Jonathon Penny

Review: “Babbling on toward Ephemeral Patterns” Patrick Madden, Disparates

Alphabetize yourkarma, sever your qigong,jinx your wifi code. Disparates, 134 I want to suggest that Disparates is less disparate than it claims to be, that there is a running theme or a coherent message that…

Out of the Garden: The Nature of Revelation in Romanticism, Naturalism, and Modernism

One of the defining preoccupations of the Romanticists—and of the Romantic poets in particular—is the idea that God reveals himself to the human most palpably in a natural setting: to experience the natural world in its wildness is to experience God in his wildness. 

Mere Tears and Torrents, Signs and Seals: The Sweet Semantic Everything of Troubled Love | Matthew James Babcock, Four Tales of Troubled Love

If Matthew Babcock’s Four Tales of Troubled Love is about something, it is about private worlds; the reconciliation of self and other; the reckoning of what two people are with each other, without each other, and with the people that made them and that they make in turn; the luke and warm compromise of to-be-with-you and as-I-am.

Winterscape: Prairie

Fallow soil, windblown, is a rigid latticework 
Pressed hard against patchwork fields etched with snow. 

A river, drawn amblingly, God’s Hancock doodle,
Flows its cursive way across the whole.

Mormon Scholars in the Humanities Conference | Savior, silver, psalms, and sighs, and flash-burn offerings

Help thou mine unbelief  and I 
Will give away my sins or keep them close to know you;   
Will seek you in the best  and brokenest of books; 
Will cling hard, let loose, bring forth flesh and fruit,  if this will please;
Will more-than-tithe my time and talent, open windows;   
Make room for oil and balsam, if you’ll pour;   
Will labor, useless, to admit,  but leave a spare under the mat,
Create diversions, throw down ropes; 
Will pray and fast and follow and hope; 

“Epithalamion” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

HARK, hearer, hear what I do; lend a thought now, make believe
We are leafwhelmed somewhere with the hood 
Of some branchy bunchy bushybowered wood, 
Southern dene or Lancashire clough or Devon cleave,
That leans along the loins of hills, where a candycoloured

Fern Hill Revisited

Time held me green and dying, though I sang, 
And spun me off the whinnied fields and out of praise
In his big harvest hands ’til horse and hen and place
Were only memory, then myth, then vacant space