Friday Links, March 18, 2021
+ What power does a poem have, and what work can it do?
+ Speaking of power, Elizabeth Lev shows how art in Ukraine powers cultural memory.
+ “The Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination” 2022 Catholic Imagination Conference. Are you going?
+ St. Bernard’s School of Theology and Ministry is offering the chance to audit one summer course for free—including one on the nature of aesthetic experience, the relationship between truth, goodness, and beauty, and the role of beauty in liturgy.
Poetry as Finding Through a Falling Away
Father Michael Rennier, Dappled Things web editor and contributor, quotes the beginning of the above-linked book review by Tom Breaks at “Genealogies of Modernity”:
“A friend sent me an email asking for my thoughts on a disagreement between Jacques Maritain and Paul Claudel about the nature of poetic creation."
Father Rennier also mentioned that he had recently asked a friend exactly the same question. The friend he questioned was revealed to be Ann Thomas, DT managing editor. Father Rennier then invited Thomas to make a blog post with her notes of her own response. Until that happens, and we can see Thomas’s thoughts on the matter, we can ponder the case Tom Breaks makes in this essay. Breaks states the contrasting views of the two poets, and then he suggests that the work of poet Anna Key’s in her Notebook of Forgetting offers a third way.
“The question was intriguing, and it helped me see something critical in a work of poetry by Anna Key, Notebook of Forgetting, that I edited and published through In the Wind Projects. The book poses a unique (to my knowledge) solution to the poetic antithesis . . ..”
In Ukraine, art is cultural memory
Katy Carl, DT editor in chief, recommends the above linked article by Rome-based art historian Elizabeth Lev at The Pilar. Thanks, Katy, for this unique and timely look at Ukraine’s endangered art.
“Art has long been a victim of war, and there is no reason to expect a gentler treatment of Ukraine’s art.
“Amid bombs and skirmishes, art professionals, students, and aficionados wait in trepidation to see which Ukrainian works will wind up as a photograph and a memory.
“It may seem frivolous to talk about art during such a grave humanitarian crisis, but art is an essential part of the humanity of a culture, exploited by invaders and destroyed by barbarians to strike at the heart of a people’s identity.”
Iconostasis from the village Skvariava Nova, Lviv Oblast: Archangel Michael, painted by Ivan Rutkovych. Credit: Mykola Swarnyk/wikimedia. CC BY SA 3.0. At Lviv’s Andrey Sheptytsky National Museum, founded by the Metropolitan Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in 1905.
“The Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination”
Several present and former DT editors and contributors and many well-known Catholic writers of all sorts are scheduled to appear at the upcoming biannual 2022 Catholic Literary Conference to be held in person at the University of Dallas from September 30 to October 1.
Dana Gioia, poet and promoter of the much-buzzed about Catholic literary revival, says in the following video,
“What we have tried to do with this conference is [sic] not simply about writers. It’s about creating the necessary community to revitalize and rebuild not simply American Catholic literature, but American literature—which will be enlarged, refined, and enriched by having the Catholic voice heard more robustly than it has been in the last half century.”
Who’s going to be there? For starters, James Matthew Wilson will moderate the Wiseblood panel with panelists Glenn Arbery, Katy Carl, Joshua Hren, and Trevor Merrill. The complete list of speakers with bios is here.
Dear readers, you are invited to write a comment to let us all know if you are going too.
There doesn’t seem to be a link to register, yet, but you can sign up to get conference updates here.
Free Summer Audit Opportunity
May 9th - June 23rd (Session I) | June 28th - August 11th (Session II)
What are you doing this summer? St. Bernard’s School of Theology and Ministry is offering the chance to audit one summer course for free. Students who live within commuting distance to the class’s location are encouraged to attend in person, but online attendance is available for others.
“We are committed to featuring courses that enhance the truths of our faith, and as such, wish to share our offerings to as many people as possible.”
This course may be of particular interest to DT readers:
“BEAUTY, LITURGY, GLORY: TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHICAL AND THEOLOGICAL AESTHETICS
“In his Letter to Artists, Pope St. John Paul II draws upon the following statement by St. Macarius the Great: ‘the soul which has been fully illumined by the unspeakable beauty of the glory shining on the countenance of Christ overflows with the Holy Spirit... it is all eye, all light, all countenance’(§6). What does it mean for the soul to be illumined by the unspeakable beauty of the glory shining on the countenance of Christ? How can we begin to understand the relationship between divine glory and the more typical experience of earthly beauty? How does this encounter with beauty most sublime affect clarity and depth of sight and right regard (recta ratio) of the soul in relation to the whole of existence and to/of its summit in Christ Jesus? This course will gesture towards these mysteries by considering questions and themes relevant to philosophical and theological aesthetics. The nature of aesthetic experience, the relationship between truth, goodness, and beauty, and the role of beauty in liturgy will be explored. Sources for the course will include key philosophical and theological texts as well as examples of ancient, medieval, and modern art.” [Emphasis mine.]
