Monthly Roundup(s) IX: Summertime Edition
A man can be the warhorse of his God
Welcome back to the monthly roundup(s) for June, July, & Aug. 2024 at Silver Door, where perusal-worthy articles and poetry related happenings from Substack and beyond are highlighted alongside recent SD news and posts.
Before compiling this roundup I felt like Silver Door hadn’t produced much this summer. But while I was busy putting off wrapping up the details for my book of poems Approaching The Cup (available sometime 2025) and J.Z dedicated himself to learning video and podcasting skills, we were still able to put out a lot of great stuff.
Silver Door was graced with the debut poems from poets
and Clarence Caddell, and we were delighted to have Mary Angela Douglas, Joseph Teti, and Nik Hoffman with their characteristic excellence.The Silver Door editors look forward to battling the falling leaves here in the North East United States of America for our beloved followers, subscribers, and future paid subscribers (who will be rewarded in this life, and hopefully the next).
Around The Web
I didn’t read much of anything from the internet this summer, but here is a pair of gems:
Nik Hoffman: Poetry and Posterity: Complete Edition — Hoffman is doing the hard work of grappling with our sullen art. From the introduction:
The following piece of writing is about Poetry, and further, about Poetry’s relation to us and to the world. Also it is about Posterity, by which I mean both our own duty to pick up the Tradition handed down to us, and our role in passing down that same Tradition. The “handing down” is not done for the sake of tradition, it is done because tradition is good. Likewise we do not pursue poetry solely for the sake of poetry, we pursue poetry because we pursue something better—the Good. It is only in this configuration that poetry is able to blossom in and of itself. The further that Poetry is divorced from Good, Truth and Being, the less it achieves any significance or meaning.
A piece worth reading.
&
William Collen: Poetry’s return to form—Collen takes a look at this little corner of internet poetry. He writes this regarding Hoffman and Co:
His is a representative voice of a rising generation of poets and readers of poetry—and it must be admitted that, positioned as they are in the online space centered around Substack, these voices find themselves in a unique cultural and temporal position, able to pass on the traditions of the poetic craft into the digital age, and to transmit these traditions to a generation which the academy has failed spectacularly at engaging and which the small presses simply don’t have the scope to reach. What will become of this movement? I don’t know; but I can truthfully say that it is, probably for the first time in decades, an exciting time to be a poet.
Silver Door Posts
The Choice
The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work, And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark. When all that story's finished, what's the news? In luck or out the toil has left its mark: That old perplexity an empty purse, Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse. -W.B Yeats Alongside The …
Christianity & Culture (via Fr. F.)
It may be perfectly true, as I personally believe is the case, that our contemporary culture or civilization is "on trial." But should Christians, as Christians, be concerned with this cultural crisis at all? If it is true, as we have just admitted, that the collapse or decline of culture is rooted in the loss of faith, in an "apost…
Christianity & Culture: Pt. I
Silver Door explores the intersection between poetry and the digital. You can find the primer to this series here if you haven’t read it already.
In the Green Water
“He… worked through natural laws, and the laws of men, through prophets and kings, through artists and sages- inasfar as they could, and were willing to, give themselves over to His actions. Wherever there fell tears of yearning for God’s righteousness into the dust of the earth, this was from the warmth with which He warmed men’s hearts. Whenever a wise man had a flash of insight about the one, immortal God, this was His spark in a man’s soul. Whenever an artist sang, or carved, or painted, some allegory of life that, in some way, opened the eyes of blinded mankind to see divine truth, there He touched that man’s spirit with His life-giving breath.”
Christianity & Culture: Pt. II
We ended Pt. I with the words of Fr. Georges Florovsky: “…Man was created by God for a creative purpose and was to act in the world as its king, priest, and prophet.”
The Impossibility of Pure Redundancy
“In the realm of the Eternal, repetition is always a surprise.”
This is The School in Which We Learn
What will become of you and me (This is the school in which we learn...) Besides the photo and the memory? (... that time is the fire in which we burn.) Calmly We Walk through This April's Day, Delmore Schwartz
Approaching The Cup is Done!
The final manuscript for Approaching The Cup is locked in at 49 poems.
The Providential Reader
I. The text pictured below I found in a bookstore in Northern California. I was a moderately literate fifteen year old, though I spent most of my time engaged in whatever all the other fifteen year olds were doing. Generally, it was not a high manner of living. Aside from martial arts and collegiate wrestling, my time was used in Whiterun and Rick and Mo…
White Horses and Black Ships
Always too eager for the future, we Pick up bad habits of expectancy. Something is always approaching; every day Till then we say, Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear Sparkling armada of promises draw near. How slow they are! And how much time they waste, Refusing to make haste! Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks Of disappointment, for,…
J.Z from White Horses and Black Ships:
We create the world, as
has said, every time we speak. It is thus, also, that AI for the most part is a thing of mummery.Call fire down upon the altar, or turn the key which locked the rain in heaven.
This no LLM can do.
A man can be the warhorse of his God.
Poems on Silver Door
Written by Nik Hoffman:
Written by Mary Angela Douglas:
Written by Clarence Caddell:
Written by
:Written by Samuel Wilson:
Video of the Month
J.Z has been hard at work upping Silver Door’s video capabilities. Check this out on Golgonooza. I’m biased, obviously, but it’s VERY COOL. The channel also has a backlog of great interviews, including a great recent conversation between Dr. Timothy Patitsas & DC Schindler.
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