Letters to a Young Poet

This book, a collection of letters written from Rainer Maria Rilke in response to one Franz Kappus, who was studying* at the same military academy Rilke had, and wanting to become a poet, reached out to his school's most famous-thus alumni: you can guess who. It is not super easy reading - Rilke was a master wordsmith as well as a pretty mentally troubled and emotionally complicated man, and while the overall tone of his letters is of an immense generosity of spirit and optimistic view of man, nature, art etc; the tortuous route he makes it sound like to truly go into and get to know oneself in objective truth at all enough to make a halfway interesting poet - it is, he repeatedly states, a role one can only take up by committing oneself endlessly to purity of perspective, to unlearning and relearning and revising and revolting, to solitude so deep that one's own thoughts burst out of you and onto a page with such urgent strength that to suppress them would be suicide. These letters are a potential goldmine for those who want to devoutly follow the classic (and dumb) trope of the 'tortured artist'; who prioritises their inner struggle above all else as it feeds their work; but however much he could've benefited and probably lived longer with a bit of therapy the general views offered here by Rilke are not, I don't think, supportive in themselves of this view, but are provocative, spiritual even, in ways that are challenging & ambiguous - and as a poet should know, Results on Readers May Vary.

* There is appended another longer essay, which may Rilke wrote to one 'Mr V.', entitled Letter from a Young Worker - which delves into much more sociopolitical critiques of the hegemonic repressive Christian ethics and expectations, especially around sexuality and personal expression; he rails against the hypocrisy and cultural stagnation he sees as being symptomatic of this deeper religio-philosophical malaise.

milk and honey

This book by Rupi Kaur is among those gigantic few poetry books of the past decade that are responsible for helping mass-popularize poetry among new audiences - namely, people who search through self-affirmation/breakup/trauma hashtags on Instagram.* My thoughts on this book may come across as sounding priggish and judgmental but I'd like to try to assure the reader this is far from the case. Okay - so I really genuinely 100% do not think the poems in this book are that good. Most** read more like a youth's private derivative heartbroken scribbles than anything of any particularly noteworthy originality or heft. That's not to say they're bad - it just requires one to step back and ask what poetry is for - moreso, who it is for.

   I'd say it's for everyone. Does that include people who have never really cared for poetry*** but who share similar traumas to an artist willing enough to expressively carve out the niche of their own struggles and recovery to help others reflect on their fundamental similitude? Yes, absolutely. And those folks, speaking objectively from the sales statistics, wanted a book of poems that apparently didn't exist before this one - and how many people do you think were inspired to process their own traumas, plot out their own paths to wholesomeness, forgiveness, forgetting or wellbeing, through their own bespoke lenses of creative writing - by this very book? The figures here don't even bear estimating but by my very asking even if the answer were to be Just One you'd know it's a worthy attributation of priceless evidence that this book - whatever the haters in their ivory towers wanking off to T.S. Eliot's most obscure & esoteric academica might say - has DONE something good, and that is infinitely better than everything said by the critics**** who would be the arbiters of Is [x] Thing Good.

   This is my blog and I will arbite here: this is a very good book and would make a strong heartfelt present to anyone (even if they don't generally give a hoot about poems) who is going through a rough patch after surviving abuse or having a bad breakup. Kaur's poems will sit with readers through their grief and may genuinely help disentangle webs of self-doubt, fear or other negative emotions, and they won't even have to keep cross-checking Sparknotes to ensure they're following their feels-journeys properly.

* Don't @ me, it's a big fucking market

** I say most because there are quite a few that I properly enjoyed too, for their creative content and not just pathos-bombing.

*** And for many people rightly so, because maybe for they the sole initial means of encountering poetry has been through rigorous pointless academic study and never for enjoyment or personal growth or exploration. Do you think some of the people who read milk & honey who had never read a poetry book before went on to read more poetry and found that in fact they found poets who they decided were better than Rupi Kaur? Maybe! Does this make Kaur less of a fantastic poet for having created a book which both helps people & induces them onwards into the world of words?

**** Yes, I am fully aware that I do write a whole blog effectively critiquing every book I read - but I approach the entire endeavour rather laxly, and always try to consider context & intended audience & such with stuff, and don't usually rate the books rather preferring to recommend who might enjoy it and for what - so I'm not really a critic, more a sort of pan-biblioliterary speculative cartographer.

Single-Minded

This book by Kate Wharton is about singleness; a vital counterpoint to the mass of extant Christian literature about its alternative. Rooted in personal experience to demonstrate the veracity of her case, as well as very much in Scripture - the "ideal" individual disciple's experience of primary intimacy with God in Christ rather than any worldly relationships - throughout she makes powerful arguments and highly encouraging ones to anyone who, like me, may have felt somewhat left out of the all-too-often world-conforming Christian culture of "oh well we may as well get married to someone as soon as possible because isn't that just what all the nice Christian couples at church have done?"
   It's likely to be an uncomfortable read for many on that side of the divide just as much as it is an affirming one for single people: but Kate's right in saying that Jesus very much emulated the ideal of a single life, well kept and well lived, to and for God alone; it's a message so deeply counter-cultural both inside and outside of the Church & I can only applaud her for having put forward the view so poignantly as here given the fat enormity of this particular lacuna not only in Christian literature but most church communities too.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

This book is of course the children's classic by Lewis Carroll - & I'm not going to talk here about the literary impacts of nonsense writing, nor the many & myriad cultural spinoffs or references strewn across Western book/screenwriting like flecks of shit out of a hippo's arse aimed across the wasteland of post-Victorian Anglophone normativity, nor even the whole paedophilia question; because this YouTuber has already done a better job talking about these things than I could be bothered to do.

   One thing I will talk about instead is that recently, and I forget the context exactly of how or why or if this revelation was prompted, but smack-bang in the middle of my inner angstful dithering over whether & when to come out as non-binary, my dad told me that had I been born without my Y chromosome my name would've been Alice - and this was - a lot, as discerning empathic readers will probably long have realised that I've been well on my way down a variety of rabbit-holes anyway and my life is even to me somewhat topsy-turvy nonsensical at the best of times.

   I can't think of an appropriate segue for this but I'm mentioning it anyway - I've been fired.* Yes, from my dream job that I was really quite good at and had foreseen as being as close to a lifelong fruitful career as someone like me was likely to find - without moving to London, which is still very much fuck that. I don't know what the next chapter is apart from it definitely entails moving out of my flat that I can't afford anymore. I can't say however that I don't know why this happened. It happened because my mental health has been All Over the Damn Place recently and I've been too irregularly unreliably missing days at work given this, and have consistently failed to develop means of communicating with the rest of my team in mitigating any inconveniences this causes to our work. I got my first formal disciplinary warning less than a month ago, and my head being where it is at the moment, I think part of me just went "okay this is happening, fuck it" and I've got the second and third-final within an impressively neat time-frame.** It sucks. I will miss that job, that whole office, like anything, and I really hope that in time God will help me to work through my shit enough to even get a handle on why it all happened the way it did. But for now, I can only press onwards, through the mystical horrible wonderland that is my life, in the hope that things will get - if not easier or better - then at least clearer.

* I mean, not like right now, I'm on holiday with my family at the moment. But last week.

** As I don't want to run any sort of risk of people thinking I'm bitter or trying to slate the Church Army folks or their HR personnel here, let me state that they've handled things with incredible patience, generous kindness and proper formality.
   The first warning only came in after the problems kept manifesting when they'd already given me several sessions of counselling, which weren't much help, and repeatedly asking me what if anything they could do to help my situation, which I could only say I didn't know, as I don't. Tim, Faye, Mark, Des, Andy, Neil - you have my utmost apologies, thanks, and sincerest reassurance that I hold nothing against anyone and you made the right call. If I wasn't as mental as I obviously must be I'd have fired me too.

the Saint of Milk and Flames

This book, a collection of poetry by the fantastic Kate Garrett,* is among my favourites of recent reading. I read the whole thing in one sitting while on a family holiday, going back during that same long weekend to re-read certain poems over a third or seventh time.** Its themes are broad and deep, touching on faiths lost and wavering and refound, the human challenges of self-realization as mother or daughter, the isolations and solidarities found in disability and disappointment - ultimately there is a strong vein of hopeful healingness throughout and the subtleties herein should prompt most discerning readers to reexamine their lives through lenses of everyday myth, reverent grief and life-affirming love.

* To whom apparently I am 'grand-padawan', she having mentor-inspired my own primary mentor-inspiration in the spoken word world Kinsman.

** Including possibly my favourite of Kate's poems that I've read thus far - Everyone needs a friend when the world begins to end, which for my money sums up the beauty of poetic community in these strange dark times better than anything.

the Etymologicon

This book by Mark Forsyth is, as its subtitle concisely proclaims, something of a circular stroll through the hidden connections of the English language. It's been my go-to toilet book for the past six months or so, and honestly it's far more interesting than you'd maybe expect and certainly far more entertaining than I did. Everything from farts to frankfurts to Milton to nutshells to China to organs to testicles to cynicism to the fascinating story of the somewhat arguably insane self-made eunuch murderer who did an astonishing bulk of the legwork on proofing definitions for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary... having finished this book I don't think I'll ever look at my own language the same way again, to say nothing of the truly bizarre island culture that spawned it. A must-have for Werd Nerds, and if you're anything like me in terms of reading habits - it works brilliantly as a toilet book as the chunks are pretty much exactly poo sized. You know what I mean.

5Q

This book by Alan Hirsch is quite possibly the best work dealing with the nature and proper practice of Church that I've ever read. It literally [okay, figuratively, but very much] blew my mind.

   It's probably not the best of reasons for checking out a new thought-leader but my first encounter with Alan Hirsch was hearing him talk at a Fresh Expressions conference earlier this year which I was sent to for work purposes; it was an incredible weekend all round, at which I was also introduced for the first time to Ignatian reflexive prayer and the whole concept of orthopraxis - but I digress; he mentioned anecdotally how he met his wife, who now helps him run a range of missiological ecclesial initiatives, when tripping on LSD, and I thought that "this alone makes him a much more interesting figure to be hearing talk about the church and stuff than most other people at these kind of conferences." Though I may very well have misheard or misremembered this, so if Alan or anyone with any kind of quasi-legal responsibilities for him thereabouts wants to push me on this particular cited anecdote, I will happily remove it from the post.
   In any case, this book was about as psychedelic as theology gets, so buckle in.

   This book is effectively a gigantically thorough unpacking of Paul's model of the Church as the Body of Christ - as we're given in Ephesians 4: 1-16 - which is well worth a read before you dive into the rest of this post, as it'll help make sense of it.

   First then - what even does he mean by 5Q - it is Hirsch's coined term to describe a kind of fivefold quotient, much like the IQ or EQ of intellectual or emotional capacities; only it's describing five distinct elements which, he argues, though with deeply grounded and in my opinion thoroughly convincing roots in Scripture and orthodox Christian doctrine, are latent as psychosocial forces/powers within all of mankind - demonstrably synthesized to their fullest and most perfect extent in the single personal being of Jesus Christ, and thus distributed as empowering drives among his people. We did say all of mankind, as Hirsch does argue this too, but we'll come back to that and deal with the ecclesiology first. The five foldings of quotient herein are:

• Apostles: those who push the Body onto new ground & so aid its development
• Prophets: those who help the Body listen well to what the Head said/says
• Evangelists: those who share the Body's goodness with others around it
• Shepherds: those who maintain functional unity of the Body's members
• Teachers: those who remind the Body that & how the Head's cleverer than it

As clearly laid out in the Ephesians passage. Not controversial stuff, even though much of the pragmatic holistic reality of these quotients doesn't seem to be realized to too widespread an extent in many Christian cultures today... Anyway. Each of these five quotients is unpacked by Alan in great depth and detail, far more than I've given above; with many a helpful scriptural example as well as broad pointers for looking at sorts of roles within the life of Christian communities or wider society that map onto the particulars. There is far more granularity and intricately considered detail to this whole model in Hirsch's book than I could summarise here - plus buttloads of excellently illustrative diagrams.

   The basic point though is that this 5Q can be taken as a means of apprehending the real-life latent capacities present within the psychosocial collective intelligence of the Church as the Body of Christ - and this is why this book is such a mindbomb: Hirsch, in one deft book - has married metaphysical Christology to managerial ecclesiology in a holistic model that makes total theological sense and is easy to derive pragmatic applications for. Just reread that last post-colon half-sentence, because it shows why this model of Church is a potential game-changer - in ways nobody, but God, can fully imagine.

   Hirsch does make clear distinctions between the capacities as lived practices and as the categories for which people might be expected to 'pick one': he argues that all humans do have all five latent within them, which within properly developed spiritual communities we might expect people to become proficient at performing all five elements - but it is more common to see individuals excel at one or two;* and it is this that makes us, as the Body, an interconnectedly-self/Christ-reliant psychosocial system in order for these quotients to be effective. As I mentioned earlier - there can be derived a pretty strong theological gist for the meta-existence of 5Q as being latent within literally all of Creation: I'll not delve into his arguments here as this post's already quite long and you know what I get like when metaphysics are involved, but the keys provided by his arguments and model unlock a view of all humankind whereby I can now kind of see what he means, with the apostolic and prophetic and evangelistic and teaching and shepherding tendencies designed for the Church but usable to all - handled, to greater or lesser degrees of actual efficacy through relative faithfulness to these quotients' intended purposes - by all, and in all things. It's a crazy new view that I can't unsee; and that I just wish to God the Church by and large would come to embrace wholeheartedly very soon - because it gives linguistic legs to the workings of an organic mechanism that is already there, but well overdue its MOT.***

   If you're a church leader or planter or thinker or attender or whatever - this, above all the other books I've read this year - is the one I'd most ardently recommend. I'm actually getting well excited just typing about it - and liably expect a second post as I reread soonish.

* I have since done the APEST online test to determine which of the fivefold quotients I'm apparently gifted in - I'd recommend checking it out here - and if Alan's test instrument is to be believed, my strongest element is the prophetic - which, by this stage, wasn't any much of a surprise** - followed relatively closely by evangelism, which did surprise me.

** One of my colleagues really freaked me out earlier this year - as after everything that I'd been unlearning and learning last year she completely unbidden one day in January as she passed my desk said to me "I think you're a prophet"; and other than the fact that I'd read a verse or two from Jeremiah at that day's noon prayer moot I had no meaningful idea where that could have come from other than the usual place, which is the source of all true hunches, which is God, which annoyed me a bit as it meant I had to learn how to be this thing that I'd only very recently decided I seriously believed in as a spiritual vocation. Ol' King Jesus has a pretty funny sense of humour like that. Anyhoo, I doubt you're reading this, Alison Wooding, but you kickstarted my maddest not-career path yet - so - cheers?

*** There's four pretty handy appendices also, though two of which I found particularly of impact and topical heft. One dealing with the plague [don't think he uses this word but as far as I'm concerned now it basically is] of cessationism that has been a quite powerful stumbling block to the development of many church communities' 5Qs. And a second that roundly and somewhat dishearteningly tells the story of how a lot of churches, and to not-inconsiderable degrees Christian cultures at large, have basically exiled the A/P/E functions to seriously retain only in any meaningful strength the Shepherding and Teaching, as this facilitates a model of church where Bible-knowing elders can be in, and stay in, control; without any of those pesky prophetic reminders/questions or apostolic hazardous horizon-shifting or God forbid! the influx of those ignoramus noobs that evangelistic members of the congregation would otherwise keep dragging in. Most of this sentence is my own sentiment but echoing the same gist as the appendix.

Encounters on the Edge: A Short Intermission

This booklet (online as pdf here) by George Lings (see also) is a practical, example-rich, missionally-minded consideration of how churches can engage with the arts better in a variety of ways, be that to reach new people, develop relations or deepen faith journeys among older ones, or whatever - it takes a much broader tack than just Messy Church, and for anyone in church leadership who'd like to think of ways of bringing creativity into your ecclesial life (which, trust me, is worth doing but bloody difficult oftentimes) I'd recommend checking out this as it's a fab little primer.

Our Story Isn't Over

This book is a collection of poetry* by seven young people** at [past & present] the Amber Project in Cardiff, a Church Army project working with youth at risk of self-harm. The poems in the collection reflect this, and draw heavily on themes of one's own self in relation to mental and bodily wellbeing, exploring trauma, identity, renewal and growth; I bought a copy of this not out of artistic interest but genuine solidarity as the creativity unleashed by these brilliant young people at Amber is truly inspiring. I went to see their pantomime with colleagues from the Church Army head office over Christmas and it was SO FUCKING DOPE, LIKE - I've never actually enjoyed a pantomime until I saw theirs and even beyond enjoying it blew me away with how funny, confident, clever and subversive the whole thing was. Anyway I'm rambling about a pantomime but in all honesty several of the poems in this collection brought a tear to the eye & a lump to the throat also; and further some others are resonant with sheer determination to overcome their struggles and grow into the joy they've found through community, creativity, and hope. Definitely some rough stuff in here so major content warning for mental health and self-harm theme in poetry, but builds on these elements to make an overall booklet that is life-affirming to a grand degree, and I'd heartily recommend getting a copy if there's any left.***

* Didn't want to figure out where to mention this in that horrendous run-on sentence but it also has some lovely intricate illustrations by Aimee Taylor

** Ryan, Nicki, Channing, Louise, Adam, Hanna & Maryanne

*** All proceeds go toward the Amber Project's work with Cardiff's youth.

the Art of War

This ancient Chinese text by Sun Tzu has, purportedly, been high-ranking among the most influential books in the history of military, political, cultural, corporate, &etc kinds of strategically-navigated arenas of conflict for like, ever. However upon reading I found for my own taste a surprising amount of it is ridiculously practical pointers on logistics and supply lines, a furtherly surprising amount quasi-mystical poetic ruminations on various types of ground; on the whole though, there is depth & subtlety in every [stanza?] of it - and it's all online for free anyway, so in the spirit of a decisive tactician I am going to withhold sharing precise information from my own perspective so that others are forced to send spies out for themselves - only for your camp to find itself under my cunning ambush. You never expected that, did you?

Hit the Ground Kneeling

This book, by Bishop Stephen Cottrell, is an extremely helpful series of practical Bible-and-life-experience grounded reflections on the natures of and interplay between prayerfulness and leadership. Everyone in my office got given a free copy, and I've been going through it bit by bit over the last couple of weeks - would strongly recommend to any Christians in positions of leadership, be that in church life or the secular realms.

Quakers: Advices & queries

This booklet (available as text online) comprises the introductory guidelines to what it means to be a Quaker or participate in the community, worship or otherwise life/activity of the Religious Society of Friends - 42 short reflections laying out the roots, gists, and thrusts of Quakerism generally - if you can even call it an ism, which I'm growingly sure you can't, not accurately at any rate. I'm still very new to & relatively suspicious of this whole Quaker thing [wQt], and while this short book by no means answered any let alone all my questions it laid out a fruitful groundwork of understanding by which I can now approach the wQt. If you don't know much about the wQt - whether you are irreligious, or a Christian, or whatever - I'd be interested to hearing people's first (or current etc) broad impressions of it in the comments, as I'm still very much an explorer here myself. But as with all things I'd hasten to add a warning that you can't dismiss something out of hand if you don't know what it is from a nuanced, unbiased perspective; and I've not found it very easy so far to get these kinds of views from other Christians about the wQt.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How Faith Changes

This book* by Ruth Perrin is an absolute marvel of qualitative research in the complicated theological and cultural context that is millennials. She interviewed 47 young people from across 23 Protestant denominations, all living in Newcastle upon Tyne, the Tees Valley or Northumberland, and who had all been actively-affirming Christians in their early 20's - now aged 29-37, she explores a rich and deep and thoroughly challenging set of ways in which their faith has been knocked, changed, reformed, dropped, and so on. I've probably read this more like two or three times because it spoke so deftly into the particular kinds of things I've seen young Christians wrestle with (often, as she discusses, largely without helpful support from church families, for a number of reasons) and the fallouts of these issues; though not wishing to simply offload an attempt at a personal summary of her whole arguments and methodologies (fascinating though these are), particularly because she has a fuller book about the same thing coming out soon and I'd rather discuss it in detail then (as I will definitely be getting a copy when it comes out in January). Not much point making a recommendation to you, dear audience, when there is very little chance you would be able to acquire a copy of this particular book either - but it was a highly informative and illuminating exploration of the field and would probably surprise most readers as to the fluidity of religious faith and some of the dynamics underlying this.

* No link on this one, sorry! I know it's against my own rules but hey, it was a limited run exclusively shipped to church research folks and I can't find a page for or about it online anywhere. Check out her blog Discipleship Research though. And consider pre-ordering her next wider-audience book which will probably build on a lot of the research discussed in this.

the Tale of Pigling Bland

This book by Beatrix Potter (available free online from that link, albeit with only one illustration) is, pardon my French, really fucking odd. I'd read it to the same kid I read this to, only he didn't really enjoy this one as much, because it's a lot longer - and as much as we Brits all have deep-rooted cultural memories of how much we love Peter Rabbit I started to wonder reading this whether this is just a subconscious myth of denial, because either those books must be far better than this one or Beatrix Potter was just not a very good children's writer (especially compared to A. A. Milne or Jacqueline Wilson or Anthony Horowitz or Julia Donaldson), or maybe she properly hit her stride with Peter Rabbit and Pigling Bland was left to rot on the dump of Things That Didn't Make It - frankly, I spent the first ten minutes of the reading increasingly wondering whether it was in fact some kind of spoof akin to the Ladybird ones, and genuinely had to apologise to my three-year-old audience to check the publishing info page to realise it was a legit Beatrix Potter - but whatever the case, I found it quite entertaining as it was just so bizarre, with enormous gaping holes in every aspect of its narrative (which, if it could be said to be comprehensible at all, was of utterly no consequence) and new characters on every page and an overarching narrative that started nowhere, traversed through nowhere, and seemed then to conclude nowhere, with a giant bunch of nonsense spouted by anthropomorphic pigs in between.
Probably one to skip.

Hold Your Own

This book is a collection of poetry by Kae Tempest, of whose other stuff I've read I'm a big fan. Based on the ancient Greek story of Tiresias, the poems here are bound together in a sequence that follows through childhood, manhood, womanhood, and 'blind profit' - each layering continually circling, reflecting, with a deftness of social commentary and a relatableness that quite belies the ostensibly lofty or complex bundle which are hallmarks of why Tempest is one of the world's most famous working poetic artists. Feelings will fly in all directions and thought-provocation oozes from every page, as the fine [im]balances between subtlety and poignancy wrestle each other across the themes and narratives in recognizable conflicting archetypes that shout with a voice that is as fresh as grime yet resonates like myth. High among my favourite poetry books that I've read recently.

Five Escape Brexit Island

This book by Bruno Vincent is, weirdly enough, the only Famous Five book I've ever read, never having been much of a fan of Enid Blyton - in it, our plucky four whoevers and their dog are trapped in a mysterious detention facility off the coast of Dorset, from which they have to try to escape to get back to the mainland. I do appreciate the satirical point of all this but to be honest I just found it incredibly depressingly close to reality. Would perhaps recommend as a Christmas present for your gammoniest relatives.

Oi! Duck-billed Platypus!

This book, by Kes Gray, illustrated by Jim Field, is one I was prompted to read to the children of the family of whom my third-youngest brother is lodging with in London; it's a pretty serviceable kids' book with rather entertaining illustrations* but on the whole boils down to a series of interrogative puns about animals sitting on stuff which rhymes with their names. Cat on mat, dog on log, the platypus when it comes round has nowhere to sit... you get the gist.

* On that front alone it's probably worthwhile for a child who likes animals, especially weird ones.