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Articles by Carolyne Wright
On Víctor Jara’s “The Right to Live in Peace” by… | Poetry Foundation
In October 2019, there were shootings in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Long Beach, and Kansas City. Bernie Sanders had a heart attack and Simone Biles won her twenty-first medal at the world gymnastics championships. But these are US headlines—the rest of the world focused on other events, and in Latin America the spotlight was on Chile. During that tumultuous month in 2019, protests rocked the narrow nation.
Round: At First Sight Through the window’s louvered blinds, you glide in profile across the room, angled pitch of your hips almost a dancer’s backlit by a single kitchen bulb. That’s all.
Fairies and Mystics
On the first day of summer, my daughter created a makeshift microphone in the backyard with a curved branch stuck into the wet soil. Behind, her younger brother beat on an upturned ice cream bucket with two sticks. They were practicing fairy music, they said, to welcome the fairies on summer solstice.
Recovering Evangelical: Reflections of an Erstwhile Christ Addict
If it is a mystery, we too have a right to preach a mystery. —Dostoyevsky THE ONLY BOOK I ever remember throwing away is Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping. With great fanfare and what I took to be Christian zeal, I tossed it into a dumpster by my college dorm. To this day I don’t remember what I found so disturbing. High praise indeed for Robinson’s bewitching art. With fans like me, who needs a reviewer’s damnation?
A Christian Nomadic Art: A New Generation of Evangelical Mongolian Artists
NEARLY THIRTY YEARS have passed since Mongolia burst out from under the domination of the Soviet overlords who had forced the entire culture into a Marxist-Leninist mode. During the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s, some twenty thousand to thirty-five thousand Mongols—mostly intellectuals, Buddhist clergy, political dissidents, and minorities—were executed.
Confession - Image Journal
Audio: Read by the author. https://imagejournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Confession—Maggie-Smith.m4a My son’s terrible fevers are softening me to God. To the idea. When he sizzles to the touch, speaks a strange new language of not-consonants and not-vowels, I need one golden iteration I can live with. When even syntax is burnt black, smelling of creosote. By nightlight I mitten his hands and sock his feet with cold washcloths.
Sing out the Old; Sing in the New
Some years ago, I slipped into my Christmas cards a copy of Denise Levertov’s poem “For the New Year, 1981,” which begins: I have a small grain of hope— one small crystal that gleams clear colors out of transparency. I liked Levertov’s image for the smallness of her hope—not at all the raucous tone of “Happy New Year!” which we shout gleefully at midnight on December 31.
A Conversation with Rowan Williams
Rowan Douglas Williams was born in Swansea, south Wales, in 1950, into a Welsh-speaking family, and was educated at Dynevor School in Swansea and Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he studied theology. After two years as a lecturer at the College of the Resurrection, near Leeds, he was ordained deacon in Ely Cathedral before returning to Cambridge.
Caedmon's Hymn: The First English Poet
ENGLISH POETRY BEGAN with a vision. It started with the holy trance of a seventh-century figure called Caedmon, an illiterate herdsman, who now stands at the top of the English literary tradition as the initial Anglo-Saxon or Old English poet of record, the first to compose Christian poetry in his own language. The story goes that Caedmon, who was employed by the monastery of Whitby, invariably fled when it was his turn to sing during a merry social feast.
Orpiment - Image Journal
King’s yellow for the king’s hair and halo, mixed if the monastery can’t afford the shell gold or gold leaf to crown the Lord, to work the letters of his name, the Chi-Ro, in trumpet spirals and triquetras, the yellow a cheap and lethal burnishing, the hoard not gold but arsenic and sulfur. The Word curves in compass circles, and again I follow, tracing on yellowing vellum my dread of this jaundiced, intolerant composition, this gold that cannot coexist with lead or copper.
The Entry into Jerusalem
Here—the terminus from which he begins. The road, tilted like a tipped-up tile, Points to those in trees pulling down branches. Wind rucks and buckles the cloak-covered path. Soon enough the day will be a ruin. Soon the crisp half-light of dusk will give way To the salt-light of stars, a gibbous moon. Although foretold, the future is the past: A leaden, inert matter-of-factness. His retinue approaches like a storm: Rain pent up. Lightning that blinds us for now. His afterimage is that of a ghost.
And Yet - Image Journal
I was going to meet Miep Gies. I was going to meet Katie Couric. Life looks different now from the way that I thought it would then, at age nine. And yet here I am. There was the New York City of my dreams. My mother’s mother was from Philadelphia, and my mother has fond memories of driving through the city after visiting relatives in PA. There was the Today show of my dreams. My mother’s mother, my mother, and her sisters visited its set in the 1990s. Live from Studio 1A, in Rockefeller Plaza.
Web Exclusive: A Conversation with Scott Cairns
The current issue ofImagefeatures three new poems by Scott Cairns. The author of numerous volumes of poetry, a convert to Orthodox Christianity, and a longtime contributor toImage, Scott has often advocated what he calls a “sacramental poetics”—the idea that a poem should not so muchdescribe something asdosomething. Image:Your poems use an exacting, prophetic voice, but they’re also very funny. Where does that voice come from?
Noah Buchanan and the Renewal of Mystery
IT WAS THE FIRST FULL DAY of the fall semester at the New York Academy of Art, and California artist Noah Buchanan was riding the Number 2 subway to lower Manhattan’s Tribeca district where he would disembark five blocks south of the school. The Brazilian beat of Paul Simon’s Rhythm of the Saints thrummed on his headphones. It was a cloudless late summer morning with temperatures expected to approach 80 degrees. Buchanan was beginning the final year of his MFA studies.
The Spiritual Discipline of Inspiration: Carey Wallace
Carey Wallace is the author of The Blind Contessa’s New Machine, which tells the story of the invention of the typewriter in 1808 by an Italian count for a blind woman so that she could write him letters. It’s a love story, but it’s also about the imagination and how it fails us. Patti Smith, one of Wallace’s heroes, called it “exquisitely written” and “a jewel.
Opening the Door: A Conversation with Abstract Painter Lanecia Rouse Tinsley
Lanecia Rouse Tinsley is an abstract artist based in Houston, Texas. She creates out of a desire to make the invisible landscapes within us known, using texture, form and color to speak to life in ways she feels words cannot. She says she is drawn to the “negative spaces” in life—times of ambiguity and uncertainty, silence and mystery. A graduate of Duke University Divinity School, Tinsley was a pastor’s kid who became a pastor herself.
Andy Goldsworthy’s Sticks & Stones
Audio: Read by the author. I climb out of my fear. The mind enters itself, and God the mind, And one is One, free in the tearing wind. —Theodore Roethke You are alone. You are alone naked in a forest, surrounded. Alone, surrounded by a live ossuary of trees, shed twig, spell of oval stone. You are separate from hours in a forest of small yet perpetuating sounds. No one will hear you breathe. You are alone, bare hands like large up-curling leaves still soft from the falling.
Scene - Image Journal
O spent saint finished, haloed by a spider web of shattered glass, a semicircle spatter pattern auraed on the sidewalk, and casings like last bits of gold in a mosaic picked by thieves. What angel will descend this night, will light this wire-strung alley to draw the fallen upward? This thing far too destitute to pay each aerial tollhouse, to climb concentric circles toward that mystery that makes the streetlights flicker on at night?
ICU, Four a.m. - Image Journal
In the dark, everyone is kind. Nurse Ho gently taps along my arm, looking for a possible vein. People from all over the world are rushing to help me. The hospitalist from India asks, “Do you know where you are? Who’s the president? What month is it?” These seem like important questions but somehow difficult. Impossible. “Make a fist,” she says, inserting the slow drip. My compass needle wobbles, confused. Do I know where I am? Some sort of midpoint. Or not. I loosen my grip.
What Was Promised
The LORD is a man of war. —Exodus 15:3 I. Jordan River, Golan Heights I hadn’t expected it to be so green. When I pictured what lay between Dan and Beersheba, I imagined arid, caked earth, like what I later found in the Negev or at Masada. Here, instead, the Jordan slipped like a shiv between the sharp-arcing hills, and a diffuse mist lingered above the ground. It made sense, in the end, that lushness precipitated all the violence.
Marriage - Image Journal
Audio: Read by the author. There are two ways to marry: right and wrong. The right way is to find the proper mate: God-fearing, wise and prudent, chaste and strong (They say such folks exist)—then you await— Stemming your desire until you’re wed— The fierce abandon of the marriage bed. Without hypocrisy you’ll teach your heirs To live well and resist the devil’s snares. The other way’s what films and novels show: You fall in love, you fall in bed, you live Together maybe, marry, and divorce.
Millat’s Orchids
MILLAT’S ORCHIDS were blooming again. After ten years of neglect in his basement, he’d moved them up to the kitchen, repotted them, watered as directed, and now they bloomed twice a year—big vibrant purple blooms in groups of four. Their sleek petals bared to the sun like open palms, they devoured sunlight and yawned in reverie. They grew luxurious and colorful. A decade earlier, after the divorce, he’d relegated them to a basement storage room.
Imagination and Affection: Photographer David Hanson Enters the Cloud of Unknowing
David T. Hanson’s photography collection The Cloud of Unknowing takes its viewers into the mystical space between seeing and believing. Hanson’s photographs, which include holy spaces from both Eastern and Western religious cultures, lead viewers on a visual quest to encounter “sanctuary,” reminding us of the bright, empty mystery that remains at the heart of our lives.
Nocturne - Image Journal
It’s three a.m., that empty hour when the noisy last-call jetsam of the bars has leaked away into the city’s substructure or parceled off for fare in gliding hansoms, leaving the rat’s hackled moment there in the blacker shapes that shift around the square. It’s three a.m., that empty hour when gangs of theologians prowl the streets looking for some stray angel to accost. And the rails have ceased their humming, and the watchmen end their rounds nodding on stools in darkened corners.
Vulnerable Targets
AACCORDING TO EVACUATION PROTOCOL, the oldest children, four-year-olds, would be first to exit the building. They had been taught to form a chain with linked hands behind their teacher and follow her through the door in the direction of the soccer field, then all the way to the tennis courts, where they were to sit crisscross-applesauce against the fence until the drill concluded. The courts were thought to be an ideal gathering place—a safe, contained spot—and beyond any potential blast radius.
Bound by a Common Anguish: D.L. Mayfield Interviews Casey Cep
Casey N. Cep is a writer whose work tends towards thoughtfulness, with an eye for stories that are haunted by faith. Her work appears often in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and her first book, Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee was recently published by Knopf. Here, she discusses the book and why she was drawn to Lee and her questions of geography, writing, and vocation.
Disenchanted Mother of Clarity
Audio: Read by the author. https://imagejournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Klatt.m4a I am a woman unlikely to write. The foggiest ideas come to me malevolent and hopeless; I have only the urge to strike them. My mind is a dark enough place without me drawing blood from it. But let’s suppose that there is a spotlight waiting within the heart, and the heart is innocent because it is made of paper and can be cut, and the hurt is good health. A cut would give me reason to type.
Earthbound Hymn - Good Letters
My daughter is the star of her first music festival: she is nine months old, pink cheeked and fat. We’ve dressed her in a cotton tank-top, a screenprint of a kitten wearing a flower crown. It’s almost too cute, but this is a strategy: I’m hoping that if she’s fussy, festival-goers will find the baby or the kitten so cute that they won’t mind. Baby animals evolved to have those huge eyes so we’d be tricked into caring for them, my friend reminded me recently. My daughter’s face is 90 percent eyes.
The Gospel According to Fleabag
This is a love story. If there is such a thing as the Gospel of Fleabag, then this is how it begins. In the beginning, there was Fleabag herself, patron saint of jumpsuits, standing at the bathroom sink, face smeared inexplicably with blood. She glances at the camera—at you—and smiles. “This is a love story,” she announces. She’s daring you to believe her. Season one of the show is about grief, sex, and guinea pigs; season two is, quite unexpectedly, about faith, hope, and love.
The Pleasures of (Re)Reading
If you’re going to make a habit of re-reading novels (as I do), then it helps to have a pretty poor memory (as I do). My re-reading seems to fall into two categories. First there are the novels I’ll re-read every ten years or so. These are the super-long ones that draw me inexorably into their special worlds: worlds that I can happily return to night after night for weeks or even months.
Faith Is Found Here: New Year's Intentions for Artists
Oftentimes in my teaching of creative writing, I include on the syllabus this passage from the poet Muriel Rukeyser’s book The Life of Poetry: “Faith is found here, not in a destiny raiding and parceling out knowledge and the earth, but in a people who, person by person, believes itself. Do you accept your own gestures and symbols? Do you believe what you yourself say?
The Living - City Arts Magazine
They walk into the room carrying trays of fresh fruit flown in last night from New Zealand or Peru, Panama or the Windward Isles. Kiwis, mangoes, star-apples. What about tarantulas among the bananas? The living leave those alone— they know how close the shadows are when night falls, how far their yearning and its intricate delivery systems spread. The living set down the trays and arrange the fruits on the table. Patterns of unmoored stars rise from the platters.
Snow before Sleep: A Reflection in Winter
You must desire Nothing. —————Saint John of the Cross Light glows off the drifts like a child’s long gaze upwards. Only the sky is heavy, a drum full of laundry—white, reluctantly tumbling. I don’t need to look out the window to know how the corners of houses give themselves away, like people who’d do anything for love. I don’t glance where the snow-shagged hemlocks sag, like the arms of saints who have given up in prayer.
Snow on Snow - Image Journal
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak mid-winter Long ago. You probably know these lines, either from Christina Rossetti’s poem of 1871 or, more likely, Holst’s setting of them as a carol. I know them. I used one of them as title of a book, “bleak” altered to “deep” by the publisher, who thought the former too gloomy. Which it might indeed be.
That Bird Has My Wings: An Acrostic Pantoum About Death Row Prisoner Jarvis Jay Masters
Listen to Carolyne Wright read her touching poem, “That Bird Has My Wings,” and don’t miss the author’s note below on why her acrostic pantoum vertically spells out the name Jarvis Jay Masters, an African-American on death row in a California prison. Carolyne Wright reads “That Bird Has My Wings” Your browser does not support the audio tag. That Bird Has My Wings By Carolyne Wright Just look at that gull soaring over the yard, All its feathers bright in the unfettered sun.
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