DiaBLOGue

Lost in Translation | Adam S. Miller, The Sun Has Burned My Skin: A Modest Paraphrase of Solomon’s Song of Songs

October 26, 2018

In my review of Adam Miller’s wonderfully imaginative and provocative book of criticism, Rube Goldberg Machines: Essays in Mormon Theology (2012), I stated: “At times, Miller seems as much poet as theologian. Essay after essay does what Robert Frost says poetry is supposed to do: ‘begin in delight and end in wisdom,’ although at times Miller’s essays begin in wisdom and end in delight. In reality, Miller’s writing is often theology as poetry.”

I’ve Got a Feeling

October 26, 2018

My dad gave me Hugh Nibley while I was in high school. His writing seemed to be a place set for me at the table of Mormonism. I dug into Nibley’s work and quoted my…

In Memoriam: Douglas Heal Thayer (1929–2017)

October 26, 2018

This is how Douglas Thayer often greeted me when we met in the hallway of the Jesse Knight Building, where both of us taught for years. I wonder if I was the only person who got such a greeting from his rich supply of poems. I was still in my twenties, newly married to Bruce Young, when he first greeted me this way—in 1985. I had taken advanced creative writing from him in 1978, but I’m not sure he remembered that. 

“Twisted Apples”: Lance Larsen Takes on Prose Poetry | Lance Larsen, What the Body Knows

October 26, 2018

What makes something a poem? How do you recognize one, even if it has no broken lines? For most of us who read and love poetry, the answer is, “I just know.” There is the buzz of new vision from a surprising metaphor or imaginative framing, the sensual delight of rhythm and rhyme. But even more, there is the feeling. A good poem sends sparks through our synapses, makes us feel more alive. “I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” says Emily Dickinson. It’s visceral.

Norma: An Excerpt from The Encore

October 26, 2018

The mid-November darkness settles early in the afternoon. As my window dims, a tall man with a chocolate complexion peeks through the door. “Charity,” his rich baritone voice fills my small room, “I’m one of…

In Memoriam: Elouise Bell (1935–2017)

October 26, 2018

In the fall of 1973, I enrolled as a sophomore at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. On a whim, I registered for a course titled ENG 240 WRITING POETRY, INSTRUCTOR: E. BELL. I had no idea who “E. Bell” was—male or female? animal, vegetable, or mineral?—but I soon found out. The first day of class, as we eager, would-be-poets settled into our neatly aligned desk-chairs, the door opened and a statuesque woman with the regal swagger of a Hawaiian queen and the deadpan grin of a stand-up comic entered the classroom toting a hefty book bag that she promptly dropped on the teacher’s desk—clunk!

Nothing by Itself | George B. Handley, American Fork

October 26, 2018

It’s difficult to know where to start in discussing a novel as thoughtful as American Fork. Politics, religion, belonging, family history, ecology, sense of place, the high costs of love and our dogged willingness to pay…

Art

October 26, 2018

Gender Structures within Seasons of Change: Stories of Transition | Sandra Clark Jergensen and Shelah Mastny Miner, eds. Seasons of Change: Stories of Transition

October 26, 2018

Aptly titled, Seasons of Change: Stories of Transition is a well-curated collection of prose and poetry featuring a specific demographic of Mormon women who read and contribute to the literary journal and blog Segullah. Eleven thoughtfully arranged categories containing fifty-eight voices capture a diversity of experiences that occasionally touch on issues of class, sexual orientation, ability, race, and ethnicity, but primarily plumb the life and death observations and gendered experiences of a middle-class swath of well-educated, able-bodied, heteronormative, married women from different age groups and North American geographies (their rare references to race or ethnicity also suggest racial homogeneity among them).