Semi-significant anniversaries

2010 will mark:

-- 20 years since I left college

-- 25 years since my discovery of Dylan Thomas

-- 25 years since The Breakfast Club (mega-popular John Hughes film) and "Apostasy of Love" (one of my weirder poems)

-- 25 years since that Seamus Heaney reading at Boston College, where I got my copies of Field Work and Station Island autographed

-- 30 years since my first day at Boston Latin School

-- 30 years since my first trip, with my parents, to Quebec City

-- 70 years since my dad was born! (Yikes!)

Because I have weekly archives

This is my first post of "2010."

And what a post it is!

Music at yesterday's Mass

Ding dong merrily on high,
In heav'n the bells are ringing:
Ding dong! verily the sky
Is riv'n with angel singing.
Gloria, Hosanna in excelsis!

E'en so here below, below,
Let steeple bells be swungen,
And "Io, io, io!"
By priest and people sungen.
Gloria, Hosanna in excelsis!

Pray you, dutifully prime
Your matin chime, ye ringers;
May you beautifully rime
Your evetime song, ye singers.
Gloria, Hosanna in excelsis!

In defense of Pope Pius XII

Cardinal Seán O'Malley devotes the initial part of this week's post at his blog to defending the late Pontiff against charges of Nazi sympathies.

A quarter-century ago ...

... this song was everywhere:

2010

Happy New Year (and New Decade) to one and all! God bless.

The true meaning of ALL ARE WELCOME

"I don't think you should check us out." If you're not a welcoming sort (read: leftist), stay away!

Via Mark Shea.

Poetry meme UPDATED

Found at Inscapes (a blog that comes recommended by the sagacious William Luse), after clicking on the label "poetry."

UPDATE (12/28): I was just rereading the post from which I stole the meme below, and found this sentence:

Some of the most beautiful and moving poems I know are not “pretty”; they are harsh, maybe even dissonant, and treat ugly subjects, for example, “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owens, or Lawrence’s “Do Not Go Gentle.”

Yikes! Lawrence? Lawrence??

The ghost of Dylan Thomas, I'm sure, forgives the blogger!

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::


1. The first poem I remember reading/hearing/reacting to was .....

2. I was forced to memorize ..... in school and .....

3. I read/don't read poetry because .....

4. A poem I'm likely to think about when asked about a favorite poem is .....

5. I write/don't write poetry, but .....

6. My experience with reading poetry differs from my experience with reading other types of literature .....

7. I find poetry .....

8. The last time I heard poetry .....

9. I think poetry is like .....

My answers:

1. The first poems were of course the songs I heard on AM radio before the age of three ("American Pie" and "A Horse with No Name" were particular favorites). Then, later: Beatles lyrics, and Robert Frost (age 11, just as I was beginning to write rhymes of my own).

2. Memorably, I was forced to memorize Poe's "Annabel Lee" in school. I was out of school when the assignment was given, to be done by the following day. So that following day I was in class, sweating bullets and frantically hoping the teacher wouldn't call on me before I had the chance to memorize the piece right then and there! In 30 minutes, I managed to memorize enough of the poem to earn a grade of 15 out of 20.

3. I read poetry because for me, it is almost the only kind of literature worth reading!

4. Favorite poems include Dylan Thomas's "Prologue"; Shakespeare's sonnet 18; Catullus's "Odi et amo" (I hate and I love); many poems by Cummings; Theodore Roethke's "I knew a woman, lovely in her bones"; Countee Cullen's "A Song of Praise"; "O Holy Night" in French (Minuit, chrétiens); and a hundred others.

5. I used to write poetry. Nowadays, I perpetrate a feeble kind of light verse every once in a blue moon.

6. See answer to #3!

7. I find poetry where it can be found, which is almost everywhere.

8. The last time I heard poetry was my own viva voce reading of A Child's Christmas In Wales last night. Prose poetry, but poetry nonetheless!

9. I think poetry is like nothing else in the world. (Oh, what am I supposed to say?) I think poetry is loads of fun. And more, I think poetry is necessary, at least for me.

José Garcia Villa

Bring the pigeons watermelons, Abelard.
The order has cool philosophic purity.
This is not largesse but Roman nobility.

Bring the peacocks oranges.
Turn the philosophy to sensuousness.
Pallas Athene is Greek thereby.

But if we bring the watermelons pigeons?
If we bring the oranges peacocks?
Is that very difficult?

This would not be Greek nor Roman,
This would be purity without philosophy.
This would be artistry.

José Garcia Villa, poem #34, in Doveglion: Collected Poems, ed. John Edwin Cowen, intro. Luis H. Francia (Penguin Books, 2008), pp. 21-22.

Prayers

This Christmas evening, it's probably a good idea to pray for the peace of mind of the troubled woman who ran at the Holy Father as the late-night Christmas Mass began, and for the healing of Cardinal Etchegaray who broke a bone (his hip, was it?) during the confusion.

Incarnation

by Dr. Eric Milner-White (1884-1963)

What is man that thou visitest him,
      and the son of man that thou so regardest him?

LORD, let me kneel before thy miracle
      -- an infant in a stable
            on a human mother's breast,
      from all eternity thine only begotten Son,
            thy Word from before beginning,
      God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God,
            of his own choice, of thine own purpose,
                  made mortal man.

What is man that thou visitest him,
      and the son of man that thou so regardest him?

O CHRIST, let me kneel before the wonder of thy Glory
            thus made manifest to all flesh;
      to be made one with thy lowliness,
                  one with thine obedience,
                  one with thy majesty of love,
      in a union, that by thy grace
                  shall know no divorce
                      unto the ages of ages. Amen.

Eric Milner-White, My God, My Glory : Aspirations, Acts, and Prayers on the Desire for God, ed. Joyce Huggett (London : Triangle/SPCK, 1994), p. 57

O come, all ye faithful ...

Adeste, fideles,
laeti triumphantes,
venite, venite in Bethlehem.
Natum videte regem angelorum!
Venite adoremus Dominum!

En, grege relicto,
humiles ad cunas
vocati pastores approperant :
et nos ovanti gradu festinemus!
Venite adoremus Dominum!

A kid's answer to a Santa question

This was on the news around here. A reporter was asking little kids questions about jolly old St. Nick, and one of the questions was, "How fast does Santa's sleigh fly?"

A girl of about six came up with the best answer. She thought about it and said, "Ten seconds per second."

Christmas Eve

A meditation by the distinguished 20th-century Anglican churchman Eric Milner-White.

Take it up to the next level

Do you or some of your co-workers utilize -- I mean, use -- these jargonistic terms?

On a happier note!

Enbrethiliel gives us a characteristically cheery post for her Sacerdotal Sunday: about the Curé of Ars; about "sin detection" and running shoes; about smiling at the thought of returning to dust, and other good things.

And yes, on Ash Wednesday, I wish I could hear the priest say to me, in "sexist" iambic Elizabethan: "Remember, man, that thou art dust, and unto dust thou shalt return."

More unpleasantness

Anti-Christian graffiti mars the site of the Last Supper. Graffiti and so forth.

Via Catholic and Enjoying It!

Trashing Pope Pius XII

The American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League can, and should, shut their faces.

Thomas Merton, great Christian pacifist

The race situation is certainly ugly and out of hand, and I see it as pretty hopeless. But it was to be expected. Too bad it tends to nullify all the good work and all the sacrifice of Martin Luther King and his followers. But if the country insists on practicing terrorism in Viet Nam then it deserves to get a taste of it at home. Only the ones who get it aren't the ones who deserve it.

Thomas Merton to James Laughlin, letter, August 1, 1967. From Thomas Merton and James Laughlin: Selected Letters (W. W. Norton & Co., 1997), p. 326 [italics mine]

GKC on Christmas

At Enchiridion.

The beauty of inequality

From an Orthodox Christian blog.

John Ashbery

For those readers that are interested, here is Helen Vendler's review of John Ashbery's latest collection, Planisphere.

Via The Provincial Emails.

The Tonight Show

Sarah Palin meets William Shatner.

Review in Poetry

In the latest issue of Poetry magazine, I value Christina Pugh's notice about Marilyn Hacker's and Heather McHugh's latest books, not merely because we have the art of poetry sagely and sanely considered, and not merely because the reviewer considers the work of two very different poets with equal ease and aplomb -- but because of this paragraph, a withholding of praise in an otherwise laudatory summation :

At times, though, Hacker’s cosmopolitanism has adversely affected her formal choices. Like so many others these days, she has fallen under the spell of the ghazal, and the book contains too many of them. This Persian form has become the multicultural flavor of the month for many poets who are formally-minded, and it’s a very tough nut to crack in English. Hacker is no more immune to this linguistic weakness than anyone else, as shown in lines like the following: “I might wish, like any citizen to celebrate my country/but millions have reason to fear and hate my country.” In short, there are some poems here that read like outtakes from Poets Against the War (“the war goes on and on and on and on”).

30th anniversary

McNamara's Blog reminds us of the anniversary of the death of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen; the occasion falls today.

Eminem faking it

Now, I like the talentless Mr Mathers about as much as I like the bubonic plague. But this is ridiculous. Apparently, gay activists are criticizing the rapper's use of the phrase "fake it" to describe some gay pop stars. You see, "fake it" sounds an awful lot like an anti-gay slur.

Is there any way we can banish both Mathers and these insane activists to Antarctica for the rest of their lives?

Dream of a bibliophile

Dreamt of acquiring books at low or no cost by Adrienne Rich, Charles Baudelaire, and St Bernard of Clairvaux as translated by Thomas Merton. Now that's a motley crew!