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    Opening King David: Poems in Conversation with the Psalms
    Opening King David: Poems in Conversation with the Psalms
    Opening King David: Poems in Conversation with the Psalms
    Ebook237 pages1 hour

    Opening King David: Poems in Conversation with the Psalms

    By Brad Davis

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    About this ebook

    The human experience is an intimate, tough, and, at times, hilarious conversation with what is familiar and what is mystery. Poetry at its best turns this conversation into art and teaches by example how to employ language creatively and courageously--even coyly--in exploring the full range of human response to whatever life may deliver. Certainly the biblical Psalms set the highest of standards in this regard. In Opening King David, Davis takes aim at making contemporary poems in conversation with the Psalms; his personal, cultural, and natural surroundings; and the wonder and mess of his own soul. As a painter with all colors at his disposal, Davis writes with the full spectrum of his available vocabulary, sometimes reaching for the glorious ineffable, at other times bluntly telling it like it--darkly--is. Neither devotional nor inspirational nor religious, these human poems take God seriously and honor our common struggle toward what Saint Paul calls "the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ."
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherResource Publications
    Release dateApr 11, 2011
    ISBN9781498274203
    Opening King David: Poems in Conversation with the Psalms
    Author

    Brad Davis

    Brad Davis is on the faculty of Pomfret School, a Connecticut boarding school, and has taught also at the College of the Holy Cross and Eastern Connecticut State University. He has published several books of poems, most recently Opening King David (2011), and edited the anthology Sunken Garden Poetry 1992-2011 (2012) for the twentieth anniversary of the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival.

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      Book preview

      Opening King David - Brad Davis

      Opening King David

      Poems in Conversation with the Psalms

      Brad Davis

      13182.png

      Opening King David

      Poems in Conversation with the Psalms

      Copyright ©

      2011

      Brad Davis. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

      199

      W.

      8

      th Ave., Suite

      3

      , Eugene, OR

      97401

      .

      Resource Publications

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199

      W.

      8

      th Ave., Suite

      3

      Eugene, OR

      97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      isbn 13: 978-1-60899-554-7

      eisbn 13: 978-1-4982-7420-3

      Manufactured in the U.S.A.

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Preface

      Acknowledgments

      Book One

      Ashre

      Hard Times

      Among the Living

      Against Solipsism

      Moto at Broadway and Hewes

      Desire

      Narcissus poeticus

      Instructions, with a Question

      Forget God

      The Wicked Man

      Snapshot

      Reasons I Write

      Among Luminous Things

      Shortsighted

      Eucharist

      Rush Hour

      She Said

      Seth’s Pond, West Tisbury

      So

      Answer Me

      Shock and Awe

      In Fact

      23

      Crossing the Williamsburg Bridge

      With Bill at Bafflin Sanctuary

      General Confession

      To Self-Pity

      No Worries

      Neighbor as Theologian

      As It Is

      Putting a Name to the Face

      Brother Chronos

      Report

      God

      Word Problem

      Two Worlds

      In Ministry

      On Silence, Briefly

      LORD

      Crossing the Notch

      Amen & Amen

      Book Two

      Imitatio

      In the New Year

      Roofing the Balls

      Silly Sally

      Under the Sun

      Joy

      Waiting

      No Comfort Here

      50

      At Her Eightieth Birthday Party

      In Need of an Exit Strategy

      Judgment

      Reading the Psalter

      The Commuter

      Two Ways

      On the Balcony of the Racquet & Tennis Club

      The Way It Is

      April Again

      What I Know about a Neighbor

      The Vulture Tree

      In It

      Against Nostalgia

      Old Story

      Renting

      Anticipating Our Retirement

      For the Director of Music

      Then

      Isolato

      For Now

      Elegy

      Litany for an Empire

      Book Three

      Off Jake’s Pier

      North Housatonic

      To Exalt Oneself (Quietly)

      Enough

      Opening Day

      Jubilate

      Less Is More

      E-mails to Asaph

      Sing for Joy

      In the School Library

      Even a Postcard

      Better Far

      Glory

      Here, Now

      Hunger

      My Spiritual Practice

      Last Sunday in Pentecost

      Book Four

      The Good Life

      Alison

      Visiting Brooklyn

      A Christmas Poem

      Genuine Replications

      A Winter Sea

      What Holds Us Back

      You Are Goliath

      After a Snowfall

      The Oblation

      In the Right Direction

      No Vile Thing

      Insomniac’s Commission

      Direct Address

      Morning

      Short List of Wonders, besides That Summer Sunrise from the Train in North Dakota: Sky, Horizon, Prairie

      Pornea

      Book Five

      Good Things

      Lining the Field

      Against Complaining

      Pentecost

      Between

      In Cooperstown

      Intercession

      Enter God

      From the Green Room

      The Centerfielder

      Gambol

      Spring Colors

      Words That Matter

      Song of Ascents

      At a Boarding School Reunion

      Wild Blue

      History

      1963

      True

      Google Robin Needham

      A Watchman’s Song

      Philia

      At Ely

      Coffee with Vishnu

      What I Saw

      Quiet Words

      Note to Bookstore Owners

      Common as Air

      Praise Him

      Holy, Holy

      Smoke

      Common Life

      David Says

      At the St. Francis Yacht Club

      Blood

      Rumor Has It

      Returning

      O My Soul

      Procession

      In the Hospital, Berryman to Dylan

      In Heaven

      Lightning, Hail

      Toward a New Song

      Shonda-La

      Notes

      For Deb, John, and Mariko—and all who struggle and hope

      These conjectures as to why God does what He does are probably of no more value than my dog’s ideas of what I am up to when I sit and read.

      —C. S. Lewis,

      Reflections on the Psalms

      Preface

      The writing of these poems began on the first Sunday in Advent 2002 . Over the next six years, they were drafted (sequentially through 2005 ) and then revised. The plan was to make a slow, contemplative read ( lectio divina ) through the Bible’s book of Psalms, one psalm a week, and by each week’s end to draft a poem in loose conversation with the biblical text. The intention was not to create a new translation/adaptation of the Psalms, engage in midrash, or even generate religious verse, but to make poems in a conversational idiom that bear witness to an attention to three horizons: the text, my surroundings (natural, cultural, relational, situational), and whatever may have been happening inside my skin at the time of composition. The sequence is an extended ekphrasis, writing that reflects upon and calls attention to another art form, in this case the 150 liturgical song lyrics of the biblical Psalter.

      Other than to utilize a generally hospitable idiom (one of the rhetorical strategies in the Psalms), I set for myself no formal parameters though early on enjoyed working with a decasyllabic line and toward a sonnet-like fourteen-line form (in Book One especially) to which I returned here and there throughout the drafting process. Rhyme and regular rhythm happen now and then, but these are more happy accidents I decided to keep than anything else. Likewise, there are lines in which I have chosen to retain words or phrases some may find offensive. As an artist, I paint with the colors available to me, compose with the full range of notes on the scale. That said, if any poem with a bad word is also a bad poem, that is another matter altogether.

      If there is a reader to whom my heart inclined throughout the drafting and revising of these poems it is anyone whose relationship with religion is strained or broken and who is familiar with struggle and the hope for something more or better or more real. I am a believer. This does not make struggle or sickness or layoffs or dying go away. At the best moments, I’ve a lively sense of God’s sustaining love for all things and me right there in the mix; at other moments, there is silence, fear, a sense of vast distances, absence, and I cling to faithful words and sacramental acts that speak blindly of what may lie beyond their otherwise empty occurrences. Early in the composition of this sequence, I drafted a line that captured my sense of purpose for the project as a whole: Every word, a stand against losing heart. I still believe it.

      A final paragraph about the volume you hold: it is divided into five sections or books following the traditional five-book division of the biblical Psalter. The one-hundred fifty poems in Opening King David are in conversation sequentially with the Bible’s one-hundred fifty psalms. As a navigational help, there is, atop the first page of each poem, a quotation or triggering verse from its corresponding psalm.

      Acknowledgments

      Grateful acknowledgment is made to Emerald City Books—Ian Creeger, in particular—and to the editors of the journals where the following poems or versions of these poems first appeared:

      Anglican Theological Review: At the St. Francis Yacht Club

      Ascent: Eucharist

      Christianity & Literature: A Watchman’s Song, "Philia"

      City Works: Judgment, "The Good Life According to Architectural Digest"

      Connecticut Review: Instructions, with a Question, No Worries, 50, Genuine Replications

      Image: Common as Air

      Louisville Review: Anticipating Our Retirement

      Main Street Rag: So, Answer Me, Crossing the Williamsburg Bridge

      The Other Journal: Praise Him

      Rock & Sling: Enter God, The Centerfielder, In Heaven

      St Katherine Review: Off Jake’s Pier (forthcoming)

      Tar River Poetry: Neighbor as Theologian, Waiting

      The following poems appeared in the chapbook Short List of Wonders, selected by Dick Allen as winner of the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize and published in 2005 by the Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT: "Ashere, Instructions, with a Question, The Wicked Man, Shortsighted, No Worries, Imitatio, Joy, 50, Two Ways, The Vulture Tree, Litany for an Empire, Less is More, Sing for Joy, Better Far, Glory, Genuine Replications, After

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