Friday Links, November 12, 2021

+ James Matthew Wilson announces the first annual Summer Writers Institute.

+ Natalie Merchant sings old poems to life.

+ Can signing your name to a graffiti-ed wall affirm your membership in the communion of saints?

+ Is Sally Rooney this generation’s greatest Catholic novelist?

THE UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS SUMMER WRITERS INSTITUTE

June 16 - 18, 2022

Poet James Matthew Wilson—co-founder with writer Joshua Hren, of the University of St. Thomas-Houston’s online MFA program in Creative Writing—announces the program’s first annual Summer Writers Institute. All of the in-person events of the summer institute will be held on the University of St. Thomas campus, in Houston. Students will be eligible for on-campus housing

Our MFA program is committed to restoring the spiritual and intellectual depths of contemporary literature and to cultivating a culture of craft, where artistic excellence and the humble practice of the artisan guide everything we do. The Summer Institute is an annual opportunity to share the joy of literature, the epiphanies of beauty that are the fine arts, with an audience beyond the conventional graduate classroom.All who know that literature and art are life-changing presences in our world are welcome to join us in Houston.

Singing old poems to life

Dappled Things web editor, Fr. Michael Rennier shared the above link to a recording and a transcript from a TED conference, of Natalie Merchant performing “from her poetry-inspired album ‘Leave Your Sleep,’ which pairs lyrics from poets -- from Gerard Manley Hopkins to a near-forgotten 10-year-old girl in Brooklyn -- with simple melodies and her unmistakable voice.”

Fr. Rennier writes, “At the 17min mark she sings a Hopkins poem I'm obsessed with. The whole set is well worth a watch.” Bernardo Aparicio, DT founder adds, “She has an album of ‘children's songs’ that includes that poem.” And Katy Carl, DT editor in chief, writes, “LOVE this album: someone gave it to me as a gift when Fred was born.”

From the transcript: “Gerard Manley Hopkins, a saintly man. He became a Jesuit. He converted from his Anglican faith. He was moved to by the Tractarian Movement, the Oxford Movement, otherwise known as -- and he became a Jesuit priest. He burned all his poetry at the age of 24 and then did not write another poem for at least seven years because he couldn't rectify the life of a poet with the life of a priest. He died typhoid fever at the age of 44, I believe, 43 or 44. At the time, he was teaching classics at Trinity College in Dublin. A few years before he died, after he had resumed writing poetry, but in secret, he confessed to a friend in a letter that I found when I was doing my research: "I've written a verse. It is to explain death to a child, and it deserves a piece of plain-song music." And my blood froze when I read that because I had written the plain-song music 130 years after he'd written the letter. And the poem is called, ‘Spring and Fall.’

“Spring and Fall” (1880)

To a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

They Were Here

Natalie Morrill, DT fiction editor, shared the above link, “On weird theatre kids & the communion of the saints.” Fr. Michael Rennier and Rosemary Callenberg, DT associate editor, also Liked. Am I the only one who doesn’t Like?

For example: “the Catholic Church has long commended ‘friendship with the saints’ as a way to holiness. But, fallen as we are, our knowledge of them can easily become plagued by misapprehension and perverted by idolatry. Thus St. George becomes a hero of English nationalism, St. Maria Goretti takes up as a youth-conference chastity speaker, and St. Thomas Aquinas boorishly patrols the boundaries of orthodoxy. And this is the trouble: lives that can be ‘read’ can be misread, and if we are persuaded by the testimony of history, they will be.

What if Flannery O’Connor ate avocado toast? Sally Rooney isn’t just the ‘Snapchat Generation’s’ Catholic novelist (but she is that)

America Magazine poses this question about the above-linked article: “Is Sally Rooney the millennial generation's great Catholic writer?” Katy Carl writes, “Your thoughts, friends?”

Ann Thomas, DT managing editor, replies, “I have Beautiful World, Where are You on hold at the library. Long wait.” My thoughts, “Huh, how does Rooney’s portrayal of people who have lost their faith but retain some sentimental idea of it being ‘romantic’ while they violate its moral teachings make her a great Catholic novelist?”

“If reviewer Ciaran Freeman is to be believed (this is known grammatically as an “unreal conditional”), the millennial generation now has its own challenger to the throne: Sally Rooney. I know, I know: You can’t wait for the latest Chosen One to appear drinking a White Claw. But Freeman is being serious. “If the goal of art from the Catholic perspective is to reveal beauty, truth and light—to point in the direction of God,” he writes in his America review of Beautiful World, Where Are You, “then Sally Rooney is my generation’s great Catholic writer.”