Revival and Renewal

In an effort to share what I’m working on, I’m going to try to post regular updates entitled “The Kiln”. Thoughts, fragments, and rough drafts mainly. Subscribe here to get regular updates.

A newsletter

For a while I’ve been toying around with sharing more rough-draft stuff on here. I know several of you enjoy reading my work, but finished poetry is starting to move off of WordPress and to poetry magazines, as this counts in many publishers’ minds as “published” poetry.

So, I’ll be sharing with you some fragments of works, some thoughts, and the miscellaneous rough draft, as well as news of what’s in the works.

I’m calling this Newsletter “The Kiln” because what you find here is in the refinement stage, waiting to be tried seven times.

Poems of the Incarnation-Looking to This Year

It took a while, but my series of poems on the incarnation from John the Evangelist’s perspective have been published at Foreshadow. I’m really proud of them.

I’ve set out a scheme for the next two years to write two more series of poems focusing the perspective of different Bible characters revolving around the Incarnate Christ. So, right now, the project looks like this:

• Year One: John the Evangelist (Old Age, Tangibility of Christ).
• Year Two: Joseph of Nazareth (Doubt, Confusion, Certainty in Christ)
• Year Three: Mary Magdalene (Trauma, Healing in Christ)

The Cantos

I’ve embarked on a journey to write an epic inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, but instead of Dante meeting Virgil in the Italian hills, I meet T.S. Eliot on the Badger State Trail. I’m on the fifth “canto” or chapter of Inferno, but here’s a draft from the beginning, when Eliot informs me of the path we are to take together:

“What can I do, then?” I cried in desperation,
“Set in on every side, like the man caught
Between the rocks and the tide?” 
“To live you must die,” he replied. 
“To feel again the heat you must freeze. 
In order to wake up you must sleep,
And see visions again instead of dreams. 
The only remedy is to show you, step by step,
The place the cold eternally keeps
Not just vengeful, wrathful, lusting souls
But those who were neither hot nor cold,
Who living were dead, and dead now hold
As the soldering rod and the solder
A living, seething, never-fulfilled desire.” 

This has been a very exciting journey for me thus far. I’ll keep you posted.

Songs of Samuel

I’m working on another series of poems meditating on the life of Samuel from the Old Testament. For me, Samuel’s life is emblematic of the godly man caught in a tectonic age, when both what we inherit and what comes down the pike are unfitting, and we must find who we are to be by the costly task of learning to listen to God while those around us have grown deaf, learning to see God’s will when those around us have grown blind. I’ve written the scene where Eli spies Hannah praying on the stairs:

Her words are but wires of wind,
Expectorated in appetency
Into the silence.

“O Lord of hosts”

They flow in patterns set before,
marked by prolonged, provoked agony
Into the silence…

“Remember me”

Slow Progress Painting

Here’s the underpainting for “St. Mark,” part of a large series of paintings I’m calling Both Old and New: Retrieval in a Rootless Age. This picture shows stage four of a six-part process. After the white paint dries, I’ll layer color over the surface of the painting.