"And beat upon this high cloud of unknowing"

The St. Austin Review has just published my poem, "And beat upon this high cloud of unknowing."  I encourage you to subscribe to this magazine, edited by the great biographer Joseph Pearse and committed to the revitalization of Catholic culture in this twilit era.  (Click on the picture or here to visit the magazine's home page).

An incidental word about the poem.  Some years ago, a poet I know mentioned that he never collected a poem in a book until it had first been published by a magazine or journal. This made good sense to me, giving me the chance to submit my work to an editor's judgment before I presumed it worthy of publication.  Of the fifty poems in Some Permanent Things, all but two appeared first in magazines (or, in the case of three of my four long verse letters in a limited edition chapbook).  This is a practice that has become a policy for me.  "And beat upon . . ." is the last poem that was accepted for publication by a magazine prior to the release of Some Permanent Things, and I am glad to see it out, on its own, as well as tucked as one of the last poems of La Rochefoucauld's Ghost, the long lyric sequence at the heart of the book.  Two other previously unpublished poems are also part of it; I had to include them, despite my policy, for the sake of the sequence's argument.