thinking, “Yes, I was that person. And I’m not exactly that same person now but I could still say those things.” And I feel very connected now to all of my books.

The very young woman who wrote the poems in A Change of World (1951) was a very different person from me, but she’s in me somewhere, too. It was my late editor’s idea to collect the first six books in one volume, rather than keep them all in print separately. I was very glad of that. It put that part of my life in a place. And now I’m working on the second part.

LYNNE: How do you see the future of poetry?

ADRIENNE: Poetry is becoming an ever more popular art in the best sense. We tend to say popular meaning that which is mass-marketed, but genuinely, grassroots, and it’s multilingual in this country, bilingual, written in Navajo and English, Spanish and English, Vietnamese and English, Yiddish and English. There’s a lot of work being done because we are such a nation of immigrants, trying to bring together the language of the past, the mother tongue and the American vernacular, which can be so many things. A lot of poets are writing for the microphone.

(Rich’s 1995 release was her first accompanied by a cassette tape of her voice reading her poems. She loved the idea that people could be driving down the road, listening to and immersed in her words. A generation before the Kindle, here’s what she said:)

I don’t think poetry will ever stop being on the page…books are so portable. You want your book to stick in your pocket. It’s amazing all the places you see people reading.

That said, poetry is being taken off the page and put back onto the voice.

Read Rich! Here are a few great starting points …

CLICK ON the book covers, above, to visit Amazon. Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose (Norton Critical Editions) is the most complete collection and remains on sale after nearly two decades. We also recommend the more recent Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004-2006 and A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997-2008

Care for more with Lynne Golodner?

Lynne Golodner is an expert in cross-cultural issues with a specialty in writing about food, faith and family. Her most recent platform is Parenting Without a Map™, an empowering workshop currently touring the country. Her next books are a novel and “Flavors of Faith: Holy Breads”—a tour through the breads that are symbolic in a variety of communities and religions. Both will be published this year by ReadTheSpirit Books. She is founder of Your People LLC, a company known for taking fresh approaches to marketing. She recently published an overview of her ideas in “Stand Out from the Crowd: The Your People Guide to Beside-the-box, Funky, From-the-Heart DIY Marketing, PR & Social Media.”
Care to meet Lynne as a writer? She has a limited number of openings for a writers’ retreat she is organizing for August in Nova Scotia.

Please help us to reach a wider audience

We welcome your Emails at [email protected]
We’re also reachable on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Huffington Post, YouTube and other social-networking sites. You also can Subscribe to our articles via Email or RSS feed.
Plus, there’s a free Monday morning Planner newsletter you may enjoy.

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.

Willis Barnstone talks about poets & the poetry of Jesus

April 25, 2012 by

CLICK THE COVER to visit the book’s Amazon page.In Part 1 of our coverage of Willis Barnstone, we published an overview of his new book along with some samples.
Also, we published a new poem that Willis wrote on the occasion of this interview.
TODAY, we publish ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm’s interview with Willis Barnstone:

HIGHLIGHTS OF OUR INTERVIEW
WITH WILLIS BARNSTONE
ON WORLD POETRY
AND POEMS OF JESUS

DAVID: You rank among the most prolific poets, so let’s start with a question about your poetry. You’re famous as the author of more than 1,000 sonnets. A new volume of them is forthcoming. How did you write so many? Are lines of poetry always swimming around in your head? Are your pockets stuffed with scribbled-up slips of paper? Tell us how you have written so much poetry.

WILLIS: No one has ever asked me that very sweet question. Well, for example, I was working on a poem when the telephone rang for this interview. (Now published in completed form.) I am always writing and I don’t mind interruptions. But, let me start by explaining that half of the poetry I write is formal, and half of it is free verse.

The first poem I published was actually in a French magazine. I was a 20-year-old graduate student at the University of Paris in 1948 at the time. Then, the second poem I published was a sonnet, a somewhat artificial piece of work. I wrote a few more sonnets over the years, but not too many. Then, 18 years before The Secret Reader, my main collection of sonnets, came out—I was riding in my car at night going up to Purdue from Indiana, when I began to think about two sonnets. I had a very bad recording device with me, but I tried to use that as I went along in the car. However, when I got home, the recording quality was so bad that I could hardly hear my own words. I wound up listening to it over and over until I could decipher each word. That was the start and, then, I planned to write a total of 25 sonnets. Suddenly, that became 100. I won various prizes with my work and eventually I got this letter from Knof, I think it was, asking if I wanted to publish these sonnets.

I decided to wait and I’m so glad I did because it took me many more years to finish all 501 that appeared in the first collection, The Secret Reader. After that was published, it took me a while to de-sonnet-ize myself, but I learned to do that, too. And, then, of course, I began to write many more.

Where do the words come from? You get a feeling, an emotion, and if it is genuine then you can write. Sometimes at night when I’m dreaming or perhaps while taking a shower, words may come to me. Then, I write with whatever I have handy. If I have a computer handy for writing, then I write on a computer. I like seeing the final form take place on a computer. But I write nine out of ten of my poems by hand because that’s usually the first thing available to set down my words.

WHO ARE THE POETS WE SHOULD REDISCOVER TODAY?

A 12th-Century illuminated manuscript looks back to St. John as the legendary Gospel writer contemplated lines in Greek.DAVID: Your work as a poet, translator and educator circles the globe. Back in my own undergraduate days in the mid 1970s, I studied under the poet Joseph Brodsky, who managed to master both Russian and English. But you’re accomplished in so many languages, certainly more than Greek and English. You’ve worked with Chinese, Spanish, French and other languages. So, this is a rare opportunity for our readers to hear from a master of world poetry: Can you name a few poets who we should seek out from other world cultures?

WILLIS: Oh, so many! People should read Sappho, Pindar, John Donne and, of course, Blake. They should read more of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson. And Borges, too. There are so many!

DAVID: The poetry of Jesus comes to us from Greek Gospels, so let’s focus on Greek poets. You’ve mentioned Sappho from the ancient world. How about more contemporary Greek poets?

WILLIS: Well, there’s George Seferis who won the Nobel Prize, I think at least in part because of the very fine translation by Edmund Keeley. And then, oh yes, C.P. Cavafy and I would have to recommend the translation by my daughter Aliki Barnstone.

DAVID: Great suggestions. I love Cavafy’s Myris Alexandria, which evokes this 4th Century pagan, named Myris, who winds up becoming part of the early Christian community. Myris dies and the poem is written from the perspective of an old pagan friend who looks in on the memorial rites. It’s haunting. I remember first reading and memorizing some of Cavafy in the early 1970s not long after some of the Keeley books on Cavafy came out. I still recall the opening lines of Myris:
When I heard the terrible news,
that Myris was dead,
I went to his house, although I avoid
going to the houses of Christians,
especially during times of mourning or festivity.

I realize it was Keeley’s rendering that we memorized as students, at the time. Now, we will also tell our readers about your daughter Aliki’s edition, The Collected Poems of C. P. Cavafy: A New Translation. In fact, I’m enough of a Cavafy fan myself that I’ll order a copy of that edition, too.

WILLIS: One good thing that my daughter did in her version is to place the poems in their chronological order. That’s interesting because, during his lifetime, Cavafy rejected some of his poems that later were found in Alexandria. But in the past, they were just put at the end of the book, regardless of when they originally were written. She puts them all together including the earliest poem, which is a wonderful poem about Julian the Apostate. Here’s a good example of different approaches to translation. Keeley did a splendid job on Seferis and Seferis is almost exclusively free verse. But, Cavafy is almost exclusively formal and what’s magical about his formalism is that he wrote this way in the best sense of modern poetry. My daughter’s translation of Cavafy restores more of the original music in Cavafy’s lines.

DAVID: One more question on world literature: Our readers have a long interested in China and writings like The Analects, which collected around Confucius. There’s even more interest in this today, given the growth of China as a world power and the recent release of a Hollywood-scale epic, based supposedly on the life of Confucius. It’s simply called Confucius, and it’s available in DVD and Blu-ray. But here’s the problem: I’ve seen the movie and it is full of high adventure, but it’s more Hollywood than actual precepts of Confucius. Then, if we turn to Amazon, we find hundreds of books on Confucius. You’ve worked on some Chinese projects, like Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Poems of Wang Wei with your son Tony. Tell us what translations you recommend on Confucius.

WILLIS: Well, there are various people who have done them well and certain people who don’t do them well at all, so that’s a good question—but it’s also a difficult question. I would say that, for his time, Arthur Waley did a very good job on The Analects. But I would recommend others, like the translator Burton Watson who gave us his version of The Analects. And then there’s some wonderful work from Michael Nylan in books like Lives of Confucius: Civilization’s Greatest Sage Through the Ages.

POETRY OF JESUS FROM KING JAMES TO TODAY

Ancient fragment of Greek Gospel of MarkDAVID: Turn to biblical poetry, our readers will recall that we just celebrated the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible last year. Probably our most popular story in that series was: Can You Tell the Bard from the Bible? What do you think of the King James version? I gather from what you’ve written that you admire much of it.

WILLIS: Yes, I say that in the preface. I love everything they translate and it’s amazingly accurate given the bad texts they had to deal with. They were working with copies of copies of copies. For example, they had texts that were translated from the Latin Vulgate back into the Greek, and you can imagine what other kinds of bad versions they were using as their sources. Their best copies went back to the 13th or 14th centuries. Today, we have texts that go back centuries further.

Generally, they did not make mistakes in terms of misunderstanding things. But every translator changes each new version according to what’s politically or religiously correct at the time. And those translators did some of that, too. Overall, the magnificence of the King James Bible is both its glory and its defect. From that era, I would say that the Tyndale translation is much closer to the original, but it isn’t as easy to read as the King James today.

DAVID: We should point out to readers that your new Poems of Jesus Christ is actually from a much larger translation you completed. I would urge people to go ahead and order a copy of the new book, which I think is great for inspirational reading and small-group discussion. If they like the way you handle these lines, they should know that these texts also are part of The Restored New Testament: A New Translation with Commentary, Including the Gnostic Gospels Thomas, Mary, and Judas. Is that right?

WILLIS: Exactly. In the course of doing this book, I did look back at the Greek again and I made a few changes here and there. But 90 percent of the texts in this new book are the same as what you’ll find in the Restored New Testament. The prefaces to each book in this edition are all new. Some are based partly on the prefaces in the earlier book, but they are all freshened.

DAVID: I’ll close with a question we always ask: How do you describe your religious affiliation?

WILLIS: I am a Jew and there’s no secret about that. I’ve written about it in other books. Has that influenced my translations? I suppose that as a Jew, and knowing other cultures as well, I want to make it clear to readers of my translations that Jesus wasn’t a fellow from Kalamazoo—he was a person from the Middle East.

DAVID: That’s certainly a big part of the teaching that comes from the whole spectrum of today’s leading Bible scholars: properly remembering Jesus’s origins and context.

WILLIS: That’s right. But I also want to say that the distinction as a Jew does not define me. In fact, I try to tackle the vital questions of religious harmony vigorously and I prefer to do that without typing myself as Christian, Jew or Buddhist. I prefer my words to be read as neutral and fair. In fact, if I were to name an official denomination I’ve attended, I would have to list the Unitarians or, earlier in my life, the Quakers, based on my Quaker schooling.

The problem I’m trying to describe is the same issue described by John Shelby Spong, who has written about growing up in a community where he just assumed that Jesus must be a Swede.

I make no secret of my background. In fact, I wrote part of a book about relations between Jews and blacks. But I want to transcend these tribal associations. I think that is the great challenge we all face if we are ever to mend the hostilities between the religions of Abraham.

Please help us to reach a wider audience

We welcome your Emails at [email protected]
We’re also reachable on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Huffington Post, YouTube and other social-networking sites. You also can Subscribe to our articles via Email or RSS feed.
Plus, there’s a free Monday morning Planner newsletter you may enjoy.

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.

Willis Barnstone: Writing Jesus’ words for a new generation

April 22, 2012 by

Willis Barnstone in his lifelong vocation: Writing! Photo by Sarah Handler, released via Wikimedia Commons.Willis Barnstone is a living testament to the power of pen over the frailty of flesh. In his mid-80s, when most of us are at least slowing down, he continues to publish major works in poetry, religion and translation that freshly inspire readers of all ages.

Aside from his major works on poetry and world literature, just consider his books on biblical themes in recent years:
The Gnostic Bible, a 900-page 2009 volume that he co-edited with Marvin Meyer;
The Restored New Testament: A New Translation with Commentary, Including the Gnostic Gospels Thomas, Mary, and Judas, a 1,500-page 2009 volume that collected his own translations of biblical and gnostic scriptures;
and, this spring, the closely related new book called, The Poems of Jesus Christ, which weighs in at a more comfortable-to-carry 288 pages.
Meanwhile, Barnstone has two more big books about poetry and the art of translation nearly ready for coming seasons.

Also, read our interview with Wilis Barnstone.

WHY RESTORING THE POWER
OF JESUS’ OWN WORDS
IS SO TIMELY

Considering that Barnstone’s favorite cultural realm is thousands of years in our past—immersed in the works of poets such as Sappho, Deborah and Wang Wei—he has a remarkable talent for timeliness.

There is no hotter topic in Christianity today than the words of Jesus. Beyond the decades-long debate over what Jesus actually said, a growing chorus of influential Christian writers are urging the deeply divided body of Christianity to reunite over the actual teachings of Jesus. This note is struck loudly and clearly in new books by John Dominic Crossan, Diana Butler Bass and N.T. Wright.

Other leading Christian writers are going further than that. Campaigning for a specific spiritual focus on the words of Jesus are the matriarch of re-emerging Christian spiritual practices, Phyllis Tickle, and the barnstorming theologian popular on college campuses nationwide, Tony Campolo.

Phyllis Tickle tried to capture the enduring power of Jesus’ sayings in her own book, The Words of Jesus: “Devoid of narrative context, the sayings come straight at us like so many bullets, piercing all our armor and destroying all our carefully thought-out prior convictions.”

In his book, Red Letter Christians, Tony Campolo tried to give this particular spiritual movement a name, focusing on the sayings of Jesus: “By calling ourselves Red Letter Christians, we are alluding to those old versions of the Bible wherein the words of Jesus are printed in red. In adopting the name, we are saying that we are committed to living out the things that Jesus taught. The message in those red letters is radical, to say the least. If you don’t believe me, just read Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount, found in Matthew 5-7. … Jesus calls us to an upside-down Kingdom, far away from the dominant values of the modern American consciousness.”

What all of these efforts lack, until now, is a fresh, artful and authentic rendering of Jesus’ words in contemporary language. Yes, accurate contemporary translations of the Gospels are widely available—but that authenticity is rarely coupled with the “fresh” and “artful” pen of a poet. Enter Willis Barnstone. These sayings of Jesus, now separated out and rendered in poetic typography in this new volume, also appear in the complete Gospel texts of his 2009 Restored New Testament. Or, well—almost—Barnstone tells us in our interview later this week. When this more compact new volume was prepared, Barnstone freshened the prefaces to set the tone of each gospel and he did tinker with a few lines here and there—perfecting them in this purely poetic format.

Bottom line: If you care about reading the Bible in fresh ways—and especially if you find yourself among the broad movements encouraged by the many other Christian writers, described above, then order a copy of The Poems of Jesus Christ from Amazon now.

Care to read more about Willis Barnstone’s
creative process as a poet?

By coincidence or perhaps by fortunate inspiration, Barnstone wrote a new poem on the occasion of our ReadTheSpirit interview, which we have published today. This new poem a fascinating additional perspective on the multi-faceted ways Barnstone reflects on his longevity, his vocation and other issues you will find raised in more prosaic fashion in the interview, later this week.

Samples of Willis Barnstone’s translations of Jesus’ sayings

Click this cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.In his book, Barnstone argues that Jesus spoke in poetry—at least his most famous sayings were in that form. This idea makes sense, if you are involved in regular Bible study in your church and think about this point for a moment. First, we know that Jesus often was quoting directly from the Hebrew scriptures—lines of poetry from psalms, prophets and other ancient texts that were set in Hebrew poetic forms. Beyond that, most of the teachings that his followers shared so widely were in memorable forms poetry. So, Barnstone argues that he is not turning Jesus’ sayings into poetry. Rather, Jesus taught in poetry and Barnstone is simply restoring the original format in this translation.

In the opening pages, Barnstone writes: “Jesus Christ is the great invisible poet of the world. Like the Old Testament prophets, he communicates in wisdom poetry—in short maxims, in narrative parable, and always in memorable metaphor. We hear the lyrical voice and his words are on our lips, yet implausibly for two millennia the lyricism has not been heard as poetry.”

Taking the advice of Tony Campolo and others about the Sermon on the Mount’s enduring power, here are samples from Barnstone’s new book that are part of that much larger passage.

LIGHT OF THE WORLD

You are the light of the world.
A city cannot be hidden when it is set on a mountain.
Nor do they light a lamp and place it below a basket,
But on a stand,
And it glows on everyone in the house.
So let your light glow before people so they may see
Your good works
And glorify your father of the heavens.

LOVE YOUR ENEMIES

You have heard it said,
“You will love your neighbor and hate your enemy.”
I say to you to love your enemies
And pray for those who persecute you
So you may become the children of your father in heaven,
For he makes the sun rise over the evil and the good,
And he brings the rains to the just and the unjust among us.
If you love those who love you,what reward have you?
Do not even the tax collectors do the same?
If you greet only those who are your friends,
How have you done more than others?
Have you done more than the gentiles?
Be perfect as your father the heavenly one is perfect.

Birds of the Sky and Lilies of the Field

Consider the birds of the sky.
They do not sow or reap or collect for their granaries,
Yet your heavenly father feeds them.
Are you not more valuable than they?
Who among you by brooding can add one more hour
To your life?
And why care about clothing?
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.
They do not labor or spin
But I tell you not even Shlomoh in all his splendor
Was clothed like one of these lilies.
And if the grass of the field is there today
And tomorrow is cast into the oven
And in these ways God has dressed the earth,
Will he not clothe you in a more stunning raiment,
You who suffer from poor faith?

ALSO: Enjoy our interview with Willis Barnstone.

Please help us to reach a wider audience

We welcome your Emails at [email protected]
We’re also reachable on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Huffington Post, YouTube and other social-networking sites. You also can Subscribe to our articles via Email or RSS feed.
Plus, there’s a free Monday morning Planner newsletter you may enjoy.

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.

Willis Barnstone: In the 84th Year of Residence on Earth

April 22, 2012 by

Willis Barnstone (right) walking with his friend, the poet Jorge Luis Borges, in Buenos Aires in 1975. Photo courtesy of Barnstone and Wikimedia Commons.Willis Barnstone is best known as a translator—as in the case of his new Poems of Jesus Christ, which we are recommending this week. ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm was so moved by the fresh and artful rendering of Jesus’ sayings in this new volume that he scheduled our weekly author interview with Barnstone.

When Crumm called Barnstone, the poet and translator cheerily began the conversation by pointing out that, although he had been in the midst of composing a new poem, this was indeed a good time to do an interview. After Crumm expressed surprise and offered to delay the call, Barnstone insisted that this was simply the way he worked—always writing, always in the middle of some project.

After the two hit it off in their interview, Barnstone emailed ReadTheSpirit’s home office a couple of hours later with the finished poem—the completed version of the text he had started while contemplating the looming telephone interview.

Barnstone’s email explained: “I was writing a poem when I picked up the phone—never mind interruptions, helps the mind to keep going down below. I had written the first lines, but I knew the poem was not finished. As soon as we hung up, I added the last lines. I think of this one as our poem. Hope it works. Somehow, it has to do with some of the things we were talking about. Willis.”

Then, an hour later, he emailed again with the following, finished version of the poem, making a number of key changes since the original emailed version. “This shows you how I work. It really was exactly the same process in doing the poems of Jesus Christ.”

So, here is Willis Barnstone’s new poem, a reflection on themes we are exploring this week in our coverage of his latest book.

In the 84th Year of Residence on Earth

By Willis Barnstone

When I consider how my life is spent,
Rocked here and there by vile stupidity,
I wake from tons of shame and don’t repent

The worst or best in me. Felicity
Should be my flag. Milton, my guide, was dead
At sixty-five, blind, scorned, saved by Marvell

When every monarchist wanted his head
Dumped in a pit. My body-mind is well
And tricks the clock. How dare I think remorse?

Is bitching a right? Yes, but not my right.
As long as earth is round, I’m like a horse
Following insane commands to work

And work without regret and go berserk
Locked in a basement deprived of all light,
Or best, sit in the sun, first dawn in Greece,

War dotting hills, the sea Homeric grapes,
Islands, old metaphors for droplets of peace
After decades of slaughter, marble shapes

Entering ink of poets, years I greet
As clearly as an Oakland riot, London
Milk bottles breaking on a foggy street.

When I consider how my life has spun
My threading cape of creativity,
In dark night sun forces the heart to run.

 

Read our coverage of Willis Barnstone’s The Poems of Jesus Christ.
And: Come back later this week for our interview.

 

Please help us to reach a wider audience

We welcome your Emails at [email protected]
We’re also reachable on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Huffington Post, YouTube and other social-networking sites. You also can Subscribe to our articles via Email or RSS feed.
Plus, there’s a free Monday morning Planner newsletter you may enjoy.

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.

Walt Whitman on the loss of Lincoln, on death and rebirth each spring: ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed’

April 13, 2012 by

Death and rebirth have always been poignant themes in American culture—especially in the spring and especially in April of 1865 as the Civil War’s end brought hope to President Abraham Lincoln that the nation might heal from the cataclysmic conflict. When Lincoln was assassinated on April 15, 1865, the poet Walt Whitman felt the blow on such a visceral level that he penned some of his most enduring lines.

Wikipedia has a biography of Whitman, but the essential details are these:

Whitman had family and friends in the front lines of the Civl War. He volunteered as an Army nurse and worked with the wounded and amputees. He also was a great admirer of President Lincoln. His harrowing experiences poured into his poetry. Ironically, the Whitman poem that became instantly popular after Lincoln’s assassination was the shorter and more traditional O Captain! My Captain! Editors and the general public weren’t ready for the full force of his longer verse. So, Whitman’s far more eloquent When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d was largely unknown until many years later.

In Justin Kaplan’s National-Book-Award-winning biography, Walt Whitman: A Life, Kaplan describes the emotion associated with this poem for decades after Lincoln’s death. Kaplan describes a public lecture Whitman gave in April 1887 in New York City to mark the 22nd anniversary of the assassination:

Terrible, cleansing and restorative for the nation, the Civil War became the central imaginative event of Whitman’s middle life and Lincoln his personal agent of redemption, a symbolic figure who transcended politics, leadership and victory. Whitman’s lecture was his ritual enactment of the passion of Abraham Lincoln, a Mass offered both to “sane and sacred death” and, as he had also written in his great poem of mourning, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” to “the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands.”

When Whitman was finished, that night, the emotion was as palpable in the New York theater as if Lincoln had died that day, Kaplan writes.

Here is …

Walt Whitman’s
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d

 

WHEN lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.

2
O powerful, western, fallen star!
O shades of night! O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear’d! O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless! O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud, that will not free my soul!

3
In the door-yard fronting an old farm-house, near the white-wash’d palings,
Stands the lilac bush, tall-growing, with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom, rising, delicate, with the perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the door-yard,
With delicate-color’d blossoms, and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig, with its flower, I break.

4
In the swamp, in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary, the thrush,
The hermit, withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding throat!
Death’s outlet song of life—(for well, dear brother, I know
If thou wast not gifted to sing, thou would’st surely die.)

5
Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes, and through old woods, (where lately the violets peep’d from the ground, spotting the gray debris;)
Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes—passing the endless grass;
Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprising;
Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards;
Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave.
Night and day journeys a coffin.

6
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags, with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves, as of crape-veil’d women, standing,
With processions long and winding, and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit—with the silent sea of faces, and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn;
With all the mournful voices of the dirges, pour’d around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—Where amid these you journey,
With the tolling, tolling bells’ perpetual clang;
Here! coffin that slowly passes,
I give you my sprig of lilac.

7
(Nor for you, for one, alone;
Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring:
For fresh as the morning—thus would I carol a song for you, O sane and sacred death.
All over bouquets of roses,
O death! I cover you over with roses and early lilies;
But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first,
Copious, I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes;
With loaded arms I come, pouring for you,
For you, and the coffins all of you, O death.)

8
O western orb, sailing the heaven!
Now I know what you must have meant, as a month since we walk’d,
As we walk’d up and down in the dark blue so mystic,
As we walk’d in silence the transparent shadowy night,
As I saw you had something to tell, as you bent to me night after night,
As you droop’d from the sky low down, as if to my side, (while the other stars all look’d on;)
As we wander’d together the solemn night, (for something, I know not what, kept me from sleep;)
As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west, ere you went, how full you were of woe;
As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze, in the cold transparent night,
As I watch’d where you pass’d and was lost in the netherward black of the night,
As my soul, in its trouble, dissatisfied, sank, as where you, sad orb,
Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.

9
Sing on, there in the swamp!
O singer bashful and tender! I hear your notes—I hear your call;
I hear—I come presently—I understand you;
But a moment I linger—for the lustrous star has detain’d me;
The star, my departing comrade, holds and detains me.

10
O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be, for the grave of him I love?
Sea-winds, blown from east and west,
Blown from the eastern sea, and blown from the western sea, till there on the prairies meeting:
These, and with these, and the breath of my chant,
I perfume the grave of him I love.

11
O what shall I hang on the chamber walls?
And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls,
To adorn the burial-house of him I love?
Pictures of growing spring, and farms, and homes,
With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright,
With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air;
With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific;
In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there;
With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows;
And the city at hand, with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,
And all the scenes of life, and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.

12
Lo! body and soul! this land!
Mighty Manhattan, with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships;
The varied and ample land—the South and the North in the light—Ohio’s shores, and flashing Missouri,
And ever the far-spreading prairies, cover’d with grass and corn.
Lo! the most excellent sun, so calm and haughty;
The violet and purple morn, with just-felt breezes;
The gentle, soft-born, measureless light;
The miracle, spreading, bathing all—the fulfill’d noon;
The coming eve, delicious—the welcome night, and the stars,
Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.

13
Sing on! sing on, you gray-brown bird!
Sing from the swamps, the recesses—pour your chant from the bushes;
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.
Sing on, dearest brother—warble your reedy song;
Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.
O liquid, and free, and tender!
O wild and loose to my soul! O wondrous singer!
You only I hear……yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart;)
Yet the lilac, with mastering odor, holds me.

14
Now while I sat in the day, and look’d forth,
In the close of the day, with its light, and the fields of spring, and the farmer preparing his crops,
In the large unconscious scenery of my land, with its lakes and forests,
In the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb’d winds, and the storms;)
Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the voices of children and women,
The many-moving sea-tides,—and I saw the ships how they sail’d,
And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy with labor,
And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily usages;
And the streets, how their throbbings throbb’d, and the cities pent—lo! then and there,
Falling upon them all, and among them all, enveloping me with the rest,
Appear’d the cloud, appear’d the long black trail;
And I knew Death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death.

15
Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle, as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding receiving night, that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars, and ghostly pines so still.
And the singer so shy to the rest receiv’d me;
The gray-brown bird I know, receiv’d us comrades three;
And he sang what seem’d the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.
From deep secluded recesses,
From the fragrant cedars, and the ghostly pines so still,
Came the carol of the bird.
And the charm of the carol rapt me,
As I held, as if by their hands, my comrades in the night;
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.

DEATH CAROL.
16
Come, lovely and soothing Death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later, delicate Death.
Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious;
And for love, sweet love—But praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death.
Dark Mother, always gliding near, with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee—I glorify thee above all;
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.
Approach, strong Deliveress!
When it is so—when thou hast taken them, I joyously sing the dead,
Lost in the loving, floating ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss, O Death.
From me to thee glad serenades,
Dances for thee I propose, saluting thee—adornments and feastings for thee;
And the sights of the open landscape, and the high-spread sky, are fitting,
And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.
The night, in silence, under many a star;
The ocean shore, and the husky whispering wave, whose voice I know;
And the soul turning to thee, O vast and well-veil’d Death,
And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.
Over the tree-tops I float thee a song!
Over the rising and sinking waves—over the myriad fields, and the prairies wide;
Over the dense-pack’d cities all, and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee, O Death!

17
To the tally of my soul,
Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,
With pure, deliberate notes, spreading, filling the night.
Loud in the pines and cedars dim,
Clear in the freshness moist, and the swamp-perfume;
And I with my comrades there in the night.
While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed,
As to long panoramas of visions.

18
I saw askant the armies;
And I saw, as in noiseless dreams, hundreds of battle-flags;
Borne through the smoke of the battles, and pierc’d with missiles, I saw them,
And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody;
And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)
And the staffs all splinter’d and broken.
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
And the white skeletons of young men—I saw them;
I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war;
But I saw they were not as was thought;
They themselves were fully at rest—they suffer’d not;
The living remain’d and suffer’d—the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child, and the musing comrade suffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.

19
Passing the visions, passing the night;
Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands;
Passing the song of the hermit bird, and the tallying song of my soul,
(Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying, ever-altering song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy, Covering the earth, and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses,)
Passing, I leave thee, lilac with heart-shaped leaves;
I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring,
I cease from my song for thee;
From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
O comrade lustrous, with silver face in the night.

20
Yet each I keep, and all, retrievements out of the night;
The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping star, with the countenance full of woe,
With the lilac tall, and its blossoms of mastering odor;
With the holders holding my hand, nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine, and I in the midst, and their memory ever I keep—for the dead I loved so well;
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands…and this for his dear sake; Lilac and star and bird, twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines, and the cedars dusk and dim.

 

Please help us to reach a wider audience

We welcome your Emails at [email protected]
We’re also reachable on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Huffington Post, YouTube and other social-networking sites. You also can Subscribe to our articles via Email or RSS feed.
Plus, there’s a free Monday morning Planner newsletter you may enjoy.

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.

Love Rumi? Meet Hafiz. And, turn, turn through a year

February 3, 2012 by

MOSAIC CEILING inside the pavilion at the Shrine of Hafiz (or Hafez) in Shiraz in southwest Iran.At ReadTheSpirit, we bring readers news about remarkable books and films that raise spiritual questions—and inspire us to connect with our world. The story of Rumi, who is a part of this book review, is profiled online in Interfaith Heroes 1.

No less a giant of American literature than Ralph Waldo Emerson called Hafiz “the prince of Persian poets,” so Hafiz’s poetry certainly is no flash-in-the-pan discovery. At this point, Hafiz is not as famous as the great Rumi, who these days journalists describe as “the world’s best-selling poet in English.” If you’re reading this review, you almost certainly know a bit about Rumi’s short, mystical poems with spiritual yearnings that often seem to ache long after you’ve finished reading his words. Well, if you have come to appreciate that general style of Persian poetry, then you’ll find Hafiz another delightfully scented breeze from the East. You’ll enjoy Daniel Ladinsky’s A Year with Hafiz: Daily Contemplations.

Rumi’s eloquent lines on love tend to wind up on greeting cards, calendars, posters and other media designed to lift one’s spirits and express one’s love for others. Of course, Rumi’s range was far larger than thoughts of love. To explore the grand vistas of Rumi’s work, we also highly recommend Coleman Barks and his Big Red Book collection of Rumi in English.

Hafiz, in this new collection from Ladinsky and Penguin, comes to us fully flowered in 365 selections. For Emerson, and many other Hafiz fans down through the centuries, the attraction in Hafiz’s works is a relentless quest for his own spiritual voice. Especially in these English-language renderings of Hafiz by Ladinsky, Hafiz comes across as downright defiant and sometimes darkly funny in that quest for truth, wherever that journey might lead.

Hafiz’s tomb with its distinctive pavilion in Iran.If you’re confused by the one-word name in the book’s title, it’s possible that you’ve run across him as Hafez, another way of transliterating the Arabic into English. His full name and title sometimes is given as: Khawaja (which means Master) Shamsu d-Din Muhammad Hafez-e Shirazi (meaning that he was born in Shiraz, which today is in southwest Iran). He lived and died in the 14th Century. (Rumi lived in the 13th Century.) You may recognize that Hafiz, the core of his name, is the same word used to refer to someone who has memorized the entire Quran. Tradition holds that this poet called Hafiz also accomplished that feat, but little historical detail can be documented about his life.

In the 19th Century, Emerson wrote that one of Hafiz’s greatest gifts was “his intellectual liberty, which is a certificate of profound thought. We accept the religions and politics into which we fall; and it is only a few delicate spirits who are sufficient to see that the whole web of convention is the imbecility of those whom it entangles—that the mind suffers no religion and no empire but its own. It indicates this respect to absolute truth by the use it makes of the symbols that are most stable and revered, and therefore is always provoking the accusation of irreligion.”

More than a century after Emerson wrote that assessment of Hafiz’s spiritual wisdom, that passage still stands up as a good summary of Hafiz’s appeal. If you’ve tasted Rumi and you’re restless for more from this branch of global culture—then spend a year with Hafiz. Sure, the daily entries all are marked with dates on the calendar, but start your year anywhere and circle back around. Rumi, Hafiz and their friends would smile at the turning.

Please help us to reach a wider audience

We welcome your Emails at [email protected]
We’re also reachable on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Huffington Post, YouTube and other social-networking sites. You also can Subscribe to our articles via Email or RSS feed.
Plus, there’s a free Monday morning Planner newsletter you may enjoy.

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.