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Inside
NCR Awards
and appeals in prose and poetry
When John Wilkins, our journalistic
cousin in London, was recently honored by the queen, we asked NCRs
poet laureate Arthur Jones to muse a bit about it:
In England, Our friend at The Tablet, John
Wilkins, the editor there, Is now on a par with the Beatles, For a
Catholic a stature quite rare. The queen In her wisdom will honor Her
subjects whose service doth please, Our pal Johnny Wilkins among
them, Hes one of her new MBEs.
(MBE: Member of the British Empire. This most minor of the
queens awards is an honorific worn as initials behind the name. The queen
confers the title -- along with a medal -- at Buckingham Palace. The Beatles
received their MBEs in 1965. John Lennon sent his back in 1969 because of
British involvement in the war in Biafra.)
One thing Ive learned from
this page is that third time lucky is more than a cliché.
People need to be reminded of things not twice but three times. When I first
appealed for applicants for Keeping Faith , nearly nothing
happened. When I tried a second time, there was a very gratifying response.
With this third appeal we hope for an avalanche of entries. This is a unique
opportunity to honor some soul you know who has made a difference, made a
gesture, stood out from the crowd in some way. Get in touch with Teresa Malcolm
and tell her about your favorite person.
Last issue, commenting on the
brouhaha caused by our story (NCR, June 19) on the Philadelphia
archdiocese and its archbishop, Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, I cast a mild
rebuke in the direction of editor Robert Rosenthal whose Philadelphia
Inquirer had refused to run the story written by its own staffer. Its
only fair to report that, in a subsequent meeting, reportedly with 45 of his
writers and editors, Rosenthal made a gallant effort to come clean. In effect,
Rosenthal retracted comments made about the articles author, Ralph
Cipriano, and admitted he would have run the article, according to a report
about the meeting published in the Philadelphia City Paper, an
alternative weekly. Rosenthal also promised, according to the City
Paper, that there would be no journalistic sacred cows in Philadelphia,
including the archdiocese.
Poets dont turn out epics like
they used to. As the world turns faster, people want their poetry pithy. And
the pithiest poetry youre likely to find is the haiku.
Haiku originated in Japan: three lines of managed syllables
intense with content. As this poetic form came west, the syllables loosened up
a little, but the format is still very tight. As in:
What we do to our Mother Earth Is just the way We
treat each other
This is from Tersely Yours II: Haiku Poetry in Defense of
Nature for the Coming Spiritual-Ecological Age, by Vic Hummert (available
from 122 Rosedale, Lafayette, LA 70508). Hummert, a former Maryknoll priest and
missionary to Hong Kong, has long been an environmental activist. His little
poems cry out to the nation to wake up:
We are water thinking What we do to the
rivers We do to ourselves
Haiku is cryptic. Its brevity has something of a shock
impact on consciousness, writes ecologist and theologian Fr. Thomas Berry
in an introduction to Tersely Yours II: It evokes a response
before a person can engage in any logical process of apprehension. It provides
inspiration before resistance can be activated. This stealth approach is
especially necessary in a complacent world going for the gusto while the
environment goes into a tailspin:
Rejecting climate change Is like telling a mirror
My hair isnt growing
An ancient genre, maybe, but topical as today:
Since they are fading fast Dont miss your
chance To pet a neighborhood frog
Or this:
Long before Holy Books Were written --
pagans knew Our Earth is sacred
Never one to console the complacent, Hummert the salty prophet is
salt of the earth.
No one will ever say Fr. Joe
Gallaghers was an unexamined life. The Baltimore priest, now retired, has
been writing books and articles for a long lifetime. They are full of poetry
and epiphany and insight, holding reality upside down at arms length and
shaking it until a new version comes out. For example:
Does life persist beyond the grave? Back and forth
debaters go. But those who hold the negative Can never say, I told
you so!
Thats the first poem in his new Statements at the
Scene (100 pages, $10, The Bench Press, PO Box 50027, Baltimore MD 21211).
This is followed by A Work of Superirrigation:
The cleanest feet in Christendom, those least in need
of soap, must be the ones each Holy Week denuded for the
pope.
Those two are taken from the Lighter Scenes section,
which is followed by Shifting Scenes, Scenes Unseen,
Behind the Scenes and much more. The Philosophical
Scene, for example, includes Bifocal:
A lifetime: too short to be serious, too long to
be trivial
The next poem is called Courage:
A law of courage to clip and save: The fearless
heart cannot be brave.
Gallagher, who wrote a column for The Baltimore Sun for
many years, writes frequently for NCR, most notably his end-of-year
peregrinations through the events and pronouncements of the previous year.
Writes Josephine Jacobsen, former poetry consultant to the Library
of Congress, about Gallaghers poetry: It perceives the constant
ironies of life and the way in which the beautiful can flash out of the
mundane, like a brilliant bird from a shabby bush. He has the great
clown-instinct, which perceives the enormous intimacy of the funny with the sad
and even the grim.
The poems are not all just frisky and fun. Some, such as
Missing, are heavy as life:
He takes a lot of trips. I ask his wife do you miss
him when hes away? No, she says, wistfully. I only miss
him When hes home.
Its hard to stop quoting Gallagher, who also says this:
The pessimist thinks the earth is flat; the optimist thinks its
bubbly.
-- Michael Farrell
National Catholic Reporter, July 17,
1998
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