Category: Poetry

Food from the “garbage pail”

Thank goodness, the NFL has spared us anything nasty at Superbowl halftime, like Janet Jackson’s nipple.

Instead we had that nice, clean-shaven young man, Bruno Mars, with wholesome lyrics like … oh. I hadn’t noticed.

Never had much faith in love or miracles
Ooh!
Never wanna put my heart on the line
Ooh!
But swimming in your water is something spiritual
Ooh!
I’m born again every time you spend the night
Ooh!

‘Cause your sex takes me to paradise
Yeah, your sex takes me to paradise
And it shows, yeah, yeah, yeah

Gee, thanks for nothing, NFL.

Truth be told, I don’t follow pop music – not even to tut-tut about it. (H/T or Tut-Tut credit to Fr. Josiah Trenham) I don’t follow the spectacle of sport (unless Purdue men are winning at basketball this year). I don’t watch much commercial TV.

I wish I could say it was because of high principle, like refusing to let my eyes and ears and soul be sold to manufacturers intent on multiplying sovereign desire. Alas, it’s because I find it boring, and generally feel a twinge of Calvinist guilt that I’ll never see those 30 or 60 minutes again, and have nothing to show for them beyond an odd urge for a Whopper or a trip to the Mall.

All that, plus sometimes, like if I’d seen those lyrics on close captioning, I feel rage, or the need to shower off the slime. “Like looking for food in a garbage pail when there’s so much wholesome food around you already,” a wise father said to his son, who solemnly, mendaciously, insisted “I read Playboy for the articles” some 45 years ago.

So I overlooked Leonard Cohen for, well, decades until I stumbled onto him within the last ten or so years. If I heard the name at all, I took him for just another occupant of the pop music garbage pail, with no reason to think he was even a cut above, let alone near-genius.

Harpers has extracted a tasty Leonard Cohen bit from the archives not of pop music, but of poetry: Pico Iyer writes about Leonard Cohen’s performance at 92Y in New York City on February 14, 1966. It’s accompanied by 52:34 of streaming audio.

Pico Iyer’s an artist in his own right. So, if you hadn’t yet noticed (as I hadn’t), is Leonard Cohen. Enjoy the brief essay and the audio stream. Yes, it’s 52:34 you’ll never see again, but unless you think poetry is always and everywhere a waste of time, it’s worth it.

But beware. Adolescent boys might enjoy it for the wrong reasons: it’s got nipples.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

A Very Unsentimental Christmas Poem

This little Babe so few days old, is come to rifle Satan’s fold;
All hell doth at His presence quake, though He Himself with cold do shake;
For in this weak unarmed wise the gates of hell He will surprise.

With tears He fights and wins the field, His naked breast stands for a shield;
His battering shot are babyish cries, His arrows looks of weeping eyes,
His martial ensigns Cold and Need, and feeble flesh His warrior’s steed.

His camp is pitched in a stall, His bulwark but a broken wall;
The crib His trench, haystacks His stakes; of shepherds He His muster makes;
And thus, as sure His foe to wound, the angels’ trumps alarum sound.

My soul, with Christ, join thou in fight; stick to the tents that He hath pight.
Within His crib is surest ward; this little Babe will be thy guard.
If thou wilt foil they foes with joy, then flit not from this heavenly Boy.

Robert Southwell, 16th Century. Benjamin Britten brilliantly set this to properly martial music.

This is the Babe a few decades later, Christ Pantocrator (the All-Conquering):

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Saturday: 72nd Anniversary of Pearl Harbor bombing.

  1. “Not a Christian view of God”?!
  2. How a new morality crushes the old
  3. From the vault: dubious educational distinction
  4. In praise of snark
  5. Sen. McCarthy’s Poetry Inquisition
  6. [Fill in the Blank], God help us
  7. Memory Eternal, Dad!

Continue reading “Saturday: 72nd Anniversary of Pearl Harbor bombing.” →

The Poetry of God

I don’t want to slime you on Sunday, but my lead item was a about a megachurch pastor, so it really was kinda slimy. Tune in tomorrow.

Let’s do something lovely instead. Like me getting out of the way (mostly) and letting Father Stephen Freeman talk about The Poetry of God.

My taste for poetry has grown year by year since I’ve become Orthodox and begun to learn that there’s just so much about God and about life that cannot so little about God that can be said discursively.

“When we include the fact that the bulk of Orthodox theology is to be found in the hymns of the Church, we have to admit that the heart of the poet and the heart of the theologian are much the same thing.” (Fr. Stephen) It hit me especially hard ten days ago when we celebrated the Entrance of the Most Holy Theotokos into the Temple (link will download a Word file with text marked for chanting). This is not prosaic hymnody.

For you Western Christians, have a blessed Advent and let me commend W.H. Auden’s For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio for your Advent reading pleasure. It’s part of mine every year. I note that there’s even a YouTube video, though I’ve not watched it. Here’s a few other opinions about it, too: First, Second, Third, Fourth.

UPDATE: Reading this after publishing it, I realized how odd it would have sounded to me twenty years ago that “Orthodoxy” – an equivocal term I associated mostly with doctrinal exactness, not with the Church that received me four years later – does a lot of its theology in hymnody that’s not literal. But it now seems to me that poetic theology is right meet if only because it keeps God out of the “box” of prose, where we can (we delusionally think) examine him and study him in safety.

* * * * *

“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Thanksgiving bonus

  1. Economic “science” – in the service of human ends
  2. Linda Greenhouse, obscurantist
  3. Bill Clinton, Medal of Freedom awardee
  4. The best thing about Czech communists
  5. And don’t you forget it!

Continue reading “Thanksgiving bonus” →