Poetry and Prayer with Malcolm Guite and George Herbert and Finale

Welcome to the Hidden Cathedral Poetry Celebration 2021. This is just part of what we do through Cathedral Arts, a mission of The Cathedral of All Saints. To receive regular posts from us, please subscribe to the Cathedral Arts Blog.

On Pentecost Sunday, we revealed this entire hidden page with all its contents—allowing its many poems to fan out like tongues of flame that tell of art, God and human experience—a contemporary virtual Pentecost in verse with a few pieces of visual art and prose thrown in. Scroll down to the bottom of this page to start and scroll up to enjoy the posts in the order they were released.

This video with Malcolm Guite is the finale to our Hidden Cathedral Poetry Celebration 2021, shared on May 22.

Evan Craig Reardon, poetry consultant to The Cathedral of All Saints, answers the question: why poetry? in this post in the Cathedral Arts Blog.

---

Foliate with Tongues and Things

It is Week 7 — the final week of the Hidden Cathedral Poetry Celebration. Join us for our finale on May 22 for “Poetry and Prayer”

with 17th century priest-poet George Herbert, and his contemporary counterpart, Malcolm Guite. Click below to learn more and register:

“Seven” is a number signifying completion and God whose Spirit first brooded over the waters and Who later rested on the seventh day after creation. Yesterday we began the week leading up to Pentecost, the festival on which the Spirit came sounding like a rushing wind and appeared as cloven tongues like fire above early followers of Jesus Christ (gathered in Jerusalem for the Jewish Feast of Weeks) who then began to speak, as did those who witnessed this event and thought them drunk…..

Pentecost by Brynna Carpenter-Nardone

This week’s readings also speak of heavenliness and earthliness in sometimes jarring juxtposition…..

Marly reads Jane Swart who takes Saint Martha through the ages and back again to her unique relation to Jesus in a last line.

Marly ruminates on reconciliation with outer and inner landscapes in this reading of a poem by Lisa McCabe

Marly reads a poem, “I Heard Their Wings Like the Sound of Many Waters” from her own book Foliate Head. As it was for those at Pentecost, here the writer hears an “unlikeness” as well as things she likens.

A final, light-ish poem by A.M. Juster to Mr. Wizard that comes in on a wind straight from the 1970’s and ends, well….

A foliate head (or “green man”) carved in the choir stalls of our cathedral.

Click on the videos to watch them on YouTube’s website where you can scroll down to read Marly’s notes about the poets and find links to more of their work. Stay tuned for a post this week from poet Evan Craig Reardon, and await Pentecost on May 23 when we will unleash the hidden page of the Hidden Cathedral Poetry Celebration and make it available on our website.

---

Schoolyard Afternoon to Tartarus in Terza Rima

For Week 6 of the Hidden Cathedral Poetry Celebration, Marly Youmans reads poems by Daniel Sheehan, Ivy Alvarez, Sally Thomas and Andrew Frisardi.

Seasons change as where you stand in space and time changes.

Detail from Children Playing in the Snow under Plum Trees in Bloom, woodblock print, 1887, Yōshū (Hashimoto) Chikanobu

Two more poems from ANNUNCIATION, a collection of poems about Mary from Phoenicia Publishing.

“The Hermit Hears the Noise of Many Waters” by Sally Thomas

“Roll Call at Acheron” is written in terza rima, a form first used by Dante Alighieri

Click on the videos to watch them on YouTube’s website where you can scroll down to read Marly’s notes about the poets and find links to more of their work.

---

Readings that Wrestle

By now, in Week 5 of the Hidden Cathedral Poetry Celebration, you know that while the poems we share are not all explicitly religious they do excel in spiritual sinew……

Hananiah Harari, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, 1936, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum

……meaning the poems have an ability to wrestle with reference to God’s presence and the problems of being human, and that they succeed somehow as Jacob did, whose story is remembered in this second poem by Mischa Willett

This second poem by Andrew Frisardi takes flight with sounds that animate the poem and propel it forward

In Burial in Holy Week by Sally Thomas, God gives and receives in one one dread day, still in the world of sound and color

Animate in another way, here is an amusing short poem by Gail White on Julian of Norwich

---

Readings and Art with Marly Youmans

For Week 4 of the Hidden Cathedral Poetry Celebration, first Marly Youmans shows her books of poetry with art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

These friends and collaborators—the poet and the artist— collect images in their work for their texture and shape, strangeness and beauty, and for their fantastic, historic and symbolic value, such as you can see from a book jacket above, and also behind Marly in the videos she has made for us.

For Clive’s artlog (for fans of Cocteau, especially) visit the link below:
https://clivehicksjenkins.wordpress.com/

For Marly’s blog which also includes her fiction visit this link:
https://thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/

This video contains poems from the standpoint of a father, including a stunningly vivid poem that paints surgery, the Man of Sorrows, and medieval art—from Majmudar’s most recent book of poetry.

David Middleton’s poem with two interesting epigraphs leads to a poem by Jones Very—mystic from the time and circle of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

A poem from ANNUNCIATION: SIXTEEN CONTEMPORARY POETS CONSIDER MARY from Phoenicia Publishing by Luisa A. Igloria, 20th Poet Laureate of Virginia, with art by Elizabeth Adams.

Click on the videos to watch them on YouTube’s website where you can scroll down to read Marly’s notes about the poets and find links to more of their work. See you next week.

"Light in its Common Place" by Michael Joyce | 4 Poems with Marly Youmans

Welcome to Week 3 of the Hidden Cathedral Poetry Celebration. First, Michael Joyce will read for us from his most recent book.

His friend, Cathedral Arts visionary and writer, Eugene K. Garber, wrote a short review below. The two friends had planned to give a talk together for our 2020 festival which was postponed due to the pandemic. But Michaels’s poetry is not bound by time or place, as Gene indicates:

“Light in Its Common Place is a truly extraordinary work…...It reaches deeper into darkness and into the possibilities and limitations of language. It dares to do things with "poetry" that are not done by anybody else that I know of. I could go on…..”

Biography: Michael Joyce is Professor Emeritus of English and Media Studies at Vassar College. His fifteen books and several digital works— most recently the poems, Light in its Common Place, from Broadstone Books, 2020— span a career as novelist, poet, critic, theorist, digital literature pioneer, and multimedia artist. His poems and translations have appeared in numerous journals and he has published three prior collections of poems: A Hagiography of Heaven and Vicinity (Broadstone, 2017), Biennial (BlazeVOX, 2016) and Paris Views, (BlazeVOX, 2012).

Below is another reading from the Broadstone Books October 2020 book launch (which you can access in its entirety here).

---

For part 2 of week 3 of the Hidden Cathedral Poetry Celebration, Marly Youmans reads

“Christening” by Mischa Willett, and “No’” by A. M. Juster from his recent book, Wonder and Wrath.

I was particularly struck by this poem by A.M. Juster. It touches on a theme we are led to in our poetry reading groups—a tendency toward self-destruction which is a side-effect of the affliction of creative people—I would call this chronic pain caused by acute perception. But what is important here is that, as Marly points out in her introduction, Juster has a direct message for those who make creative work.

Marly has included more information about the poems and poets in the notes beneath the videos on YouTube’s website, so please go to the site and scroll down if you are interested. See you next week.

—Brynna Carpenter-Nardone, Director of Cathedral Arts

Reading by Luke Stromberg | Introducing Marly Youmans

In part one of this post, Luke Stromberg reads his poems

after explaining his personal connection to our cathedral. (You might see his brother, the Reverend Canon Matthew Stromberg, in Luke’s photo below.)

Luke also offers context for the poems he selected and how they relate to life, faith, and doubt.

Theologian Paul Tillich wrote, “If faith is understood as being ultimately concerned, doubt is a necessary element in it. It is a consequence of the risk of faith.”

Creatives take the risk of making the unknown manifest. Poets collect what ultimately concerns them, making poetic forms though which we receive these things. I wonder if this why poetry, even as it mystifies, makes its writers and readers more alive?

Luke Stromberg's poetry and criticism have appeared in Smartish Pace, The Hopkins Review, The New Criterion, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Golidad Review, Think Journal, The Raintown Review, The Dark Horse, Cassandra Voices, and several other venues. He also serves as the Associate Poetry Editor of E-Verse Radio. Luke works as an adjunct professor at Eastern University and La Salle University and lives in Upper Darby, PA.

---

Part two begins a series with Marly Youmans……

Poet and novelist Marly Youmans made twenty-four (yes, 24!) short readings of the work of contemporary poets. A few have permissions that have expired, but most remain accessible on YouTube.

To read Marly’s post on Easter and other treasures and marvels, click HERE

1. Invitation: Come along, while Marly Youmans reads poems for The Hidden Cathedral Poetry Festival

3. Jane Greer, "This Blue" and "On Nearing Our Thirty-fifth Anniversary”

4. Maryann Corbett, “Alcuin: Concerning a Nightingale” from MID EVIL

---

Welcome and Poems by Leonard A. Slade, Jr

Welcome to the Hidden Cathedral Poetry Celebration, 2021, an online celebration of and by contemporary poets and poetry in relation to living with questions and faith.

What we had planned as an in-person festival is still a communal celebration through the generosity of these poets in sharing their work with us through the Cathedral Arts Blog. Please join us for posts every Monday during Eastertide.

To open our celebration, in our first video we introduce Leonard A. Slade, Jr, a longtime member of The Cathedral of All Saints. In our second video, the poet reads from his most recent book, Selected Poems for Freedom, Peace, and Love.

Click HERE for a pdf of his biography.

To show your support of the Cathedral’s mission in the arts, please make a donation: