Welcome to English Teacher Weekly—your source for what’s worthwhile from the worlds of literature, education, Christian thought, and the humanities at large.
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Some changing dynamics at the ETW offices require us to move our publishing day to Wednesday, at least for the time being. Thanks for understanding.
National Poetry Month continues, and we are here for it. Enjoy!
THIS WEEK’S COLLECTION
Edward Knippers
This week’s edition features the art of Edward Knippers—many thanks to him for giving ETW permission to share these beautiful images from his gallery. Be sure to check out his work here. Chock full of vitality! As art historian and priest Timothy Verdon says, Knippers’s work “denies us distance: this is Michelangelo with body hair, Rubens acrid with sweat.”
Here is the beginning of his artist statement:
The human body is at the center of my artistic imagination because the body is an essential element in the Christian doctrines of Creation, Incarnation, and Resurrection.
Disembodiment is not an option for the Christian. Christ places His Body and His Blood at the heart of our faith in Him. Our faith comes to naught if the Incarnation was not accomplished in actual time and space – if God did not send His Son to us in a real body with real blood.
Heresy results when we try to minimize the presence or preeminence of the body and the blood. Yet even believers have become comfortable with our age as it tries to disembody reality. Physicality is messy; it is demanding and always a challenge to control. In the name of progress, our communication is increasingly becoming a disembodied voice on the line or we listen to a virtual image on a screen. We move human interaction, even consciousness, from the real into a virtual realm. When we must deal with the physicality of the real world, it is increasingly uncomfortable.
Lowell, Plath, Sexton: Three Confessional Poets in the Same Room
In 1959, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath audited a course at Boston University taught by Robert Lowell. That’s a lot of firepower all in the same very sad room together.
From Humanities Magazine Spring 2024:
The dynamic of the seminar briefly held Plath, Sexton, and Lowell together in a tight orbit. Sexton caught Plath’s attention by fearlessly taking up personal aspects of her own life as her subject, and Lowell had a guiding hand in releasing Plath from self-imposed structural constraints on her verse. In class, Sexton, by her mere presence, was a help to Plath with substance, while Lowell was a help with form.
Farewell, Dennis Covington
Dennis Covington died last week at the age of 75. His book Salvation on Sand Mountain was a National Book Award Finalist in 1995. In it, he covers the snake handling sect of churches on Sand Mountain in northern Alabama and his own growing relationship with the congregants.
posted this lovely tribute to Covington, a mentor of his, last week:I didn’t know the real power of words until I heard him. Before, I was flicking at them, watching them spin on the table. But the moment I heard Covington, it all changed. Words became, suddenly, gold, razors, the breath of God. For me at least, they’ll never go back to what I once misunderstood them to be.
And this moment from an interview with Covington for Image Journal caught my eye. Asked if he had gone back to visit the Sand Mountain congregation since writing the book, he told this story about visiting the McGlocklin family:
I last saw them in 2002. They weren’t going to the church on Sand Mountain anymore, because they felt like there were evil spirits there. Charles and I sat on his front porch, and he baptized me with his tears. I had never heard of that, or seen it before, but it was true. My life had taken a pretty bad turn, and I was telling him about it. He said, “Brother Dennis, I’m going to baptize you with my tears.” And he started crying, laid his hands on my head, and I swear to you it was as though I were being immersed. It was like water was pouring down my scalp. Even though we haven’t seen each other since then, we’ll always be brothers.
Covington wrote a regular column for The American Scholar called “Deep in the Heart,” about his life in Texas. You can find the archives here.
Lacunae
Christianity Today recently interviewed Scott Cairns about his new poetry collection Lacunae. The term “lacunae” refers to the inner space between two boundaries—the unknown within the known.
Cairns, a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church, was drawn to Orthodoxy because the Protestantism of childhood too easily explained away the inherent secrecy of the ways of God. His devotion to the Orthodox church, as well as to poetry, serve as a way to resist the dangers of easy answers. As he says regarding scripture, the theologian must be on watch for how “glib paraphrase” may threaten “to eclipse an inexhaustible text.”
Here’s a part of the interview:
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Letters to a Young Poet, makes a connection between the art of poetry and the art of living. Do you see a connection between these two endeavors?
I think that our primary art must be the shaping of ourselves. I also think that any endeavor that we can rightly call a vocation is best understood as a means to better apprehending who we are and what we are called to become. So, yes, for those called to the art of poetry, that calling is utterly connected to the art of living, of living well and in a way that enhances our own spiritual journeys, even as it enhances the journeys of others.
Success in the art of poetry and in the art of living depends on a deeper development of the art of prayer. Early on, I tended to resist the associations of poetry with prayer, but, in my dotage, I have given up that resistance. So long as we understand that prayer is less about petition than it is about communion, and so long as we understand that poetry is less about expression than it is about pressing language for illumination, then we can glimpse how each can serve the other.
Mary Oliver: A Good Poet
successfully defends the poetry of Mary Oliver (no relation) from the jackals in his excellent post “Is Mary Oliver a Good Poet?” She has gotten some heat lately for being “middlebrow”—a term his post takes to task. And, let’s be fair, when you see poetry as widely shared on Pinterest and TikTok as Oliver’s, an eyebrow begins to raise.But sweetness or hipness is far from Oliver’s concern:
The problem, for detractors, is that Mary Oliver is not analytic or detached or cynical or knowing. She is not using literature for some bigger, ideological purpose. Instead, heaven forbid, she is earnest. “How rich it is to love the world.” Yes! Yes! How rich indeed! Of course, you often aren’t permitted to talk like that in many modern literary groupings. Eh, their loss. Her work is a standing rebuke to their disinterest. “The world offers itself to your imagination.”
Whitman, PTSD, and The Red Business
For Liberties Journal, Helen Vendler considers how a poet like Walt Whitman found a way to write about the Civil War. Could he enter into the experience of those on the front lines? How should his poetry convey what he called “the Red Business.”
Vendler’s essay traces some of his experimentations in perspective and form that finally led to his collection Drum-Taps, published in 1865. She claims that his poem “The Artilleryman’s Vision” is “the first American poem of PTSD.”
“The Artilleryman’s Vision” is Whitman’s early — and astonishingly accurate — example of the variety of PTSD that, as an internal mental disease, is harbored invisibly by a physically uninjured veteran.
Toward the end of the poem, the artilleryman, hearing the sound of the canons, feels a “rousing, even in dreams, a devilish exultation, and all the old mad joy, in the depths of my soul.” Vendler has this insightful commentary to offer:
At this desperate point Whitman’s genius comes most fully into play: the last word we expect to hear from the Artilleryman is “joy.” Yet here it is, as Whitman penetrates to the ultimate heart of war: it is a primitive tribal savagery, permitted nowhere else in “civilized” life. Not only is it a “joy,” but it is also a madness — an “old” madness recognized from some previous undefined violence perpetrated by the Artilleryman himself on some victim. Whitman’s boldest insight is the frighteningly intimate response of “joy” to violence. In the depths of his soul the Artilleryman feels “a devilish exultation and all the old mad joy.” The Artilleryman still has a conscience, he still knows his joy to be “devilish,” but in the grip of his vision he is immune to shame and guilt. From the indifference of the soldier to the bodies that fill the gap in the line, from the dehumanization of the soldier until he is nothing but a weapon of war, feeling wild joy as his cannon leaps into action, Whitman depicts the Artilleryman’s moral dissolution as he ignores his own companions, wounded unto death, as they flee the front. Indeed, self-numbed against the truth, he boasts of his own insensibility: “The falling, dying, I heed not, the wounded dripping and red I heed not, some to the rear are hobbling.”
Jazz as a Way of Life
From “Jazz as a Way of Life” by
at the SubStack:Whether you’re an entrepreneur, teacher, nurse, builder, pastor, farmer, banker, computer programmer, student, or anything else, your work’s going to be more successful if:
you’re a faithful student of its tradition
you respond generatively to those you’re working with
you get outside your head and let things flow
Improvisation is just another word for life well lived.
THE HYPERLINK GARDEN
From Fresh Air: Salman Rushdie on his new book Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.
And Anderson Cooper interviews Rushdie here for 60 Minutes, which gives more context about his career from The Satanic Verses onward.
Jonathan Haidt versus the Libertarians for Reason.com (Spotify) (YouTube)
“So that’s how you go from thinking about Walt Goggins to thinking about monks, pretzels, and prayer in a just a few steps. All thanks to the American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd edition, purchased for $5 at Goodwill.”—
on the glories of using a paper dictionary.From Electric Literature: 8 Magical Libraries from Literature
For Literary Matters, Garrett Hongo recounts the first time he heard “The Weight” by The Band: “I felt in my guts this was something special, a song from the roots of humanity, a long, hectoring sadness plaintively expressed, and a simultaneous resolve to keep going through travail.”
From the WSJ’s review of Byron: A Life in 10 Letters: “The letters are practically Messianic in their intensity, aflame with relish for the incidental scenery or the women Byron is pursuing, full of outrageous judgments and personal quirks. Only Byron, you feel, could write from Cambridge that he had ‘got a new friend, the best in the world, a tame Bear.’”
4th grader Gwen Coffey’s TED Talk on the micromanagement of children and the call to “Let Go, to Let Grow!”
From Mere Orthodoxy: Daniel K. Williams's review of They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos Eire—“Was a monk’s levitation a sign of divine approval or evidence of the devil’s work? Was a levitator a saint or a witch? If those who saw these levitations firsthand could not agree on how to interpret them, perhaps it’s no surprise that we as historians face difficulties making sense of them today.”
From The New Yorker’s review of Macbeth, starring Ralph Fiennes: “Even after the four-star generals quit the cabinet, insecure clowns are the ones who will kill us all.”
From Chris Wachter at Mockingbird Film: Fatherly Love and Messiah Complexes: Who or What Are We Rooting for in Dune?
“After you’ve finished reading this book, come back to me and tell me then that English has little value.”—
recommends Carol Atherton’s new book Reading Lessons: The books we read at school, the conversations they spark and why they matter
Thank you for the mention, Andrew—I’m glad you liked the post. Thanks, too, for all the other great links. They’ll keep me busy for a week!
Thanks Andrew for mentioning my piece on Carol Atherton's book - all English teachers will love it.
This ETW appeared in my inbox 30 minutes after I heard about the death of the great Helen Vendler.