Friday Links
June 21, 2024
Sacred Heart Illumination by Hildegard Mohr
Micah Mattix on “Navigating Poetry’s Tumultuous Waters”
Steven Knepper: Les Murray on Shorts and Life
Loganberry Books Presents: George David Clark, Ryan Wilson, and Matthew Buckley Smith
Joshua Hren on The genius of James Joyce: Sin, guilt and the redemptive power of laughter
The odd couple: Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene
ESU Formal Verse Contest
Micah Mattix on “Navigating Poetry’s Tumultuous Waters”
Fashions have come and gone in 30 years, and not all of them have been good for poetry, but a handful of books on the art of poetry have helped me navigate contemporary poetry’s tumultuous waters.
Steven Knepper: Les Murray on Shorts and Life
Steven Knepper’s New Verse Review Substack is a must read for lovers of verse. In this one, he gives us a bounty of Les Murray links, including one to Don Featherstone’s 1991 documentary The Daylight Moon: A Film About the Poet Les Murray.
Loganberry Books Presents: George David Clark, Ryan Wilson, and Matthew Buckley Smith
Elijah Blumov of the great Versecraft podcast hosts a poetry reading with George David Clark, Ryan Wilson, and Matthew Buckley Smith. It’s worth your time as the poetry is wonderful and the banter between the poets shows their deep friendship and respect, not something that is always evident with a couple of writers get together. NB: Clark’s penultimate poem is NSFW or around the kids, probably.
Joshua Hren on The genius of James Joyce: Sin, guilt and the redemptive power of laughter
Joshua Hren reviews Gabrielle Carey’s biography of the great Irish writer, James Joyce:
In her posthumous biography James Joyce: A Life, Gabrielle Carey grants that sin was one of Joyce’s lifelong obsessions. The young author himself admitted that a “special odor of corruption” surrounds his early stories in Dubliners, but Carey justifies the stories’ “scrupulous meanness” on the grounds that Joyce “is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentiment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard.”
In this view of literary realism, what is most real is the ugly underbelly, the ubiquitous “ashpits and old weeds” that make our world a cosmic tragedy. But more pertinent, Carey says, to our understanding of the overall trajectory of Joyce’s literary canon is a paradoxical notion at the very heart of the faith Joyce lost: felix culpa, or the Catholic theological tradition that finds happiness in the fallen state of humanity, wherein the Fall brought Christ to humanity and ushered in the possibility of the Resurrection.
The odd couple: Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene
This is a fascinating review of the friendship between these two great, but deeply flawed men:
An accidental meeting in January 1948 revealed their contrasting characters. Improperly dressed for Mass, Greene looked like a bum who needed a handout. Waugh rescued him, writing in his diary: “Mass at 12 at Farm Street where I met the shambling, unshaven and as it happened quite penniless figure of Graham Greene. Took him to the Ritz for a cocktail and gave him 6d to check his hat. He had suddenly been moved by love of Africa and emptied his pockets into the box for African missions.”
Ah, poets! The winnings for this contest are more than most poets will make in a lifetime of writing poems. God bless the ESU.
