The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination: Critical Reception of the Catholic Imagination

good morning oh there we are

good morning everyone I hope you can

hear me

yeah

it's lovely to see all of you and to

open the second day of our wonderful

conference with a paper on Catholic

women and poetry our paper this morning

is really going to be in two parts and

it's going to form something of a

dialogue

today Emma Mason and I will both be

speaking about a neglected and actually

I think submerged tradition of Catholic

poetry by women and with me speaking

first I'll be talking about poetry from

my own National and cultural context in

Scotland within a kind of global grammar

of Catholic devotion and giving brief

examples of poetry mostly from the early

to mid 20th century and then after that

Emma is going to be speaking about

contemporary poetry by women poets whose

Aesthetics manifest presence absence

perception and contemplation

and once we're finished we'd be very

very glad to carry on the conversation

with you and to take questions and talk

more about your response to what we've

set out here

so in many ways a conference paper on

Catholic women poets might not seem to

be at least at first especially radical

or To Tread particularly fresh ground

however writing and especially poetry by

Catholic women and from a range of

cultural contexts has really yet to

receive the kind of sustained critical

attention received by the best known

canonical figures of Catholic creative

writing and those figures nearly always

tend to be men

for example if we were to look up the

Catholic literary Revival

that themed period of writing in England

and France broadly between the mid 19th

to 20th centuries and we had a look on

Wikipedia we would find the leading

exponents of this movement represented

in the photograph above me whoops I want

I've gone one too far

there we go

that's them

so here we have George Bernard Shaw

Hillier Bellic and UK Chesterton all

looking deep in thought and very very

serious man dressed in black and of

course the standard representation of

this movement in Britain and France as

predominantly male isn't confined only

to Wikipedia

so you had a sneak preview a minute ago

but here are uh some covers of some

popular and accessible studies of

Catholic fiction published in roughly

the last 40 years on the left we have

Joseph Pierce's study literally converts

spiritual inspiration in an age of

disbelief or unbelief and it's cover

displaced photographs going clockwise of

Oscar Wilde

Hillary bellock again George Bernard

Shaw who wasn't actually a Catholic

convert

and the young Evelyn wall

and it should be said that alongside a

photo of GK Chesterton on the back cover

of this book there's also an image of

the Catholic English crime writer

Dorothy Sayers and in another edition of

the book Edith sitwell features on the

front cover again with three male

writers but the overwhelming impression

here is that the Canon is male centered

the book in the middle of the slide is

the important wide-ranging and

groundbreaking study faithful fictions

the Catholic novel in British literature

by Thomas Woodman and this is a really

important book and for me one of its

great strengths is that it recognizes

that British Catholic literature isn't

homogeneous Woodman explores the work of

writers from across Britain diligently

and with a very keen eye always aware of

historical and cultural nuances at work

in his writing in their writing and on

this cover we see a more mature Evelyn

War than there was on the last cover

and we also see a Muriel spark a woman

and then of course Graham green and

these are three writers that Sparks

biographer Martin Stannard called a

grand triumvirate of Catholic convert

novelists in the 20th century and Below

them in the final photograph is their

literary inheritor and actually a very

fine critic of green David Lodge

the novelist

and then on the right hand side the

final image on the slide you'll see the

cover of Richard Griffith's 2010 study

the pen and the cross Catholicism and

English literature 1850 to 2000 so The

Usual Suspects are depicted in some

rather nice line drawings here we've got

Cardinal Newman possibly Maurice bearing

you can correct me if I'm wrong

um David Lodge again Muriel spark once

more and of course Graham green and then

in the foreground I'm very pleased to

see that we have Anna haycraft who wrote

Under the pen name Alice Thomas Ellis

and she was a writer of both Welsh and

Finnish Heritage so she

um is not uncomplicatedly a part of

English literature as the book's title

suggests and then our final writer

um in the foreground in Repose is Evelyn

War again so he's he appears on all

three covers and he kind of wins so

disappointingly despite being on the

cover on a haycraft or Alice Thomas

Ellis

isn't really discussed at length in this

book at most she she Garners a couple of

paragraphs

and the great English Catholic poet

Elizabeth Jennings who I know that Emma

is going to discuss today isn't there on

the cover and she merits only a couple

of paragraphs in the book too despite

writing so evocatively about Rome it's

worth reading her while we're here

actually and being described by her

publisher Michael Schmidt as the most

unconditionally loved poet of her

generation so despite that she receives

very scant attention in the book

now it's undoubtedly the case that

Publishers and not authors have the

final say about the covers of books and

there is often of course a commercial

element to this critical books on

writers like war and green are still

very very much in demand and so it makes

good sense from a marketing perspective

to show their likenesses on the front

cover of these multi-author studies

and I don't show you these covers in

order to condemn the authors of these

works and for my own books cover I have

a photograph of a dedication of the

crucifix on the orkney islands off the

North Coast of Scotland and this image

shows an almost entirely male

congregation

and in tracing a history of Scottish

Catholic writing in my past work I focus

predominantly on men so I'm Not Innocent

of the charge of foregrounding a

tradition of male Catholic writers

but my intention in displaying these

covers today

is to propose that there is a critically

submerged body of work by Catholic women

writers especially Catholic women poets

which is yet to receive proper attention

uncovering this work and bringing it to

light in criticism and in brand new

editions represents something of a sea

change in attitudes towards writing by

Catholic women and indeed the new

Catholic University of America press

series Catholic women writers edited by

Bonnie Lander Johnson and Julia metzaros

is leading the charge in bringing out of

print works by Catholic women back into

publication

now let me just turn to

the work of some Catholic women

here we go whose work I'm currently

reading and working on and who I believe

are part of an untold story of Catholic

creative writing in the 20th century

you'll have noticed that there is one

woman who appears on the cover of two of

the books that have been on the slides

this morning already and that's Muriel

Spark

and Spark is a writer who nicely

troubles the Waters of two easy

definitions of Catholic writing and

English for a start she was a convert

excuse me of mixed Anglican and Jewish

Heritage and she referred to herself as

the Gentile duess and she was also

Scottish from Edinburgh the city in

which I work

the photograph on the left I don't know

if you can make it out is in fact a

flagstone from the the writers Museum in

Edinburgh which is situated right next

door to the school of divinity where I

work just a few steps away

and this flagstone bearing Spark's name

and dates includes the words the

Transfiguration of the commonplace a

quotation from perhaps her most famous

novel the prime of Miss Jean Brodie from

1961 and also I think a very pithy

summation of the work of Catholic

fiction and poetry the Transfiguration

of the commonplace

and I've also included a photograph of

Spark's gravestone here which is on the

right

if you look closely you'll see that it

Bears the words Muriel Spark poeta or of

course poet in Italian

and Spark moved to Rome from New York in

1966 before settling in Tuscany in the

early 1970s

where she lived until her death and it's

in Tuscany that she's buried

spark is not known as a poet she's the

very well regarded author of 22 novels

but she thought of herself this way she

thought of herself as a poet and her

poetry still has to be reckoned with

critically

moreover despite being as Jared

Carruthers puts it the superlatively

successful Scottish author since Robert

Louis Stevenson another Scottish writer

and poet who lived a Cosmopolitan life

around the globe sparked scottishness is

often ignored or subsumed into the

broader Canon of English literature

despite her inclusion and studies of

Catholic writing like those already

mentioned her Catholicism sometimes goes

under appreciated

Willie mealy rightly observed that

Spark's poems of Africa can contribute

to discussions of Scotland's Colonial

past and certainly her years in Zimbabwe

from I think 1937 to 1940 then Southern

Rhodesia and which formed the backdrop

to many of her short stories and some

poetry are now the subject quite rightly

of critical scrutiny and debate and

critique

but we shouldn't miss the spiritual

content of this work

and other work

so if we take the poem like Africa

for example it begins

let me just wait till the slide loads

oh

it's going to be well I'll read it to

you

oh thank you

he is like Africa who's White Flame the

brilliant Acres lie and all his Nature's

latitude gives the measure of hit of the

simile

his light his Stars his hemisphere Blaze

like a Tropic and immense the moon and

leopard stride his blood and Mark and

him their opulence

and hem the muffled Drums of forests in

form like dreams and manifold links

Eagle Thorn effect about him their very

night and emerald

so melee reads this as a love poem for

Sparks One Time Suitor Howard Sergeant

who she fell in love with during the

1940s melee writes the continent

represents her lover and all his

magnificence Sergeant is described as a

continent a proud wild animal the

zamfisi river

this poem comes close to another poem

anniversary in that both verses draw on

imagery from Spark's African experiences

well that's all very well but is this

really a love poem

um of romantic love to my eyes at least

this is divine love or perhaps both

Divine and romantic love coalesce in

these lines but me at least Spark's poem

is a love song to The God who creates

the vast sacramental Cosmos

I'll turn now very briefly to two other

Catholic women poets

whose work I've been reading recently

and working on

if Sparks like Africa draws on her

experience of the of Zimbabwe then the

work of Anne scottman creep a hugely

neglected figure of the so-called 20th

century Scottish cultural Renaissance

it's a wholly vernacular work which

determinedly signals its scottishness

through its choice of Scots language as

a vehicle for late modernist spiritual

contemplation

Lake spark and Scotland Creek was a

convert

but while she found considerable success

as a writer of children's stories which

are still in print her poetry in fiction

for adults is now almost wholly

forgotten and her husband also a

literary convert is a better known

though relatively neglected Scottish

writer

and her poem darge Scotland Creek writes

now for a while said to your deathless

flesh we heard the biding Bayern the

high Sky loon and man made like to God

us letters our Helix we catch inkling of

the word and see the upstairs room the

famous supper spread by Christ Jesus by

wine and bread

now I can understand if you find this

language a bit impenetrable it's not

easy for me and I'm Scottish

Scotland Creek is deliberately using

historical uses of Scots language here

as part of the Scottish nationalist

drive and to resist what poets saw as

the cultural imperialism of English in

the early Decades of the 20th century

what we have here as a result is

something that is perhaps outwardly

quite difficult and is part of that

modernist project but it's also intimate

and tender

the speaker talks about Humanity as sib

to God's deathless flesh so sib in this

context is a noun that is applied to the

relationship between Christ and man

viewed as a blood tie in the literal

sense according to the Scots language

dictionary and her poem ends with the

sense of humanity our heal it or

overtaken by Eucharistic vision

and finally I want to give you a little

glimpse into another Scottish vernacular

language poet that now nearly entirely

forgotten Jessie Annie Anderson

Anderson's contribution to Scottish

poetry has only very recently been the

subject of an article by Charlotte Lord

our very fine piece and she notes

Anderson as a prodigious and eclectic

working-class poet writer magazine

editor and cultural revivalist of the

early Decades of the 20th century

she too was a convert and she wrote in

Scots

her poem at Sweet Mary Shrine is a

lovely example of the richness of her

Marian oov and it would have been

published in magazines and periodicals

she writes I'll sleep me soon

and tender Ethan they're singing to the

serest heart that our love yance was

blython love broke my heart and got

within he only tried to paint it how

could love breaks he sort of the heart I

never saw tahin it I tuck the simple

eye-fold thing that's been sincerely

sifted and lay it on sweet Mary Shrine

and leave her grace to lift it

and Sparks like Africa she knows the

Zambezi what she called the seraphic

River but in Anderson's work we see her

reflecting gently on the sighing willow

trees and the tender River Ethan a river

in the northeast of Scotland which flows

into the North Sea the river and the

willow trees singing are singing to a

heart which is lost love and which the

speaker offers to Mary for consolation

and solace

there's much more to say about poems

like these underlooked for decades but

once a very popular feature of much red

magazines and I'm glad to say now that

there are burgeoning signs that this

work is receiving the attention that it

deserves and is being seen as another

Rich part of the global Catholic

literary imaginary I'll pass over to

Emma now

hi everyone

so it's not too echoey

so I'm uh Emma Mason and as Mark said

I'm from the University of Warwick I

work in the English Department there and

I teach um

mainly Christian literature and

philosophy as well

and I'm going to start with a brief

extract from a poem by Jennings although

I will be talking mainly about

contemporary women who are sort of

writing now

um but Jennings was really the poet that

I started to kind of think about

Catholic women's poetry

um

mainly because she's a really popular

poet in Britain

and in America

she's Catholic most of her work is

religious and yet nearly all the

criticism on her up until probably about

10 years ago treated her completely like

a secular poet and that was partly

because the anthologies of her work were

edited by Michael Schmidt who did say to

me directly

I'm not interested in religion I've

deliberately cut all the religious stuff

out of her work because I didn't think

that she would sell if I left it in and

of course Michael was very supportive of

me doing my own addition which tried to

put a lot of that work back but there's

still quite a lot of work by Jennings

that's unpublished including a really

interesting essay called Rome that's in

them the Jennings archive at Georgetown

so it's sort of extraordinary that

somebody that is relatively canonical

for a poet popular is still not explored

you know if that if that was somebody

like even more I doubt there's anything

that we're going to find by Evelyn Moore

I mean I hope there is but I I doubt

there are any boxes of un unknown novels

in attics anywhere

so I'm just going to say something

before we get to listen to our poets

about

um

the way in which academic study has had

a very mixed relationship with their

work

now on the one hand those who work on

literary historical philosophical and

Theological questions are now very keen

to acknowledge women writers and

thinkers

on the other hand higher education and

I'm going to talk about higher education

in the UK because that's what I know but

listening to people yesterday it seems

like it's widespread

it tends to be very suspicious of

Christianity

which it charges with reducing women to

an uneducated and naive ambassadors of a

conservative if charitable social agenda

but since their earliest writing

Christian women have not just balanced

compassion with profound intellectual

and spiritual Insight but see them on a

Continuum so that's I think part of the

reason that they are often sidelined

because there's a sense that their

intellectual work works together with

their emotional capacity and literary

criticism isn't very good at kind of

seeing

um intellectual thought and emotion

together it kind of wants to split them

off so that there's difficult poetry

here and there's emotional poetry here

of course that's not true when you when

you look at

um most poetry

uh so so art and compassion are

connected and that's why I wanted to

just quickly put up this um an extract

from Jennings poem

um

Michelangelo's first payeto

where Jennings identifies our lady as a

kind of poet figure who joins art

compassion

carve a compassion older than you are he

lies upon your lap

what can you do but hold him with a

trust you also fear

thus Michelangelo saw what a girl may do

for gods

it's perhaps difficult to meaningfully

align the work of Catholic women poets

given the complexity and Nuance of their

individual experiences

however I do see identifying

characteristics across the modern

Catholic women but I've been reading in

the last few years

the Trinidadian British Vani Anthony

Ezekiel capaldeo the Mojave Natalie Diaz

the Australian Anne LV American poets

Fanny Howe and Anne Carson

Irish Rasheen Kelly Brazilian Adalia

Prado Russian Elena Schwartz and British

Hilary Davis Maria pachella and Sally

Reed

as a group Catholic women poets are

often defined by their confessional

negotiation of the ostensible strictures

of the church through Dogma motherhood

childhood sacraments prayer Nostalgia

and the body both of themselves the

Saints our lady and Christ

the thought I'd like to offer today is

that what gathers their poetry is a

refusal of the secularized Scramble for

Universal explanatory mastery

this comprises a valuing of

non-measurable forms of awareness in

which to perceive spiritual time

Now by this I mean that many of the

women that I've just listed reject an

intellectual imperialism that only

esteems that which can be objectified or

measured via money or classification and

by that I'm thinking some of the

comments yesterday also about the the

valuing of um science engineering

technology over literature and the Arts

in contrast to that drive in higher

education to basically make money these

women find in the poem a language to

enact presence perception contemplation

and meditation vision and Faith Often by

turning to metaphors and light sorry

they have vision and Faith Often by

turning to metaphors of light and

darkness in which to Glimpse not grasp

discern not master so it's really

interesting listening to The Poets

yesterday because so many of them

talking about light and I was incredibly

interesting I think many of the women

that I'm reading are really interested

in darkness and the relationship again

between those two

as Jennings argued in her 1961 book of

essays every changing shape mystical

experience and the making of poems in

the complexities of poems we find fitful

Sparks that's her phrase in which to

find connections between a mystical

sense of Union with God and a making of

poems

that is the making of the poem is a

search for God

now the poet Peter O'Leary Echoes this

in his recent book on religious poetry

in a secular age called thick and

dazzling Darkness

and O'Leary reminds us that any search

for God takes us into a space of

darkness and in doing so he draws both

on God's appearance on Mount Sinai in

Exodus 20 in which Moses draws near unto

the thick Darkness where God was and the

image of the burning bush as a symbol of

the Visionary imagination

Jennings and Leary alike move us past

the facile questions that often

preoccupy secular critics which is

mainly does it believe it does a right

to believe in God or not you know that

that's all they sort of really want to

know and if they don't that's the end of

it and then they can they get to sort of

like leave it

behind and so moving us past that kind

of that question to focus on the ACT and

process of creation

um namely the making and thinking of

poetry and art I think it is is the more

nuanced question

um to ask I said there's a very nice

phrase that the Catholic philosopher and

poet and Kevin Hart uses where he talks

about poems uncovering and revealing God

in order to reveal them in darkness so

heart is is playing on the kind of sound

in English between the word reveal and

reveal

The Poetry Catholic women are writing

today encourages a poetic thinking and

bringing forth of awareness that

counters the thinking that dominates

most of the world

that is a means to an end approach based

on capital gain individualism

competition

overwhelmed by this instrumental thought

we have become like faulty radios we can

no longer tune into each other our

effective signals blocked by the white

noise of capital

but many Catholic women poets use

rhythms pauses and cadences that invite

the reader to empty themselves of this

everyday white noise and listen instead

to the indirect meanings of the poem

and as such I think that one of the

things they really offer or they've

offered me anyway is that they've made

reading into a process of kenosis a kind

of weakening of the self before God and

emptying of

um

the anxieties of the self you know I

think about the sort of Mental Health

crisis that we have we can again talk to

the situation in the UK so so many of

the students are kind of so obsessed

with their kind of their self

um which produces a huge amount of

anxiety and of course very important for

them to kind of have a sense of self but

maybe it's sort of become a bit

overwhelming and that something that

kind of empties us of this and making

nothing of ourselves allows us to better

decipher the glimmer of meanings these

poems

um ignite

select their male interlocutors from

Gerard money Hopkins to David Jones Toby

Martinez de las Riveras to Tim Lilburn

Peter Larkin and John Dean women poets

reach for Transcendent and imminent

spiritual experience but women also

write within a poetic tradition that has

expected them to take the place of

patient vulnerable forebearing handmaids

the thick Divine darkness in which God

resides this becomes a refuge for them

in which to think and write away from

the sheer light of those who seek to

explain away the mystical and visionary

the gradations of Darkness from which

they write help defend a world whose

spiritual rhythms are disrupted by the

need for accountancy just as our

circadian rhythms are fatally disrupted

by light pollution I sort of very

interested in the kind of some of the

arguments around

light pollution the fact that you can

kind of when you look at the Earth from

space now it's just completely lit up

all of the time which stops as kind of

having any actual Darkness to kind of

reflect in and sort of thinking about

the sort of you know need for everything

to be lit up

um

and the parallel between that and the

kind of Enlightenment thinking which

wants everything to be explained away

otherwise we can't kind of tolerate it

and we haven't got any patience for it

this demand for absolute Clarity at all

times is redressed by the non-measurable

forms of awareness Catholic women's

poetry explores

for example

no too far there we go

in rushing Kelly's poem Easter we hear a

moment of luminescent renewal through

remediation on words and the agency they

Grant

you yourself are glowing with words they

move up and down you as if they're alive

the words bring themselves to me and

tell my tongue sweetness over and over

the words are everything with them I'll

turn water to wine at your wedding

the glimmer of Kelly's poem gives us an

image of light made strange by Sally

Reed in her poem Holy Saturday

one that confronts our desire to retreat

into what feels familiar

when confronted by pain and encourages

the preparation and reflection needed to

anticipate the resurrection

and this is Sally's poem

this is the way of man to gather up the

body and shut it in and try uselessly to

go back to the way things were again

the Earth is bloodlogged blood feeds

each thoughtless weed in dark houses

women's ears are strummed by those last

cries

sounds that will not die and have come

to shape them as dry trees are cupped

around the Cry of long-spent wind

the light is strange says one and the

road is dull to the feet as though a

covering had been drawn across the sky

enmeshed in the horror of the

crucifixion the women who attended the

cross listen rhythmically to Christ's

last cries here as they resist the

attempt to go back to the way things

were

Christ's death brings a new kind of

strange light in which the sky and so

the heavens feel suddenly withdrawn but

the light is still there the poem

creates an abundance of possibilities

that counter a modern insistence on

Independent secularity and the Restraint

of the sacred

thus for Maria apachella and she's the

last poet I'll talk about today she is

also in your volumes of poetry that you

can scan

um

illumination is always accessible we can

always attempt to elucidate the promise

of the Divine

but it is communal moments of sharing in

everyday experience that make room for

God

here is poem 16 from her collection

sarmody

was it there

writ of Illumination where are you on a

Saturday night

do I need to wooy with candles why do

the cynical Thrive I've flung down my

life like a Turkish rug when will you

bring me home to your shelter

let me breakfast in wheat flaked

gratitude let all my feelings be simple

painless to share like cigarettes salt

directions to the black lion

in linguistic form these images salt

cigarettes the alcohol that you get when

you go to the pub the black lion

are all covenants of friendship and in

the poem becomes a metaphysics of

participation

so to paraphrase Fred moton poetry is

how we Fellowship

but without God such covenants can end

up in harmful protective

self-definitions that atomizes from each

other

with God the poem takes us into a

thinking of relation where we are

emptied cannotically of our complex

worldly selves and drawn into the

enduring commonality of identity in

Christ

asafachella writes at the end of this

poem

if you will not answer bandage me in

blankets of weakness strongly I really

love that phrase weakness strongly a

kind of weak a prayer for weakness and

holy undecidability in the anticipation

of actually Experiencing God and so kind

of being filled again so from from that

state of emptiness to kind of be filled

so that they're kind of again there's a

Continuum between these parent

um binaries light dark weakness and

strongness emotion intellect that

produces I think a very non-jewelist

experience for the reader

so that's what I've got to say and I

think now we're going to bring the poets

up aren't we marked so that they can

read some of these poems thanks

thank you