Tomorrow, August 15, the Orthodox church celebrates the falling asleep and bodily assumption of Mary to heaven. Since it comes mid-August, this feast overlaps seasonally (in the northern hemisphere) with late summer harvest, so the hymnography of the feast includes images of the harvest and nature. The symbolism for the Mother of God in the church’s hymnography is layered and poetic, giving the Christian much to ponder about this great mystery—a woman containing and giving birth to God.

I wrote a poem about the feast, which ended up being the final poem in Sesquipedalian Rain Chant. The church’s liturgical “ year” starts September 1, with the first feast being the birth of Mary (September 8) and the final feast being the Dormition (August 15), such that the yearly cycle of feasts (which mostly features the life of Christ) is “enveloped” in the life of the Mother of God. (Rain Chant also starts with September and ends with the Dormition.)

I share the poem below, preceded by Ikos 3 of the Akathist to the Theotokos, which I refer to in the poem.

Blessed Feast!

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Having received God into Her womb, the Virgin hastened to Elizabeth whose unborn babe at once recognized Her embrace, rejoiced, and with leaps of joy as songs, cried to the Theotokos:
Rejoice, branch of an Unfading Sprout: Rejoice, acquisition of Immortal Fruit!
Rejoice, laborer that laborest for the Lover of mankind: Rejoice, Thou Who givest birth to the Planter of our life!
Rejoice, cornland yielding a rich crop of mercies:
Rejoice, table bearing a wealth of forgiveness!
Rejoice, Thou Who makest to bloom the garden of delight: Rejoice, Thou Who preparest a haven for souls!
Rejoice, acceptable incense of intercession:
Rejoice, propitiation of all the world!
Rejoice, good will of God to mortals: Rejoice, boldness of mortals before God!
Rejoice, Thou Bride Unwedded

–Akathist to the Theotokos, Ikos 3

The Dormition

In the third ikos of the Akathist 
the Holy Lady is a tree and a cornfield
and a harbor. We know it is true 
when we see pines thrashing in the hot gust
and run our hands over brown grass. 
	In winter grass sleeps
what seems the sleep of death, awakes again in March
bringing the manifest power of the sun 
to our mouths. By August we’re hungry. 
Our arms form nets to catch the lint 
which you make for us O Lady
by creation light, full of movement and weight, 
easing over longitudes. How can we measure the growth
of the world? How can we gather you to us O field 
ponder-awake since the dawn of time? 

There are few copies left of Sesquipedalian Rain Chant available from Ink & Ribbon.

	 renewed up
into Christ in unilateral bones 

for love may even electrify 
by simple hope 
				an opening 		 

in the innocence of brotherhood
a gesture of thanks

the void the oval the mouth
is washed with Theophany

		we turn and see
how we live in metaphor

you, the woman waiting 
			we have just kissed after 
fifteen pages of bending down 
and the stars are bright your cheeks are rosy
and the fragrance of life is gone for it must pass—
								 
a nose cannot smell mid-kiss
they don’t tell you that they only say 
kiss and cut the cake		what sadness 

you put your hand on your coat
and smile and say all the things again
				with Old Testament nouns
		
and Mt Sinai has its encounter with I AM
Who shows His back

“Renewed up into Christ” from the Journal of George Fox

My first poetry collection comes out in little over a week, and I’ve been thinking about what it means and how I got here. Three years ago I was inconsistent in my habits, unable to move poems to final drafts or submit them to magazines. I didn’t like where I was. I would not have called myself a poet with confidence, even though I was fiddling around. I knew I was just fiddling around.

I needed a reset. More than just trying harder, I needed to examine long-held assumptions and make significant changes.

Here are the ones that made the biggest difference:

1. I started a daily writing ritual. I write every morning for 30 minutes, during which I have to draft at least one poem. Even if I have only 15 minutes I do a rush job to keep the habit consistent. 30 minutes often turns into an hour or more. Over time I’ve come to love this part of my day. I start by reading 1-5 poems by poets I love and wish I could write like. The best time for this ritual is first thing in the morning. I’m not a morning person and for years resisted what is clear enough when one listens to successful writers talk about their process—they get up early to write. The rumors are true, friends.

2. I started writing with a pencil. I still like rapid typing for the energy it gives to freewriting, but I’d hit a ceiling and needed to find a different voice. Writing by hand is breezy enough to still allow for moments of spontaneity, but slow enough for the “profound” to poke its head in. It’s slow enough that at some point in the draft I start to feel where it wants to go, what point it wants to make. There is still (as with freewriting) a sweet spot, a flow state that usually comes only at the bottom half of the first page. (Tip: when you go back to revise, throw away those “warm up” opening lines.) Writing with pencil gave me access to a few different “speeds,” which added layers and depth to my drafts.

3. I gave myself permission to write with emotion. I broke into poetry in graduate school, when I was a city-dwelling “hipster” suspicious of the “cult of authenticity.” But at my crisis point a few years ago, I felt intuitively that if I was going to write better poems they would need to reach for something important, to say something that mattered. Now, it did not work to try to do this with my head—to think, “What important thing do I want to say?” That resulted in terrible didactic drafts. What worked better was trying to write (cliche warning) with my heart, to let myself feel and to write through that emotion, without agenda. My former, skeptical self would have expected that approach to churn out sentimental drivel, but what happens, counter-intuitively, is the feeling doesn’t come through pure but gets filtered through the language and indeterminacy of experience, and it ends up soft and feathery. So: swing for emotion and you get warmth and humanity, versus swinging for reservation and ideas, which begets artifice and blather.

4. I joined a writing workshop group. I’d also been skeptical of this. I’m still not sure I’m an evangelist. It doesn’t do what you think. I value my workshop group but if I’m honest I get almost no helpful feedback. (Some but not much.) That’s not what it’s good for. It’s good for creating accountability to bring something ready to share, for making oneself more honest about how obscure one’s draft is, for realizing the context one’s hoping the reader will somehow get, for getting to know the limits of readers’ patience. And, because of the seriousness it communicates to oneself, being part of a group slowly convinces you that you are a writer.

5. I searched my soul and knew I was a poet. For whatever reason, I love poetry. I know I love it, one of the few things I know. In my moments of doubt I kept coming back to an urge to write. I had to keep reminding myself of this, both in the moments of crisis and throughout the journey. Remind myself over and over. The oft-quoted soundbite version of this idea comes from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet: “[A]sk yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple ‘I must’, then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life.” Honestly, I don’t love the way he says it—it feels desperate. It sounds like you have to sell out, make a Mephistophelian wager. I don’t know if that’s good advice. There are things more important than being a writer, such as loving one’s neighbor or the salvation of one’s soul. But the idea that you must have a real desire to write and make a commitment to it—yes, that’s true.

6. I fell in love with something. For me, where I’m at in life, that was nature. Among other things, Sesquipedalian Rain Chant is about the beauty of nature, especially of the Pacific Northwest. After the better-known passage above, Rilke continues, “Then draw near to Nature.” It’s a critical point some miss. There’s a beauty in the world that gives rise to song. One might prefer the locus of beauty in the social, even the urban. But the point is, I found something external to write about. I am not sure it’s enough to write about the self. One must write about self—one is always doing that. Life is self-discovery through the other. Poetry is about life in that sense.

These things added up and helped me write poems I liked. I didn’t consciously plan them or know they would work, I was just trying things, but especially things I’d been resistant to.

Of course, writing’s not easy. It’s a ton of work—but I think a lot of writing advice takes things too far with the masochism: you shouldn’t feel like shit all the time. Not if it’s working. Writing is struggle, but at least some of the time if not often, it’s struggle that feels good.

I didn’t set out to write a how-to piece, but maybe something here will be of help. Leave a comment if it is.

You can buy Sesquipedalian Rain Chant at Ink & Ribbon, or, if you live on Bainbridge Island, at Eagle Harbor Book Company. (Thanks to them for the display table!)

My wife and I are back from two weeks in Europe—a week in Corfu, and about a week in Paris, for our twentieth anniversary. Two very different destinations: a sleepy Greek island versus the epicenter of European civilization. The Paris half requires its own post.

But for Corfu I can report that it is green and topographically pleasing. This was a hiking trip. We trekked up and across the island, going from village to village on the Corfu Trail.

Hiking 13-15 miles a day was tiring! I did little writing. But I picked up Calvino’s Invisible Cities in the airport and was inspired by his fantastical (re)presentation of cities. It made me wonder what would I write if I wanted to capture the feeling of Corfu’s villages and towns.

Calvino:

Cities & Memory 1
Leaving there and proceeding for three days toward the east, you reach Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a crystal theater, a golden cock that crows each morning on a tower. All these beauties will already be familiar to the visitor, who has seen them also in other cities. But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman’s voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.

Cities & Desire 1
There are two ways of describing the city of Dorothea: you can say that four aluminum towers rise from its walls flanking seven gates with spring-operated drawbridges that span the moat whose water feeds tour green canals which cross the city, dividing it into nine quarters, each with three hundred houses and seven hundred chimneys. And bearing in mind that the nubile girls of each quarter marry youths of other quarters and their parents exchange the goods that each family holds in monopoly–bergamot, sturgeon roe, astrolabes, amethysts—you can then work from these facts until you learn everything you wish about the city in the past, present, and future. Or else you can say, like the camel driver who took me there: “I arrived here in my first youth, one morning, many people were hurrying along the streets toward the market, the women had fine teeth and looked you straight in the eye, three soldiers on a platform played the trumpet, and all around wheels turned and colored banners fluttered in the wind. Before then I had known only the desert and the caravan routes. In the years that followed, my eyes returned to contemplate the desert expanses and the caravan routes; but now I know this path is only one of the many that opened before me on that morning in Dorothea.”

I like the long sentences, the continuous present tense, the motifs stretched to nearly-absurdity. More than that, I like how natural a way, it seems to me, this might be to write about a place as a traveler, as it focuses on a place’s essential feeling. I can imagine and feel these cities by how Calvino describes them, despite having no facts or physical description.

I tried it for a couple Corfu villages, though I’m got nowhere near as fantastical (or fantastic) as Calvino:

Asprokavos
In Asprokavos is a man who runs the only good taverna in the village, who, on nights when the taverna is almost empty, pours extra glasses of wine for travelers and says “You are lovely people” over and over, and later explains he’s a farmer and how the taverna pays for the farm, and how much he loves hiking and trees. The food is prepared by a woman working silently in the back. His daughter-in-law or cousin or some young relation has convinced him to install artificial turf like a golfing green on the wall behind the bar to give the space a trendy vibe, though its the most traditional taverna on the island. There, at the start of the trail, hikers stumble to their hotels after dark, full of expectation. In the morning they will struggle over hills and roads with potholes filled with hand-sized stones and broken tile, will pass through groves where old men shoo their barking dogs and shuffle along the ridge, eyes full of years in the sun. They don’t look at you there, nor at where they’re going, and their thoughts grow old with the olive trees, the trunks of which twist in and far away.

Paramonas
By the time I am old I hope I have learned to smile, wrinkles around my eyes and across a face bronzed from work in the sun, prepared to answer any question, like the Corfiot who runs Skala Pension, who scoffs when asked on a night in May, “Will the tavern be open this evening?” He shakes his head. “Where else would the people eat?” There are a half dozen icons set in dark wood with the gold leaf flaking off on a shelf behind the bar above the whiskey and amaretto.

Pelekas
Pelekas is up a hill two kilometers from the beach. One street cuts through to the next village and it hairpins as it ascends sharply on the ridge. At this hinge is the village square, with a church, a bakery, and a cafe. Down the block from there is a mysterious building with a sign of a witch on a broomstick flying somewhere at night. The witch wears black, like the priest’s wife, who trudges to her apartments after Vespers, hips locked. Above her black frock and shin-length skirt, the same worn by every presbytera, her locks of white hair crest in waves. The way she walk shows how proud and full of love she is, proud of how up-to-date her husband’s service books are. Her husband, though old, stands tall, his cassock fringe lightly brushing the street. The sun sets in Pelekas behind a rocky cliff, which breaks the light into red petals soft and numerous as elephant tongues. On some evenings clouds draw their tassels across the stars and refract the rays further out, to sink into the wide Mediterranean. The sky changes from bright to medium to somber blue, then to violet, and at last to musical black. It joins the presbytera in her slow walk up the path, into the depths.

Are you traveling this summer? Try sitting in a cafe or on your hotel balcony and writing a “Calvinian” description of the place. If you write a few “invisible cities,” send them to me to read!

For academics and students, it’s the end of the year, a transitional season. The start of summer requires intention: What books will I read? What will I write? Some years, it’s obvious; in others, it takes some searching, or remembering who I am, this other me who lives this semi-other life “of the mind” that has leisure time to read and think.

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You breathe. New shapes appear,
and the music of a desire
as widespread as spring
begins to move like a great wagon.

Drive slowly.
Some of us walking alongside are lame.

– Rumi (trans. Coleman Barks) The Big Red Book 185

“New shapes appear”—late spring is like that, a level of awareness coming back, returning one to familiar forms of the world. I get into photography again. Not just because the light is better, but because I am looking up and out.

Victoria Chang says vertical shapes are violent, war-like; horizontal lines are peaceful. Of course, horizons calm the soul. Horizons say, Stay there and look me: I go on forever. Horizon is mystery that doesn’t demand we walk forever to find it. Why don’t vertical forms say that?

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I’m still working on how to see
I’m tired of having separate senses through or of the idea of senses 

– Alice Notley, The Speak Angel Series 341

Notley has lived in Paris for years now. Another (US) American writer living in Paris.

I will go to Paris next month, for the first time.

I am trying to awaken my senses, recall what it was I wanted or believed I wanted, in going there. It was no doubt something like what these other writers went for. I imagine it a place Americans go, an America away from America—but at the same time Europe, a Europe that is the idea of Europe for Americans. And that is why they like it, since they find there what they are looking for.

I suppose I will find this too, or approximately. When I’m there I will test out this hypothesis of how anticipation works. And if I am not right, I will try to measure how much and in what sense I was wrong. And I will try to adjust for my anticipation next time, if a guess of this kind ever again occurs.

Paris is where Gertrude Stein lived and wrote. For 43 years, from 1903-1943. This is also when she wrote The Making of Americans.

If we do not travel with a blind expectation of finding the world as we presume to know it, we might go expecting to find the world we do not. Proust’s Marcel moves through the landscape or the objects of a room looking for himself, a self he does not know, hoping to walk by a Celtic anima in a tree, a vestigial self that activates as one passes near.

Something of myself may be in Paris. So much of what I’ve read has come from there. I’m from there in that sense, at least.

Perhaps Paris is not self or other, but a window—the window that Marcel sits and looks out from his room, or the window with the man being cut in two Breton found in his subconscious, or the window Rilke sat by as he wrote his Les Roses:

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N'es-tu pas notre géométrie, 
fenêtre, très simple forme 
qui sans effort circonscris 
notre vie énorme?

Celle qu’on aime n’est jamais plus belle
que lorsqu’on la voit apparaître
ecandrée de toi; c’est, ô fenêtre,
que tu la rends presque éternelle.

–

Aren’t you our geometry,
window, very simple shape
circumscribing our enormous 
life painlessly?

A lover’s never so beautiful 
as were we see her appear
framed by you; because, window,
you make her almost immortal.

– Rilke (trans. Poulin) Complete French Poems 30-31 

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Me trouvera-t-on lorsque la nuit abonde 
ayant passé le jour entier peut-être 
livré à toi, inépuisable fenêtre, 
pour être l'autre moitié du monde.

–

And when night falls, who knows,
perhaps I’ll find I’ve spent all day
given to you, inexhaustible window,
to be the other half of the world.

– Rilke (trans. Poulin) Complete French Poems 39

Last week we read Charles Baudelaire for my world lit class, noted his devastating presentation of the modern city, its decay and disorder and its subjection of people to utility and vice. But more tragically the modern city is for Baudelaire a place of isolation and loneliness. His everyman, the flaneur, roams the Latin Quarter at night, sinking further into loneliness, seeking beauty in increasingly corrupted forms, until he exhausts himself in pursuit of decay. The individual sinks into ennui and “spleen.”

In diagnosing the problem of loneliness and monotony, Baudelaire sets the table for literary modernism. Several generations of literati will twitch with the loss of God and the good, as try to invent new approaches to order and beauty, with varying and often terrible results.

This time through his poems I noticed a particular line: “Forests, you frighten me, as do cathedrals...”

This line struck me is because it reminded me of something. Several years ago I attended a workshop on the sacred textile arts by Presbytera Krista West, who told us how she grew up a “nature” girl in an agnostic household, running around the forests of Oregon. Then, as a young adult, she visited her first church. When she walked in (it was an Orthodox church) she said to herself, “Ah, I know this place. This is like the forest.”

That image has stuck with me: the church is a forest; the forest a church. There is a profound truth in this, a “sacred” or “deep” image of how the world is.

Baudelaire, suffocated by the isolating effects of industrialization and individualism, hadn’t lost that intuition, but the disposition had flipped. Instead of the forest and cathedral being familiar, they’d become alien.

Last week I visited St George Antiochian church in Portland. They have just finished an iconography project, and it’s astonishing. I stared transfixed through the pre-sanctified liturgy. Lines of saints assembled in the vertical and horizontal “processions” in an astounding numbers. I’ve seen many churches, but few achieve a feeling that history is an arc bending toward the salvation of the world, not by statement but by accumulation and structure. As the saints increase and gather, the rows stack higher, mounting into towers and pillars, the New Jerusalem being built across time.

When a forest or church reaches sufficient density it becomes an ecosystem, to some degree self-sustaining and perpetuating, a place defined by relationship, pattern, and fullness. So too the church is becoming a city by providing the right conditions for relationship and shalom.

This is the plane on which we’re laboring as Christians and poets: we work to build cities (actual and metaphorical) and plant forests—not dystopian morasses where isolation swallows us, but cathedrals of theosis.

To build a city excellently requires a love for beauty. It takes the highest expression and synthesis of the human arts, an understanding of and cooperation with nature. It takes sacrifice and ascesis and magnanimity. It springs up and out of holiness and prayer.

Poetry too is like a forest or cathedral—made of words, surrounding us with sound and image, and, ideally, healing us.

Everyone can participate in making the city by making things, putting beauty into the world.

The city is our home and hope, the structure that rises from active love, realized in kenosis. The church and the forest show us the pattern on which society must be built.

Also, the following poems have recently been published by online journals:

• “Shiver Morning Baptism” The Dewdrop

• “Evening Letter” Eclectica Magazine

• “An Ictus is a Pliability” Ballast Journal

• “January 31” Seasonal Fruit (Winter 2025)