Canada Council Grant Essay

I am an adult, a Catholic, and a writer – and I am reading the Bible for the first time.

Of course I grew up with Eve and the Serpent; Noah and the dove; Ezekiel and the bones; and Jesus and company. But somehow I skipped from the Bible Tales for Children to Seven Storey Mountain and Summa Theologica, missing much in between. So I came to the Bible late, with the tongue and ears of a writer, ready to appreciate the stories and the poetry.

But I was not ready for the deep power and strangeness I found. I feel as if someone has given me another Shakespeare, another body of literature so compelling and original that it made the world over in its own image. Certainly the Bible has struck me like lightning, has turned my heart inside out. I am writing this book of poems, Seal up the Thunder, to capture some of this feeling.

There are three threads to the book, and I will discuss them each briefly, and mention how they are woven together.

Voices

Thunder's voice poems revisit biblical stories, usually by finding a first-person voice, often for someone who didn't have a speaking part in the original. While the stories and the voices telling them are diverse, each poem has at its heart a moment of transformation or revelation. The voice poems are more story than theology – though the transformation is sometimes one of faith. It's my hope that a new perspective will give readers the taste of freshness and strangeness I found in these stories that I thought I knew.

Poems in this thread include "After the Flood," "Leah Names her Sons," and "Acta Thomae."

Psalms

Thunder's psalms begin from the biblical psalms, and are written around them. They are not translations, literal or otherwise. Some strike out from a single image or thought from the biblical psalm, and some weave through the biblical again and again. All are conversations with the biblical psalms, which are conversations or supplications to God – prayers.

Some of Thunder's psalms are biblical or neutral in setting, but most contain the goldenrod, Holsteins, and mason jars of my own home turf. This is because the biblical psalms are so rooted in the physical and everyday that any attempt I made to keep Thunder's psalms in the past and in the distance rang false. But while I've made free with context, I have tried to stay attuned to cadence and stance of the psalmist, to keep Thunder's psalms recognizably psalms.

Forms

In this last thread, I'm experimenting with treating religious forms – such as the litany, canticle, and suffrage – as literary forms. This is a leap away from the spare, understated, East-leaning ideal I usually struggle towards. These religious forms are built of repetition and repletion, of call and response, of heaped up details, digressions, and leaps. They are overfull, and meant to seduce
and sweep away.

In outlook, these poems look for the presence of God in and through the everyday – though most of them don't mention God at all. Poems in this thread include "Suffrage to Water," "The Bone Pastor," and "While the Earth Remains." Pier Giorgio DiCiccio called "While the earth remains" the finest poem of its theophanic sort I've seen in this country.

Manuscript Structure

Because I'm still writing poems, the manuscript for Seal up the Thunder is only loosely structured, with the voice and form poems mixed together, then separated into two "testaments," with the psalms set apart in the middle. There are some happy juxtapositions: I like, for instance, the way "Suffrage to Water" strikes sparks off "After the Flood." There are also some rough patches where the voices aren't balanced or the flow feels choppy.

I hope that as I write more, the manuscript will find a more muscular, flowing form. At the moment Thunder is still skeletal, though I think it has good bones.

I am under no illusions that what I'm doing is new. Benedict, the patriarch of Western Monasticism, named what I am doing lectio divina, or holy reading, 1500 years ago. There is a step in lectio called oratio, prayer, where the reader reaches out for God and the World. For me, this step moves through the pen.

For many centuries, people have been practicing lectio, and there is much teaching on how do it well. Two things that are needed are slowness and quiet. I am applying for this grant in hopes of buying time – devoted, concentrated time in which I can seek out that slowness and quiet, time in which to listen with Benedict's "Ear of the Heart." While I don't expect the Canada Council to fund my spiritual development, I do think that Seal up the Thunder will be a deeper, better book with your support.