This post isn’t just for knitters. It’s for anyone who reads poetry—or prose. I’d love your help in sleuthing for knitting metaphors: in poetry especially, but wherever they happen to turn up. In my previous post, I mused on knitting as a way of meditating with poetry. Today I want to turn the tables and…

Knitting is my current obsession. I began learning just a year ago, after I won three classes at a silent auction for a community organization in my town. When I decided to bid for the knitting classes, I was thinking: yes, in my grandmotherly years, this is the perfect craft to teach my young granddaughters.…

In the May 6 issue of Christian Century, several people in the book business (writers, editors, professors) were asked what sort of book they’d like to see written. I was struck particularly by the comments of Lil Copan, who is senior editor at Paraclete Press. Lil said that what she craves is books that will…

Springtime seems appropriate for considering poems about the Garden. I mean the Garden, the biblical one. Adam and Eve’s encounters there continue to fascinate poets, right up to Richard Jones’s “Adam Praises Eve” in the current issue of Image (#57). In Jones’s poem, what Adam is praising Eve for is her physical loveliness. “She is…

Reading Rafael Campo’s new book of poems, The Enemy (Duke UP, 2007), makes me appreciate what intriguing religious poetry can come from someone outside of conventional religious practice. Campo grew up in the Catholic church and culture of his Cuban-American community, but — according to his memoir-essay in The Poetry of Healing — he left…

“Desperately Seeking Silence” is the title of an intriguing essay in the current issue of Cross Currents (Fall, 2007). The author, Brett Esaki, who identifies himself as a member of the Hip-hop generation, argues that the noise we hear in youth culture’s art forms is actually creating a meditative space of silence for those who…

Greg Wolfe’s editorial in Image issue 56 makes a convincing case for beauty, the stepchild in the classic trio of transcendentals: truth, beauty, and goodness. I’d like to throw into the conversation a lunchtime chat I had last summer at Image’s Glen Workshop — with sculptor Ginger Geyer, who was on the faculty that year. Ginger’s porcelain…

How does poetry speak for brokenness, for pained desire, for grief? A couple poems in the current issue of Image raise this question for me: B.H. Fairchild’s dramatic monologue, “Frieda Pushnik” and Robert Cording’s cycle “Four Prayers.” § Fairchild’s speaker is the “Armless, Legless Girl Wonder”—as her obituary in 2000 put it—who made her living…

“Here where the wind is always north-north-east And children learn to walk on frozen toes…” From “New England,” by Edwin Arlington Robinson Edwin Arlington Robinson grew up in Gardiner, Maine; I live a couple of blocks from his house, which still stands. Nothing much changes here. The brook that ran beside Robinson’s childhood bedroom now…

I’m always a few months behind in my magazine reading, so it was only recently at breakfast that I opened the December 7, 2007 issue of The New York Review of Books to Edward Mendelson’s review-essay, “Auden and God.” Mendelson, who is Auden’s literary executor, reviews Arthur Kirsch’s Auden and Christianity (Yale U.P.) — praising…