More on: G.C. Waldrep

Is it possible / that your experience / is a form of joy? / Or a word for joy, / in an unspeakable / tongue.

It is one thing to write an inspirational poem about the raising of Lazarus, from this great distance in time and space, and another to be Lazarus: to be the one who is raised. I think any genuine religious art leads the reader (and presumably the writer) to a place of encounter, an encounter with radical otherness.

There is a moment prayer occurs to the conscious mind, or rather the absence of prayer in the moment of need hitherto. Experience names the vacuum it has been seized by, only the mouth— the physical fact of the mouth, sensuous, capable of beauty or deceit— can’t form the words the ventral thalamus is telegraphing.…