Michael Hicks
MICHAEL HICKS {www.michaelhicks.org} is a Professor of Music at Brigham Young University. A former editor of the journal American Music (2007–2010), he is also the author of five books in University of Illinois Press’s Music in American Life series, including The Mormon Tabernacle Choir: A Biography (2015). His poetry has appeared in various Mormon journals and in anthologies such as New Poets of the American West (2010), and Fire in the Pasture (2011).
Articles
Letters to the Editor
Read moreTrue Religion
When you’re young you think “widow” is a misprint for “window.”
Then the tarp of age gets pulled over you and the words drift apart.
There is a cleanness to good marriage that is like the Renaissance.
It is a force of beauty that tramples mere love. When the blood rushes
The Agreement
After the staredown, saliva gathering in their mouths,
cotton swelling in his, Daniel invited the lions
out for drinks and a late supper.
The Four Stanzas of the Apocalypse
The sky has fasted in the desert
forty thousand years.
Now it’s caught a glimpse
of barley fields and orange groves:
the table the world sets for winter.
Understudies for Angels | Megan Sanborn Jones, Contemporary Mormon Pageantry: Seeking After the Dead
The cover photo startles us into the book’s theme: two tribes, ghosts and mortals, staring off in the same direction. Beyond that cover we take a trek through Mormonism’s pageantry—not the pageantry of temple rituals…
Read moreNotes on Brigham Young’s Aesthetics
“If there is anything virtuous, lovely . . . we seek after these things.” Granted. But loveliness by what criteria? We in the Church often presume a common aesthetic; or when conflicts in judgment arise—whether…
Read morePoetic Borrowing in Early Mormonism
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it seems, has had little ^ use for poetry that cannot be sung. The chief place of verse has always been the hymnal, and not without reason:…
Read moreJoseph Smith, Sr., Dreams of His Namesake
Vermont, Autumn 1805
And the boy, the milky angel said,
will be like the wild rain
that shatters the crops and spins the brittle stalks
end upon end.
Rebaptism: A Manual
When the first letter comes,
a quiet verdict,
water sheds its sense:
coastlines stiffen,
The Statue of Brigham Young at South Temple and Main, Salt Lake City
The cupping hand cradles the winds
that whir like crickets
beneath the swoop of traffic lamps.
The legs like stumps of pillars
Family Tree
Adam: The wind hissed in the branches,
green tongues
whispering
a secret I could
never peel open.
Faith Healing
And there she was, Kathryn Kuhlman* strolling the stage at the Civic,
parting a sea of applause, her gown like an angel that got away,
so pure it might have been empty but for the Holy Ghost preening
in her body as she paced the floral proscenium, lifting her hands
in a sign language I knew only God understood.
Elder Price Superstar | The Book of Mormon (Broadway musical)
I’ll never forget the first time I heard my mother swear. I was in my thirties and had finally decided to talk to her about her second husband, whom she’d married when I was eleven, divorced two years later, and about whom, as if by a silent contract, we never spoke. “So tell me what was going on in that marriage,” I said to her. She bit her lip, paused, then said, “It was really shitty.” And that was it. This woman from whose mouth I’d never heard a “hell” or a “damn,” a woman who read her Daily Light devotional every morning, listened all day to Christian radio, and kept a pocket-size New Testament in her glove compartment, had now, deliberately and with great care, spoken a word I could never imagine escaping her lips.
Read moreMy Mother Tongues
You can’t forget your first time. Mine was in the back of a beige ’68 VW bus, which I’d just bought from my mom’s boyfriend. I was taking Annie home from an Assemblies of God…
Read moreSinging in the Easter Choir beside My Enemy
A sustained tone, our conductor says,
must narrate our belief: begin, develop,
then patiently subside. That’s what she
learned in the Welsh choirs of her
Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection
I should keep a journal. If I did I could look up what year this happened. Or exactly why I drove to Ed’s house and knocked on his door. Or what time it was when…
Read moreGuest Editor’s Introduction
Kristine Haglund gave me a gift. This issue is the long thank you note.
She had asked me from time to time to write something on music for Dialogue. Or take part in a panel discussion on music for the journal. Or do anything on music, since she loves the art and its place in our faith and I have been a kind of go-to guy on that for years.
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