Quarantine Holy Week, with interviews, excerpts, poems, and Charis

Charis in the World of Wonders 

and poems: updatery!

Anak Krakatoa erupted on Good Friday, locusts afflict Africa, the pandemic rages everywhere, Etobicoke Creek ran as red as blood: maybe you had better get started on your quarantine reading of Charis in the World of Wonders...

"Q and A with Marly Youmans, Author of Charis In The World Of Wonders" - interview at Women Writer, Women's Books  11 April 2020

Excerpt (the first appearance of Hortus) from Charis in the World of Wonders at Women Writers, Women's Books  3 April 2020

"Mystic Journey," "Jane Eyre in the Red Room," "The Plum Oak Pot," and "The Hand" (audio and text) at Pete Candler's pandemic project, A New Decameron. The first and last poems are blank verse; the other two are part of a sequence of poems influenced by Hebrew parallelism and Yoruban praise traditions: art has always been a Silk Road. Thanks to Pete for a request.

"Plague-spell" and "Death of a Singer" at The Living Church (Episcopal/Anglican Communion) 19 April 2020 issue. Thanks to editor Fr. Mark Michael for his request.

Upcoming

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"The Homunculus" from The Book of the Red King (video) 

at The Ballsians on youtube.

Update: It is up! Go here.

Poetry videos and text from The Book of the Red King 

at the Cathedral Arts blog from Albany, New York

"Night Blooming Cereus" at A New Decameron, read by Paul Digby

Excerpt (audio/text) of Charis in the World of Wonders at A New Decameron

Podcast at NAA

and more

A bold 19th century #GoodFriday depiction:
"As Seen from the Cross," James Tissot, c. 1886-94,
public domain via Wikipedia.

THIS NEW NOVEL is unlike anything I’ve ever read—
and the best novel I’ve read in ages. 
It’s set in Puritan New England In the late 17th century 
and uses gorgeous language to tell a gentle but riveting story. 
I stayed up until 3:30 this morning to finish it. 
If you’re tired of all the “The Girl Who—-“ novels 
floating out there, cleanse your palate with this.
--poet Jane Ullrich Greer, April 8

from A New Decameron

"Orcadian Painting (Good Friday)" by painter
and my occasional penpal/collaborator, Graham Ward. Acrylics, 2019.

Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century: In Siena, where more than half the inhabitants died of the plague, work was abandoned on the great cathedral, planned to be the largest in the world, and never resumed, owing to loss of workers and master masons and “the melancholy and grief” of the survivors. The cathedral’s truncated transept still stands in permanent witness to the sweep of death’s scythe. Agnolo di Tura, a chronicler of Siena, recorded the fear of contagion that froze every other instinct. 'Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother another,' he wrote, 'for this plague seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And no one could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship.… And I, Angolo di Tura, called the Fat, buried my five children with my own hands, and so did many others likewise.
[Siena Cathedral dome photograph by Livio Andronico 2013
Creative Commons license Wikipedia]

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.)