Begin with the image. Though it is a rendering rather than a reality, it will bring you and anyone else willing to see it into the passing illusion.
The cathedral at Duke University broods alone, four-horned, above the trees of Durham. Its stone crown marks the campus from miles away, even from the mundane freeway exit from Chapel Hill where thousands of commuters pass each day.
I had driven east to attend the poetry reading which opened the Poetry & Theology: 1800 - Present Symposium at the Duke Divinity School. Like any visitor to a scene not his own, I hoped to see and be seen. I also bore the need to render.
Duke offers only paid parking, so that we aspirant-poets must pay the same $2-per-hour rate as the visiting theological pioneers, pilgrims to the lore of college hoops, or collegial Nobel laureates in biochemistry who visit the wooded, Gothic campus. The nearest public parking to the Divinity School, a right from Science Drive and minuscule before the grave tower and medieval body of the cathedral, only accepts cash, so that I gave up my last bill, a five. While I might just see and be seen by the poets, I wouldn’t receive change for my two-hour parking. The path to the reading passed beneath the cathedral and through its lawns, and I thought how it would’ve only made sense to house the Divinity School inside it, to teach theology in its cloisters, humble candles, and dust of ages. I have yet to go inside the cathedral. But, in my imagination, every cathedral is necessarily medieval and immutable.
The Alumni Common Room of the Divinity School, where the symposium began at four p.m. upon the tongues of Dante Micheaux, Toby Martinez de las Rivas, and Lisa Russ Spaar, is a well-heeled room for tasteful entertainment. A jet baby grand piano waited beside the buttressed stone fireplace, some dozens of feet across the room from the well-plumped sofas and armchairs. The lectern for the speakers was ornate, wooden, and Edwardian.
The symposium’s speakers, professors, and undergraduates (these youngest doomed to depart once their teachers had seen them in attendance) filled the front, central rows of stackable chairs. The more distinguished literary citizens sat deeply in the sofas and armchairs behind them. We saw they were the distinguished attendees by their casual sweaters, their nondescript scarves unfurled across their laps, and how they leaned into one another’s ears to speak throughout the event. A harried, whispering staff member moved around the room to take pictures with his iPad. As the last of the on-time attendees, I sat along the wall nearest to the door. I was diagonal to the lectern and the poets soon to occupy it, never quite to see what any of them looked like from the front. Their half-profiles would themselves surely be a more poetic vantage, I told myself.
The bald, bearded literary critic Anthony Domestico sat directly before me on the aisle seat of his row in the center section. He wore black spectacles with frames of cartoonish thickness, a plaid shirt, white socks, and gray New Balance sneakers. I should’ve thanked him for introducing me to the fiction of Kathryn Davis, but he was sitting very carefully, with his small notepad balanced on the shin of his crossed left leg. One shouldn’t disturb a man so ready to take notes with his entire body.
Dr. Thomas Pfau, the accented professor whose ongoing research into the poetry, and theology of the 19th century had birthed the symposium, welcomed us as “an international selection of scholars at the intersection of poetry and theology,” which we apparently were. Next to approach the lectern was Martinez de las Rivas, an incongruous Brit with gray-blond bangs. I do not fully recall what he said to introduce Dante Micheaux, only that it ended in applause which he must have earned.
Which details of the Alumni Common Room do you know that I’ve omitted? There are too many for me to include or even recall, of course. And if you’d forgotten, my narrated visit to the reading is a rendering, not a photographic reality.
My rendering is only my limited selection of impermanent symbols which you read now with a trust that they are enough to be true, these few symbols themselves drawn like a pipette’s remnant from the hyperobject of sitting in that large, warm common room with dozens of other people whose clothing, conversations, personalities, placements, intentions, and shoes wavered over me like the dissipating aromata of passing entrées. Could I have known who those other people were, truly? Could they have known who I was? Can you know what “I” means in this essayistic nonfiction? I am the observer but also the forgetter, the curator; I am the eye but also the sieve. My thumbs a-flurried in my Notes app during the event, but they did not record everything I was seeing, and I had never once been interested in seeing or reporting everything anyway.
This sort of nonfiction is, at heart and often in practice, fiction. It sends a narrator into a setting where there are exceptional characters the reader would like to know, even to meet for themselves, without once fully understanding them as real people. When the narrator overlays these characters with certain concrete facts and quotation marks whose authenticity we trust like fiat currency, the story is afoot and always one step ahead of incredulity.
This sort is also my favorite form of the genre we call journalism. Long-form reporting that sends a writer into many unreachable places and unknowable conversations—which in 2024 is precisely the cumbersome form which many financially-precarious magazines jettison—is the only journalism I actually enjoy reading. But my enjoyment, especially for the aspirational sub-genre of scene reporting from literary gatherings, is often leavened with the half-guilt of one who knows he shouldn’t listen in to the gossip of people he envies.
Many of these scene reports are socially-accepted voyeurism—not (or rarely) sexual peeping for the high-browed who would simply never, but a cultural gaze through the parlor window for the aspirants who imagine they belong in those unknowable rooms, though they’re never inside them. What would it feel like to attend a literary reading, award ceremony, or black-tie dinner in rooms where you weren’t invited or couldn’t afford to go? What could the life, people, words, and purposes of a cultural scene—note that word’s fictional usefulness—be to the person who will likely never see that scene but knows they’d belong?
Here I am, in the Duke Divinity School Alumni Common Room, where Dante Micheaux has begun to read from the last canto of his poem “Circus.” I will not quote from this canto. Like all things, it was impermanent and passing like a stream.
Dante is impeccably dressed in every photo I’ve seen of him, and in person he dialed down his formality but maintained his taste, in leather Oxfords to the ankle and a white linen shirt buttoned to the throat. He read nine poems without hurrying, stuttering, or stumbling. His smooth, rounded tones of voice held your ear by the lobe, gently. Unlike his fellow poets and their unhelpful preambles, he did not introduce the poems with anything more than a short pause and their titles.
Of the three poets, Dante wrestled most like Jacob with the images and dictates of Scripture. His “heretic theology” as a once-Baptist made for a struggle with the Word which I heard thrashing even in his measured voice. “I’ll read next from ‘Theologies for Korah,’” he said. “Korah was the Israelite swallowed by the earth for disobeying God. And Cora is my goddaughter.”
“Superior to the purifications of Old Law was that of water. Be opened, daughter. All power on heaven and earth is. No questions. Be opened. Hold fast to my teachings, not those of stewards but my words. Seek you first, girl, the kingdom of my love, with all your mind. All your mind. Do not forget your mind. You are mine. Be opened. Power!”
In the most complimentary way I can express, Dante is a Christian poet with bits of insect wing in his beard whom the church ought to welcome and foster, in part because his poems are beautiful, ranging diggers who will never quite be house-trained. “I practice the ways passed to me / by descendants of followers of a wild man,” he read. “Followers in the desert downwind of his musk, / listening to him confess himself unfit to / loose latchets on shoes.”
Toby Martinez de las Rivas rambled more than Dante had. From what I made of him from my slanted vantage, he is a middleaged English punk and former archaeologist who once turned to G.M. Hopkins out of desperation and lately—at the reading, sheepishly—wears gray blazers with black elbow patches. He is the 2023-24 Blackburn Artist in Residence, having traded the English Durham for the American derivative to practice and teach what he called “the word in the poetic sense and the Word in the religious sense.”
“I do see writing as a form of prayer,” Toby later said during the Q&A session after the readings. His percussive poetry of floods, bewilderment, and razed landscapes reminded me of the growlings of prophets enthralled to God’s mandate that they announce their land’s impending doom, their mutterings to the Lord for grieving strength.
While reading with mounting intensity, Toby excavated an odd use of silence from his lines: long, five-second pauses between stanzas in the poem “Three Weeks After Conception”; longer, anguishing ten-second pauses between each fragmentary line of “The Great Woods of the”; all with confidence, daring us to imagine he was confused or losing his place. Will, the small young professor who had introduced Toby by lauding his work as “lyric apocalypse,” sat through these silence-riddled poems with an intent look of ambiguous displeasure.
Toby also read from ten of his “American Psalms” collages, written from fragmented notes about his new surroundings. Many of the psalms were ornithological. All were delivered at the usual pace of poetry in public, and most were fragmented.
“Poem is transfiguration.”
“These texts are bodies.”
“I am f****d. F***.”
“We are f****d.”
“We are f****d. F***.”
I haven’t exaggerated the number of profanities. But why blur his profanities with pinhole stars? A modest omission for modest readers who were not present but still wish to hear what was disruptive among Toby’s lines. That he actually read “fuck” twice and “fucked” thrice in quick succession, rather than gurgling his tonsils to imitate the non-sounds of asterisks, is something you’ll just have to believe now that I’ve implied it.
When Toby had returned to his seat and his former sheepishness, Lisa Russ Spaar stood and took the lectern. Unless she had collided with—and dissolved against—the image of herself seated between Toby and Dante in the black chairs gathered for the Q&A session, that is. Unless what immediately followed Toby’s reading was not the Pushcart- and Guggenheim-winning Lisa herself but the sound of Dante saying, “Poetry and theology are each ways of examining, ways of being, ways of thinking” when asked about the relationship of the titular symposium topics, as it happens in my recollection.
I’ve skipped ahead in my narration to the moments when these poets opined rather than read. When Dante offered his “very Protestant understanding of a very personal relationship with God” to say that “theology must be examined as we inherit it” when discussing the Baptist literalism of his upbringing; when Lisa recalled a colleague who considered himself a “God-fearing agnostic” to laughter; when Toby talked about his admiration for the blind, Cornish, Calvinist poet, Jack Klemmer. Dante’s elegant iconoclasm—“I don’t see the emptying of American churches as a threat to poetry,” he said without being blithe—especially colors my recollection. And so it populates the rendering before your eyes, and it may well have happened in exactly this order in the Alumni Common Room.
When Lisa began to read her short poems, she donned plastic reading glasses with lime-green arms and round brown frames. She is a small woman who dressed well but discreetly for her public appearance, in short heels and a cozy dress of bright patterns whose color could’ve been orange and navy, if it weren’t red and gold, or kelly-green and cream. Herself the creative writing director at the University of Virginia, Lisa knows that the full, attentive room she saw is not guaranteed for poetry: “There’s a terrible anxiety that no one will come to these things,” she admitted.
Lisa read short poems drawn like blood from the body of her poetic personae. Given that I inexplicably took few or no notes about the words of her poems, I’m tempted instead to describe their titles, her half-swallowed way of speaking, or even the stray anecdotes she mentioned. Her delivery often sounded slight and hurried, though her introductory preambles and commentary were more measured. When Lisa said the titles “Penance, “Ouija,” and “Temple Tomb,” I thought of the Lenten spirit of mortality we are all supposed to be contemplating.
She mentioned that she’d been raised “northern Presbyterian.” If I were to fill in the contrasting present practice which she did not mention, she might’ve said, “That’s probably why I’m a happy Southern Episcopalian today.” In an aside after the poem “Sky,” Lisa spoke about the “flamboyant” Episcopalian music director who taught her the historic, liturgical beauty of “real” church music, Bach and Buxtehude and all the carols she still hums to herself. “These liturgies are tied up with the turnings of the natural world,” she said, “which to me introduces a pantheistic or mystical element as well.”
Or Lisa did not. Had there been no aside about her Episcoplian music director, she could well have spoken of her love for “baroque, incensed” Catholic aesthetics and their richness for her verse, but which, for Lisa, balance always too lightly against the Church’s historic social teachings that trouble her heart. “Pope Francis can sometimes be a breath of fresh air,” she admitted, comfortable enough with the papal title and significance.
These two believable, fictional stories (and others) trickle like tributaries from the very real fact of Lisa standing before us all that afternoon. Thanks to their place in the sequence of this reporting, to their unmistakable double-quotation marks around the words y’all did not hear Lisa say, either story could be read as true. Who even among the other witnesses could falsify my rendering here, when I can simply omit them from my narration?
Aside from the metastasis of my chronic and ongoing meta-form affliction, I trembled with another bad habit during the event—a measuring, needling concern for the accuracy of the theologies expressed within and beside the poetry that was read for us. They were too often heterodox, I thought. Were Dante, Toby, and Lisa teasing away the Word into abstractions like ashen burning pages on the wind? Were we, in our attendance to them?
I’m thinking specifically of how Lisa mentioned that colleague who named himself “a God-fearing agnostic,” and how we all laughed at the term. Such form-skirting paradox and faith-bending play is the place of poets and those who read them. But does it make the Word and His people into mere words in mere human verse? Like nothing else, the Word is permanent while we are impermanent, passing like streams from His mouth. The Ignatian tradition holds that attachment to the world’s material is an embrace of illusions, not of the eternally real—were we holding our phantoms fast?
At the reading, this questioning was also passing, more easily an illusion than it is now. I wanted only to stop measuring so that I could hear the poems and see the poets where they stood. Perhaps I did, in the end. Perhaps I only deceived myself instead.
Before the Q&A session began, I bumped into P (Paul? Ptolemy? Pythagoras?), the raspy-voiced teacher and poet I know who holds a degree in theology and art from the Duke Divinity School. Like the church boys we are, we stacked the black chairs into four-seat towers once the event had ended. P held the door open for Anthony Domestico as we walked out to the parking lot. Domestico did not join us, sadly. I told P that I didn’t have time that evening for a beer when he offered, though we could certainly trade poems soon. We said more.
I’m leaving out the rest from the sense that P is a new friend to me, another young man, not a character the way I’ve rendered myself and the poets. He is not an illusion; none of us were. Only the words you’ve been reading are, truly. To withhold P is to angle toward preserving him against my own fictionalizing. Though, of course, I’ve already rendered him as “P” and enjambed my own intent. If this nonfiction were a poem, its discordant lines in disarray against one another but harmonized only in the verse where they all descend together, would it be truer?
Thanks for being here, y’all. In all earnestness, I did enjoy most of the Duke theology reading; it’s just that every piece of journalism I try to write contains a manic essayist weeping for release.
(For what it’s worth, Lisa Russ Spaar did actually mention the “pantheistic or mystical element” she sees in liturgical seasons in an interview with Waxwing Literary Journal.)