Palm Sunday in The Long Lent

About the Image

Pietro Lorenzetti, Entry of Christ into Jerusalem, 1320. Painted 27 years before the peak intensity of the Black Death began. 700 years after Lorenzetti painted this image, it is Palm Sunday in The Long Lent. The very Long Lent. Public domain image, Wikipedia.

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Marly-words

(or, what I've been working on lately)

The Lorenzetti is pilfered from my own facebook site. I'm finding it hard to keep up with current requests for writings, videos (yes, I have finally made some videos of poems from The Book of the Red King, and will make a Charis excerpt as well), and poems--people are finding more time to make extended projects and to ask for contributions, I imagine. Lots of requests for poems, and even a commission to write a pandemic poem, a thing I had promised myself not to make because I disliked so many 9-11 poems. However, dear reader, I did it because I am fond on the editor who asked. Aiee! There's a notable increase in requests from Christian venues, and I find that curious and interesting. Meanwhile, I've been keeping up with a couple of my social media sites better than the blog--mainly because that's where the most interaction with readers happens, these days--and am pleased by some good attentions to Charis in the World of Wonders. In addition, I'm doing some radio interviews for the book launch, something I've never done before, and hoping not to appear as a doofus on the airwaves!

https://twitter.com/marlyyoumans

https://www.facebook.com/marly.youmans

https://www.anewdecameron.com/

Paul Candler's pandemic project--

lovely to be on the home page,

and so far four of my poems are up.

Forthcoming--a long poem

and the opening of Charis.

Charis in the World of Wonders excerpt at

http://booksbywomen.org/charis-in-the-world-of-wonders-excerpt/

Clive Hicks-Jenkins on The Art of the Cover,

with a good bit about our collaborations

https://clivehicksjenkins.wordpress.com/2020/01/18/the-art-of-the-cover/

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ceccoop.net

The Word, and a Virtual Palm Sunday

Want to go to Palm Sunday services with me
in The Village of Cooperstown?
Christ Church Cooperstown
Easy to stay six feet apart...
Feel free to wear your pajamas!

ceccoop.net

And if you're bookish, which I assume you are (having landed here), you might like to know that novelist James Fenimore Cooper was warden of this church, and that it has had a remarkable number of writers as members--William Wilberforce Lord (the famous poet that Wordsworth praised but Poe derided, and with much vigor), Susan Fenimore Cooper (read Rural Hours! surely influenced Thoreau), Paul Fenimore Cooper, Fae Malania, Ralph Birdsall, and many more...There's also a memorial niche to Constance Fenimore Cooper, friend of Henry James and writer who has been getting a lot of attention lately. James Fenimore Cooper was the one responsible for turning a little village church into a Gothic bandbox after he returned home from Europe.

A sheep in green and flowering pasture for Palm Sunday.
Interior illumination by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for Charis in the World of Wonders

Pete Candler's A New Decameron launches

Pete Candler's storytelling project--an edifice of words and images to be built during our time of pandemic, and glancing back to Boccaccio and the time of the Black Death--begins. Like Boccaccio's Decameron,  A New Decameron will rejoice in a multitude of narratives. Right now you'll find a trailer (including one of my poems as part of an introduction from Pete) and print versions (audio posted soon) of four poems of mine with art by Bruce Herman, who holds the ethereal, leafy Chair of Lothlórien at Gordon College.

Here's an excerpt from Pete's introduction, referencing the original Decameron:

I don’t know how many people are going to read Boccaccio these days, but I had a thought: why not recreate the Decameron for our time? I want to collect 100 stories to share online in written and audio form, to provide some of that common humanity Boccaccio’s characters found in their time. The only rule is that these stories should be as fully human as Boccaccio’s, and will be about anything except the coronavirus. The text versions will be posted here, accompanied by contributions from visual artists. The audio versions will be posted in podcast form and made available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and elsewhere.
Each day, for as long as our social isolation lasts (and possibly longer), we will post one new reading in the hopes of making something beautiful together out of our collective isolation, and, in the words of Boccaccio, “to offer some solace…to those who stand in need of it.” We may not have a lavish country estate to retire to wait out the contagion, as Boccaccio’s characters did, but we do have this, and that is not nothing. 

As Pete Candler is already the accomplished maker of the rich and challenging online project (films, still photographs, and stories) titled A Deeper South, I expect A New Decameron will be wondrous. If you haven't visited A Deeper South, go there too. "The vision of A Deeper South is rooted in the idea that the spiritual, political, and cultural health of a nation, region, city, town, or person depends upon an honest and unflinching memory; that the gravest danger to our cities and ourselves is a willful amnesia; that hope is to be found through the work of active remembrance, putting back together the fragments of personhood scattered by a culture of selective memory." Like A Deeper South, A New Decameron is ambitious and unifying in its goals.

Our opening salvo features four exquisite and timely poems by @marlyyoumans accompanied by Bruce Herman’s “Mary Annunciate,” a fitting word+image for today. Audio readings coming soon. https://t.co/Tmxt9WWnDG

— A New Decameron (@anewdecameron) March 25, 2020

To take pity on people in distress is a human quality which every man and woman should possess, but it is especially requisite in those who have once needed comfort, and found it in others. I number myself as one of these, because if ever anyone required or appreciated comfort, or indeed derived pleasure therefrom, I was that person. 
--Boccaccio, The Decameron

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(Thanks to Artemis Journal and poetry editor Maurice Ferguson for permission to reprint two poems, and to Beth Adams for permission to reprint from her Annunciation anthology, which will be back in print from Phoenicia Publishing in July 2020.)