Holy Saturday Poem

This weekend's* Saturday poem in The Scotsman was the title poem from The Ambulance Box**. Great publicity for the collection! I'd heard several weeks ago that it was happening and knew the date but it only occurred to me in the middle of the week that it would be the Holy Saturday poem. An appropriate date, given the piece is about, as the paper neatly puts it,

"THE inextricable link between our suffering, our sense of celebration and our hopes for healing".

Many thanks to the good folk of the Scottish Poetry Library for choosing it.

*I'd have posted this yesterday but couldn't get on to Blogger for technical reasons.

**Please note that the layout isn't quite right in the paper, because the indentation hasn't come out at all. You'll just have to read it in the book for the full effect on the page.

Happy Birthday, Mr Burns

Technically, I've let the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns's birth pass without comment, but I could hardly let it pass without mention, even if a touch belated. I'm not going to regail you with an online immortal memory; I'll simply point you in the direction of one of my favourite pieces of Burns.

I love "A Poet's Welcome to His Love-Begotten Daughter" -- or, in its unbowdlerised title, "He Welcomes his Bastart Wean" -- for a number of reasons. First off, its mixter-maxter of swagger and sweet tenderness. So typically Burns. He can't resist thumbing his nose at convention even as he's expressing how fatherhood has bowled him over.

Secondly, it demonstrates the flexibility of the Standard Habbie (better known, but less accurately so, as the Burns stanza). It's tempting to think of that form as fit only for the satirical and comic poems that Burns so excelled in. After all, it's the stanza of "Holy Willie's Prayer" and "To a Haggis". But, in this poem, it proves itself equal to the task of containing and shaping the conjoined tenderness and bravado. And there's some great rhyming.

Thirdly, giving this as my favourite piece of Burns in a BBC Radio Scotland competition won me a copy of the Linn complete Burns songs recordings! A fantastic set of discs.

At the link above, there's a good reading of it, taken from the BBC's project to record, gradually, all Burns's poems and songs. I'd have wished John Gordon Sinclair to read "faither" instead of "father", but he hits the nail on the head when he uses the fricative in "unsought for", "fought for" and "unwrought for", rightly taking his lead from "dochter".

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Another Burns link, but less striclty Bardic: The Falkirk Antonine Friendship Link will be holding their 2nd Burns Supper on Fri Jan 30th at 7.30 pm, in the Christian Centre, Glebe St, Falkirk - with apropriate music and food. This year's speaker will be Gene Stolzfus, founder and Director Emeritus of Christian Peacemaker Teams. CPT maintain trained Violence Reduction Teams in several parts of the World, including the Hebron area and Iraq (where four of a delegation were held hostage two years ago, and Islamic Peacemakers were established). Gene had been asked to talk about "A Casestudy in Peacemaking: Iraq", but also to refer to Israel/Palestine - no doubt this will include Gaza. Admission by donation, all are welcome.

The Visible Image

Interesting short post about Christianity and poetry on Todd Swift's blog Eyewear. Swift says:

Christian poetry, in Britain, has become nearly as invisible as God - partially due, no doubt, to the fear on the part of would-be practitioners of such verse, that such discourse would lead away from the irony, or ambiguity, expected (or required) of poetry now, towards something too dogmatic, earnest, or even, "too emotional".

I'm not exactly sure that Christian poetry is that invisble. Of course, it largely depends on what Swift means by "Christian poetry", which he doesn't define, and my reluctance to agree with his assessment might in large part be due to my being an enthusiast and practitioner.

However, I wouldn't call the career of Michael Symmons Roberts, for instance, invisble. Let's not forget that his collection Corpus, which is profoundly Christian in its concerns and imagery while also being fresh and contemporary in the same, won the Whitbread poetry prize in 2004. Nobody can understand Michael's work properly without understanding how it arises from and interacts with his Christian faith.

Perhaps it might not be so obvious that another Cape poet, Robert Crawford, is a Christian, but a reading of his work with this in mind will shed light on the impetus for, and imagery of, a number of his poems. Les Murray, of course, while not being a British poet, is still a well-known figure in these islands and, again, Christianity is a strong feature of his work. Then there's Gillian Allnutt, who might be best described as post-Christian but cannot be described as anything other than a religious poet.

I wouldn't call that invisble.

Swift also says:

Christian poetry... needs to engage with the difficult, the tentative aspects of its style, its subject area ... - appropriate, since language, too, is invested with the same problematic, indeterminate elements as faith. It is only the (empirically or theologically) strident that needs to be resisted, not writing which seeks, inquires, and, importantly, ethically engages, with the mystery - and yes, often the beauty - of existence.

Well, that seems to me to be a reasonable description of what the above-named writers are up to, in different ways and with different musics; it's also not a bad description of what I aim for.

Perhaps the invisiblity Swift feels is less to do with the degree to which faith shapes the poems contemporary Christian writers produce, the way it shapes them or how that shape is received in the wider poetry--which I have generally found to be warm--than with the growing blind spot in wider society's knowledge and understanding when it comes to Christian, or any other, faith. The challenge for religious poetry in this society is not only to do what Swift says above but to find ways of doing it that neither ignore the riches and depths of religious traditions nor lean on them in a lazy, uncommunicative fashion. That said, Swift's small contribution to bringing into wider view the possibilities of contemporary poetry with a Christian perspective is certainly most welcome.

A Note on Joy and Sorrow

"The joy of the Lord is your strength." (Nehemiah 8:10)

It's a verse often used in certain quarters, under the rubric of encouragement, to bludgeon the hurting for a failure to demonstrate happiness in pain. No thought given to the harm this misapplication does or what it implies, namely that God is not to be found in the pit. Not only is this scriptural illiteracy ("De profundis", anyone?), but it seems to me tantamount to a denial of the incarnation.

No thought is given either to what "the joy of the Lord" might be beyond grinning through grief. But we have here a possessive--"the joy of the Lord"--therefore, it's God's joy, not the believer's joy in him, that is the source of strength. What is God's joy? Perhaps it is the ceaseless adoration of each person of the Trinity by the others, the joy that Rowan Williams explores in relation to Rublev's icon of the hospitality of Abraham, also known as the Old Testament Trinity. We glimpse it at Jesus's baptism and again at the transfiguration in the voice of the Father coming out of the cloud. God's joy breaking through into a broken and fallen world, a world of sorrow and grief. Joy in the Man of Sorrows. That joy is in the background of Jesus howl from the Cross, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?", perhaps (depending on how you view it) the only time when this ceaseless adoration was interrupted.

This is not, is never, a joy that ignores, denies or glosses over suffering. It is a joy that enters pain and grief, comes alongside it and redeems it because the suffering of the Man of Sorrows, the Son of Joy, is eternally part of the life of the Trinity. ("Those wounds, yet visible above ... .") Holding joy in one hand and and grief in the other, this is the life the Body of Christ is meant to model to its members and to the rest of the world. Which is why lament and worship should always be found under the one spire.

Grief and Humanity, Pain and the Self

I don't know where Simon Barrow came across this quotation on grief from Rowan Williams, but it's worth reproducing here:

"[G]rief and desperate loneliness aren’t political things but human things. It’s only when we can get to the humanity can we begin to get beyond the sterility of historic racial and religious conflicts. Facing the abiding realities of the human condition, facing death; your own, or that of someone you love, is something that puts everything else into perspective. Change, real change, happens when we’re ready just to be human – not to use our suffering as another weapon against each other, not to argue about whose sufferings are worse, but just to recognise the same love and the same loss."

[Update: I've just discovered it's from Williams's Christmas Eve "Thought for the Day", which you can read in full here.]

And let me add to it this, which I read today, from his Lost Icons:

Authentic religious ... practice begins in the attempt to attend to the moment of self-questioning -- to refuse to cover over, evade or explain the pain and shock of whatever brings the self into question, to hold on to the difficulty before the almost inevitable descent into pathos and personal drama begins.

Singing from a Strange Hymn Sheet

Just finished reading Alistair Findlay's The Love Songs of John Knox, a sophisticated but hugely entertaining collection. It's not often a book of poems has me chuckling aloud to myself almost every page. Even rarer is the collection I pass round colleagues at my day job to watch them chuckle and giggle aloud.

Findlay takes us for a surreal and manic spin through the Scottish Reformation and 21st century Scotland. In numerous poems, Knox lands in various 21st century settings--appearing on Newsnight (not, you note, Newsnicht) and This is Your Life, watching Celtic play Porto or visiting the seamier side of Livingston. He also writes to various figures (including Calvin, Elizabeth I of England and Lenin) and addresses the poet. Some poems cover the Reformation ground alone, albeit usually with the same revved-up style. And there are plenty other voices besides Knox's: "the poet", Knox's two wives and his daughter, Lenin's (yes, he writes back), Mary Queen of Scots' ladies in waiting, even a 16th century police report as well as the various voices of parodies and pastiches.

For the most part, the writing is a very conversational style of free verse, but a few poems (the Eliot and Milton parodies in particular) opt for a more formal tone. The language throughout veers between 16th century Scots, 21st century Scots and standard English not only across poems but within individual pieces, stanzas and even lines. Some phrases and lines come directly from Knox or his contemporaries. Indeed, some of the pieces consist solely of such lines, which feels a bit like channel surfing on a short-wave radio into the past. One poem, "God and Revolution--Knox and Lenin's Lines to the Faithful" juxtaposes phrases from the two gentlmen named.

It all makes for a wonderfully distruptive linguistic texture. Easily readable for most Scots, I reckon, as Findlay is careful with his archaisms. And not unreflective of how many of us speak, aside from the 16th century rhetoric. If it's a speech-based poetic, it's a rich and complex one, capable of subtleties and textures a more resolutely street-based approach might miss.

This book could easily reach out to people who don't usually read poetry. Sure, they'd miss the smattering of literary jokes, but there's much else besides to admire and enjoy. It's also pretty essential reading, given how central to the nature of Scotland are the events, obsessions and figures it deals with.

Knox often gets the blame for just about everything that's identified as being wrong with the Scottish psyche, particularly the male version. Yes, Scotland has changed immeasurably since Knox (where hasn't?), but, every now and then, the disturbing sense arises that Knox's rhetoric is not as alien to today's Scottish society as it ought to be. Findlay simply lets that sense arise without making too much of it, which is part of the book's strength.

Nonetheless, don't think for a minute that Findlay's Knox is the soor ploom beloved of much Scottish social comment. Findlay is a Marxist, which gives him obvious respect for Knox the revolutionary. That's crucial to the success of his endeavour, because his Knox emerges as a far more complex character than the dour Calvinist we're usually subjected to. Neither traditional secular Knox-bashing, hardline Calvinist Knox-worship nor mainstream Protestant Knox-ambivalence could have yeilded the gloriously anarchic reading of Scottish history and society that this collection offers.

If the sequence has a significant weakness, it's that Findlay slips into summarising Reformation history too much. When he combines this with wit, comedy and surrealism--as he very often does--it's part of the pleasure. But, in the odd poem where those are lacking, the considerable virr and smeddum that characterise the sequence dissipate and we're left with rather thin brose. Findlay should have trusted his readers more and left out those pieces. More to the point, his editors should have cut them.

The question some might ask is whether this book will translate to a non-Scottish audience. It probably won't, which is a shame in that it could be a good one for introducing people to certain aspects of Scottish society and culture. It's not just a matter of language, because the work assumes a fair amount of background knowledge, as does all good, rooted poetry. But, on the other hand, we need to talk to and about ourselves as much as any nation. It's a crucial part of understanding ourselves, understanding where we've come from and where we're headed. Whether or not anybody else understands what we're saying, seldom has it been this much fun.

Dark Matters

I managed to scoot up to the Ingleby Gallery on Thursday to catch Alison Watt's installation "Dark Light" on its last day. Her shift from white canvases to black is logical: a further step in the stripping down that is represented by her progression from full-blown portraits to paintings of fabric to paintings of purely white fabric. White is a combination of all the colours of the spectrum, so a move to black marks a removal of that underlying richness.

Thursday was, of course, Maundy Thursday, one of the days on which it is traditional in some Christian demoninations to hold a tenebrae service, in which the light in the church is gradually extinguished--another stripping back to black. The churches in Linlithgow held a joint tenebrae service on Good Friday, but experiencing Watt's piece was a tenebrae for one: standing in the cube waiting for the paintings to emerge from the dimness was highly contemplative, not unlike waiting for God to emerge from the gloom of prayer. It put me in mind of the closing stanza of Henry Vaughan's poem "The Night":

There is in God (some say)
A deep, but dazzling darkness; As men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear;
O for that night! where I in him
Might live invisible and dim.

Ecce Choco

David Taylor at Diary of an Arts Pastor has a very good post on the stoushie about the

Oh Do Desist, Dear Boy

Not that I'm given to watching Sunday morning TV, but I happened to see the art historian Brian Sewell pontificating disdainfully about modern art in churches on BBC 1 this morning. I assume the item, which was part of the Heaven & Earth show, was a brief televisual extension of his BBC Radio 3 show for Christmas week, the rather pompously entitled "Divine Art", which I missed, at least partly by design.

Sewell maintained that "we must insist" on a "spiritual" quality to religious art. The latter term seemed to mean visual art associated directly with Christian worship, which seems a remarkably narrow conception in today's society. However, although the rallying cry might not seem particularly controversial at first sight, it is hopelessly vague. Sewell did not define the "spiritual quality", but as far as I could gather, it is something to do with a sense of mysticism (a term Sewell used), transendence or the ethereal. From his reaction to the Henry Moore piece he lambasted, it certainly seemed to rule out any strong physiciality.

This is one of the most irritating things about Sewell's approach. Christianity in its orthodox forms--and remember, all the pieces he considered were for Christian places of worship--is founded on the belief that God became human in Christ or, to express it slightly differently, that Christ was fully human as well as fully pine. Therefore, the physical is as essential to the faith as the spiritual and ought be as strong an element in Christian art as the spiritual. God's transendence and immanence must be held in tension, if not necessarily in any single artwork then at least across the totality of Christian art.

The other irritatant was that Sewell didn't have anything positive at all to say about the modern and contemporary art he examined, except the grudging acceptance that Moore had at least considered the architectural setting of his altar, unlike another artist he critiqued. Granted, some of his criticisms were justified, but if he had lifted his head above his prejudices and ventured north, he might have found something to shake his disdain in Alison Watt's wonderful, award-winning painting Still in Old St Pauls Episcopal Church in Edinburgh. In this piece, presence and absence, the physical and the spiritual, death and resurrection meet naturally and powerfully. Surely even Brian Sewell could not fail to be moved.

New Links Added

I've added a couple of new links to the "Faith" section:

• Foundation is an emerging church group in Bristol in which a friend of mine is heavily involved. The site has some basic information about the group and links to blogs by Foundation members, but consists mainly of intimations of events.

• Perhaps Virtual Theology is of wider interest. It's an online repository for pdfs and mp3s of theological talks that, I think, are run by Foundation. I confess I haven't yet investigated them, just discovered they're there, so I can't comment on the quality of the material.

Opening

Yesterday's opening of illuminate went well. Just about the right number of people came to make it feel busy without being crowded. The mulled wine, mince pies and lebkuchen went down a treat and everyone enjoyed the exhibts (some of the children who came particularly enjoyed standing in front of the video projector). Photographs were taken, so I'll have to see whether I can grab any of them to post here.

Switching on the Lights

We spent most of today setting up the illuminate exhibition I plugged in the previous post. Tiring work, but it's looking good. There are still a couple of things to install before tomorrow's opening, but I think everyone involved is very pleased with how it looks and hangs together.

illuminate

This Christmas exhibition will include three poems of mine presented as a triptych. Readers of Tonguefire will be familiar with two of them--"His Wading Light" and "A Voice is Heard in Ramah"--but the third, which is called "Down Darkness Wide", is new and takes a different view of the story.

Interestingly, although the word triptych is usually applied to paintings, the first sense given in The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is "A set of three writing-tablets hinged or tied together." So it seems I'm taking it back to an earlier usage.

illuminate will also include, among other pieces: a video installation, paintings, stained glass work, a hanging photo-montage, a shadowbox/calligraphy installation and a sound recording of some of Douglas Briton's poems. You can view the details of where and when by clicking on the poster to the left.

If you pop by, post a comment on the blog and let me know what you thought of the show.

Des Canyons aux Étoiles

I must attend more live music. No matter how good a recording, it simply can't compare to hearing the resonances shimmer away into the rafters of the concert hall. And shimmer they did last night in the hands of the pianist Benjamin Kobler, the horn player William Purvis and the NJO Summer Academy, under Reinbert de Leeuw's baton.

Des Canyons ... is an epic work: 12 movements of Messiaen's inimitable colour, birdsong, space and rhythmic invention. Its programme is a double journey: while travelling through the deserts, canyons and birdlife of Utah, the listener also traverses a spiritual desert, via fear and awe, on into the life of the resurrected in the celestial city. I, for one, came away from the performance bathed in what felt like it must be the ecstasy of the saints in glory.

Perhaps nowhere in the work is Messiaen's compositional style more tuned to that ecstasy than in the eighth movement "The resurrected and the song of the star Aldebaran" (the brightest star in Taurus, apprently). Messiaen has the knack of transporting the mind to a position in which it seems to be surveying the whole of creation, which he does in this movement superbly. The strings and woodwinds create a cosmic sense of space into which the piano, percussion and individual winds float glistening strands of birdsong to paint the rapturous souls of the resurrected.

There is a lot of piano solo, not least because there are two birdsong movements for the pianist alone. That's one of the joys of the piece for me, and the piano playing was powerful. However, the only movement for solo horn, "Interstellar call", was the high point of the solo work. William Purvis conveyed its structure and emotion beautifully, and his use of the piano as a sounding board at certain points added electrifying resonances beyond those of the hall's acoustic and beyond those to be heard on the recording in my growing Messiaen collection.

Vital Sparks: Olivier Messiaen

Tomorrow evening, I'm off to an Edinburgh International Festival performance of Olivier Messiaen's enormous orchestral piece Des Canyons aux Étoiles, so it seems appropriate to inaugurate a projected series of occasional blog entries on the writers, musicians and artists who most invigorate me with a few words about Messiaen. Over the past few years, I've grown more and more interested in his music. I've yet to undertake any serious reading about him and his work, but his orchestral and piano writing affects me deeply.

Messiaen was a man of strong Christian faith and profound artistic originality. The combination has, apparently, puzzled other avant-garde French composers, but it is essential to the intellectual and emotional content of his works. He can hold the full richness and complexity of faith in a few notes. It never ceases to amaze me how a single Messiaen chord can express so much: the now and the not-yet of trusting God, the simultaneity of joy and sorrow in the soul's present adoration of Christ and its ache for the perfection of heaven. His suite for two pianos Visions de l'Amen is particularly full of examples of this, as is his orchestral work, Éclairs sur l'Au-delà.

The musical colour of Messiaen's work is breathtaking. He was a synaesthete, seeing sounds as colours, and used this as a basis for his musical composition. Birdsong was another strong element in much of his work. I often wonder how his work looked to him. It would never be possible for me to experience what he experienced, but the palete is wonderful and stimulating nonetheless. I've only ever heard his music on CD or on the radio; tomorrow will be my first experience of it in concert. I can hardly wait.

Wee Picts and Mars Hill

Mars Hill, the blog of fellow Subway member Paul Burgin has a link to and post about Tonguefire. The main focus of Paul's blog is political, so I've linked to it under "less literary blogs".

Under "Theoblogical/Emergent", I've also added a link to Paul Thomson's wee beautiful pict blog. Paul's theological/ecclesiological musings are consistently stimulating, inspiring and challenging. And he knows heaps of interesting folk.