Tag: Danny Nelson

Let the 2nd Annual #MormonPoetrySlam Voting Begin!

Now that the busyness of Christmas has passed and the final performance in the 2nd Annual #MormonPoetrySlam has posted (see the event archive here), it’s time to determine the winner of the Audience Choice Award. For your consideration and reviewing pleasure, here are the eighteen entries, listed in order of appearance (you may need to hit “Read next page” at the bottom of the Storify to review all of eighteen).

To get straight to voting, click here. Continue reading “Let the 2nd Annual #MormonPoetrySlam Voting Begin!”

Wrapping up the #MormonPoetrySlam

In case you haven’t been following the Mormon Poetry Slam at home and have an interest in Mormon poetry (I mean, who doesn’t, right?), here’s an update (which I initially posted here):

The final performance in the slam—which I’ve been hosting on FireinthePasture.org and which as far as I know is the first online competition of its kind—posted last Friday. (You can find the event archive here). Now it’s time to determine the winner of the Audience Choice Award and we need your help with that because, well, the participants need the audience to vote. So, if you would: Take several minutes to consider the slam performances, then vote for your favorite before Wednesday’s end (voting rules are outlined below). For your consideration and reviewing pleasure, here are the fourteen entries, listed in order of appearance: Continue reading “Wrapping up the #MormonPoetrySlam”

Monsters & Mormons: a fourth round of admits

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Exciting times here in Monsters & Mormons headquarters. You can expect, mm, probably one more round of admits after this. We do hope the suspense has been mortifying.

But first, five more tastes of pending excellence:

S.P. Bailey’s The Baby in the Bushes

No supernatural monsters here, so if you can stand a sideways step into a separate genre, then put your gumshoes on and help us solve the mystery of the body in the storage unit. Old Testament law arrives in modern Utah and the consequences are not pretty.

TV McArthur’s The Blues Devil

I don’t think it’s natural for deals with the devil to leave the reader warm and smiling, but somehow TV pulled it off. I can’t explain it. I don’t even want to.

Bridgette Tuckfield’s Experimenting with Life at Extraordinary Depths

As I look back at my notes, I discover that Bridget’s story has “unique and pleasurable elements.” It also has a lot of mud and slime. But it’s unique and pleasurable mud and slime, so no worries. Just stay out of the water.

Brian Gibson’s The Eye Opener

Gibson is clearly wasting his time working in television. I now think about this story every night when we say family prayer. You don’t know how unsettling this is. Yet.

Danny Nelson’s The World

Rarely have I seen stereotypical “Relief Society Ladies” drawn with such love and care and depth and richness that you want to slap anyone who’s ever used that stereotype dismissively. Not to mention perhaps the most original monster I’ve ever read. You can’t predict this story. You can’t you can’t you can’t.

Payday Poetry: Philistina by Danny Nelson

This is a deceptively simple poem best read in the context of the entire project (The FOB Bible). It’s seems a bit underdeveloped in isolation. And yet it still accomplishes what many of us seem to be working on these days — a riffing on scripture that asserts both literalism and metaphor or fable-ness. That underscores the essentialness of historical, familial struggles turned in to literature to people of the Book (Books?). At the very least, it extends the network of personalities that we engage with when we read the Bible, that are in some sense part of the history of Mormons (and people of other faiths as well). Even more — and here you should probably just skip down and click through and read the very short poem itself — it slyly points to the way in which sing-songy, rhyming (bad) poetry is employed by Mormons for didactic means and shows how its a double-edge sword and a two way street.

And again: so far, Theric is the only one who has submitted anything. Spend 15-20 minutes this holiday season and dig up something good for us. Or I’ll be forced to start posting more of my slammin’ rhymes. And nobody wants that.

Title: Philistina

Poet: Danny Nelson

Publication Info: The FOB Bible, 2009

Submitted by: Theric Jepson

Why?: Th. writes: “.

I hope you appreciate that I am limiting myself to one poem per poet included in Plain and Precious Parts. It’s not easy. I picked this one because it was a poem even my father, not a famed devourer of poetry, latched on to immediately and has told many people about. He has brought it up in conversations. I think it’s new point of view gave him equal parts fascination and sadness.”

Wm adds: I do appreciate it. I also appreciate the comment on the new point of view — that’s something that literature can give us that other forms of discourse can’t (or at least can’t in quite the same way).

Participate:


Here’s the link to the spreadsheet so you can see what’s already been submitted

Looping through the Mormon Arts, from me to me

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Though this post is by it’s very nature heavily self-indulgent, I am going to try to spin it as more altruistic than it is. Continue reading “Looping through the Mormon Arts, from me to me”

Re: The Fob Family Bible (Part I)

Note: While some may consider it a conflict of interest to post a review of a book edited by one of AMV’s contributors on AMV, to you I say, “Blogging is all about the art of self-service and self-promotion. So I’m reviewing The Fob Bible (published May 2009 by Peculiar Pages and edited by Eric W Jepson, et al) here as a public service whether you like it or not. And I say that with all the kindness I can muster.”

 

Part I appears today and I’ll post part II next week.

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Re: The Fob Family Bible, Part I: Introduction and The First Four Fobnesses

I’ve got two family Bibles on my bookshelf: one nearly brand-new two-volume set from Bookcraft/Deseret Book–The Old and New Testaments for Latter-day Saint Families (Salt Lake City, 2005 and 1998 respectively); and one unwieldy, second-hand volume from Crusade Bible Publishers, Inc. (Nashville, 1980s)–The Holy Bible Family Altar Edition. These were intended, I believe, as coffee table volumes, books meant to be points of gathering, conversation, and communion between family members, their communities, and their God. Such creation of communal understanding is enhanced, the editors of all three volumes imply, with the editorial apparatus–the study helps–built into each text: among other things, the glossaries, the book and chapter introductions, the topic headings, the colored words that highlight important aspects of the text, and the footnotes that include cross references and scriptural commentary. According to the editors of the scriptures for Latter-day Saint Families series, these helps are “designed especially” to “help [“¦ us] read, understand, and think about [“¦ the scriptures] in exciting new ways”1–ways that will lead us, presumably, to become as God is, the central and defining focus of LDS theology. Continue reading “Re: The Fob Family Bible (Part I)”