Another Zombie Apocalypse in Suck City

I had a four-hour stretch in front of me, a beautiful spring day to squander beneath the sleek silver cover of Zone One. I ended up taking a three-and-a-half hour nap. Even with the concrete steps pressed against my back and the wind lashing my hair across my face, Whitehead’s words still lulled me into a near-catatonic state. It seems strange that a book imbued with suspense could have this effect. We’re dealing with zombies, after all, and though Whitehead goes to great lengths to describe “the dead” in stunning detail and to construct impenetrable sentences, still... so sleepy.

Whitehead shows his skill for poetic cadence, but because the sentences give the reader little information about the characters, they end up feeling hollow. For example: “[O]n Gary the weight loss registered not as the result of scarcity but as the slow creep of a subcutaneous harrowing.” The slow creep of a subcutaneous harrowing. Beautifully rendered, but what does this sentence tell us about Gary or the narrator, Mark Spitz? The dominant presence here is Whitehead, not the characters or the effect they have on one another.

Another example: “What impotent rebellion they enacted, feebly tapping the leather facsimile of their horns and spitting the top-shelf profanities.” Spitting the top-shelf profanities. Lovely, but can we hear the profanities, please? Can we see Spitz interacting with his surroundings? I kept waiting for Spitz to lose control, to dissolve into the chaos that spawned his new-found identity. Instead we get Whitehead’s measured prose, his bloated language and heartless characters.

I continued to read. Each night I would open the book and let lifeless sentence after sentence wash over me. I felt apathy toward the characters and their fate. And yet when I fell asleep, I would dream exclusively of the dead. For weeks after I finished the book, they haunted my dreams, invading my apartment, crashing into windshields, dodging shotgun bullets. I would awaken, sweat-drenched and afraid, and fall right back into the same dream. I lost hours of restful sleep in breathless flight.

At the same time that I was reading Zone One, I was finishing Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick Flynn’s memoir about becoming and not becoming his father. Surprisingly, I noticed many congruences. As Spitz sweeps Manhattan’s high-rises, searching for dead to eliminate, Flynn navigates Boston’s streets, plucking the homeless from park benches. Both Spitz and Flynn work for government agencies, both voluntarily confront that which others would prefer to ignore.

I used these parallels to trace a path to the underlying cause of my nightmares. Like the protagonists in these stories, my dream-self was caught in a running loop, motivated by fear. In one of the latter nightmares, I dreamed the dead approached my apartment, and I had to make a split decision, leave or die. I wedged one cat beneath each armpit, confident of our escape, and looked down only to discover my lovelies had slipped into the realm of the undead. Heartbroken, horrified, I watched my life transform into something unrecognizable, something that I could not maneuver into a recognizable place, and so I ran.

Interview with Alicia Oltuski

by Jessica Hindman

Alicia Oltuski’s debut, Precious Objects: A Story of Diamonds, Family and a Way of Life, (Scribner, 2011) received glowing reviews from Jonathan Yardley and Gary Shteyngart. As part of ALR’s efforts to provide a literary platform for emerging Creative Nonfiction writers, Oltuski recently spoke with fellow Columbia University MFA colleague and ALR’s Creative Nonfiction Contest Coordinator, Jessica Hindman, about the craft of nonfiction writing.

ALR: You only get one first book. Why did you choose this particular topic for a debut?

Oltuski: The topic of diamonds was at once incredibly personal for me [Oltuski’s father is a diamond dealer in the Diamond District of Manhattan] but also, every writer seeks to uncover some hidden world. The diamond industry, with all its secrecy, seemed a natural place for that endeavor, to uncover its mysteries. The book was also about uncovering the mystery that was my father. I mean, I obviously knew him, but there were so many things about him that were a mystery to me. The book was an attempt to uncover both of these mysteries.

ALR: One of the things I love about Precious Objects is how fearless you are in fusing different Creative Nonfiction techniques. The chapters alternate between intimate family portraits and journalistic reportage and research that is academic in its thoroughness, if not in its style. Why did you choose this particular organizational structure for the book?

Oltuski: Structure is something I thought about a lot. And it’s something I really changed as I went; it’s probably the aspect of the book that I spent the most time thinking about…To me, structure in both fiction and nonfiction is incredibly important because it not only shapes the narrative arc but the reader’s impression of the characters. I say characters even when the “characters” are real people; I think it’s useful to think about them that way when you’re interviewing them and writing about them. So structure is the single-most influential part of the writing process in how you make a reader think about your topic and your characters.

When I was writing, it was very important to me to not write a “subject” but to write a “story” even though I was writing about a subject that I think a lot of people have some sort of inherent fascination with—diamonds—which is completely unrelated to me and my family and how I wrote the book. What I tried to do is excavate the history of the diamond industry and the diamond district but at the same time to attach all of this to characters. One of the reasons it was so important for me to let the characters emerge in shapely ways was that the diamond industry, from its inception, has really been an industry full of characters, and not just the ones that I happen to know but also this entire cast of historical characters that all seemed oddly larger than life—even before diamonds emerged as a major commodity. So what I really wanted to do was have this emerge as a story of people. I tried, even in the parts that were history-oriented or journalistically-minded, to show these people and what they were about and what made them so perfectly suited to this business. To a large extent, the reason the diamond industry has come to mean so much to so many people is because of these odd characters who almost forge a sense of importance upon this one mineral. And I think the reason for that is because the people who were involved in shaping diamond history were such idiosyncratic people, and I think that’s one thing that hasn’t really changed.

Getting back to structure, I wanted to capture this one moment in diamond history, because I do think the industry is on the cusp of transformation. Obviously, the topic of “diamonds” is overwhelmingly large, but I think we find ourselves in this strange time in this larger history where everything is about to change. I looked back at the creation of DeBeers and the whole advertising campaign that shaped the industry [i.e. the idea that diamonds are a staple for engagements] and in a weird way I felt that we are at another similar threshold of sorts. I wanted to tell the story of how we had gotten from there to here, and where we were headed in the future. And of course it was also a family story—how I came to see my father and the occupation he had chosen in a different way.

Surrounded by Water, Stories by Stefanie Freele

Congratulations to Stefanie Freele, whose new book, Surrounded by Water, was published by Press 53. Here's some information on the book from the publisher's website: 

 

     Awards for stories in Surrounded by Water include First Place in the Glimmer Train Fiction Open for “While Surrounded by Water”; Second Place in the Glimmer Train Family Matters Contest for “Us Hungarians”; a 2010 Million Writers Notable Story award for “Buccaneers”; an Editor’s Pick in the Mid-American Review Fineline Competition for “Removal of Oneself From Corporate Identity”; and a Pushcart Prize nomination for “Pozniejszy.”
    
     Visit Stefanie online at www.stefaniefreele.com

An Interview with Patrick Donnelly

Justin Bigos: I wonder if we might begin by you describing the project of your latest book, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin. I am particularly interested in the structure of the book as well as its voice(s).

Patrick Donnelly: Oh, it is hard for an author to describe his own book—I wish you would describe it for me! However, I will do my best. Narratively and thematically, the book explores, and I would say even celebrates, different kinds of ruin, of falling apart, of failure, of losing status and approval from others, and even of losing one’s sense of a self, especially if that sense is too narrow or limited. The title refers to the Sufi idea of the “tavern of ruin,” a seedy dive in the red-light district that can cause one to lose reputation just from being seen going in or out. Inside is an intimate, dimly-lit space (something like the atmospheric photograph of the Cyprian bathhouse on the cover of my book) where people stay up all night singing and reading poems and telling dreams to one another, and metaphorically, if not actually, getting drunk on the wine of spiritual things. (I’ve actually done all this while spending some time with the Sufis during the 90s.) It’s a place where you may lose the useless burden of your reputation, but in return learn what it’s like to give and receive love, and gain spiritual knowledge by making mistakes, even terrible mistakes.

So the poems explore loneliness, growing older, getting sick, infecting other people with sickness, losing material things, a sense that everything is constantly changing, the ground unstable—not to preach any particular point of view about these things, but to sing about them. It’s always been my thinking that there’s nothing better than a sad song in the right circumstances.

As you said, the book has voices, plural. Among other things, it includes translations of poems by various authors that I made with my spouse Stephen D. Miller from the thousand-year-old Japanese imperial anthologies of poetry. (Stephen teaches Japanese language and literature at UMass Amherst, and we’ve been translating classical Japanese Buddhist poetry and drama together since 2004.) One of many strategies that I borrowed from the imperial anthologies was the idea of poems by different authors responding directly to one another. The Japanese call these pairs of call-and-response poems zōtōka, and the book contains several examples, both of the Japanese originals, and of poems of my own that behave in the same way.

Structurally and narratively the book is kind of a sandwich. In the middle section the speaker’s brilliant and difficult mother dies. I will say in reference to the relationship between autobiography and creative writing that when my actual mother died in 2005, I thought of Stephen Dunn’s wonderful poem “The Routine Things Around the House,” which begins:

When Mother died
I thought: now I’ll have a death poem.
That was unforgivable […]

I myself thought, also unforgivably, that I would probably write four or five poems about my mom’s death, and then sprinkle them somehow around the manuscript that I was working on. Eighteen poems later my mom had crashed into the book, and demanded the entire middle section for herself. (Which, if you had known her, was absolutely in character.) But I didn’t give her the whole book: in the first and third sections the speaker finds somebody to love, after the years of being alone that The Charge described—somebody coincidentally named Stephen—but that doesn’t mean that he behaves all that wisely or admirably after that, and pretty much everything else around him continues to be threatened and temporary, including his own body. The book ends quietly, as also did The Charge.

There is something that appeals to me, after a sequence in which a great deal of struggle is implied, about not ending fortissimo. It’s never my goal to resolve tensions that arise in a poem or a sequence, but I have no problem with leaving the story in a hopeful moment between conflicts.

JB: See, you did a great job describing your own work. I also noticed that the mother got the entire middle section, and anchors the book not only in mortality—which is in all your poems, in both books—but in themes of origin. And this origin, as maternal, seems also a kind of poetic origin. While the poem “Received Wisdom” pays debt to both father and mother for “that cursive fountain in me,” the poem “Mudra,” beginning, “Who / gives you authority to speak?,” dismisses father, teacher, and literary judge for a mother who is both “adversary” of the poet and “germ” of his literary authority. And this confession of origin is earned, through “long practice / noticing what I was told not to notice [. . .] practice extending sympathetic embassies toward everything / low and dangerous in myself.” This is a pretty fascinating way to get to literary authority! How is this connection between the vulgar and the maternal a literary agency? Are you subverting the conventional image of the female muse, or are you making a very personal claim?

PD: Anne Carson, in Autobiography of Red, wrote: “Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.” It’s in the sense that I needed to discover and then separate my own procedures from those of my powerful mother, and later from my other teachers (emotional, spiritual, literary), that I see those people as the muses of my poems, and I suppose also of my life as I understand it today. In order to live as a child and to be a student of any art or spiritual path, one has to give over power for an indefinite period of time, and become vulnerable to the strategies, sensibility, and opinions of another, or many others. Then, at a certain (uncomfortable, dangerous) point, one has to take back power, and to put some light and distance between, which may include disobeying certain specific instructions one has been given. In my experience, that’s the phase during which one learns the most. (Or dies—as one teacher in particular said I would if I left him—but hopefully not.)

JB: Raymond Carver was once questioned by a critic for his choice to include the work of other poets alongside his own in his last book of poems, A New Path to the Waterfall. When asked, rather aggressively, why he thought he had the right to do such a thing, Carver said, “Because I love them.” Do you feel similarly about your choice to include translations from the Japanese alongside your own work?

AWP Highlights and Lessons on Evil

Christ what good times we had at AWP Chicago. For all you who missed it, we really slit those good times right up the belly; we danced on their entrails without even the slightest wink of remorse. We shed sangria-laced tears at poetry readings, ate Thai food as Marilynne Robinson spoke about evil, gave homeless men peanut-butter sandwiches, rode the el train through rooftops at sunset. We stuffed our chests with the sort of unconscious un-loneliness only known to big-city dwellers.

And maybe we learned some stuff too. Maybe we had some hard realizations about good and evil—epiphanies even. Maybe when Lee Martin read the scene of his first kiss, and extended that scene to include the awkward boner that resulted, we were reminded that those Hollywood-love-conquers-all scenes are bullshit. Maybe in every panel we attended, panelists expressed the need to explore the evil, the hidden, the uncanny. They encouraged us to uncover the sides of ourselves that we would rather keep covered—sides that (in Stephen Elliot’s words) we didn’t know we had.

Probably it was just me. My persistent unwillingness to relinquish idealistic views of just about everything makes me astute to such remarks. Remarks like “Writing is in NO WAY a noble calling,” (Stephen Elliot again—he really rocked me) and Ha Jin agreeing with Auden that “Poetry makes nothing happen.” They’re trying to help chip away at this tower of self-importance I have erected, but geeze it ain’t easy.

The point is: shit’s complicated. I’m in the process of overcoming my urge to ignore its complexity, so you should know that I left some things out in the above description of times had at AWP Chicago. You should know that I declined all eighteen of my mother’s phone calls; was disgusted at the sight of a filthy, oil-covered pigeon; thought almost exclusively about sex during at least one of the panels; saw a good friend more upset than she felt comfortable showing me; drove through my hometown in Missouri, a heap of emotional wreckage, and just felt irritated. I even stole a scarf someone left in the hotel lobby on the first day.

So there you have it, a larger slice of the AWP pie. We’ll spare you all the gritty details in the highlights below, but I would like to second the motion to clamp your jaw and go to the places you feel most uncomfortable—participate in the fucked-upness that is human experience.

ENOUGH OF MY BANTER NOW FOR THE MAIN ATTRACTION: 

AWP HIGHLIGHTS

Justin Bigos

• Erin Stalcup's kick-ass panel on "surprise" in fiction.
• Landon Godfrey's skull-and-crossbones scarf.
• iO/Catch Up/Lana Turner reading at the Chicago Public Library.
• Michael Martone's hair.
• The three or four young men who weren't trying to look like James Franco as Allen Ginsberg.

Nate Logan

• Deep dish pizza delivered to the hotel room
• Having lunch with poet-from-another-mother Brooklyn Copeland and her bf (my gf was there too <3)
• "Are there any horses in the crowd? / Neigh! / This poem is for you."
• The mummies and the Mongol diplomatic passport at the Field Museum
• Photobooth at Quimby's in the rain

Shannon Abbot

On the business of selling out everyone you know in CNF:

• Stephen Elliott: To write about a negative experience with someone, you have to actually forgive them first.
• Krista Bremer: Truth is one half of the equation. Compassion is the other. Remain as humble as you can about your recollections.
• Lee Martin: To be truthful about other people, you have to tell the truth about yourself.

Tim Boswell

• Seth Harwood saying the idea that publishers will not want your work if it’s already appeared as an e-book or podcast is a myth. Better to get your work out there and show it can generate interest!
• Stepping onto the skydeck at Willis Tower with only a glass floor between me and a 103-story plunge to my death. Terrifying.
• From a DIY publicity panel: Send a copy of your book to your most-admired writer. Send one to the president. Be audacious.
• Chicago deep-dish pizza. Lou Malnati, you have spoiled me for all other pizza.

Hillary Stringer

• From "Men from Venus, Women from Mars: Writing from the Perspective of the Opposite Sex," with Kyle Minor, Kevin Wilson, Reese Okyong Kwon, Alan Heathcock, and Jennine Capo Crucet: Society often does not allow male characters to directly address their feelings; instead, these male characters must perform actions that convey these repressed emotions to the reader.
• Creepy "art" videos in the elevator continue to ominously say/flash "FIN."

• From the panel "Finding Home-Immigrant Voices in American Literature," with Aleksander Hemon, Nami Mun, and Stuart Dybek: The readers of the past lived in a world of "in-betweeness," while the ideal reader of the future lives in a world of "overlapping belonging." It is increasingly difficult to argue that we live in a monoculture. Observing the "melting pot" of America enacted on another culture (in Dybek's case, the change of his Pilsen neighborhood from Polish to Mexican) can help a writer highlight aspects of their own culture before these traits are assimilated.
• "Lobsters" at the South Loop Cafe.
• From a panel on "Writing Class, Representing Socio-Economic Realities in Your Work," with Courtney Tenz, Josh Weil, Ru Freeman, Sabra Wineteer, and Sterling Holywhitemountain: Class in America is ignored, while in international fiction, class is an inescapable reality. Are we intellectually curious enough to address class in America? Do we instead confuse "class" markers, such as eating watermelon, with "racial" markers, and how can we represent a variety of experiences? Does the majority of American fiction only address the realities of the upper-middle class?
• From a panel on "Literature and Evil," with Ha Jin, Paul Harding, and Marylinne Robinson: Sentimentality denies both good and evil, while complexity is what enables writing to control the perception of evil and explore it.
• The mystery of the overpuss....lives on.

Laura Miller

• Beyond the Pulp: Genre & Literary Fiction: Kevin Brockmeier’s words: "Viewing things at a tilt produces an exactness of vision," and his list of Top 50 Works of Fantasy and Sci-Fi.
• Discovering the journal Unstuck.
• Free sangria at the McSweeney's reading, and the heartbreaking genius of poet Rebecca Lindenberg.
• Paper Weight exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago
• Poetics of the Essay Panel: The metaphor: Writing nonfiction is like bees gathering pollen to make honey.

Things I Should Have Done Yesterday*

First reading of the season! Thanks to ZVZ for the photos and Elishia Heiden for the poster. Sorry I missed it!

Tori Sharpe

Matt Davis

Chris Beard

The man behind the camera: Zach VandeZande

*Title shamelessly stolen from Walker Smart.

An Interview with C. Dale Young

Justin Bigos: I’d like to start by talking about beauty. I am currently taking a poetry workshop in which the teacher, on the first day of class, asked us: “Is beauty something you think about in your poems?” I was kind of struck by the question – as if a poet could possibly not think of beauty, not just in his or her own poems but in the poems of others. Carl Phillips has written in an essay, “The point of the poem is not to say anything about beauty, but to enact the vision of it” – “to see it.” So, the student now asks the teacher: Is beauty something you think about in your poems, in the poems of others?

C. Dale Young: Many have written about beauty, but I always return to Stephen Dobyns and his extraordinary book of essays Best Words, Best Order. In that collection, he has a phenomenal essay on the problem of beauty. In that essay, he quotes a passage by Dostoyevsky in which one finds the following:

"Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God setsus nothing but riddles. […] The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the Devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man."

I return to that quote often because I don’t know exactly what beauty is, and I firmly believe one cannot know it without the juxtaposition of the ordinary. Someone once tried to convince me you could only see the beautiful if you had seen the grotesque, but I disagree. I believe to see beauty one must also see the ordinary out of the corner of one’s eye. So, in the drafting, the getting the poem down, I do not think of beauty. But in revision I do, and at that point I am also keenly aware that to have beauty one must also have the ordinary. If a poem is filled with nothing but the beautiful, it becomes a kind of grotesque. In the end, I strive not for beauty but for elegance, remembering that elegance arises from simplicity and not from the beautiful. Reliance on the beautiful, reliance on detail, gives rise not to elegance but to the baroque, something which if taken to the extreme is grotesque.

JB: I like your emphasis on the common, the ordinary, even the peripheral. It does seem that poets who have an aversion to “beauty” may think of it as necessarily precious. And in that way the beautiful becomes “sentimental” – another word poets tend to hate. I think of your poem “The Bridge,” which begins, “I love. Wouldn’t we all like to start/ a poem with ‘I love’? I would.” The poem moves from this playful ars-poetica opening to a love poem, and the poem ends on the image of the speaker and his beloved holding hands, and how they look together like the Golden Gate Bridge. The poem definitely flirts with sentimentality, and in its flirting it feels defiant – and so the ending is a kind of middle finger to those who would deny – well, the things we’re talking about: beauty, feeling, joy, which are found in common, everyday life. So: what the hell is going on? Seriously, where does all this doubting of our own emotions come from? Is it worth thinking about? Or should we just get our work done and not worry about it?

CDY: It is, I would argue, a good thing to doubt our emotions and how they are used in poems. If the poem arises wholly from a single emotion, the likelihood the poem will be flat increases significantly. “The Bridge” started because many years ago I noticed that there were parallel lines in the word “parallel.” I just loved that. When I was much younger I falsely believed that the love poem was in essence a dead form; I believed this out of a kind of laziness when I was a graduate student. What I realized with time is that the love poem isn’t dead but just incredibly difficult to pull off. I wanted to write a poem about the fact I love so many things. I wanted to be playful. In the end, I believe it is the playfulness that allows me to pull that poem off. If I had opened the poem with what comes at the end, the poem would have spiraled into utter sappiness. For every force there must be an opposing force. Poems are much like that basic idea in physics.

An Interview with Kristina Marie Darling

Justin Bigos: First, thank you for visiting UNT this January to read your poetry. As I was listening to you read, I had the sense that your poems might be typographically playful. And indeed, when I had your books in my hand, I saw that they are. Are you more attentive to the poem as human voice, or as aesthetic object on the page – or something in between or other?

Kristina Marie Darling: That's a great question. When I first started writing, I saw myself as a lyric poet. I definitely believed that there should be a connection between poetry and an authentic spoken voice. After reading the work of poets like C.D. Wright, Myung Mi Kim, and Kristy Bowen, I became interested in writing poems that allow multiple voices to coexist within the same narrative space. For me, the use of typography is useful for differentiating between the various speakers, found texts, and types of rhetoric that inhabit my poems. I do believe that poems should be musical. But I'm skepticalof the belief that poetry is synonymous with a spoken voice. For me, poetry's great appeal is in the potential for dialogue between found texts, and between different types of appropriated language. I've found that typography in my own poetry helps to facilitate this dialogue.

JB: Some of your poems "take liberties with" the letters of H.D., those written to Richard Aldington and to Freud during H.D.’s psychoanalysis. I don't get the sense many people read H.D. these days. Why should they – not just her letters but her poetry?

KMD: I definitely agree that H.D. isn't as widely read as some of her contemporaries. This is a mystery to me, since H.D.'s work reflects many of the aesthetic concerns that define contemporary poetry. I see her as the first truly modern poet. Works like Sea Garden, Helen in Egypt, and Trilogy privilege tangible details over abstraction, yet they allow these concrete images to serve as a point of entry to discussions of love, death, and history. This is definitely something that contemporary poets like Srikanth Reddy, Eric Baus, and Lisa Robertson strive for. H.D.'s work is also wonderful in its matching of form and content. Tribute to Freud, for instance, offers a lyric account of H.D.'s sessions with Freud. The work itself is driven by the same associative logic that one would observe in psychoanalysis. With that in mind, I think there's much to be learned from H.D.'s work in terms of craft. Her aesthetic concerns align beautifully with those of contemporary poets, myself included.

JB: I’m interested in your claim that H.D. is the “first truly modernist poet.” Aside from her use of concrete imagery to enter larger human and historical discussions, what would make her modernist – and the “first” modernist? (Ezra Pound is tapping his fingers, waiting for your answer . . .)

We Have a Love-Hate Relationship with Lists

This is the only time of the year that it's acceptable for us to shove our reading lists in your face without you saying: "how dare you. how dare you tell me what i should be reading. like i don't have lists and lists of my own, piling up like uneaten pancakes. don't you see how many delicious pancakes i have to eat already? get yours out of my face."

Well it's 2012 now, and its time to eat some new lists. Here's some books the ALR staff devoured last year:

Inferno by Eileen Myles - Caitlin Cowan

Owning It All by Bill Kittredge - Ryan Flanagan

The Kids Are All Right by the Welch siblings - Jessica Hindman

Either Way I'm Celebrating by Sommer Browning - Nate Logan

Horse, Flower, Bird by Kate Bernheimer - Kara Dorris

The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia - Tim Boswell

Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon - Hillary Stringer

The Facts by Philip Roth - Matt Davis

Songs of Unreason by Jim Harrison - Justin Bigos

The View from the Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier - Laura Miller

An Interview with Luke Hankins

Justin Bigos: Your first book of poems, Weak Devotions, contains a fifteen-part sequence of the same title. The sequence as well as the book contains much conversation with God, often interrogating His motives – even His very authority. What is the human cost of entering this mysterious place of devotion – as God once entered the mystery of “mortal flesh,” “his holiest act”? Is a “weak devotion” the closest we humans come to something holy?

Luke Hankins: Yehuda Amichai writes in his poem “Relativity”:

Someone told me he’s going down to Sinai

because
he wants to be alone with his God:
I warned him.

Indeed.

You ask what the human cost of entering “the mysterious place of devotion” is. In my experience, it is very high. And judging by what poets devoted to God throughout the ages have written, I think they would agree. But I don’t think anyone enters a devout life counting the cost—not even monastics and ascetics (which I certainly have never been). That’s because one can’t imagine or begin to comprehend the actual price until it’s already being exacted. Hopkins, in “Carrion Comfort,” writes:

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me?

The psalmist(s) of Psalm 42 write(s):

Deep calls to deep
in the roar of your waterfalls;
all your waves and breakers
have swept over me.

Some, from a perspective outside of religious or spiritual devotion, would undoubtedly say that the cost is high because the devout are fooling themselves, chasing after shadows and myths and confronting their own neuroses in the dark, working themselves into a frenzy seeking what was never there to begin with. This is certainly not a novel idea for anyone who has ever genuinely sought the divine. (E.g., see R. S. Thomas’ poem “Threshold.” Whom do you meet in the desert? Is it the Maker in whom you see all of your fears and all of your hopes embodied, or is it the Nothing in which you see only a reflection of yourown inexplicable being? And which is more terrifying?