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WC76 – Review of Seduced by Grace

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Rvu_kellyseducedbyfaith_2Seduced by Grace:
Contemporary Spirituality, Gay Experience and Christian Faith
By Michael Bernard Kelly, Helen Kelley [Editor]
Melbourne: Clouds of Magellan, 2007
ISBN 9780980298321
Reviewed by Victor Marsh

You have seduced me, Lord, and I have let myself be seduced. -Jeremiah 20:7

While the dyspeptic (iconoclastic?) Christopher Hitchens is content to go on bashing his straw-man ‘God’ (see God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, 2007), a more interesting set of insights into that tired, overworked tradition has come from what might seem to be an unlikely source — a self-professed Gay man and, moreover, one who knows from first-hand experience the shortcomings of his Church (specifically, its Roman Catholic incarnation). For Michael Bernard Kelly, as David Marr puts it, has ‘has come out but stayed in’—rather than quitting a homophobic Church in disgust, he is pushing for it to renovate itself from within. A potent collection of thoughtful writings by Kelly, the noted Australian Catholic dissident, Seduced by Grace gathers essays, articles, letters and talks he has produced over almost a decade, from late 1998 to May 2004, that are at once an acutely accurate critique of the shortcomings of the Church and a poignant testimonial to the heroic spirit that has, at times, invigorated it.

Kelly the activist is (in)famous in Australia. He was one of the founders of the Rainbow Sash movement that has been a thorn in Cardinal George Pell’s side, with its public challenge to the Catholic Church’s treatment of Gay and Lesbian people (the movement has been taken up in the United States, also) and in this role, he has become a prominent media spokesperson for Gay Catholics. But as is clear from the opening piece in this collection, “On the Peninsula, alone with God,” Kelly’s activism is grounded in contemplative practice. He has produced a stimulating video lecture series, “The Erotic Contemplative: the spiritual journey of the Gay Christian” (through Joseph Kramer’s Erospirit Institute) and leads Gay spirit retreats at Easton Mountain, in New York State, as well as in Australia and the U.K. His voice reaches loudly and clearly across the once impassable divide between eros and spiritus. Kelly is now working on a doctorate in the field of Christian mysticism and Gay experience at an Australian university.

Raised in an Irish Catholic family in Melbourne and educated in Church schools, Kelly was smitten early with the religious life and served as an altar boy, assisting priests in the celebration of Mass, as all good Catholic sons would do. As a teenager, he was inspired by the life and example of Francis of Assisi —“Who could resist a dancing saint?” he asks in his short piece on the inspiring 12th Century figure. He actually joined the Franciscans at 17, but eventually left the Order, and while remaining celibate, continued to work as a religious education specialist and campus minister in Catholic schools and universities for a further seventeen years, before taking the fateful decision to come out, and to come to terms with his sexuality — a decision which, of course, cost him his job. But he continued his studies in theology (including a master’s in spirituality in San Francisco) and today inspires many men with his revisioning of a spiritual life not predicated on a denial of the body. Kelly says his dick keeps him honest.

More power to him. This is the kind of “real world” starting point that earths his spirituality and renders his positions convincing to those of us who have found more breathing room outside the stifling environs of Christian idealism. Before reading this collection, I might have presumed that it could only be a perversely masochistic urge that would compel a man to persevere with a manifestly homophobic Church, especially considering that his own difficult struggle to come to terms with his “abominable” sexuality would appear to stem so directly from the unreconstructed teachings of that very institution. In fact, even on the eve of his re-birth as an activist, adopting the rainbow sash for the first time, in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, he writes of his reluctance “to re-engage publicly with church structures.” A dyed-in-the-wool skeptic might ask: Does the Church really deserve the attentions of such conscientious objectors?

To an outside observer, it would seem that the Church has traded its mystical power – of initiating believers into a direct encounter with the mysteries of the divine – to take up a default position as a bastion for normative social mores. In this limited imagining, the radical figure of Jesus is trimmed to size to serve as a standard bearer for petit-bourgeois sexual morality, and large swathes of the population, banished from the membership reserved for the select, are expected to survive on the margins. That is, of course, unless they are willing to trade their own sexual life for the questionable benefits of membership among the socially respectable (as if the Church were the only possible model for the conscientious life). Kelly is aware of the countless men who stay “in” and, because they remain silent, advance their careers in the hierarchy, somehow making their peace with the institutionalized hypocrisy their masters continue to promulgate (and then, in some cases, becoming the “masters” themselves).

The sociologist Erving Goffman showed how institutions often produce the very behaviors they are intending to overturn; hence, for example, jails produce criminals, hospitals disease, and churches sinners. Or, as the Chinese sage Lao Tse wrote (in Stephen Mitchell’s translation), “Try to make the people moral, and you lay the groundwork for vice.”

If, like myself, you have written off the churches (even in their nouveau, charismatic forms) as unredeemable, as long as individual seekers like Kelly find useful tools within what is left of those traditions, you might be persuaded, reading this collection, that a divine child may well have been discarded with the bathwater in the long, sad aftermath of the “Enlightenment.” Meanwhile, as Kelly so cogently and persuasively argues, what he calls “the Holy Spirit” will continue to manifest wherever and in whatever forms “she” will. On the cusp of the new millennium, human intelligence continues to seek out new pathways for spiritual inquiry and growth.

As articulate as he is as an activist (and the various pieces that make up this collection would make good source material for other non-conformist Catholics trying to find their own voice in the context of an authoritarian religious culture that sanctions silence and obedience in place of discussion), the personal tone of the writing gives room for some very touching testimony. The clarity and passion are, in places, almost combustible, and all the signs of a sincere and effective engagement with the spiritual life are movingly present, proving, ultimately, worthy of deep respect.

It seems to me that in the long journey of coming to accept and celebrate his sexuality, Kelly’s message reaches beyond the community of the faithful. When he writes that, in his experience, the official teaching “has virtually always been based on distaste for and even hostility towards sexuality,” with rules and regulations “based not in reverence and honest reflection but in rejection,” he insists on addressing the broader issue of sexuality per se, “including heterosexuality.” Relegating “deviants” to the margins, in theory (even while nursing them close to its bosom, in practice), allows the Church — and too many of us in the wider, secular population — to refuse to face the challenge of marrying the physical with the spiritual. That challenge is posed, uncomfortably, in the dignity and wisdom of the position he had already reached by 1997:

What if the very thing that we had been told was a curse, the very thing we had hidden and feared and been told was intrinsically evil, unclean, unnatural, turns out to be Blessing, Gift, Grace. Such a position confronts even the contemporary squishy liberal compassion that would promote “tolerance” towards Queers. But it is also a challenge to those who would abjure the life of the spirit altogether, just as much as it is to those who simply cannot come to terms with the body — “Gay” and “straight” alike.

Having taken the Church more than 350 years to recognize it was in error over the findings of someone like Galileo, for the sincere seeker the urgent question arises — Do Queers really have the time to wait for better guidance to emerge from such recalcitrant troglodytes? Reading Kelly’s impassioned and eloquent diatribes, one gets the feeling that it is only through the peculiar insights of its Queer sons and daughters that the Church will find its own way. Highly recommended.

Victor Marsh is a research associate at the University of Queensland. His PhD Thesis, The Journey of the Queer ‘I’, focused on spiritual memoirs by Gay men. He is working on two books: a memoir, The Boy in the Yellow Dress, and a study of Christopher Isherwood. Victor interviewed artist Don Bachardy for White Crane #71.

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journaland need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Victor Marsh is a research associate at the University of Queensland. His PhD Thesis, The Journey of the Queer ‘I’, focused on spiritual memoirs by Gay men. He is working on two books: a memoir, The Boy in the Yellow Dress, and a study of Christopher Isherwood. Victor interviewed artist Don Bachardy for White Crane #71.

Reviews, WC75 - Bears

WC75 – Review of Steve Berman’s Vintage

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Rvu_berman_vintage Vintage:  A Ghost Story
By Steve Berman
Haworth Positronic Press,
Paperback, 150 pages, $12.95
Reviewed by Toby Johnson

Steve Berman, author of Vintage, has become an integral member of the White Crane family in the past year. In addition to being a writer, Berman is also an activist in Gay genre publishing and a very competent editor. My own writing has benefited significantly from his literary astuteness and advice.

To publish a collection of his own short stories, Trysts: A Triskaidecollection of Queer and Weird Stories, in 2000, riding the wave of the Internet and state-of-the-art desktop publishing, Berman established Lethe Press out of his discovery of how desktop publishing has created a new kind of publishing industry, one built on literary experimentation through print-on-demand technology, not big-money investing in blockbuster pop hits.

Berman also saw a mission in keeping Gay classics in print and available to Gay booksellers and the internet connected public. Because my book Gay Spirituality was one of the first such books Lethe selected to save from oblivion when Alyson, though a Gay-owned company, declared it “out-of-print” despite its winning a Lammy, I forged a connection with Steve Berman. Gay spirituality titles were especially likely to be declared O.P. after a short life because they appeal to a limited audience. And, of course, part of the whole enterprise of the Gay Spirituality Movement is to keep alive Gay wisdom in order to validate and redeem our hidden history. So Lethe Press’s mission made great sense. And Steve Berman’s facility with state-of-the-art publishing made him a logical partner. He knew how to do it and he had established business relationships with distributors and booksellers across the country. White Crane’s current editors, Bo Young and Dan Vera, have now concretized that connection in forming White Crane Books as an imprint of Lethe Press. In every issue of White Crane now readers will likely find a full page ad for White Crane Books and Lethe Press titles.

Steve Berman had his own supernatural thriller Vintage published by Harrington Park Press. Vintage is “a smart and stylish work of contemporary Gay fantasy with a gothic twist,” the back cover advertises. As the subtitle reveals, it is a ghost story. In some ways, the novel follows the accepted conventions of the ghost story: an unhappy soul haunts a section of highway not realizing that he is dead and so causes problems for the living, the plot of the novel is how the ghost is allowed to rest. But Berman’s added a neat twist — actually two twists. The first is that the main characters who experience the haunting and then try to do something to help the ghost are modern day goth teenagers with a penchant for dressing outlandishly in black (with maybe a little mascara for effect), drinking and drugging with reckless abandon, and driving their parents crazy. The novel is told in the first person of one of these teenagers; Berman has got the jargon and voice down pat to introduce the reader to this goth Holden Caufield with a cellphone and taste for ecstasy and peppermint schnapps.

The second twist is that the main character is Gay; he’s living with a liberal-minded aunt because his uptight parents told him to leave when his homosexuality was made embarrassingly public. He’s got a job working in a retro fashions and used clothing store and made friends with several teenage girls, including a young Lesbian couple, who frequent the store looking for goth costumery. And the ghost that’s haunting the highway on the outskirts of town was himself a teenager of the 1950s who died mysteriously after his own homosexuality was made embarrassingly public — maybe he was murdered; maybe by the guy he was in love with; maybe in an act of homophobia.

There are twists and turns in the plot. The resolution is delightfully satisfying. Even the ghost is happy by the end and can go to his rest. And the teenagers turn their goth fascinations toward adulthood.

The most interesting and well-written section of the story revolves around the protagonist’s infatuation with the ghost — and the ghost’s with him. It’s not giving away too much to reveal that the ghost died longing for love and conflicted about his sexuality and so when the goth teenager shows up dealing with the same issues, a strange relationship develops. The description of their lovemaking is both arousing and exciting and creepy and, literally, chilling. For the ghost’s affections turn out to suck the life and warmth out of the living boy and he has to struggle against his own conflicts with growing up Gay to avoid following the ghost into icy death.

Vintage: A Ghost Story isn’t exactly a White Crane Book of Gay wisdom. But it certainly plays on the Gay interest with consciousness on the margins. It’s a fast read, entertaining, and just delightfully chilling. The reader too will be happy, warmed up, and satisfied when the steaming hot peppermint-flavored cocoa is served at the end — and Gay love saves the day.

Toby Johnson is the author and editor of countless fine books like Gay Spirituality, Charmed Lives and Secret Matter.  He is also former publisher of White Crane Journal and White Crane’s current Reviews editor. Visit him at www.tobyjohnson.com

Reviews, WC75 - Bears

WC75 – Review of Walt Whitman’s Franklin Evans

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Rvu_whitmanfranklinevansFranklin Evans, or
The Inebriate, A Tale of the Times
By Walt Whitman
Duke University Press
Paperback, 147 pages, $21.95
ISBN-10: 0822339420 
Reviewed by Kim Roberts

Long before Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass, he wrote a novel, Franklin Evans, or the Inebriate, a Tale of the Times. Roundly scorned by Whitman’s biographers and critics, and disavowed later in life by Whitman himself (who claimed to have written it while drunk), the novel has been treated mostly as a curiosity. Now Duke University has brought Franklin Evans back into print with a handsome edition containing a fine introduction, two related short stories by Whitman, and Lincoln’s temperance address of 1842, edited by Christopher Castiglia and Glenn Handler. The question remains: will this book be of any interest to general readers, or is Franklin Evans only for academics and Whitman scholars?  The answer is: only somewhat.

When first published, Franklin Evans appeared not as a bound book, but as a newspaper supplement to the New World in December 1842. Released in large-format folio size, it sold for 12 ½ cents a copy. And it sold well — approximately 20,000 copies — making the novel by far the most widely read of Whitman’s work during his lifetime.

Readers interested primarily in the social history of the country will find much here that is compelling. The temperance movement was the first wide-spread social reform movement in the United States, and the novel’s greatest claim to interest from a wider readership comes from what it reveals about that movement.

Temperance stories were the bodice-rippers of the 1840s.  Under the guise of moral uplift, they treated readers to graphic scenes of violence and crime, featuring such underworld characters as prostitutes, thieves, wife-batterers, and the like. These stories titillated readers while adhering to a strict formula tracing an individual’s downfall and degradation as his alcoholic consumption worsens, then providing a happy ending thanks to his reform and the signing of a temperance pledge. Whitman sticks to the conventions for the most part, combining sensationalism with rank sentiment. But he tacks on some of his own additions as well: a marriage to a former slave, the loss of an investment to a swindler, the saving of a drowning child — and, for our happy ending, the completely unmerited inheritance of a fortune from a dying acquaintance.

Anyone familiar with Whitman’s democratic idealism will be surprised by several elements of the novel.  These include a defense of slavery. Whitman’s narrator tells of a sojourn in Virginia, and his host Mr. Bourne, a “gentleman planter” who “became convinced of the fallacy of many of those assertions which are brought against slavery in the south.  He beheld, it is true, a large number of men and women in bondage; but he could not shut his eyes to the fact, that they would be far more unhappy, if possessed of freedom. He saw them well taken care of—with shelter and food, and every necessary means of comfort…”

Also surprising is Whitman’s warning of the evils of urban life. We are used to thinking of Whitman as a celebrator of cities, but in Franklin Evans he says repeatedly that they are “pestilent places, where the mind and the body are both rendered effeminate together” by "the dangers that surround our young men" who can so easily be ensnared “with the seductive enchantments which have been thrown around the practice of intoxication.”

One character, Mr. Lee, warns the narrator from the back of a carriage, even before he has entered New York for the first time: “You are taking a dangerous step, young man.  The place in which you are about to fix your abode, is very wicked, and as deceitful as it is wicked. There will be a thousand vicious temptations besetting you on every side, which the simple method of your country life has led you to know nothing of. Young men, in our cities, think much more of dress than they do of decent behavior. You will find, when you go among them, that whatever remains of integrity you have, will be laughed and ridiculed out of you. It is considered ‘green’ not to be up to all kinds of dissipation, and familiar with debauchery and intemperance.  And it is the latter which will assail you on every side, and which if you yield to it, will send you back from the city, a bloated and weak creature, to die among your country friends, and be laid in a drunkard’s grave; or which will too soon end your days in some miserable street in the city itself. It is indeed a dangerous step!”

Whitman even condemns boarding houses, which he himself continued to live in for most of his adult life. His reformed narrator, at the end of the novel, asserts: “Boarding-houses are no more patronized by me…The comforts of a home are to be had in very few of these places; and I have often thought that the cheerless method of their accommodations drives many a young man to the bar-room, or to some other place of public resort, when the road to habits of intoxication is but too easy.” He goes further, adding this ironic vote for heterosexuality: “I would advise every young man to marry as soon as possible, and have a home of his own.”

The reader can certainly complain of lots of bad writing here. Franklin Evans does its share of sermonizing and finger-wagging. The novel is too quick to veer off onto tangents. The women characters are all one-dimensional. And a couple of times, the point of view changes abruptly from a subjective first-person to an omniscient narrator.

But there are also glimpses of the young poet’s developing voice. The novel reveals a belief in the power of words to change the lives and influence the actions of individual readers, most of whom would have come from the working class. Joined with more original language, this conviction would give Leaves of Grass, written a decade later, its passion and force.

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journaland need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Kim Roberts edits Beltway Poetry Quarterly and  is the author of Wishbone Galaxy and the recently published The Kimnama.  Visit online at www.kimroberts.org

Reviews, WC75 - Bears

WC75 – Review of Kitt Cherry’s Art That Dares

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Rvu_kitcherry_artthatdaresArt That Dares: Gay Jesus, Woman Christ, and More
By Kittredge Cherry
AndroGyne Press,
Paperback, 96 pages, $38.95
Reviewed by Toby Johnson

Editor’s Note: Regular readers of White Crane will recall this book from our Friends issue, in which, in addition to the beautiful cover image, several images from the book were published in connection with a show at JHS Gallery
in Taos, NM  (www.jhsgallery.com)

Kitt Cherry’s newest creation is wonderful, mind-blowing, and beautiful. White Crane readers will recognize her name from previous mentions of her equally mind-blowing novel, Jesus in Love, which presents an autobiography (i.e., told in the first-person) of Jesus Christ as a modern psychologically sophisticated and sexually aware ego-person. Cherry is a lesbian former MCC minister, now in semi-retirement, and author of a book for young people on coming out and a guide to lesbian and Gay worship and ceremonies. She is also an art historian. And it is in this last identity that she has collected paintings, photographs and graphics that depict what might be called “alternative” versions of Christian imagery.

This book is effectively a “catalogue” of an exhibition she mounted at the JHS Gallery in Taos, New Mexico, as part of the National Festival of Progressive Spiritual Art, in May 2007. It includes beautifully reproduced images of some eleven artists, along with in-depth articles about each artist and explanations of the themes in the selected examples. The subtitle reveals just why “explanations” are in order: “Gay Jesus, Woman Christ, and More.” The introduction contains an account of Cherry’s motivation in searching out this truly “visionary” style of artistic expression and an intelligent discussion of the meaning of the oh-so-religious-sounding term “blasphemy.”

You can imagine she’s had that epithet hurled at her!
Her “blasphemy” is so honest, so respectful, visionary, and inspiring that it becomes a kind of new religion, a Christianity not stuck in literal old stories, but alive with imagery meaningful to us today — not the Jesus of history 2000 years old, but the mystical Jesus of the present NOW, alive in human beings today, suffering and resurrecting through the struggles of modern life and of sexual and gender liberation.

Cherry explains that blasphemy refers to speech intended to transgress or express contempt for central religious beliefs, in that sense, the idea is to protect the status quo religion and culture. But in effect, blasphemy is what wakes people up and forces them to rethink their unquestioned cultural beliefs and myths. In that sense, blasphemy is the truly spiritual tool for transforming consciousness. Jesus Christ, after all, was put to death for blasphemy.

I suppose not all blasphemous speech or art wakes people to the true meaning of religion, but the very fact that a believer would feel so threatened that he or she would hurl accusations at another of this sin ought to tell them something about their own precarious hold on truth. It’s like the Jungian  notion of “the shadow” that what upsets you the most — and the most compulsively in other people — is a reflection of traits in yourself you are trying to protect yourself from recognizing and admitting. Being upset by somebody else’s beliefs one disagrees with is some sort of sign of one’s own skepticism. And so the more the beliefs seem meaningless, the more fiercely they have to defended.

The sinfulness of blasphemy is based on the first of the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt make no graven images. Jesus, of course, transformed those commandments, reducing them to two: love God and love your neighbor. And as Christianity moved into Europe in its early missionary days, it dropped the objection to graphic images altogether. That was a desert thing! Nomads — Jews and later Muslims — objected to depictions of God. Greek, Roman and European cultures exulted in creating representations of God. Indeed, during the Middle Ages, the stained glass windows of the great cathedrals were the catechisms by which the religious stories were portrayed and promulgated. The imagery made the stories more real — and memorable — and provided insight into their meaning.

That’s exactly what the image, say, of a female Christ — like that of acrylic artist Jill Ansell — does: causes the viewer to think through the contradiction and to understand “Christ” as a mystical reality which necessarily includes both male and female since humankind includes both male and female. The image of a woman rising from the tomb triumphant reminds us vividly that the Christian message about resurrection includes the feminine principle as well as the masculine.

Depictions of Jesus are often “homoerotic” in that he is prototypically shown near naked and suffering the afflictions of the flesh. Oil painter F. Douglas Blanchard portrays Jesus as a modern Gay man in modern clothing being brutalized by police and by fag-baiting protestors. The disturbing, but ultimately glorious, series of twenty-four painting, of which five are included in the book, force the viewer to consider that anti-Gay violence in the name of religion is an exact parallel to the violence done against Jesus and which Christians believe was salvific for us all.

With paint on plexiglass Alex Donis produced faux stained glass windows showing improbable combinations in an intimate kiss — John Kennedy and Fidel Castro, the Pope and Gandhi, Adolf Hitler and a Holocaust survivor—to call into question conventional dualistic categories. Reproduced in the book are the kisses of Jesus and the Hindu god Rama and Mary Magdalene and the Virgen de Guadalupe. Several of Donis’ creations were destroyed by vandals in protest against the exhibit in San Francisco in 1997.

Perhaps the most familiar artwork in the book is that of Franciscan brother Robert Lentz. His modern day Greek Orthodox-styled icons — of both traditional holy figures and modern  political and cultural characters — have been distributed through progressive and GLBTI bookstores and card shops for years. The icon of Harvey Milk, Martyr is a national Gay treasure. (Since Lentz returned to the Order later in his life, he’s been forbidden for marketing the more controversial of his icons, but they are still available through his previous distributor.) And the icons of Jesus as AIDS sufferer by openly Gay ex-Jesuit priest William Hart McNichols will also be familiar. They’ve appeared in the Gay press.

That’s to point out only five of the eleven artists. All the images in Art That Dares are equally striking and transforming of ideas about the meaning of religious iconography.
The book is liable to be dismissed and deprecated by the Religious Right. Some of the people who really need to see this material will never lay eyes on it. But now it’s out there. Kitt Cherry’s work has already been noticed and that condemnation, ironically, has brought needed attention.

This is a lovely book. And a very neat idea! I urge readers to seek it out.  Selections from Art That Dares are highlighted on Cherry’s internet page www.jesusinlove.org

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journaland need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Toby Johnson is the author and editor of countless fine books like Gay Spirituality, and Charmed Lives.  He is also former publisher of White Crane Journal and currently Reviews editor. Visit him at www.tobyjohnson.com

Reviews, WC75 - Bears

WC75 – Review of The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved

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Rvu_katzrevnotmicrowaveThe Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved:
Inside America’s Underground Food Movements
by Sandor Ellix Katz, Chelsea Green
Paperback, 400 pages, $20.00
Reviewed by Jason Mayernick

The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved revolves around two realities. First, everyone needs to eat. Control what a person needs and that person is control.  Author Sandor Katz chronicles the dozen of ways every bite of food we eat is controlled by corporations and government agencies to the detriment of our societies our society’s health and survival. Realities number two; you don’t have to passively live with the stranglehold of corporate greed that has come to characterize food production in the “modern” world. There is a Revolution under way to put food back in the hands of the individual and the Revolution is Recruiting.

Liberation is achieved through awareness of oppression and a struggle against that oppression. In no uncertain terms The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved touches on the oppressive nature of government regulations and market practices leaving their mark on everything from the seeds farmers plant to the way meat is slaughtered and shipped. With each reality mentioned Katz offers examples of how that oppression is being challenged and offers ways for the reader to join the struggle.

Across the pages of this amazingly well researched book march a host of individuals resisting and undermining the soulless food industry. Guerrilla gardeners in urban centers, raw milk dairy farmers, illegal floating food markets, and other examples highlight the work of food activists across the world. Each chapter ends with an extensive bibliography and resource list making this volume an exceptional starting point for anyone interested in food activism. Taken as a whole The Revolution Will Not be Microwaved is a call to action, a wonderful piece of accessible research, a thought provoking work chronicling the struggles of food activists across the globe, and definitely worth the read.

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journaland need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Jason Mayernick is a polyglot scholar, teacher and pirohi.maker living in Minnesota.  Visit his blog “With Pirohi & Love.”

Reviews, WC75 - Bears

WC75 – Review of That Undeniable Longing

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Rvu_tedesco_2That Undeniable Longing:
My Road To and From the Priesthood
By Mark Tedesco
Academy Chicago Publishers
Hardback, 197 pages, $23.95
Reviewed by Toby Johnson

Mark Tedesco’s interesting, chatty and entertaining account of his experience as a Catholic seminarian begins with an epigraph from St. John of the Cross: “In the end we shall be judged by how much we have loved.”

When I was a young seminarian myself, the Novicemaster gave me a holy card as a Christmas present with that same quote from John of the Cross. So I started this book identifying with the author. My experience was also similar to his in being in two different seminaries. I moved from one religious order to another after the first told me to leave on account of my homosexuality (though, fortunately or unfortunately, didn’t explain that in a way that made any sense to me). I experienced it all as a series of “divine interventions” that got me from a fairly conservative order to a liberal progressive one and from that order which had a student residence in San Francisco to liberated life as a gay man in the nation’s gay mecca.

Mark Tedesco’s journey was similar, but actually more exotic than mine. Though he was an American and lived in Modesto, California, he joined an order of priests called Oblates of the Virgin Mary which had its seminary in the Italian city of San Vittorino outside Rome. So he really got the full experience of Roman Catholicism. He was with this group for a couple of years and then was told not to return from a summer leave back in California. He was emotionally lost and confused for a while, but then got assistance from a priest he knew outside the Oblates to get into the North American College in Rome (a seminary not associated with a specific religious Order). So he returned to Italy and continued his training and was eventually ordained. He returned to the U.S. and worked in a parish in Washington, D.C. while he continued his education at Catholic University. In Rome he’d become involved with a Catholic lay group which he calls Communion and Freedom (C.F.) C.F. was paradoxically both progressive and intensely conservative. (C.F. sounds very similar to the lay Catholic organization Opus Dei which received a lot of attention during the heyday of the DaVinci Code movie.)
Throughout his seventeen some years as a seminarian and then a priest, Tedesco was emotionally wracked with fears of his gradually emerging homosexuality. And the emotional stress manifested as digestive problems and general unhappiness. To deal with these issues he saw a counselor in D.C. who innocently asked him if he’d considered leaving the priesthood. Well, long before, back with the Oblates he’d been told by a “living saint” in residence at the seminary that God wanted him to be a priest. How could he leave?

By the time of the counselor’s question, however, the “living saint” had been exposed as phony (his stigmata was apparently self-imposed and his “odor of sanctity” really just a cloud of perfume he secretly doused himself with). Maybe Il Santo’s advice wasn’t so pertinent after all and that the longing for happiness was a better sign of what God wanted for him than the self-serving admonitions of Church authorities. The counselor’s question opened the possibility of change. And soon he was out of the priesthood and back in California starting a career as a high school teacher.

That Undeniable Longing is very personal, though for all that he writes about his confusion and emotional suffering the book reads more like a travelogue through Italy and the Catholic Church than a tale of psychological abuse by religious authorities. Indeed, it is quite readable and hard to put down. I devoured it in three sittings over two days, thoroughly enjoying the experience.

I’d have liked a little more explanation of how he finally reconciled his homosexuality and his religiousness. The discovery is that the “undeniable longing” that draws people to God is also what draws them to sexual love. But this seems only acknowledged tangentially. He doesn’t seem to have developed a positive “gay spirituality” or spiritual vision of sexuality as much as seen through the oppression of the traditional Catholic culture.

And he never mentions masturbation. I would affirm his right to privacy and personal respectability, of course. This book isn’t meant to be a confession. But all the way through I kept wondering if he were strictly “chaste” by Catholic standards and, if so, how he’d managed this feat. As a young Catholic seminarian myself, I’d managed to suppress sexuality for a period of three years. And am amazed—and in a curious way a little proud—of myself for the discipline. But Mark Tedesco apparently endured this for 17 years.

Tedesco relates some of his deep emotional/homosexual attachments to fellow seminarians. I really could identify with those stories; I had similar experiences in my own religious life days. But I was in the Church in the 1960s. Tedesco’s story starts in 1978. How could he have been so unaware of homosexuality?

The fact that all this happened decades after Stonewall seems a reminder to us in the gay movement that our message about the real nature of homosexuality—and especially the spiritual side of gay consciousness—isn’t reaching the youth who need to hear it. As a devout teenager longing for God, Tedesco should have been told that acknowledging his gayness would have been a faster path to the divine that going off to Rome.

All former seminarians will enjoy this book. The stories about the “living saint” and the traditional life at the seminary at San Vittorino are just precious. There’s a pedestrian honesty and simplicity about the way Tedesco relates the life of a young priest that all readers can find appealing. I enjoyed this book.

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journaland need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Toby Johnson is the author and editor of countless fine books like Gay Spirituality, and Charmed Lives.  He is also former publisher of White Crane Journal and currently Reviews editor. Visit him at www.tobyjohnson.com

Reviews, Steven LaVigne, WC74 - Lovers

WC74 – Review of The Master of Seacliff

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Rvu_pierce Book Review

The Master of Seacliff 
by Max Pierce
Harrington Park Press, 201 pages
$16.95 ISBN-10: 1560236361

Reviewed by Steven LaVigne

Classic romantic Gay literature and the gothic novel were made for one another, because they often share similar elements. Set in an earlier time, such as the idyllic 19th century of Henry James, there’s a peculiar setting, frequently an old, possibly haunted, dark house by the sea. One of the leading characters is struggling with his homosexuality, so he’s angry, and brooding, hiding his mysterious past. The other leading character is a young and virginal hero, who, like a fish out of water, meets other characters who’d love to relieve him of his virginity. Throughout the story, there are assorted lascivious secondary characters, although one of them wisely dispenses advice to this virginal hero. Finally, there’s the domestic who knows everything, and reveals nothing.
Nowhere are these elements this more evident than in Max Pierce’s terrific novel, The Master of Seacliff. Furthermore, like those gothic novels, this is a pleasurable, entertaining read.

The story focuses on Andrew Wyndham, a talented artist. In order to earn enough so he can relocate to Paris and continue his studies, Andrew accepts a position tutoring Tim, the young son of Duncan Stewart, an industrialist. (Does this sound a little bit like Jane Eyre?) Stewart supposedly murdered his father so he could control the family business. Although this hasn’t been proven, when Andrew arrives at Seacliff, a dark, old house, which reminds us of Misselthwaite Manor, the setting for The Secret Garden. Andrew’s immediately at odds with both the son and the father. Alternatively attracted and repelled by the handsome Stewart, Andrew sets about doing his work, but he’s soon drawn into unraveling the mystery and scandal of the murder, and the disappearance of Stewart’s former lover, the talented pianist Stephen Charles.

I was halfway through this novel before I realized that it The Master of Seacliff is really a Gay variation of Daphne du Maurier’s classic, Rebecca, Duncan Stewart is this version’s Mr. DeWinter, the manservant, Fellowes filling in for Mrs. Danvers, and Andrew is the narrator-wife character. Pierce fills his novel with plenty of the right twists and turns, including a pair of lusty siblings to confuse Andrew, plenty of action (softly sexual and otherwise) at Seacliff’s various locations, and more than a few red herrings.

The Master of Seacliff is a real page-turner. It’s perfect for curling up in a comfortable chair with during those chilly Autumn nights alone.

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journaland need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Reviews, Toby Johnson, WC74 - Lovers

WC74 Review of Soulfully Gay

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Rvu_perez Book Review

Soulfully Gay:
How Harvard, Sex, Drugs, and Integral Philosophy
Drove Me Crazy and Brought Me Back to God

By Joe Perez, Shambala Publications, ISBN 978-1-59030-418-1, 328 pages, paperback original, $16.95

Reviewed by Toby Johnson

As founder and manager, for some four years, of the Gay Spirituality & Culture Weblog that originated around the 2004 Gay Spirit Summit, Joe Perez has made himself a significant place in the Gay spirituality movement. His blog has offered an ongoing series of comments and reactions to news and media events about our issues. Now in this personal memoir and philosophical autobiography he shares the events that brought him to an intellectually rigorous and psychologically satisfying understanding of homosexuality as a spiritual/philosophical experience.

An important part of Perez’s story is his discovery of the elaborate philosophical system of synthesizer extraordinaire Ken Wilbur. Perez has become an exponent for Wilbur’s ideas in the Gay context. And Wilbur, in turn, has provided a Foreword to Soulfully Gay. One might quibble with why Wilbur begins by emphatically declaring that he himself is not Gay, but he ends the Foreword with a wonderful statement about Perez’s process and accomplishment. Wilbur says that because Joe has learned through his life experience to feel “deeply, deeply okay about himself,” he is able to say yes to life and that has made Joe’s life into a work of art.
What a wonderful thing to be able to say about yourself—and, even better, to have one of your heroes and teachers say about you!

Soulfully Gay is itself a work of art. It is a sort of diary, organized by date, through which Perez recounts to himself—and his readers, of course—the events that have led him from being a devout Catholic youth from a working class background to a Harvard student studying comparative religion to sexual rebel and crystal meth user to AIDS survivor and then AIDS patient himself to mental patient to mystic to philosopher. It comes as no surprise, then that one of the crucial events in his life was a nervous breakdown during which he imagined his life was being made into a movie called The Seeker. The most skillful, soulful story-telling gimmick of the book is the gradual unreeling of this narrative, building up to a final climax that is part Buddhist mystic vision and part Thelma & Louise.

Tucked within the autobiography are several very interesting discussions of Gay spirituality. Perez’s primary insight, he says—and I’d agree—is what he calls “The Importance of Being Gay.” In a series of six short essays he argues that there are four universal, archetypal patterns that necessarily play out in human consciousness. These are masculine, feminine, other-directed and same-directed. Love, he says, is not just an emotion or a sexual dynamic, but rather a manifestation of the soul’s desire to be reunited with God—and this is how God loves: in love of others (heterophilia) and in love of self (homophilia). It is these archetypal patterns that result in humans being male, female, heterosexual and homosexual. The model very nicely places homosexuality as simply part of the way things are. And that insight eases homophobia and fear. Another layer of his model includes how fear is also other-directed and same-directed. Either way it is assuaged with truth.

Developing a systematic approach to determining truth is the main thrust of Ken Wilbur’s philosophy (which he boldly calls in one of his book titles A Theory of Everything). And Perez is following in his path. Unfortunately, this reviewer thinks, he follows Wilbur in the pattern of making up acronyms for wide-ranging concepts. Wilbur calls his integral theory of everything AQAL (meaning “all quadrants, all levels”—and including all lines, all states, and all types). Perez calls his vision of how Gayness fits into the universal patterns T.I.O.B.G. (“the importance of being Gay”). This reader doesn’t care for the acronyms; but thoroughly agrees with Wilbur’s and Joe Perez’s process of seeking a higher and higher perspective, of being “all” inclusive.

In this reviewer’s point of view, Perez rightly argues all through the book that homosexuality has to be understood from the higher perspective (called God) not just from within human prejudice.

The Gay Spirit Summit occurred during the period of this diary, and Joe “blogged” the Summit. Though it doesn’t provide specific details, Soulfully Gay does document that event.

One of the missions Joe Perez adopted for himself while he was managing the Gay Spiritual & Culture blog was the very practical task of starting up a recognizably Gay celebration of the winter solstice and New Year. He explains that in 1966 the African-American cultural holiday Kwanzaa was initiated by one man, Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga; now it is celebrated by millions. Couldn’t one person, similarly, create a Gay equivalent in that same spirit? Perez reports on his dialogues with other Gay spiritual leaders about establishing such a parallel Gay holiday (this reviewer was honored to have been included in that dialogue). He gives an account of a Yuletide/Rainbow New Year/Bridge of Light ritual he designed and conducted. Perhaps his vision will still come about—in part because it’s now immortalized in this book.

The weblog/diary style creates a sort of disjointed organization. Instead of by topic, ideas are presented by chronology. Thus comments about books he’s read or web-articles he’s written or insights he’s had tend to sound reactive and sometimes argumentative, rather than logical and sequential. But, of course, the reality of all our lives is that we live chronologically and everything’s happening to us disjointedly and reactively. So the very characteristic of the book’s fault could also be its strength.

By using the diary style, Perez is able to insert his life into his thought and share the events that surround the ideas and gives them reality. His struggle to be a good person and to live life the right way, to cope with his HIV status, to find love comes across vividly. The philosophical stuff is part of his process. It really does matter what you think.

And that’s the message he brings about Gayness, about AIDS and health, about the various issues of Gay culture and community: the philosophical, spiritual ideas really matter. That’s what being “soulfully Gay” is about—finding your Gayness in your soul and your soul in its rightful place in the universe AQAL.
And that’s T.I.O.B.G. to you!

This is a good read. Even when Perez goes off on a tangent, his ideas and insights are interesting, insightful, and appealing.

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journaland need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Gay Health, Reviews, WC74 - Lovers

WC74 Review of American Psychiatry & Homosexuality

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Rvu_drescher_4 Book Review

American Psychiatry
and Homosexuality:
An Oral History

by Jack Drescher, MD and Joseph P. Merlino, MD, Harrington Park Press, ISBN: 978-1-56023-738-6
299 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Joe Kort

Growing up Gay or Lesbian, one of our greatest losses – if not the greatest – is not having any rich stories and instructive tales passed down to us by those before us. Usually parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and other elders pass on family jokes, fables, and stories about their pasts and our own. They tell us things like where nicknames came from, why last names changed after arriving from the old country, how and why their parents behaved and believed in the old days family lore and family history.

But now bookstores are offering an increasing number of titles archiving past events and the recent evolution of homosexuality. As a Gay psychotherapist, I have an interest in the history of how my profession handled — and mishandled  – homosexuality. American Psychiatry and Homosexuality: An Oral History provides an excellent resource for regaining and more fully understanding this knowledge. This book contains numerous  interviews of  those who pioneered the de-pathologizing of homosexuality and helped remove it as a mental disorder from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the reference source mental health professionals use to diagnose the clients we treat.

Each time I sat down to read this book, I chose to imagine that I was sitting at the feet of those being interviewed, and that they were telling me stories the way my grandmother and other family elders did with me as I grew up — stories that intrigued me, angered me, made me cry and made me laugh out loud.

Without this kind of oral history, our pasts would be lost, individually and collectively. This book sets the Gay record straight.

The cover illustration is a haunting photo of a man wearing a mask that resembles something from the horror movie, The Hills Have Eyes. Under that mask is Dr. John Fryer, M.D., a psychiatrist who, in 1972, spoke at a psychiatry panel on homosexuality, appearing as “Dr. H. Anonymous,” disguising his true identity — and even his voice. In those days to come out as a Gay psychiatrist meant a ruined career.

Fryer came to this meeting to de-pathologize homosexuality, telling about those Gays and Lesbians who were not troubled and did not seek out therapy. John Fryer took the first public step for us all, clinicians and laymen alike.

I knew that homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973, but was aware that Gay political pressure played no role in the APA’s decision to have it removed — as anti-Gay therapists Drs. Irving Bieber and Charles Socarides later claimed. In reality, according to transcripts in American Psychiatry and Homosexuality: An Oral History, the decision was “influenced by the weight of scientific studies” and a vote by the APA’s Board of Trustees, with two abstentions.

I first learned about Bieber when I was in college, writing a paper on why homosexuality was a disorder and should be considered so. I was, then, in my own early stages of coming out and, not wanting to be Gay, sought out literature to support my denial and write that paper. I still have that paper, to keep and archive my own personal journey.

Just as the pioneers transcribed in this book have something to teach those of us coming up — and out — behind them, so do we, the next generations, have something to teach them as well. In an interview, Charles Silverstein, Ph.D., psychologist and well-known author of The Joy of Gay Sex, speaks out against other Gay therapists who, he says, “condemn other Gay people’s sexual behavior” by diagnosing sexual compulsivity. He suggests that Gay therapists using that diagnosis are doing the same to other Gays as heterosexual therapists did, which is to “diagnose these people as suffering from some illness because you’ve identified with society’s rules.”

On this area of expertise, Silverstein could not be further from the truth. Or at least now we know there are gradations and differentiation. As one who specializes in treating sexual addiction and compulsivity, I use this diagnosis very carefully with men and women, both Gay and straight, who suffer from compulsive sexual acting-out, without experiencing pleasure. This is not based on my “moral views” as Silverstein claims, but their own recognition of compulsive, dangerous and life-threatening sexual behaviors resulting from trauma in early childhood, not on being Gay. Still, I appreciate Silverstein’s questioning concern and hard work that resulted in restoring homosexuality to its rightful place of normalcy.

There are details in this book that make me laugh out loud at how insane things were in the 1970s and before. One interview subject — Robert Jean Campbell III, M.D., well-known for Campbell’s Psychiatric Dictionary — recalls how anti-Gay analysts Bieber and Socarides were at it again, trying to keep homosexuality diagnosed as a disorder in the DSM. Asserting that some homosexuals underwent an “identity crisis,” they invented a diagnosis called “sexual orientation disturbance” until someone pointed out that the acronym for “sexual orientation disorder of male youths” is sodomy.

For this reader, one very enlightening interview was with author and psychiatrist Dr. Richard Isay, M.D. who helped openly Gay men and women to be accepted in Analytic Institutes to learn psychoanalysis. Before that, you were rejected if you were openly Gay. Early in my career, Isay’s books, Becoming Gay and Being Homosexual inspired me in developing my work with Gay men, providing psychotherapy to and facilitate retreats, workshops and groups for Gay men. I enjoyed reading how his beliefs about orthodox psychoanalysis changed, and how he let himself grow and re-think the assumptions he had learned and used for years — creating change not only on the outside,  but on the inside as well. I say lived what he preached.

All of the pioneers in this book paved the way for me so that today I could be an openly Gay clinician, publishing books on being Gay by both Gay and non-Gay publishing houses. I feel honored and proud to stand on their shoulders, knowing the pain they went through to help us get to where we are today — liberated!

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journaland need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Poetry, Reviews, WC73 - Friends

WC73 Review of Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium

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73rvu_dickinsonBook Reviews
Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium:
A Facsimile Edition
The Belknap Press, Harvard University
Cambridge, MA and London, 2006

  • $125.00 ISBN 13: 978-0-674-02302-4 / ISBN 10: 0-674-02302-1

Reviewed by Kim Roberts

The Herbarium was the first book Dickinson ever made. She began it around age 13, while a student at Amherst Academy, and enamored of her classes in Botany. Ironic then, that this should be the last of her books to become available to the public. But the Herbarium is so fragile that it has been displayed to the public only once. It is only now, with improvements in high-resolution digital color imagery, that such a facsimile edition as this was possible.

And it is gorgeous: the large format reproductions almost give us the sense of holding the actual book, each page captured lushly, the specimens affixed to the pages and carefully labeled with the flowers’ scientific name, and a set of numbers identifying the class and genus according to the old Linnean system of classification (which became outmoded even during Dickinson’s life). The Herbarium contains 424 specimens in 66 pages, almost all identified by the poet, and most of her identifications are correct. She artistically arranged between two and eleven specimens to a page, combining native species from around Amherst, Massachusetts with specimens of garden and house plants.

Dickinson studied Botany beginning at age nine, and kept both her Herbarium and her Botany textbook throughout her life. That early text, by Almira Hart Lincoln, touted the study of Botany as the science most suited for female students since "the objects of its investigation are beautiful and delicate; its pursuits, leading to exercise in the open air, are conducive to health and cheerfulness."

Dickinson began this project in a fashionable spirit; she wrote to her friend Abiah Root at age 14: "Have you made an herbarium yet? I hope you will if you have not, it would be such a treasure to you; ‘most all the girls are making one." Dickinson included in that letter a geranium leaf for Abiah to press.

From this point on, Dickinson enclosed flowers in a number of letters, entering into a female tradition of gift exchange. Probably some specimens in her Herbarium were prepared by friends, and had personal associations for the poet at which we can only guess. Dickinson’s practice, later in life, of enclosing poems in letters (many of which were on the subject of flowers) can be seen as a continuation of this exchange; the poems are blossoms transformed, carrying their own symbolic weight.

The language of flowers, now largely lost to contemporary readers, was a common woman’s idiom in Dickinson’s time. Different species were thought to convey particular moods or situations. Giving flowers was thus also sending messages—of devotion, mourning, gratitude, or purity, for example. In the only daguerreotype of the poet, she holds a sprig of flowers in her hands; I have always wondered what kind, but the photo is not detailed enough to reveal its secrets.

We know that Dickinson was an avid collector; tramping alone through the woods surrounding Amherst, or in the company of her sister Lavinia, she wandered freely. The Herbarium represents, then, Dickinson’s formative years, when she was learning to look closely at nature, before she chose for herself a more restricted adulthood.  She referred to this earlier time as her "boyhood." (In her poem, "A narrow fellow in the grass," her poem about encountering a snake, she wrote: "Yet when a Boy, and Barefoot—/I more than once at Noon//Have passed, I thought, a Whip lash/Unbraiding in the Sun.")

Though the flowers have faded, the Herbarium retains its beauty. I can’t help but marvel: here is the evening primrose, whose petals are nearly transparent; the musk mallow whose bloom turns coyly to one side, as if shy; the large iris that retains a hint of its original blue; the thick-stemmed pitcher plant; the beautiful S-curve of the trout lily’s stem, preserved; the flowers of the arrowhead placed by Dickinson atop the broad chevron of its leaf; the surprising inclusion of both tobacco and marijuana.

Here also: the blooms of the foxglove, arrayed along the line of its stem, faded from pink to pale sepia; the sweet-scented water lily haloed by the thick circle of its leaf, so it looks like it is wearing a ruff; the tulip, its petals split apart to show off its stamen; the dogwood, with the intricate lace of lines in each petal; the amorphous blob of delicate green shoots from the smoketree; the berries still clinging to the eastern red cedar; the five-pointed star of the toad cactus flower.

Some specimens cannot help but remind me of poems Dickinson would later write: the arbutus, which she would immortalize in her poem "Pink — small — and punctual"; the two oxeye daisies, their stems carefully crossed on the book’s pages, which bring to mind her own identification with this flower ("How modestly — always — /Thy Daisy— /Draped for thee!"); or the lilac, all its purple now leached away ("The Lilac is an ancient shrub"). She included a full page of violets: palmate, downy yellow, birdfoot, round-leafed, and sweet white. This flower would later appear in poems too ("The Love of Thee–a Prism be—/Excelling Violet—").

The Indian Pipe has been damaged: the black stem remains, but the ghostly white flower is gone. Is this some unintended metaphor? Mabel Todd Loomis (who would posthumously edit Dickinson’s work) mailed her a small painting of this plant, which Dickinson called "the preferred flower of life" and "an unearthly booty." Loomis later reprinted the painting on the title page of Dickinson’s first edition of poems.

Dickinson’s Herbarium also includes some rare species, such as the strawberry blite and the gentian. The latter would appear in several poems, and must have seemed particularly evocative to the poet, not only for its rarity but because it bloomed so late in the season. The fringed gentian inspired one of my personal favorites of Dickinson’s poems:

God made a little Gentian—
It tried — to be a Rose—
And failed— and all the Summer laughed—
But just before the Snows
There rose a Purple Creature —
That ravished all the Hill —
And Summer hid her Forehead —
And Mockery — was still —
The Frosts were her condition—
The Tyrian would not come
Until the North — invoke it —
Creator — Shall I — bloom?

But as sweet as the rare specimens are, I was pleased to find as well the most ordinary and mundane flowers in the Herbarium. She collected wood sorrel ("The Clover’s simple Fame/Remembered of the Cow— ") as well as the common dandelion, signal of Spring:

The Dandelion’s pallid tube
Astonishes the Grass,
And Winter instantly becomes
An infinite Alas—
The tube uplifts a signal Bud
And then a shouting Flower,–
The Proclamation of the Suns
That sepulture is o’er.

The Herbarium must be seen as the poet’s birth — looking at these pages, we cannot help but make the connection. Dickinson would later translate the collecting of flower specimens into bouquets of poems, bound together in hand-sewn small books.

Richard B. Sewall’s excellent prefatory essay places the Herbarium in this context. He writes that this first book "foreshadowed much of what was to come…in the care she took in the herbarium, in the precise botanical knowledge it displays, in the fine composition of every page, the bent of her nature is clear: she was a ‘maker’ from the beginning." The facsimile edition also contains a Forward and Preface, and Ray Angelo’s extremely useful "Catalog of Plant Specimens."

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journal and need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Kim Roberts is a poet and community activist living in Washington, DC.  Her most recent book of poems, The Kimnama was released by VRZHU Press this Spring.