Susan Elizabeth Howe – A Motley Vision

On Poets & Poetry: Salt to the World

BYU Studies Quarterly just published my review essay on two recent poetry collections: Susan Elizabeth Howe’s Salt (Signature Books, 2013) and Lance Larsen’s Genius Loci (University of Tampa Press, 2013). Both collections are well-worth your time and they sustain and reward multiple readings. Here’s an excerpt, right from the middle of my review, to whet your lyric appetite:

Mormon theology demands that in all we do—language-making included—we attend closely to the environments we inhabit. “Consider the lilies of the field,” Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount, then again in his sermon at the Nephite temple and to Joseph Smith in Kirtland. His utterance, reiterated across dispensations, calls his disciples to rely on his grace as they seek to build Zion: “You’re worried about where you’ll get your next meal?” he seems to ask. “How you’ll quench your thirst and clothe your nakedness? Well, look closely at the lilies. See how their relationship with the earth sustains their growth? They root in rich soil. They withhold their presence and their beauty from no one. They consume only as their needs demand and what they produce contributes—even in death—to the health and constant renewal of their environment, to which the species readily adapts. Can human institutions, which are prone to excess, say the same of themselves?

“Live, rather, like the lilies.”

Howe, it seems, has taken this imperative to heart (though perhaps not directly via Christ’s statement), using her poiesis as a way to sustain the world and to draw out her presence—as well as her readers’ presence—therein. Poet and professor Lance Larsen, who (like Howe) teaches at BYU, seems to have responded likewise, although the places he inhabits in his fourth poetry collection, Genius Loci, are more directly mobile than those Howe inhabits in Salt. Salt‘s geographies and the people and creatures who populate them are essentially in motion. But a persistent concern in Genius Loci is what it means to live in a world that doesn’t hold still—scratch that: not just to live in a world that doesn’t hold still, but to be fully present in that world.

You can read a PDF copy of the full review essay on the flipside of this link.

(Cross-posted here.)

_Saints on Stage: An Anthology of Mormon Drama_ is Now Available

Saints on Stage: An Anthology of Mormon Drama is now available at Zarahemla Books’ website, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.

After a half decade of delays, obstacles, research, and revising, I am so pleased that this behemoth is now ready to release onto an unsuspecting world! The plays it includes (from such Mormon Letters luminaries as Eric Samuelsen, Margaret Blair Young, Melissa Leilani Larson, Thomas F. Rogers, Susan E. Howe, James Arrington, Scott Bronson, Tim Slover, Robert Elliott, and Thom Duncan) have effected my life in profound ways and I hope other people will feel the same. They make up some of the finest accomplishments in the history of Mormon Drama. The volume is huge… nearly 700 pages. It has 11 plays, playwright biographies, and a 30+ page introduction on the history of Mormon drama. We’ve tried to be thorough, we’ve tried to give you something meaningful. I hope you’ll see why this is a project I thought was worth working and waiting for.

_Saints On Stage: An Anthology of Mormon Drama_ is Off to the Printers!

It’s taken the better half of a decade, but Saints on Stage: An Anthology of Mormon Drama is off to the printers. This is the description of the book on Zarahemla Books’s website:

Saints on Stage is the most comprehensive and important work on Mormon drama ever published. This volume anthologizes some of Mormonism’s best plays from the last several decades, many of them published here for the first time. Several of these plays have won honors from institutions as varied as the Kennedy Center and the Association for Mormon Letters.

This volume includes historical backgrounds and playwright biographies, as well as an introduction that provides an extensive overview of Mormon drama. The following plays are included:

Fires of the Mind ““ Robert Elliott

Huebener ““ Thomas F. Rogers

Burdens of Earth ““ Susan Elizabeth Howe

J. Golden ““ James Arrington

Matters of the Heart ““ Thom Duncan

Gadianton ““ Eric Samuelsen

Hancock County ““ Tim Slover

Stones ““ J. Scott Bronson

Farewell to Eden ““ Mahonri Stewart

Martyrs’ Crossing ““ Melissa Leilani Larson

I Am Jane ““ Margaret Blair Young

Payday Poetry: Your Luck Is About To Change by Susan Elizabeth Howe

Payday Poetry returns with a poem about the end of the year and thoughts of all that could go wrong and some surprising but approachable imagery.

Title: Your Luck Is About To Change

Poet:Susan Elizabeth Howe

Publication Info: Poetry, December 2002

Submitted by: Tyler Chadwick

Why?: Tyler says: “For this line: ‘marriage spicy as moo-goo-gai-pan.’ Oh, and for the dinosaur nativity. (Read it. You’ll see.)”

Participate:

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

Poetry in Print — April 2010

This is the third year that I have prepared a bibliography of poetry by Mormons in print for National Poetry Month. Surprisingly, this year we only added titles to the list — nothing went out-of-print. But don’t think that is because all these books are easy to find.

Continue reading “Poetry in Print — April 2010”

Beyond Prescription? Part Two

I take up today where I left off .

More or Less Mormon? The Problem(atizing) of Mormon Identity

In his 1997 Dialogue article, “‘Awaiting Translation’: Timothy Liu, Identity Politics, and the Question of Religious Authenticity,” Waterman interrogates the notion of a coherent Mormon cultural identity, a religious sense of communal self constructed around nineteenth century Mormonism’s flirtation with nationhood and ethnic identity separate from that of the nineteenth century American mainstream. This “incipient nationality,” Thomas F. O’Dea observes, was born of the “combination of [Mormonism’s] distinctive values, separate and peculiar social institutions”–as, among other things, its lay ministry and its insistence that humans can receive direct revelation from God–“and [its] geographic segregation” from the rest of America (qtd. in Mauss 291 [from this]). Such “protonationality,” as Armand Mauss labels it, was “strengthened by three ‘Mormon wars'”–the 1838 conflict with neighbors in northwest Missouri, the 1844-46 conflict with neighbors in west Illinois, and the 1857-58 conflict with the Federal Government over Utah Territory–and “”˜constant … conflict’ with the [world] outside [Mormonism] to produce a total Mormon cultural environment and worldview that became ‘progressively more distinct'” (291).

Yet this distinctness faded some as Mormonism made inroads into secular American culture, assimilating, to a degree, in order to accommodate the organization’s need for expansion: if the culture of the saints had stayed too peculiar, refusing engagement with what O’dea labels “modern secular thought” in order to be wholly separate from the world, the institution may have remained indefinitely stagnant and small. Continue reading “Beyond Prescription? Part Two”

Mormon Poetry for National Poetry Month

April is National Poetry Month, so in view of our recent conversations about Mormon poetry, I though it might be a good idea to review what Mormon poetry is in print at the moment, and ask those who visit to take a look. [The links are to the Amazon page for the book – no link means that the book isn’t available on Amazon.]

I think we would also love to know of any books that aren’t on the list. I pulled this information from a number of sources, but like any bibliographies of Mormon materials, it is very hard to get everything.

The list is interesting for several reasons:

Continue reading “Mormon Poetry for National Poetry Month”