by way of explanation

. . . granted, it's been nearly an age (almost wrote 'nary') since any sort of post -- & one of the resolutions for the summer, come hell, since the high water & hurricane waters have already washed over tejas, is to write more regularly about whatever strikes me as wondrous in the things i read -- but i originally intended to offer a gloss on the why's & wherefor's of my blog's name & url, as both are, after a fashion, homages to the work of writers i keep close to my chest & even closer to my bedside table.

1)

re: the url -- "washboard prayers" -- i'd nearly swear on the holy candlewick of the virgin that i happened upon that phrase in one of wright's poems from an earlier book, but the closest i've come to finding what i thought was there are these lines from "why ralph refuses to dance" (collected in string light):

"After sitting so long, his heart could give out.
and tomorrow would unleash another spell of spare-rib theology
People will be stepped on. A fight ensue."

now i'm thinking the original lies in the pages of cooling time, but because i no longer have the copy i made my first notes, i can't be sure, though it evokes, for me, an emotional inscape akin to lines like the last stanza of "the secret life of musical instruments" (from translations of the gospel back into tongues),

"Bring your own light.
Come in. Be lost. Be still.
If you miss us at home
we'll be on our way to the reckoning."

& also this, from the section titled "now:," in cooling time, where wright's conjuring the photograph of deborah luster:

"The light's sultriness rubs off on the subfusc of flesh, foliage, clothing. Tobacco-stained light. Sparerib theology. A ludic tendency participates in all but the most sobering images. And in the most sobering images, one has to shut one's own eyes because the music is so loud. So one can believe one's own eyes."

. . . which, at least to the occasionally hoary & bleary lights that illuminate the insides of my own skull, stands as apt a descriptor of how wright's own poetry affects me mind, soul, & body as anything i myself could come up with.

& as for where the washboard came from, i genuinely don't believe i came up with that metaphor all on my own -- but i still retain enough of the old testament in me to agree with ecclesiastes while simultaneously agreeing with rembrandt in that what matters is how one perceives. as in, even if we can never fully be as transparent as the eyeball of emerson's transcendental dreams, at the very least we each must do what we can to open our eyes. wide.

2)

"You can only go wild
in the away---tracking

your miles like words in the sky

Each act is extinct
As soon as invented

and each thing too
This way you know it's not fame
but a high

time you are hunting
for in the way of

I AM."

---from "the tunnel is a lung," in the end. whenever i try to describe fanny howe's poetry to anyone -- why i learn so much from it, why it stirs & provokes (endlessly) the ache in the tooth of my childhood christian upbringing -- i just end up recommending her books. all of them. to be read in full. & not, necessarily, in any particular order. (tho if i 'had' to choose a book, i'd probably recommend her selected poems. & her novel indivisible. & the wedding dress.) honestly, i think it's the still-smarting preacher's son, who knows that he can neither stand being fully in the church anymore than being completely apart from it, who responds to her work so strongly.

i know of next to no contemporary poet whose writing chronicles the lives of the spirit where they lie down with the flesh's as searingly as fanny howe's writing does.

"If this world isn't good enough for us,
then an afterlife won't be enough." (from "lines out to silence")

that this world doesn't seem to be enough, at least on a macro-level that funnels all the way down into the microcosms orbiting inside our viscera, is why she relentlessly takes on the celestial spheres -- as did augustine, as did aquinas, as did pascal, as did weil -- but restlessly resists ignoring the material world in the process.

"Now theology is necessary
for the way there are these holes & questions." (ibid)

because howe's writings, be they poems or prose or something in-between both genres, are of a cyclical & spiraling & serial nature -- despite their aphoristic and fragmentary qualities, both of which are also true -- they don't separate into discrete pieces all too easily. if i had to hazard a classification -- knowing how delimiting such can be -- i'd call her a "lyric artist" in the same way that i'd call carole maso one though (most of the time, or only sometimes?) she writes "novels." having said that, however, some of her poems do seem to stand more alone than others:

"The End"

Multi-gems in
dragon backing.
Cubes, gold,

set up tight
by ruby rocks:

Life in a heart.

And under
deeper mulch,
same old pulse.

Again it's you:
now the worm
I travel to.

In earth
as it was
in Heaven.

---i don't know about you, but the poet who can piece together something like that is the kind of person i'd want to stand in line behind to receive the eucharist.