Friday Links
March 15, 2024
First Station on Crough Patrick
The Woman of Three Cows and more for St. Patrick’s Day
Mary Lou Williams Lecture and Gala Performance featuring Deanna Witkowski at the Hank Center
Sally Thomas reviews Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?
James Matthew Wilson on the “somewhat exaggerated death of poetry”
A World Nobody Wants by David Schaengold
“The Woman of Three Cows” and more for St. Patrick’s Day
Poems and Ancient and Modern shares Justin Blessinger’s thoughts on the Irish poet, James Clarence Mangan. James Matthew Wilson’s long-awaited, Catholic Modernism and the Irish “Avant-Garde” is available from CUA Press; Mary Harrington writes about the recent Irish referendum to once again change the Irish constitution and the somewhat surprising vote against those changes; and, finally, Paul Kingsnorth has been writing about the holy wells of Ireland on his Substack, these are free for all and well worth reading.
Sally Thomas reviews Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?
From Sally Thomas’s wonderful review of Jessica Hooten Wilson’s new book, Why Do the Heathen Rage, a look behind the scenes at Flannery O’Connor’s uncompleted last novel:
What if in art, as in life, conversion was not the end of the action but its beginning? What then? Hooten Wilson suggests that for O’Connor, the artist’s “dilemma is how ‘to make corruption believable’ so that the reader understands the significance of grace.” This problem had driven O’Connor’s fictional project throughout the 1950s, but the artistic challenge presented by her new novel was how to make a story of the continuing work of grace. How to make a protagonist of a person who has already surrendered to that grace, already undergone a change of heart? How does that surrender become dramatic action? If the mandate of grace is to change your life, how to inscribe that change in a narrative arc becomes the only real question for the artist. Every other consideration is a subsidiary of that primary question.
James Matthew Wilson on the “somewhat exaggerated death of poetry”
James Matthew Wilson responds to Matthew Walther’s (and all the others who’ve made the same claim) that poetry is dead (still alive, it needs to walk off its wounds and get to work):
If poetry is not dead, the reader may ask, then why do the obituaries keep appearing? The reasons for poetry’s decline are multiple and some of them intractable. We should note, first, that by the turn of the 20th century, poetry had lost its place as the best-loved of the art forms to the novel. All the arts are, at root, narrative, and the form of the novel could tell stories in ways often, but not always, better than could a narrative poem. Most poems written over the last two centuries have been not narrative but lyric, but some poets have continued to write good short stories and novels in verse. In any case, if the giving-up of narrative was the death of poetry, then poetry has been dead since 1813, the year Sir Walter Scott abandoned epic poetry because he was jealous of Lord Byron’s talents, and so settled for making a fortune as a novelist. If poetry is to be a living art again, more poets must learn again how to be good storytellers.
A World Nobody Wants by David Schaengold
David Schaengold reminds us, as does JMW, that at some point we should stop complaining and do something.
Why have we built an entire world that nobody loves? Why are the riches of the wealthiest civilization in history spent on hideous highway viaducts that crumble as soon as they are built, instead of temples, monuments, towers, boulevards, and gardens?
Mary Lou Williams Lecture and Gala Performance featuring Deanna Witkowski at the Hank Center
The Hank Center at Loyola will have two extraordinary events (for free!) celebrating the music of the last jazz great, Mary Lou Williams. For details, please follow the link:
Lecture, March 21, 2024: 4:00 - 5:30 PM CDT. 4th Floor, Information Commons, LSC.
Live Performance, March 22, 2024: 7:00 - 8:30 PM CDT. Skowronski Music Hall, Mundelein Hall, LSC.
