Poet Marie Howe

Issue #165 | March 4, 2009

Features
Artist of the Month: Richard Michelson
Image’s 2009 Shaw Fellow: Joanna Vance
Sixth Annual Denise Levertov Award Goes to Eugene Peterson
The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe
The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard by Erin McGraw

Gallery Watch
The Artist and the Bible at John Knox Presbyterian Church

Message Board
The Art of Lent
L.A. Film Studies Center Application Deadline
Weekend Symposium with the New York C.S. Lewis Society

ImageNews
Image Readings: Leslie Leyland Fields
Application Deadline for the Milton Center Fellowship
Scholarships to the Glen Workshop
The 2009 Florence Seminar
Subscribe to Image in Print

Features

Artist of the Month: Richard Michelson

Richard Michelson is one of those rare writers who not only understands that comedy and tragedy are close neighbors but also enables you to feel that mysterious juxtaposition. Take his poem from the 20th Anniversary issue of Image, “Another Holocaust Poem.” As he sits writing a poem, Michelson is reflecting on his childhood and family life in Brooklyn, the horrors of the Holocaust, and the anti-Semitism of poets who ought to be among his heroes--Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot--when his son knocks on the door to ask for some pocket money. “Are you writing another Holocaust poem?” the boy asks. And of course the answer has to be yes: what poem by a contemporary Jewish writer can evade the shadow of that event? The problem is that at this distance it can be nearly impossible to find the right stance from which to address the horror and absurdity of it. Comedy and tragedy meet in the absurd, as Michelson’s beloved Kafka knew so well. So the poet sits at his desk, flanked by “the Angel of Death and the Angel of Forgetfulness, / those vaudeville comics,” striving to remain human in front of terrifying mysteries. The beauty of Michelson’s writing--whether it is in poetry or in his many award-winning children’s books--is that he always finds the human note, however paradoxical or ambivalent that note might be. While he is too honest to offer us cheap grace, Michelson does seem to find glimpses of a transcendent order in the midst of our world--a place where comedy and tragedy do not merge into one another but instead dance a pas de deux of appalling beauty.

Click here for more.

Image’s 2009 Shaw Fellow: Joanna Vance

We’re thrilled to announce Joanna Vance as our Luci Shaw Fellow for the summer of 2009. Joanna Vance, originally from central Pennsylvania, is a student at Houghton College in New York, majoring in both Writing and Humanities. She began to love artistic expression at the ripe age of three, scribbling with black crayons in an attempt to “write” a story. While none of her words made sense then, she's been writing ever since--and reading. She could legitimately claim that more than half of her childhood physical education program was made up of the weightlifting of library books. While at Houghton, she's taken part in a number of enlightening educational opportunities, including being a member of the First Year Honors Program which took her to the Balkans, as well as working on the Lanthorn, Houghton's student literary magazine, as a staff member. She's thrilled to be the 2009 Shaw Fellow and can't wait to join the Image staff in Seattle and Santa Fe, where she hopes to take part in B.H. Fairchild's poetry workshop and be of good service to all workshop attendees.

Click here for more on the fellowhship.

Sixth Annual Denise Levertov Award Goes to Eugene Peterson

For Marie Howe, the "kingdom of ordinary time" is located where miracles cease, where “the woman who had been healed grew tired of telling her story, / and sometimes asked her daughter to tell it.” Howe’s delight in chronicling glimpses of the sacred in our ordinary world is tempered by an awareness that even mystics have to come out of their ecstatic trances eventually. There are moments in these poems when ordinary time can seem utterly pedestrian. It can be hard, for example, to sense the possibility of transcendence in a poem like “Non-Violence 2” that begins: “My daughter doesn’t like the fly that keeps bugging her / as she eats her Cheerios this morning.” At the same time, it’s a relief to read poems that acknowledge the existence of something as plain as Cheerios. Howe is not one of those poets who seem to subsist only on pomegranates and wine. These poems are at their best when Howe allows the ancient, musical verse of scripture and liturgy to brush up against everyday language. The “Poems from the Life of Mary” that anchor the book are gorgeous examples of this connection. In these poems, the Annunciation becomes the central meeting place for the sacred and the mundane. Howe’s Mary tells us she was “only able to endure it by being no one and so / specifically myself I thought I’d die / from being loved like that.” And in these lines we are able to sense Mary’s relief that after sacred time is over, we are held and loved in the realm of ordinary time as well.

Click here to buy the book.

The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard by Erin McGraw

Erin McGraw’s recent novel, The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard, captures the rushing, bewildering newness of Los Angeles at the dawn of the last century, a city populated by people who have left the past behind and where identity is up for grabs--if a person has enough desire, ruthlessness, and grit, that is. Nell Plat of Mercer County, Kansas, is loosely based on the author’s grandmother, who abandoned her young family without a word to remake herself in the West. The Kansas sod house that irascible Nell shares with her husband and tight-lipped in-laws is cramped and stifling with old grudges. (McGraw’s portrait of plains life is a sort of anti-Gilead.) This unforgiving home, combined with Nell’s restless nature and her extraordinary talent for sewing, propel her to L.A. by train. Never the maternal type, she leaves her two young daughters behind without looking back. There she remakes herself as Madame Annelle, “modiste” to the newly wealthy ladies of turn-of-the-century Glendale. As she climbs through the strata of L.A. society, we see the young city through her eyes: from disreputable downtown rooming houses to the department stores and drawing rooms of Pasadena to the oasis of Santa Monica, and eventually the grail of the movie industry itself. There is great pleasure in reading a portrait of L.A. in its mad, gay youth: the giddy slang, the lure of stardom, the craze for rosy, hare-brained investment schemes, the promise and threat of dramatic social mobility, the rush of those who have made it to establish barriers and keep others out--and the long-buried past that naturally refuses to stay buried forever. But this novel is more than a period piece: the restlessness of Nell Plat, and of California, are now indelibly part of the culture of our entire nation, and her uneasy reconciliation with what she’s left behind offers a discomfiting national parable.

Click here to buy the book.

Gallery Watch

The Artist and the Bible at John Knox Presbyterian Church

Last Supper by Jacques Richard Sassandra

The Artist and the Bible is an exhibition of fifty-six original works on paper of twentieth century Biblical themes currently on display at John Knox Presbyterian Church in Normandy Park, WA. Representing a cross section of cultures and styles, the exhibit features works by such well-known artists as Marc Chagall, Georges Rouault, Karl Caspar, Kaethe Kollwitz and Sado Watanabe. Edward Knipper, a painter who has been a leading figure in the contemporary Christian art movement, and his wife began the collection over thirty years ago. The exhibit includes drawings, paintings and various fine art printing techniques such as woodcut, lithograph and intaglio. Interpretations of Old and New Testament subjects, such as Adam and Eve, Sarah and the angel, the Last Supper, Noah's ark and Christ carrying the cross, are included. "While we have wide-ranging tastes and interest, over the years we have particularly focused on Biblical or Christian imagery. When possible, I have purchased works from the art movements and artists that have most influenced me," said Knippers, who calls Rouault "one of my heroes in the faith." On Friday, March 20 at 7:00 p.m. there will be an opening reception. Laurel Gasque, sessional lecturer at Regent College, will be delivering a lecture on the collection and will be sharing about what it means for patronage to be an "act of faith". This exhibit is open now until April 12, 2009.

For more information contact Brian Moss at bmoss@jkpcusa.org.

Message Board

If you have information other ImageUpdate readers might find interesting, share it here! Do you have a question that you hope a member of the ImageUpdate community might have the answer to? Ask it here. Have your messages posted by sending an e-mail to gwolfe@spu.edu.

During Lent, the Oratory Church of St Boniface (in Brooklyn) is privileged to exhibit the works of the distinguished Catholic artist and Oratory parishioner Alfonse Borysewicz. The paintings on exhibit for Lent are a continuance of Borysewicz's work for the Oratory since the early 1990's (he has completed two side chapels and a processional cross, as well as paintings for the residence chapel). The Lenten paintings will cover the stained glass windows for the solemn 40 day period of Lent. These paintings, with their austerity of near abstraction, reverence the icons of Christian antiquity. With a modern hand Borysewicz gives pictorial voice to the Catholic heritage. Alfonse Borysewicz will also deliver the Brooklyn Oratory’s 2009 Baronius Lecture on March 22 at 4:00 p.m., entitled “Art and Faith: Can You Be a Contemporary Artist and a Practicing Catholic?” The lecture will be followed by a reception and a tour of the paintings. Click here for more information.

L.A. Film Studies Center Application Deadline: April 1, 2009

Founded in 1991, the Los Angeles Film Studies Center is designed to train students to serve in various aspects of the film industry with both professional skill and Christian integrity. Each semester, students live, learn, and work in L.A. Located in one of the primary film and television production centers in L.A. and utilizing state of the art camera and editing equipment, LAFSC is designed to integrate a Christian world view with an introductory exploration of the work and workings of mainstream Hollywood entertainment. The deadline to apply for the Fall 2009 semester is April 1, 2009. For more information, click here.

Weekend Symposium with the New York C.S. Lewis Society

From August 7-9, 2009, The Immaculate Conception Center in Douglaston, New York (near LaGuardia and an hour from Manhattan) will proudly host All Things Considered to commemorate the society’s 40th anniversary. Speakers include author Dr. James Como, Fordham's Rev. Joseph Koterski, S.J., Wheaton's Dr. Christopher Mitchell, and Ave Maria University's Joseph Pearce. Pricing varies from single-day event options ($40-75) to three-day full room and board accommodations ($325). Deposits are due June 1 with balance due July 15. For more information, please email Csarrocco@aol.com or visit the New York C.S. Lewis Society's website here.

ImageNews -- The Scoop on Our Programs

Image Readings: Leslie Leyland Fields

When you read Leslie Leyland Fields' creative nonfiction or poetry, the experience is not unlike being in a skiff: you lean in to the language, landing metaphors that have the same freshness and invigorating shock of the big fish in cold water. Leslie teaches in Seattle Pacific University's MFA program in Creative Writing and is this month’s featured author on Image Readings.

Click here to listen.

Scholarships to the Glen Workshop

Thought about attending the Glen Workshop? Cursed the economic fate that prevented you from going? Every year our generous donors help give a leg-up to Glen Workshop participants. This year, we have scholarships to offer writers, artists, and songwriters thanks to such generous donors as singer-songwriter Kate Campbell, Chrysostom, The Master's Artist, and City in Focus of Vancouver B.C., which is offering a scholarship to a Canadian attendee. Special Note: Because workshops are filling fast, we've tweaked our scholarship policy. You do not need to send a $100 deposit to apply for a scholarship. You may apply to any class, even if it's closed for registration (see the course descriptions page). We've reserved a limited number of spaces in each class and some housing (triple and double dorm rooms) for scholarship winners, and will do our best to give recipients their first choices. However, if you wish to guarantee a spot in a workshop even if you do not win a scholarship, you must register for an available workshop and pay the $100 deposit.

The final deadline for applications is March 15, and all applicants will be notified by April 1. For more details, go to the Glen Scholarships page. See you in Santa Fe!

The 2009 Florence Seminar
What a Thing is Man? The Christian Humanism of Michelangelo  

On September 13-20, 2009, Image will gather a small group of inquirers in Florence and Rome to explore the life and achievements of the sculptor, painter, architect, and poet, Michelangelo Buonarroti. In his works we see the dignity of humanity and its fall, the emergence of the individual and the dangers of individualism, and a fierce struggle to harmonize beauty with goodness and truth. Yet for all the conflict and tension in his work, Michelangelo left us with exquisite images of how God's grace can transform human experience. In Image's twentieth anniversary year, we'll return to Italy to explore how Michelangelo's incarnational vision can inform our own efforts to continue bringing about cultural transformation in our time. Our week together in Italy will begin with a couple days in Rome, where we will visit the Vatican and other sites associated with Michelangelo. The remainder of the week will be spent in Florence, where we will visit the great churches and museums featuring the artist and enjoy exquisite meals at restaurants in the city and the surrounding area. If you're interested, visit the Florence Seminar page or contact Julie Mullins here to request a PDF or hard copy of the brochure.

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