rough passages and poetry

    God, Fate or Something came visiting from several directions.    

Run to Write
Gratitude for Moving Through...
a Family Crisis

JULIE B. HUGHES Substack Newsletter 

 JUL 12

I couldn’t wait to share this with you! 
I had the privilege of being a guest on The Eddy Network Podcast hosted by Ed Brenegar. I was grateful to have the opportunity to talk with Ed about lessons learned, unexpected gifts, and gratitude during my husband’s cancer diagnosis. 
I hope it is a light for another family going through cancer or an unexpected medical diagnosis. May it bring glory to God. 
Please share with someone you love. 
See you on Monday,
Julie 
P.S. Thank you for letting me drop into your inbox today. Happy Friday!

Sloan Bashinsky

Based my experience with prostate cancer, which radiation remitted, yet the radiation damaged my urethra and colon, and my mother’s fatal experience with lung cancer and my favorite niece’s lethal experience with cervical cancer, and other people I have known’s brush with or fatal experience with cancer, there is nothing glorious about it and I'm reminded of the grace under fire approach taken by Ernest Hemingway in his novels, and even in his own life when he was losing his mind to brain cancer. I hate for anyone to go through the hell that cancer is and I hope for people who do, they are able to retain their dignity and a sense of humor, sarcasm and comfort in knowing it too will pass and death is merely a passage, and God by whatever name is in the middle of it, even if that cannot be understood.

Julie B. Hughes

Thank you Sloan for you message here. It is not easy. I was grateful for my faith, running, writing, and support to lean on during this time. I'm so sorry you have had to face it in so many ways. Take good care. 

    From Erik Rittenberry’s Poetic Outlaws Substack Newsletter:

 

 

Poetry is Where Everything Happens
By: Alejandra Pizarnik 
JUL 11        

Poetry is where everything happens. 
Like love, humor, suicide, and every fundamentally subversive act, poetry ignores everything but its own freedom and its own truth. To say “freedom” and “truth” in reference to the world in which we live (or don’t live) is to tell a lie. It is not a lie when you attribute those words to poetry: the place where everything is possible.
In opposition to the feeling of exile, the feeling of perpetual longing, stands the poem—promised land. 
Every day my poems get shorter: little fires for the one who was lost in a strange land. Within a few lines, I usually find the eyes of someone I know waiting for me; reconciled things, hostile things, things that ceaselessly produce the unknown; and my perpetual thirst, my hunger, my horror. 
From there the invocation comes, the evocation, the conjuring forth. In terms of inspiration, my belief is completely orthodox, but this in no way restricts me. 
On the contrary, it allows me to focus on a single poem for a long time. And I do it in a way that recalls, perhaps, the gesture of a painter: I fix the piece of paper to the wall and contemplate it; I change words, delete lines. Sometimes, when I delete a word, I imagine another one in its place, but without even knowing its name. 
Then, while I’m waiting for the one I want, I make a drawing in the empty space that alludes to it. And this drawing is like a summoning ritual. (I would add that my attraction to silence allows me to unite, in spirit, poetry with painting; in that sense, what others might call the privileged moment, I speak of as privileged space.)
They’ve been warning us, since time immemorial, that poetry is a mystery. Yet we recognize it: we know where it lies. 
I believe the question “What does poetry mean to you?” deserves one of two responses: either silence or a book that relates a terrible adventure—the adventure of someone who sets off to question the poem, poetry, the poetic; to embrace the body of the poem; to ascertain its incantatory, electrifying, revolutionary, and consoling power. Some have already told us of this marvelous journey. 
For myself, at present, it remains a study.
________________________________
Translated from the Spanish by Cole Heinowitz. You can find this passage in—  A Tradition of Rupture: Selected Critical Writings

Sloan Bashinsky

I think, feel, everything is poetry at some level. for 49 years, my only poem was for my senior law partner’s 40th birthday. In 1991, the next poem came. It seemed to write itself. In 1992, the next poem came, it leaped out of me. That’s how all of my poems came. They just happened. Sometimes there was an external provocation, such as the birthday poem for my senior law partner. But mostly, the poems seemed to come from somewhere else and I was their scribe and their target and their subject within a surrounding soup or sea in which I swam. There was only one draft, but sometimes a comma, dash, period, semi-colon was added or removed, and when I typed it, it had to be spell-checked sometimes.

    A Crestline Heights Elementary School classmate wrote to me on Facebook about the   

Melchizedek Sunday School for lawyers, priests, business leaders, politicians and humans post, and it went from there ...

Peter
My vivid memory of Lee Graham [pastor of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Crestline] was when he would come and give some vigorous yanks on the church bell rope because I wasn't pulling strongly enough!
My family left Crestline for Forest Park and Saint Mary's Episcopal in the summer of 1955. My mother thought David Wright was a saint.
Did you ever hear of an experimental Episcopal Church in Birmingham called The Church of the Transfiguration?

Sloan Bashinsky

I attended Transfig for about 2 years when Bob Ross pastored it. I knew most members by first name. One year, I was the church’s treasurer for a while and I got to see every donor’s check and some of them were earmarked for this or that, which was very revealing. As were a whole lot of other things that happened in that congregation. 

 

Peter

Well, I attended regularly from the Ross era into the Bill Yon era. So it may be that Transfig is why I remember your name more than Crestline elementary.

Our paths have crossed in interesting ways. I would say that we have both been fascinated more by the unconventional in our world than the conventional.

Sloan Bashinsky

I remember Bill and Lib Yon. That was the time of encounter groups, open marriage discussion and perhaps more, kumbaya, Vietnam angst, and a great deal of personal angst in me and my marriage which did not help my children. I wonder why I don’t remember you there? Maybe my head was stuck somewhere the sun didn’t shine much. 

 

Peter

Ned Wright

Sloan Bashinsky
Ned Wright?

Peter

Son of David Cady Wright, minister at St. Mary's church.
   
Sloan Bashinsky
I think maybe I was in St. Mary’s once, perhaps for a wedding. When I was in the black night of the soul, I ate some meals in nearby St. Andrew’s soup kitchen and did a little cleanup afterward in the dining hall and bathroom, because I needed something to do. About two years later, I attended a service there with a friend from St. Luke’s, it was right after a man had called me one morning to say God had told him when he was praying that I needed to read the Letter to the Hebrews, which I did and understood I was in Melchizedek chastening. When the priest offered me the wafer at the communion rail, something knocked me off the rail and my friend caught me and pulled me back to the rail. Similar when I was offered the communion wine. My friend was very interested for some time in my reports of not of this world experiences, and he weathered my time at the communion rail that day. I  lived in his home for a while after separating from my 4th wife and the black night began to lift. That was a really rough patch for me, but it was easy compared to the black night, which was like half my brain had died and I was only half there for 16 months.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com