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
Read moreThe Agreement
Read moreThe Four Stanzas of the Apocalypse
Read moreUnderstudies for Angels Megan Sanborn Jones. Contemporary Mormon Pageantry: Seeking After the Dead
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.
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