Writers Here & Now

For all of you TWC fans of our good friend Rod Jellema, check out the reading he's featured in below, this month!

WRITERS HERE & NOW

THE PROGRAM IN CREATIVE WRITING at the UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND & JIMÉNEZ-PORTER WRITERS’ HOUSE PRESENT:

Rod Jellema,
Michael David Lukas,
Alison Stine

December 7th, 2011
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

RECEPTION, 6:15, at
DORCHESTER HALL

READING, 7:00, at
ULRICH RECITAL HALL
TAWES HALL


Rod Jellema is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, where he was the founding director of the Creative Writing Program. He produced five books of poems, the latest of which, Incarnality: The Collected Poems was published in October 2010. He was twice awarded poetry writing fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, and was many times a resident fellow at Yaddo. He edited and translated two books of poetry from the North Sea language of Frisian: County Fair: Poems from Friesland Since 1945 and The Sound that Remains: a Historical Collection of Frisian Poetry. For this work he was awarded Friesland's highest literary honor, the Pieter Jelles prize, and the Columbia University Translation Prize, 1986.

Michael David Lukas has been a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a night-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv, and a waiter at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. A graduate of Brown University and the University of Maryland, his writing has appeared in VQR, Slate, National Geographic Traveler, and Georgia Review. He has received scholarships from the National Endowment of the Arts, New York State Summer Writers’ Institute, Squaw Valler Community of Writers, Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and Elizabeth George Foundation. When he isn’t writing, he teaches creative writing to third-and forth-graders.

Alison Stine is the author of the books Wait, winner of the Brittingham Prize, Ohio Violence, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize, as well as a chapbook, Lot of My Sister, winner of the Wick Prize. Her poems and prose have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Huffington Post, New England Review, and many others. Her awards include the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. A former child actress, her musicals and plays have been performed at the Cleveland Playhouse, the International Thespian Festival, and Off-Broadway for Stephen Sondheim's Young Playwrights Inc. Urban Retreat.

An Interview with Rod Jellema

Rod Jellema’s fifth book of poems, Incarnality: The Collected Poems, has just been released by Wm. B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company. It includes forty-nine new poems and a selection of poems from earlier books. Rod Jellema is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland and for many years led workshops on both writing and reading poems at the Writer’s Center. This Saturday, October 16 at 4:00 p.m., he’ll read at The Writer’s Center, and will be joined by his son, the clarinetist and cornetist David Jellema, who will play in a musical call-and-response to some of the poems.

The poet and painter Marie Pavlicek-Wehrli interviewed Jellema for First Person Plural.

Marie Pavlicek-Wehrli: The title for your “Collected Poems,” Incarnality, uses a word that we rarely encounter in reading, media, conversation. Could you comment on what that word means to you and why you chose it as the title.

Rod Jellema: I wanted to play that rare word off against the better-known word carnality. We make of carne (flesh) something lascivious, slightly naughty, and yet celebratory, as in carnival. What that suggests is meat without spirit, a narrow and desperate kind of joy rising from the wild time of indulgence before the sensual deprivations of Lent. In that usage, flesh and the spiritual are split wide apart. Well okay, but why not celebrate the wholeness, the tense union of body and soul? If the spiritual is enfleshed, embodied in the beauty of physical reality, isn’t that where we find mystery and wonder? I want the word incarnality to be now and then a noisy carnival, celebrating matter infused with spirit., incarnate.

MPW: That might explain not only the title but also the artwork on the cover.

RJ: Yes. The publisher came up with a time-lapse photo of a lit carousel, shot through dark from above. It’s a slightly abstract link to carnival. Just right. Thank you for noticing.

MPW: In many of the poems you seem deeply concerned about the tendency, past and again present, for minds or entire cultures to give adherence to the spiritual world, or to spiritualism, as a separate entity. In “Catching Light,” for example., you take issue with Shelley’s famous simile, “Life like a dome of many-colored glass / Stains the white radiance of eternity.” Many regard his sense of unstained timeless purity as what is truly holy. How do you answer that?

RJ: I just don’t see the flight away from the physical world as anything holy. It’s ingratitude. I prefer poet Pattiann Rogers’ notion that pure light travels at the speed of light and keeps going unless we stop it. It is when we stop it, let it rest, that it makes color, design, shape out of pure light that would otherwise go on and on eternally into the most boring and lifeless infinity that we could imagine. It’s obvious that I begin in a very different place from Shelley, the neo-spiritualists, Asian monists, etc. The little incarnations and incarnalities that I see are real images or reflections of the capital-I Incarnation, God-made-flesh and joining us in time and history. That’s heady stuff, more imaginative than logical.

MPW: I am reminded of Richard Wilbur’s essay “The Genie in the Bottle.” Do you recall that one?

RJ: I do. Wilbur writes that The genie gets its power by virtue of being contained in the bottle. This is the function of form. I don’t use set forms but there is something formal about what poets do. We like that sense of the pressure of the poem’s energy—the soul, the spirit, of the poem that is only going to get made if it’s pushing against something. It has to have that formal demand to push against, otherwise it’s just flopping around. Or disappearing into that lifeless infinity.

MPW: I notice in the collected poems that you like setting up opposites --- not just physical vs. spiritual, but also light vs. dark, large vs. small, also other contraries. Is there some poetic principle behind this? Or a deep philosophical one?

RJ: [laughs} No, not at all. I just mistrust public opinion, which can be manipulated. It can tell us, for example, that dark and black mean evil and ignorance while light means purity and wisdom. That’s dangerous. Looking through paint and sounds, shapes and the wonder of words, artists take time to notice that the ultimate flash and glare of light we pursue could be a final nuclear blast, while the dark is also the cool place where we dream and meditate and see the unseen. Likewise, our veneration of bigness overlooks the threads and splinters from beneath consciousness. The job of the arts is to give us a second look. At everything.

Convergence: Ash Wednesday

A little news from a Writer's Center co-sponsored event taking place tomorrow, Sunday, April 5, at a great new organization called Convergence over in Alexandria. Since it's National Poetry Month AND Palm Sunday, why not learn more about T.S. Eliot's poem "Ash Wednesday"?

This is happening tomorrow at 4p.m. Longtime Writer's Center member & friend Rod Jellema will read and discuss the poem. An exhibit of Carl Lennartson's work will appear throughout April. See below:

Ash Wednesday, Exhibit
Carl Lennartson: Art from Literature
April 1-30th, 2009
Opening Reception, Sunday, April 5th 3-5 pm

4:00 pm reading of T.E. Eliot's poem, Ash Wednesday by
poet, Rod Jellema, Professor Emertius, the University of Maryland.

Followed by a panel and audience discussion on the themes of the poem, the creative process and cross-media influences.