DiaBLOGue

The fault line shifts, 
subterranean conflict rises. 
Granite knitted together 
in heat and compaction, 

there beyond 
the beachballs of our peaceful days 
beneath the rubble 
of our fractured justice 

The sun is four hours high. The air is starting
            to stir from the south, heavy and dry with sun. 

No, nothing will do just now 
            but to sit beneath a mesquite tree 
            in a dry creek bed and look long at cactus. 
            The saguaro does not sway or bend or mark the breeze.
            It has no use. It simply is. 
            I can look at it until time is lost 
            and it will not move. 

In areas distant from the central stakes of Zion, the church may occupy a more important position in the lives of members than it does where Mor mons are more numerous. This is particularly true…

From safe within the geographical and philosophical matrix that is the Church, it is often difficult for people my age and older to realize that such a thing as a “generation gap” may in fact…

Thus Clinton Larson in an interview published in Dialogue for Autumn 1969. Dr. Larson, whom Karl Keller has described as the first “Mormon poet,” also affirmed a hope that “If . . . literary artists . . . take their work as seriously as they should, and by ‘seriously’ I mean that they become professionally responsible, then a significant and coherent literary movement can begin.” Whether a “literary movement” in the church is possible, or even desirable, I wish to leave aside. Good poems, however, should be possible and certainly are desirable; they are, as Larson suggests, “part of the spiritual record” of this people. The recent books of three young writers, who might be thought of as second-generation L.D.S. poets, exhibit the grounds for both the hope and the negation in Larson’s remarks.