{"id":118,"date":"2013-09-29T20:40:41","date_gmt":"2013-09-30T00:40:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=118"},"modified":"2013-09-29T20:40:41","modified_gmt":"2013-09-30T00:40:41","slug":"review-of-a-god-in-the-house-poets-talk-about-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/?p=118","title":{"rendered":"Review of A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"God<\/a><\/p>\n

Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler, eds. A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith. <\/i>Tupelo Press, 2012. 291 pgs. $19.95<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Lynn Domina<\/p>\n

A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith <\/i>collects nineteen pieces in addition to the editors\u2019 introduction; the approach both to topic and to format is unique. Contributing poets include those we might expect to hear from on matters of faith (Alicia Ostriker, Christian Wiman) as well as those whose work might first come to mind in other contexts (Carolyn Forch\u00e9); they include well-known poets who have been publishing for decades (Gerald Stern, Grace Paley) and also younger poets closer to the beginning of their careers (Jericho Brown); and they include poets whose spiritual practices range from Christian (Marilyn Nelson) to Muslim (Kazim Ali) to Buddhist (Jane Hirschfield) to Pagan (Annie Finch). Each of the pieces originated as an interview by the editors, but because the editors have chosen not to include the actual questions, the pieces read like hybrids between interview and informal essay. This choice serves the collection well; straightforward interviews can become stilted on the page, and readers are often more interested in the answers than in the questions, for poets and other writers generally manage to say what they want to say regardless of the particular questions they\u2019re asked. I found each contribution engaging, and I found something to ponder in each one, whether or not the contributor\u2019s poetic or spiritual practice resembles my own. I was most pleased to see that each poet\u2019s contribution concludes with a poem, often prompting me to pull one of their books from the shelf or to seek out their recent work.<\/p>\n

Each piece begins with a quotation from the interview serving as an epigraph. One of the most intriguing comes from Kazim Ali: \u201cPrayer is a form of panic, because in prayer you don\u2019t really think you\u2019re going to be answered.\u201d Perhaps our poems become articulated answers to those prayers, the words we can hear once our panic subsides. Writing sometimes feels like that to me, a rhythmic breath settled into the heart of chaos\u2014but that\u2019s my experience, not one I want to imply is common to the poets included in A God in the House. <\/i>Though maybe some would agree.<\/p>\n

Ali\u2019s contribution, \u201cDoubt and Seeing\u201d describes an experience shared by many writers I suspect, that of rethinking one\u2019s aesthetic identity once readers begin to respond to one\u2019s work. \u201cTo call oneself a spiritual or religious poet seems strange to me,\u201d he says, \u201cbut once my first book came out, and I started doing readings, people would say to me, \u2018You\u2019re a religious poet.\u2019 I decided to consciously explore the topic more in my second book, but I never planned to be a religious poet\u201d (33). He suggests that his next book will be less overtly religious, but it\u2019s hard to imagine that it won\u2019t be at all religious. Of course, \u201creligious poet\u201d isn\u2019t all <\/i>that Ali is; it isn\u2019t the entire identity of any of the contributors, but each contributor does seem to be consciously\u2014maybe even intentionally\u2014aware of the spiritual components of his or her being.<\/p>\n

Several of the contributions foreground autobiographical experience. Occasionally this material will be known to readers who\u2019ve already been immersed in the poet\u2019s work, but often the material is more personal, more intimately honest than we will find in other sources. In \u201cNot a Butler to the Soul,\u201d G.C. Waldrep describes his experience with mainstream Protestant denominations as well as with Mennonites and Amish communities. His exterior life changed, almost against his will it seems, as his interior life shifted: \u00a0\u201cone does not invite the Holy Spirit into one\u2019s life and expect it to operate on one\u2019s own terms\u2026I gradually, quietly started making the cultural changes I had long dreaded, not because I wanted to, but because I couldn\u2019t bear any longer not <\/i>to make them\u201d (187). Because it\u2019s virtually impossible to separate one\u2019s artistic vocation from one\u2019s spiritual life, Waldrep experiences the two as conjoined but not identical: \u201cThe question I more often ask myself is not about the relationship between faith and poetry, but rather the relationship between prayer and poetry. They\u2019re not the same\u2026though there is some intrinsic relationship. Sometimes I speculate the two are like adjacent apartments in the same building: when you\u2019re in one, you have no direct access to the other, but if you listen closely you can hear sounds\u2014sometimes muffled, sometimes sharp\u2014coming from the other side of the connecting wall\u201d (181). His metaphor feels accurate to me, and much more satisfying than the frequent claim that poetry is prayer or that writing is praying, even if writing is for many of us a spiritual practice.<\/p>\n

Eleanor Wilner, however, comes closer to describing poetry as prayer in \u201cNatives of the Earth,\u201d though what she actually says is that the act of writing poetry shares certain characteristics with the act of praying: \u201cinsofar as the poet must relinquish a certain kind of control, and attain a kind of self-forgetfulness; must, as the ancients had it, call in the Goddess, the Muse, the power of the imagination\u2014that which must be invited and cannot be commanded\u2014in that sense, in which prayer involves a humbling and earnest entreaty for vision, and a creative deepening of perception toward a kind of ease of being, then okay, the difference begins to fade\u201d (223). The difference fades, as differences can fade between reading and thinking, between writing and being. Yet fading is not vanishing.<\/p>\n

I would like to pursue conversations with each of these contributors. I would like to ask more questions. I would like to quote more of their remarks here. The trouble with commentary is that even in the near infinite space of the virtual world, one must eventually stop talking. I want to go on, but more, I want to return to the poems of these contributors. A God in the House <\/i>is, ultimately, a book about community, one I am grateful to be among.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ilya Kaminsky and Katherine Towler, eds. A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith. Tupelo Press, 2012. 291 pgs. $19.95 Reviewed by Lynn Domina A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith collects nineteen pieces in addition to the editors\u2019 introduction; the approach both to topic and to format is unique. Contributing poets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9,10,8],"class_list":["post-118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-areviewaweek","tag-essays","tag-faith","tag-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":120,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions\/120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lynndomina.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}