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• W804122681 abstract "THE LANGUAGE OF personal religious faith has never been more prominent in American public discourse than it is today. For good or ill, we feel the need to know the religious beliefs of our presidents and police chiefs, our favorite musicians and baseball stars. And most of them, it seems, are willing to make their personal belief a part of their public persona--regardless of how it pertains, or does not pertain, to their work. In such a context, it seems comparatively reasonable to probe the religious convictions of creative writers, especially those whose beliefs are likely to figure significantly in their compositions. Even then, such inquiry is likely to lead down some unexpected pathways. In a recent interview with Darryl Tippens, former Texas Poet Laureate Walt McDonald makes several intriguing claims about his life as a poet and his Christian faith. Early in the interview he states, foundation of all my work is Christ; not one poem would have come without that rock ..., and then he adds, wonder if I was wrong not to make that apparent somehow the start. It never occurred to me to explain two decades ago that everything I wrote was an aspect of my 'awful rowing toward God,' to borrow Anne Sexton's phrase (Tippens, 174). Such a religious faith--and such an orthodox phrasing of it--may have surprised readers who have followed the poet's work its beginning. Though his publishing career has spanned over three decades, twenty books, and 2300 journal publications, only recently have critics begun to recognize him as a poet of faith, and such attention has been limited to his more recent work. The spirituality of his early books has gone largely unexplored. In his introduction to The Waltz He Was Born For, a collection of critical studies of McDonald's work, poet and editor Andrew Hudgins sketches the growth of McDonald's religious thought, noting that he did not, at first reading, recognize that aspect of the poet's work, just as he did not fully see the possibilities of salvation at the end of The Waste Land until [he] had read Four Quartets (9). Hudgins limits his remarks, however, to McDonald's middle and recent poems, referring to only one piece Anything, Anything (1980), then skipping ahead to Witching on Hard Scrabble (1985). Like most other critics with a spiritual focus, he largely overlooks the poet's first four books, and for good reason: the religious content of those early volumes is not apparent. While it may be tempting, then, to conclude that McDonald may have been responding to Tippens's questions somewhat off-handedly, the careful reader can't afford to do so. For in fact, any close study of his interviews demonstrates that when commenting on his work, McDonald responds with a craftsman's well-rehearsed care. So if we take the poet at his word, our necessary question becomes this: What shape did his religious expression assume in the early books? Certainly not a conventional one. The poems offer little in the way of mystical experience, implications of transcendence, allusions to religious texts or practices, direct references to theological concepts, or, anything else that might prick the reader's religious sensibility. Simply put, seining McDonald's early books yields little in the way of traditional Christian themes and motives. An alternative perspective which to consider McDonald's awful rowing toward God, however, may yield a better catch. During McDonald's intellectual seedtime, Christian existentialism arose and dominated American academic and popular theology. If we look at his early work this less traditional religious angle, we see what has escaped our initial readings: the psychological groundwork for Christian faith, particularly as it shows itself in estrangement, anxiety, and awe. Theologian John Macquarrie states in Studies in Christian Existentialism that man is fragmentary and incomplete in himself and suggests that the very question of God actually arises from man's estrangement himself, and his inability to bring into unity the poles of finitude and freedom which together constitute his being. …" @default.
• W804122681 created "2016-06-24" @default.
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• W804122681 date "2007-09-22" @default.
• W804122681 modified "2023-09-23" @default.
• W804122681 title "That ‘Awful Rowing Toward God’: Anxiety in the Early Poems of Walt McDonald" @default.
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