Image Update: Issue #148

Image Readings Featured Poet Scott Cairns

Features

Hear Poets Read at ImageJournal.org
So Brave, Young, and Handsome by Leif Enger
T Bone Burnett: Tooth of Crime
Practice by Dan Bellm
Love You to Pieces, edited by Suzanne Kamata

Message Board

His Gifts and Presence New England Arts Festival
Sacred Dance Guild Golden Jubilee Festival
Arts Alive Nashville 08: Arts in Ministry & Mission Conference

ImageNews

The 2008 Florence Seminar
Subscribe to Image in Print

Features

Hear Poets Read at ImageJournal.org

Though at Image we spend most of our time editing a print journal, we know that poetry is meant to be read aloud. So we’re pleased to be able to use the internet to revive the oral tradition. This month we’re launching a new web feature, Image Readings. Each month we’ll bring you streaming recordings of some of our favorite poets from the pages of Image reading their work aloud. You’ll hear from Jeanne Murray Walker, Daniel Tobin, Jeanine Hathaway, Rodger Kamenetz, and more. This month, our debut poet is the inimitable Scott Cairns. You may be familiar with his work from our print pages, but if you’ve yet to hear him read, you’ve only had half the experience. Recorded at the Glen Workshop in Santa Fe in August of 2007, Scott reads “As We See,” “Reunion,” and an excerpt from his new book about his spiritual pilgrimage to Mount Athos in Greece, Short Trip to the Edge.

Click here to listen.

So Brave, Young, and Handsome by Leif Enger

Leif Enger's So Brave, Young, and Handsome

Leif Enger, author of the wildly popular Peace Like a River (2001), has recently published his take on the classic Western tale. So Brave, Young, and Handsome is complete with cowboys, train robbers, whiskey, and even the “tang of gunpowder.” But our hero is not the young cowboy referenced in the book’s title. This is the story of an ordinary man: husband, father, and washed-up novelist Monte Becket of Minnesota. Determined to write a follow-up to his popular 1910 adventure novel, Monte has dutifully penned a thousand words a day for five years--to no avail. Then one day he befriends Glendon, an impish man who lives alone in a barn downriver and spends his days building beautiful boats. Threatened daily by the prospect of failure, and enchanted by Glendon’s mysterious joie de vivre, Monte follows a whim--and his wife’s intuition--and boards a train to Mexico with Glendon, who is off to seek forgiveness from the wife he deserted years ago. Monte is motivated by a vague yearning for adventure, and perhaps by the promise of escaping mediocrity--and he is not disappointed. The trip turns into something of an odyssey, with adventures to rival any tale Monte could have concocted from the farmhouse porch where he spent his mornings writing. The characters propel the story forward, starting with Glendon, whose craving for redemption is a fierce match to his dark past--at one point, he even coerces Monte into giving him a river baptism. Their other companions along the way include Hood Roberts, a boy they meet in a town called Revival. With a hankering for adventure and romance, Hood possesses a youthful ambition that soon gets him into trouble beyond all reckoning. But perhaps most interesting and complex is the character of Charles Siringo, an aging, relentless, ex-Pinkerton detective whose life’s work has taken him in pursuit of the most notorious outlaws, including one reformed train robber, Glendon Hale. A slave to his ambition, Siringo is bent on putting his last conquest behind bars before he dies. He is a figure who demands our admiration and also one who unsettles us--which makes him the perfect villain. Without softening the edges or smoothing the grit, Enger manages to humanize even his most despicable characters, giving us a sense that they're just a river or a train ride away from redemption themselves. This posture toward Siringo is made possible through the candid and generous voice that narrates the story: it is Monte’s voice, the skillful, observant, and precise voice of someone who has spent a lot of time with words, and yet a voice humbled by his own failures and tempered by a wide, encompassing love.

Click here to buy the book.

T Bone Burnett: Tooth of Crime

Fresh off producing Raising Sand, the celebrated collaboration between Allison Krauss and Robert Plant, T Bone Burnett has just released his most recent solo effort, Tooth of Crime. Both otherworldly and immediate, the album’s origins stretch back to 1996 when the songs--in partial form--first appeared as the soundtrack to a staging of Sam Shepard’s play of the same name. Shepard’s Tooth of Crime (1972), an unconventional musical fantasy, is a “tale about an aging rock star surviving in a spiritually bankrupt world where entertainment and warfare go hand in hand.” Of the play, The New York Times wrote: “A fascinating, even brilliant work. It is bracingly insightful on the ephemerality and corrupting powers of stardom.” With the help of Sam Phillips, Marc Ribot, and Jim Keltner, Burnett creates a soundscape equivalent to Shepard’s desolate text. “These songs came together like a broken mirror,” Burnett says, “and you get a bunch of shards and start putting them together and create a lot of different angles. That’s this group of songs, this process.” Like shards of glass, then, the songs draw blood: “People tell me I look like hell / Well I am hell” begins the opening track, “Anything I Say Can and Will Be Used Against You.” Sam Phillips’s sultry vocals join the mix on “Dope Island”: “We lived outside the law / We struck with wild desire / We blinded all we saw / We made the sun our fire.” After a searing montage of sounds and forsaken locales--from the Beatle-esque “Kill Zone” to the Dylan-like “Here Come the Philistines”--the album ends with “Sweet Lullaby,” written by Burnett and Shepard: “Time is quit / Look it in the eye / In blood we sit / In dark we die / Don’t blink now / Sweet lullaby.” If the music and lyrics of Tooth of Crime seem bleak it’s because they are--they’re the broken pieces of a world in which faith in God is almost extinguished. In many ways it’s a world not so far removed from our own, one in which humanity has nearly stopped imaging a Creator by reflecting merely the self. Shepard’s play has been called prophetic, and that might be said of Burnett’s soundtrack as well. Whatever the final verdict, it seems an important album, a warning regarding where things are, where they might be headed.

For more information, click here.

Practice by Dan Bellm

The devotion to midrash in Jewish tradition--taking the ancient texts of the Hebrew bible and letting the imagination fill in their bare bones--is a way of awakening people to the live current that runs through the oldest stories and into their own hearts and minds. Practice, Dan Bellm's third book of poems, takes as its starting point the Jewish ritual of studying weekly portions of the Torah in an annual cycle. A practicing Jew, Bellm plays on his midrashic heritage to explore the strange, deep time of creation, and the first moments when God broke across the awareness of a desert people to call them to himself and into another, deeper kind of wilderness. Selecting specific passages from scripture for each poem, he lovingly re-imagines the ancient narratives, breathing into them the mystery of the here and now. In "The Voice in the Fire," the speaker has fled like Moses to "the desert place, the sorrow / place. For what I have done. For surely the matter is known." But "the heart is not consumed" by regret and shame, and out of its living fire comes the strong, clear voice: "vagrant one, it is your call, the knowing / to turn and answer, Wilderness of God, / hard mountain, I am here." Blessing comes without warning in these poems, as warm as a laying on of hands, or as a kind of ripping exposure and vulnerability, like the hatch thrown wide to flood the ark with light after the rain, "a torn place in my sky, an opening in the crown of my head" left as an "open spot" of pain. It is the anguish of the troubled world that is the vessel of grace. Bellm watches lovers hold each other, one sliding into death. He encounters the ambiguities of faith and rejection spurred by his identity as a gay man, riffs on the torrent of war and violence in the book of Numbers, and holds his mother's hand as her mind slips away. Perhaps this is the greatest fear for a people of the book, devoted to remembering the stories of deliverance and covenant--to come to the empty place of infirmity where "no more remembrance is allowed." Yet somehow, alongside the forgetting, Bellm recalls us to the promise that even should the Ark of the Covenant collapse and the tablets of the law shatter, "you will carry me in your minds / in your mouths-- / unbearable as you want, You can bear it."

Buy the book here.

Love You to Pieces, edited by Suzanne Kamata

When Suzanne Kamata, a westerner and self-described introvert, fell in love with and married a Japanese man while teaching English in Japan eighteen years ago, she expected she’d adjust well to that country’s model of marriage, where the husband spends most of his time away from home, working long hours and going out with coworkers afterward. A reader and writer, Kamata wasn’t worried about having lots of time to herself. When one of the couple’s twin daughters turned out to be deaf, with cerebral palsy, Kamata naturally turned to literature to make sense of the experience. After all, great literary writing can offer hope and inspiration in all sorts of trials without whitewashing the struggle or grief--and a parent getting her bearings on such a challenge naturally wants stories that tell her she’s not alone. Though there was literature available, Kamata didn’t exactly find what she was looking for: nuanced, particular, literary writing that left room for the pain, frustration, and ambiguity inherent in the experience. She began to collect literary writing from and about parents whose daily task is caring for these children. The result is Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs, an anthology of essays, fiction, and poetry organized chronologically, from birth through school, adolescence, young adulthood, and the arrival of grandchildren. While many of the writers and protagonists are inspiring figures, Kamata points out in the introduction that they’re not all angels. Parenting these kids may be a kind of calling, work with potential to elevate all parties involved--but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to pull it off. In these essays and stories, parents get frustrated with their kids’ limitations. They feel despair, anger, impatience, and dread. Marriages undergo terrific strain. In one story, a mother strikes her child. The anthology includes work from Image contributors Bret Lott and Maggie Kast. Some of the work mentions God and some doesn’t, but all the essays are charged with a spiritual and moral significance. (Incidentally, one of the book’s best models for integrating adults with special needs into a community is the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh.) Disability offers a test of our culture, our families, ourselves: How much are we able to give of ourselves, and for how long? Where do we turn when the strain seems like too much to bear? What allows us to see the mysterious value in others that makes this work necessary and worthwhile, even when it’s at its most repetitive and least glamorous? Even for readers who are not parenting one of the 8 million babies born worldwide each year with genetic birth defects, this anthology offers something profound. The stories and poems collected here demonstrate vividly that it’s in caring for others that we discover our truest humanity.

Click here to buy the book.

Message Board

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His Gifts and Presence New England Arts Festival

Join us for the international, interdenominational, His Gifts and Presence New England Arts Festival, June 28, 2008, 3-9 p.m. at Windham High School Performing Arts Center in Windham, Maine. Stephanie Powell, formerly of Alvin Ailey, will be performing at the festival and teaching a community dance workshop on June 27 for the fifth year in a row. Four time Grammy nominated Dove award winner and author Margaret Becker, artists from Australia and Russia, and Emile Ibrahim, a photographer and the head of Arts for Christ from Cairo, Egypt, are joining us for this year’s event. Also joining us are Selah Warriors of Praise, Johannah Mackin from TN, Parousia Music from OR, musician Meme Stephens from NH, photographer Lauren Kleist from PA, stained glass artist Ana Corral from NC, international speaker/painter Barbara Bagshaw, Maine's Poet Laureate, Betsy Sholl, and many more!

Tickets are $15 at the door, $12 in advance, or $10 for groups of 10 or more in advance. For more, click here here.

Sacred Dance Guild Golden Jubilee Festival

Celebrate our 50th anniversary and join the Sacred Dance Guild for its 2008 festival, "Moving Mysteries,” July 20-25, 2008 at Connecticut College in New London, CT. Dancers of all ages, abilities, and faiths are welcome and full, day, and event registrations are available. Founded in 1958, the Sacred Dance Guild is an international, multicultural, interfaith, non-profit organization which, through a full spectrum of activities and information, enriches the lives of its members of all ages, backgrounds and abilities.

For more information about the festival, click here.

Arts Alive Nashville 08: Arts in Ministry & Mission Conference

Two more presenters have been added to our stellar list of Arts-Ministry Specialists for the Arts Alive Nashville 08: Arts in Ministry & Mission Conference: Makoto Fujimura and Kirk Whalum. After 20 years as a successful artist in Japan and the U.S., Makoto Fujimura has become a voice of bi-cultural authority on the nature and cultural assessment of beauty, by both creating it and exploring its forms. Saxophonist Kirk Whalum has released 19 albums and received numerous awards and acknowledgements for his musical excellence including seven Grammy nominations, and is the winner of two Stellar awards for The Gospel According to Jazz, Chapter II. He is presently on Rendezvous Records and has just released the chart-climbing CD, Roundtrip. He is currently working on The Gospel According to Jazz, Chapter III.

The Arts Alive Conference takes place August 14 and 15 at the Scarritt-Bennett Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Click here for more information.

ImageNews – The Scoop on Our Programs

The 2008 Florence Seminar

On September 14 -21, 2008, Image will gather a small group of inquirers in Florence, Italy, to explore what has been called "the first Renaissance," a remarkable moment in the cultural history of the West. Together we will investigate the ways in which three great late-medieval figures--Dante Alighieri, Giotto, and Saint Francis of Assisi--renewed the culture of Europe and left a legacy of Christian Humanism that continues to nourish and inspire. And we will ask how their vision of art and faith can speak to the work of cultural transformation in our time. The seminar includes visits to the great churches and museums of Florence, lectures by some of the world's leading authorities on the Renaissance, a field trip to Assisi where we will encounter the living spirit of St. Francis, wonderful meals, and time to enjoy each others' company. If you're interested, visit the Florence Seminar page, download the Florence Brochure PDF for more info, or contact Julie Mullins here.

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If you like reading about great new art and writing inspired by faith in ImageUpdate, and you're ready to get down to reading and seeing the stuff itself, it's time to subscribe to Image. Each quarter our editors comb the world of art and letters to bring you our favorite new work--work that respects transcendent mystery as well as the gritty truth of the material world that bears the divine imprint. A one-year subscription gets you four beautifully produced issues delivered right to your door. Ninety percent of the journal's content is not available on our website, but only through what we call "the sacrament of print." Click here to get the magazine Terry Tempest Williams calls "evocative and inspiring" and Bret Lott calls "the most meaningful literary journal being produced today."

ImageUpdate

Publisher: Gregory Wolfe
Managing Editor: Beth Bevis
Layout: David Rither
Contributors: Beth Bevis, Mary Kenagy, Matt Malyon, and Julie Mullins

ImageUpdate is the biweekly e-mail newsletter from Image, a quarterly print journal that explores the relationship between Judeo-Christian faith and art through contemporary fiction, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, film, music, and dance. Each issue also features interviews, memoirs, essays, and reviews.

ImageUpdate brings you news about books, CDs, organizations, websites, conferences, exhibitions, and tours--all of which inhabit the intersection between faith and imagination. ImageUpdate will also notify you whenever a new issue of Image is printed, an Image event is upcoming, or new content is posted to our website.