Conversion Comedy

By Ange Mlinko
Read the Translator's Notes
"I thought of you as a butterfly tonight," getting to eschatology from a sketchpad, your mom's.
And though you write sermons nice and linear you also digress and about-face.
The jeroboam trees are dark tonight.
Darker in the outage than the stars let the sky be.
Partyers all.
The abbot told you, "I do not have power, the archbishop does not have power, the pope does not have power. Only God has power."
Then it is not a kind of violence to put a photo of the Pope in a luscious hacienda, imperilled by a minature pullbell.
Someone admired the hostess's oils. "Yes, it was a surprise when they hired me to teach but they said, 'We can teach an artist to teach but we can't teach a teacher to be an artist.'" "How true," the guests murmured.
This was not your mother though artists all say it "comes from somewhere else."
When another guest compared the Catholic to the Episcopal service she said, "I think not."
In a desert once I almost fell off a cliff.
To calm me down a friend told a joke: "Descartes was sitting on a plane. The stewardess said, 'Coffee or tea?' 'I think not,' Descartes said, and vanished."
It took a moment to sink in because I thought he said "The cart" as in "beverage cart."
Confusion is the only way to get to eschatology from a sketchpad.
I'm trying to redeem that abbot.
Drawing in the outage.

Once you suggest the origins of music lay in the necessity of drowning out the cries of sacrificial victims, I start listening for them—the cries—under my own singing.
Scholars resurrect books all the time just by quoting them.
When Roman gods popped out of the soil, the Christians looked around wildly.
Sculpt the mouth around "sculpture," ulpt.
They reburied them hurriedly, and the earth gulped.
The statue of the Commendatore went down with Don Giovanni. Which shall I believe, the unrepentence of the sinkholed Don?
Or the statue that converts Leontes by resurrecting his all-forgiving wife?
Hermione who's peerless has a likeness; he who won't about-face is not "mocked by art" but brought posthaste to hell, his "shapely seat and heart". . .
The moon slips out like a foreign coin from denim: a drachma, an as.
Can we redeem it?
Cities are places are conversion, you said. But I am citiless.
"She ascended to the thrown," you wrote by mistake, of Elizabeth.

Translator's Notes:

Q & A


POETRY: Tell us what you're thinking here about 1) conversion and 2) comedy.

ANGE MLINKO: This poem was written around the time I was thinking of getting my sons baptized in the Episcopal Church. (I grew up Catholic, long since lapsed.) It felt right to raise them within this tradition generally; and locally, the community is smart and warm. The question remained as to whether I could really be Episcopal — that is, Christian. My priest suggested books by the theologians James Alison and René Girard, in order to give me a philosophical framework for Christianity quite apart from metaphysics. Girard is a French literary critic turned anthropological theologian. His study of literature led him to meditate on what he considers a universal human pattern: scapegoating and sacrificing. To make a long story short, he believes that Jesus made himself an innocent scapegoat to illuminate the psychic mechanism by which all peoples dehumanize and victimize others. And thus by illuminating, end it.

Although I really am addressing this priest throughout the poem, it was Girard who said that the origins of music lay in the necessity of drowning out the cries of sacrificial victims. So when I say “I start listening for them — the cries — under my own singing,” I suggest that this Dionysian account (like a lowercase creation myth — a myth about how we create) is relevant now, as poets continue to write in a world of strife. At least, in this view, art is not exactly frivolous. But it is frightening! Either way, the turn to religion is born of the perceived moral shortcomings of art.

Ultimately the poem reveals an apostate, someone who remembers a joke about language by way of a near-death experience; someone who juxtaposes an electrical outage with an abbot's disingenuous claims about power; someone who can only think of God in terms of art.

There's a suggestion in both Don Giovanni and A Winter's Tale that art can be enlisted to reveal the truth: the Commendatore's statue escorts the Don to hell; Hermione's statue is revealed to be her breathing self, not a mockery of Leontes's bad conscience. Both are considered comedies for their happy endings; I call my poem a comedy because the ending is a jesting one. (Lightning doesn't strike, either at apostasy or puns!) But now I don't think it's nearly light enough: despite the jokes, the rhythm of the lines doesn't swing, and that probably conveys more about the anxieties of the poem than, well, the content it's stuffed with!

P: Why do the lines look the way they do, e.g., the indents? Are you trying to break up a kind of linear narrative the poem could otherwise have?

AM: The long vatic line wars with the terse, grammatical, no-nonsense sentence.

There's a false sense of a turn starting to happen when I break between the cantos; the poem starts tipping toward some kind of climactic realization (the conversion) but then corrects itself; it balances steadily on the notion that one might convert but doesn't in the end.

Source: Poetry (March 2008)