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    Other Voices, Other Rooms: Poems
    Other Voices, Other Rooms: Poems
    Other Voices, Other Rooms: Poems
    Ebook178 pages6 hours

    Other Voices, Other Rooms: Poems

    By Tim Vivian and Pamela Cranston

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    About this ebook

    Why do we tell stories? Why are stories so indigenous to religion? Stories. Sacred stories. The three Western Scriptures express themselves most fully, and deeply, in stories.
    The original idea of "story" is "inquiry," the "result of research, information, knowledge," "telling, exposition, account, history." Its verb makes verbal these nouns: "to seek to know oneself, inform oneself, do research, inquire," "interrogate," "examine, explore, observe." All history is story. Most Scripture is story. Such stories, all stories, ask for--even demand--attentive listening, interpretation, and reinterpretation. Each of us, therefore, becomes an interpreter, speaking in tongues (so to speak), even if only for herself or himself. The poems here offer such explorations; they take scriptural stories and imagine--and reimagine--them in order to offer the reader different angles and perspectives, new experiences. Such experiences, such perspectives, can help us see the Scriptures, and ourselves, anew.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherResource Publications
    Release dateMar 12, 2020
    ISBN9781725258693
    Other Voices, Other Rooms: Poems
    Author

    Tim Vivian

    Tim Vivian is professor emeritus of religious studies at California State University, Bakersfield, and a retired priest of the Episcopal Church. He has published, among many books, The Life of Antony (with Apostolos N. Athanassakis, 2003), The Holy Workshop of Virtue: The Life of Saint John the Little (with Maged S.A. Mikhail, 2010), Becoming Fire: Through the Year with the Desert Fathers and Mothers (2009) and The Sayings and Stories of the Desert Fathers and Mothers (vol. 1, forthcoming, 2021).

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      Book preview

      Other Voices, Other Rooms - Tim Vivian

      9781725258679.kindle.jpg

      Other Voices, Other Rooms

      Poems

      Tim Vivian

      Preface by Pamela Cranston

      Other Voices, Other Rooms

      Poems

      Copyright ©

      2020

      Tim Vivian. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

      199

      W.

      8

      th Ave., Suite

      3

      , Eugene, OR

      97401

      .

      Resource Publications

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199

      W.

      8

      th Ave., Suite

      3

      Eugene, OR

      97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      paperback isbn: 978-1-7252-5867-9

      hardcover isbn: 978-1-7252-5868-6

      ebook isbn: 978-1-7252-5869-3

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      07/06/20

      E

      xcerpts from East Coker The Wasteland and Little Gidding from COLLECTED POEMS

      1909

      -

      1962

      by T.S. Eliot. Copyright ©

      1952

      by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, renewed

      1980

      by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

      With thanksgiving to the poets of my youth

      E. E. Cummings

      Richard Eberhart

      T.S. Eliot

      Stanley Kunitz

      Robert Lowell

      Howard Nemerov

      Theodore Roethke

      David Wagoner

      Richard Wilbur

      William Carlos Williams

      James Wright

      Midrash, pl. Midrashim Hebrew: interpretation, study,rabbinic Bible interpretation,(

      1

      ) an interpretation of a single verse of Scripture,(

      2

      ) a compilation of exegeses of Scripture,(

      3

      ) the method of exegesis characteristic of rabbinic Judaism.

      —Jonathan Z. Smith, ed., The HarperCollins Dictionary of Religion, 717

      Now this is an allegory: these women are two covenants.

      —Galatians 4:24

      I cannot say what poetry is; I know that our suffering and our concentrated joy, our states of plunging far and dark and turning to come back to the world . . . all are here . . . and there is an exchange here in which our lives are met, and created.

      —Muriel Rukeyser

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Preface

      Author’s Note

      Mary’s Gift to Gabriel

      Those Who Now See

      In Dreams Begin Responsibilities5

      The Bread and the Wine: A Follower, Deep in Hiding, Tells His Story

      Only One Follows Him

      There Are, Sometimes, Circumstances:Adam, East of Eden, Reflects

      Satan Nods Back Into Sleep

      Between Each Letter: A Month after the Crucifixion and Resurrection

      Nails Like Manna: After the Crucifixion and Resurrection

      Belonging to the Vision is the Vision

      When Jesus Writes with His Finger

      The Torn Flesh of One Just35

      The Moviegoer

      They Wept

      Your Husband’s Bones: A Fragment from Acta historiae Pilati, the Lost Acts of Pilate

      Can One Flesh Become Two?

      The Lord’s Own Landscape:A Faithful Disciple Reflects

      When Angels Fall

      Third Eye Blind: An Alternative Tradition in Aramaic Recently Discovered Near Qumran51

      The Quick and the Dead52

      What Forgiveness I Have Found:The Beloved Disciple in Dialogue

      Each Face, Disappointed

      Mary Magdalene as She Walks

      Psaltery: An Early Monk, Once Despondent, by the Side of the Road

      The Presence of the LORD

      Crown of Thorns: Pontius Pilate’s Soliloquy as He Sits Before Jesus, Circa 30 CE

      Broken, Yet Sacred

      Passover’s Birthright

      Herod, Himself99

      An Indifferent Mirror: The Dialogue of Pilate, A Passage from a Lost Acts of Pilate

      Descent and Ascension

      We at Great Distance

      Definitions of Joy

      Cur Deus Homo?:108 An Old Friend of Joseph Speaks

      Your Forgiveness: During the Final Days of Masada Peter Reflects121

      All Those Without

      Satan’s Angel

      The Promised Land

      Before the Stones Fly: A Soliloquy by Stephen, the First Martyr

      Gift

      Donkey Shit: A Fragment from a Lost Gospel

      A Question

      Three Strange Angels: Two Disciples Talk After the Resurrection

      Final Atonement

      Maybe Shit

      When Jesus, Crucified A Midrash on John 19:21–22 When Jesus, crucified, leans down, he sees his mother and Mary Magdalene and, now, all his belovèd female followers. Each offers him her afterbirth.

      The Child at Stillbirth

      Once Abel: A Dialogue between God and Eva’s First Son

      A Galilean’s Grave: Two Female Followers of Jesus Talk after the Resurrection

      Then to God’s Wombs: Shimon Speaks from His Cross183

      À la Recherche du Temps Perdu: en Hommage à Eva188

      Home

      Once, in God’s Presence:A Fragment from the Acta Petri,The Acts of Peter

      God’s Open Wound

      Avatars of God’s Weeping:A Follower of Jesus, Years Later,Shares Her Thoughts

      All God’s Children

      Semper Imago Imaginis: Adam’s Inquiries194

      Cages: A Newly-Discovered Fragment from the Acts of Simon Magus200

      Prologue and Its Aftermath

      A Snake Upright

      That Ghost Again: A Prose Poem and Dramatic Midrash on Barabbas

      Lacrimae Rerum, Lacrimae Gaudiae:Coda & Epithalamion

      Preface

      It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can attain his desire only by passing through its opposite.

      —Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals

      ¹

      To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.In order to arrive at what you do not know You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.

      —T.S. Eliot, East Coker in The Four Quartets

      ²

      I first encountered Tim Vivian’s poetry between 1985 and 1988, when we were seminary students studying for the Episcopal priesthood at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California. Though both of us had been writing poetry separately for many years, for my part, I shared my poems only with a chosen few. Tim was one of them, and he was always unfailingly supportive. When he sent me his brave first collection of poems for publication, asking me to write a preface for the book, I was delighted to do so. As I read them, I was riveted by his use of raw, powerful images and his acute perceptions, which I found gripping.

      In "Mary’s Gift to Gabriel (pp. 1-2), the first poem of Vivian’s brilliant collection of poems, he writes:

      We’ve slung our beliefs into a ditch

      and called them detritus—or worse.

      But the depths of each slinging have

      become feathers on the wings of each angel.

      The angels now gather together,

      bearing their burdens. Many can barely

      fly.

      Thus begins Other Voices, Other Rooms. The poems carry us into a deeply enfleshed, imagined world of Scripture. Of this collection, Vivian’s Mary’s Gift to Gabriel is to me the most beautiful and numinous poem in the book. It is the lamp by which we see all the others.

      You might expect an Episcopal priest and professor emeritus of Religious Studies at California State University Bakersfield who teaches courses in Western and Indigenous Religions, who is an expert in the New Testament and Patristics, and who most notably is a scholar of the Desert Fathers and Mothers of fourth- to sixth-century monasticism, to write comforting and comfortable stories. This is not the case. These are complex, challenging, sophisticated, nuanced, deeply incarnational, dark, and earthy poems. Vivian uses story, theology, and history as a lens to look at Scripture of the Old and New Testament (and a bit of the Quran) from a new angle—and ourselves and our twenty-first-century world as well. It is not a pretty picture. That said, almost everything in these poems, for better or for worse, is written in hindsight with the events of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as already having occurred. Thus, the Good News of the Gospel serves as a kind of backward-looking mirror and quiet undercurrent for both the narrators of the poems and those who read them.

      This is not the first time that the midrash form has been used in a poetic context. The poet Scott Cairns uses it in his prose-poem commentary entitled The Recovered Midrashim of Rabbi Sab published in his 1998 collection Recovered Body. (A renowned

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