A Poetics of the Goodness of Things

The poet Jennifer Reeser recently conducted an interview with me on my Best American Poetry anthologized poem, "On a Palm," and the state of the arts and Catholicism today.  It has now been published by the Benedict XVI Institute's Catholic Arts Today.

Reeser's questions got me talking about a number of matters beyond my own poetry, including the metaphysics of goodness which important matter led the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar to insist that Catholics must be the guardians of metaphysics in the present age:

Modern persons are very suspicious of goodness as a part of reality; they fear that goodness might be something that we impose by the power of our will rather than a property intrinsic to things as they exist.  That's a conviction betrayed every time we use the word "values." 

Click the Institute logo to the left to read.  But don't go away just yet!

Years ago, the late poet Helen Pinkerton Trimpi, to whom my new book The Hanging God is dedicated, introduced me to the online musings collected as Anecdotal Evidence, where the writer and librarian Patrick Kurp publishes short essays cobbled together out of the most wonderfully arcane literary artifacts.  Through Kurp's writing, I've encountered some wonderful passages from Dr. Johnson and other fine writers whose corpulent oeuvres more or less guarantees only the very well read will know them thoroughly.

Kurp, I'm pleased to note, used his platform to help promote my scholarship on Helen's poetry and, from time to time, added to that good cause some kind words on my own poetry and prose.  He has now published a small essay on the final poem from The Hanging God, "Autumn Road," which you can read by clicking the photo of the Berwyn Veterans Memorial at left.  As Kurp argues, that poem as all my work, is about a recovery of goodness, the goodness of being, which not only transcends the world and brings it into being, but inhabits it as the infinite interior of things.