Approaching The Cup?
What's going on here?
I don’t like explaining. Let me explain. Those even haphazardly following this newsletter will have seen that every Wednesday a new poem appears in their inbox beginning with the above image and a recording of the poem’s text accompanied by a guitar. The inestimable David Flores did the artwork and the guitarwork is by my talented friend Lance Leeson. Each poem is one of 18, which currently comprises Approaching The Cup, a body of work spanning nearly 15 years, although the majority of the poems were written between 2016-2019.
Before finding myself, against all expectations, converting to Christianity and becoming a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church, I had, without much success, attempted to make a religion of sorts out of Poetry. This journey was partially documented in Silver Door’s most popular post: Human Conversion in The Digital Age: e-Platforms, Orthobros, & The Winsome Wars.
In that piece, I talk about how early on I took William Blake as my model, for good and for ill. With that came a particular unwarranted self-confidence that I would simply self-publish my poems one day. Sadly, I have neither the work ethic nor the genius of Blake, and to date a book has yet to take material form. Approaching The Cup (ATC) is the beginning of that formation.
In the summer of 2020, the summer of love, I was baptized and chrismated into the Church. The year and a half leading up to this was a personal apocalypse, and the thought of poetry rarely entered my head.
Many poets and artists, religious and secular, will often speak of their artistic mission in a variety of registers. But as I slowly settled into my new life as an Orthodox Christian and had time to reflect on how I’d arrived at what not so many years before would have seemed the heights of madness, I realized that, whatever I thought I was doing in my own poetic mission, it was really God who was using poetry to minister to me. The thousands upon thousands of poems I'd read and written were signposts along the way of my unwitting pilgrimage to Christ’s Bride. As a poet, I naturally found this reflection deeply satisfying.
Still, I was left with the question: what should I do with this poetry thing? Or, more specifically, what should I do with my poems? I could just chuck them out and be done with the whole matter. I confess there was that temptation. At various points in my young life I'd found the pursuit of poetry for its own sake deeply unsatisfying.
But after giving it a good deal of thought, consulting with my priest, and then a trusted friend, I decided that I should do, well, at least something! To not would be ungrateful, to turn my back on what had led me to what I had from a young age so deeply craved.
Now, prior to my conversion I had come to believe, and this belief was only solidified afterwards, that just as the printing press transmogrified poetry into a visual medium over time the new digital technology would begin a reemergence of the oral/aural tradition of poetry.
So I began recording poems and sharing them with Lance. Slowly ATC emerged. I don't like to speak about my poems but I will say that ATC is, among other things, a spiritual autobiography, an unsuspecting pilgrim's travel log towards his first Eucharist. Only the final poem was written after I had joined the Orthodox Church.
Exactly how and when ATC will become a physical book (or record) is unknown, but it will. In the meantime, the original 18 poems will expand to close to 45 as I record and draw on other past work and continue to collaborate with Lance.
I'd like to end by sharing a passage from St. Augustine's On Christian Doctrine which I've recently been reading. Taken from the beginning of Book I, St. Augustine speaks of a journey to one's homeland and the proper place of use and enjoyment, which has helped me think about my own vocation as a poet, and the proper role of poetry:
Suppose, then, we were wanderers in a strange country, and could not live happily away from our fatherland, and that we felt wretched in our wandering, and wishing to put an end to our misery, determined to return home. We find, however, that we must make use of some mode of conveyance, either by land or water, in order to reach that fatherland where our enjoyment is to commence. But the beauty of the country through which we pass, and the very pleasure of the motion, charm our hearts, and turning these things which we ought to use into objects of enjoyment, we become unwilling to hasten the end of our journey; and becoming engrossed in a factitious delight, our thoughts are diverted from that home whose delights would make us truly happy. Such is a picture of our condition in this life of mortality. We have wandered far from God; and if we wish to return to our Father's home, this world must be used, not enjoyed, that so the invisible things of God may be clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made,—that is, that by means of what is material and temporary we may lay hold upon that which is spiritual and eternal.
Lance Leeson is the frontman for Aria’s Boon. Their debut album “Wander, More.” is a massive undiscovered gem of our infant decade.
You can follow David Flores at
or here: https://linktr.ee/davidmfloresWe began collaborating through our mutual involvement at The Symbolic World, and have an exciting project to announce in the near future.
My journey has been (at least in the bullet points) very similar. I too took William Blake for a master of sorts, and went down the same pseudo-religious path in relation to poetry as a vocation. My entry into the Orthodox Church has caused me to reevaluate almost everything in regards to that vocation. I’m looking forward to hearing more about where you’re at these days and how your thinking has changed. Christ is Ascended!
St. George!!!!! Fr. Isaac!! What a great church family.