Poetry & Ministry, Two Service Industries: An Interview with DAVID BREEDEN

KIRPAL GORDON: When I last saw you in the Texas Hill Country in the late 90s, you were teaching in the English Department at Schreiner University, your coming-of-age-in-the-70s novel, “Another Number,” had just come out with great fanfare and you were writing a column in the local press, Dr. Poetry. I now just learned that you are an ordained minister with the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship which got me thinking about poetry being a service industry driven more by the power of witness than by celebrity and about the ministry being a service industry driven more by the power of metaphor than by dogma. 

DAVID BREEDEN: My self-definition, my label for myself, has long been “poet.” This has been true for me from my early twenties. The question has always been for me how to survive in a capitalist society that denigrates the artist. I was born into a farming family, but I could see that I wasn’t cut out for that. So, I went into college teaching. This seemed to make sense, especially after I received an MFA at Iowa’s Writers Workshop, where the talk was about teaching college. I enjoyed that life for twenty-five years. I like teaching. But the problem with college teaching is that it is a pink-cloud sort of world. Year after year, the teaching is the same. This did not feed my soul. I wasn’t giving enough back to the universe. And I wasn’t able to use my prophetic voice.
So, I left teaching to go into Unitarian Universalist parish ministry where, as I saw it, I could be both poet and prophet. Also, life as a minister is certainly more “real.” I go from deathbed to wedding to demonstration routinely. I’m up against the ultimate mysteries all the time.  R.S. Thomas, who was a poet and Anglican priest, once said, “Christ was a poet, the New Testament is a metaphor, the Resurrection is a metaphor; and I feel perfectly within my rights in approaching my whole vocation as priest and preacher as one who is to present poetry, and when I preach poetry I am preaching Christianity, and when one discusses Christianity one is discussing poetry in its imaginative aspects. The core of both are imagination....”

KIRPAL GORDON: Sam Hamill, in a recent interview with Paul Nelson, described the office of poet much like taking a bodhisattva vow.  He said, “Poetry is the most compressed, considered and comprehensive use of language. It marries language to music. What is not said in a poem is often just as important as what IS said. And when we invest the energy and the listening, we can’t read poetry silently, you must listen to the language, you must let the rhythms enter your body. Poetry aspires to the condition of music, but also aspires to the conditions of philosophy. Poetry is a very large house and there are many kinds of poetry. There is something in there, beneath all of that, that lies at the very common core of human experience. And to follow those threads, to follow the thinking of poets over the centuries, one sees again and again, the poet speaking on behalf of suffering humanity. The poet trying to lift people out of their dolor; lift people out of their indifference. Poetry is a very valuable tool and it has been my honor and my privilege to devote my life to this cause.”  Would you comment?

DAVID BREEDEN: I certainly agree with Sam Hamil that an essence of poetry is the compression and music of language. I’m intrigued by the new media for just that reason—I love the challenge of honing a poem down until it will fit into the 140 character format of Twitter, for example. And, yes, the function of poet, priest, and prophet is exhortation to forsake the mundane for the sublime. But for me the deeper essence of poetry is metaphor. Everything we think; everything we believe; every conscious action we undertake is based in metaphor. We are handed metaphors by our cultural experience—how to act; how to think; what right and wrong action looks like. Like anything standard-issue, these metaphors will do. These will provide a cookie-cutter life. The poet and prophet however must get inside the metaphors; must learn other metaphors; and must learn how to manipulate, how to handle, the metaphors. That’s what I show Jesus doing in my latest book--–“News from the Kingdom of God: Meditations on the Gospel of Thomas.” I began translating the Gospel of Thomas as one of my spiritual practices. As I worked on the text, I realized that the Jesus portrayed there is like a Zen practitioner. I began responding to the sayings with similar sayings from other spiritual traditions. Then I began responding with my own poems. I realized for the first time that the “kingdom of God” is existence in the present moment, totally in control of the metaphors. This is heaven; this is nirvana; this is enlightenment. It is the instant of absolute creativity of both life and poetry. I don’t manage to live there all the time; but I get there whenever possible.

KIRPAL GORDON: Your “Meditations on the Gospel of Thomas” is itself a poem, a collage of meditations from many wisdom traditions. These non-canonical words of Jesus, like his riffs on the kingdom of heaven and the dance of the sacred, are startling by themselves but they’re given added dimension by your weaving in commentary from Kabbala as well as Buddhist and Christian mysticism. Would you share your Nargarjuna poem in response to Jesus’s opening remark, “Whoever hears these words will never die?”

DAVID BREEDEN: “Nargarjuna says, / Nothing comes into existence / and nothing disappears. / Nothing is eternal; / nothing ever ends. / Nothing is identical / and nothing is different. / Nothing moves here or there.”

Nargarjuna and Jesus were wily cusses. No doubt about that. 

KIRPAL GORDON: It’s a great Chapter One that says it all / or nothing!  Though I’ve studied these things for years, your “translations” brought new meanings to these non-dual ideas.

DAVID BREEDEN: I won’t deny being a slow learner. I’ve been studying the world and writing for a long time, yet I’m just now, twenty-some years later, actually hearing things that Allen Ginsberg taught me. I guess it’s a matter of “when the student is ready.” I thought I was ready. When we’re talkin’ understanding reality itself, though, I guess we’re never really ready. Or ready in only fits and starts. It’s tough. But the writing is always there. And the teachers.

 

KIRPAL GORDON: Regarding the social activism of your ministry, what do you make of the Arab spring and the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon?

DAVID BREEDEN: I have been watching the world-wide revolutions with some hope. And I have participated in local Occupy actions. What makes me most hopeful is that this has been a spontanious, leaderless movement, carried on the ripples of the social media. The new means of human communication have tremendious power and they will also I think prevent any one leader from emerging. Even on the Right, where march-stepping is assumed, the teaparty never became capitalized--never got branded by one focus. It’s a truism that when all speak no one listens, but leaders in politics and tastemakers in art are all scrambling back there in the dust now. That gives me hope that the cacaphony will produce a higher harmony.

KIRPAL GORDON: What else are you up to and how else can Giant Steps readers stay abreast of your doings and non-doings?

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DAVID BREEDEN: I'm currently working through the Tao teh Ching. Anyone interested can follow along at http://revdocdavid.tumblr.com/
or on Twitter, @dbreeden. By the way, I have an author’s page at Amazon, for anyone who would like to see what I’ve brought back from various “raids on the unconscious.” http://www.amazon.com/David

Breeden/e/B001K7PW1Y/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1

Living in a World without Borders: An Interview with author MICHAEL HOGAN

KIRPAL GORDON:  For Giant Steps Press readers new to your work, let me take it back to 1978 in Arizona. You had just hit a monster home run with “A Lion at a Cocktail Party” and were the talk of the lit circles, most especially because you had your own voice and weren’t an imitation of any MFA style-du-jour. Brother, you gave all of us struggling writers out there hope!

MICHAEL HOGAN: Thanks, Kirpal. Yes, that book did very well. A lot of the material was originally published by George Hitchcock in his magazine, “kayak.” It was a magazine that favored the unusual, the unique and surreal. The press that originally published my book went out of business, though, and it languished in limbo until Kindle came along. I continued to publish in small lit mags over the years and in chapbooks but since after moving to Mexico I was not active in the U.S. poetry scene. At least not like I was in the glory days of the Seventies. Then I did readings with Allen Ginsberg, William Stafford, Charles Bukowski, Richard Shelton, Sam Hamill and many others as you know.

 

KIRPAL GORDON: I see that Sam Hamill has written the introduction to your “Winter Solstice: Collected Poems, 1975-2012.”  How long has this been out and how has it been received?

MICHAEL HOGAN: The book is not out yet. We expect to see in print sometime in early 2012. Sam is still writing the introduction. His wife passed away recently and he has understandably been stalled. I first met Sam many years ago in San Francisco when we both read together at A Clean Well Lighted Place. After he started Poets Against the War I connected up with him again and contributed to that project. I admire him a great deal as a poet, translator and an anti-war activist and I am honored that he has agreed to write the introduction to my life’s work of poetry.

KIRPAL GORDON: Life’s work? But it’s called “Selected Poems,” not “Collected.”

MICHAEL HOGAN: That was the editor’s decision. Jim Hepworth of Confluence Press in Oregon. I wrote over 2,000 poems and many of them (he felt) were best left on the editorial floor, so to speak. However it is what I would call a “highly selective Collected Poems”…. about 300 poems.

KIRPAL GORDON: How did you find your way from poetry into writing non-fiction and fiction? 

MICHAEL HOGAN: Well, I always wrote short stories and articles. However, I had not begun any large projects in this area until the 90s. I started to write a novel about the Irish in the Mexican War because I had an ancestor who fought in it. After I had written a couple of chapters, I realized how little I knew about that period of history. So, when I had an opportunity to teach in Mexico, I went ahead and studied advanced Spanish at the University of Guadalajara, and then went for the doctorate in history while doing research extensive on the period of the Mexican-American War. My book, “The Irish Soldiers of Mexico” received the gold medal of the National Geographic Society in Mexico and went through five editions in English and four in Spanish. The novel “Molly Malone and the San Patricios” followed from that.

KIRPAL GORDON: So that explains your Ph.D. in Latin American studies. How about your role in education? And your consultancies with the State Department?

 

MICHAEL HOGAN: Well, I went to Mexico on a two-year contract to teach at a private school there. I was invited because in San Francisco I did work in the Mission District (which is mostly Latino) with at-risk kids and was quite successful. I established a literary magazine for three schools and also introduced some advanced courses. So in Mexico I founded “Sin Fronteras” which is the longest running and most talked-out bilingual student magazine in the Americas. It also has received 20 consecutive awards from the National Council of Teachers of English.  I also started the Advanced Placement Program in Guadalajara. For my work there I received a citation from the Office of Overseas Schools. This sounds an awful lot like bragging but I don’t mean it to be. I felt like I was on a mission in those days and that education was the answer. I also had a lot of help as you can imagine. In my own life I had some pretty heavy setbacks and I knew that education was a way out for many kids who might otherwise end up in dead end jobs or worse.

KIRPAL GORDON: So that led to your consultancies?

MICHAEL HOGAN: Yes, the State Department asked me to go to other countries in Latin America and work with the schools there to help improve their academic offerings. These are essentially American schools abroad which children of ambassadors attend as well as the children of local leaders of government and business. So academic rigor is important.

KIRPAL GORDON: In your latest book, “A Death in Newport,” which I just finished, you manage to deliver a multiple murder mystery in your old Rhode Island hometown with a plot that revolves around multi-national corporations, Latin America, deforestation, peonage, greed and propaganda to deliver a climax that changes the lives of the tale’s main characters while rendering to readers an intensely sober appreciation of the actual global mess we’re in deep denial over. Talk about compelling reading---that’s quite a gauntlet you’ve thrown down.

MICHAEL HOGAN: Well, a lot of things came together at the same time to help me with that book. I had written a non-fiction work, “Savage Capitalism and the Myth of Democracy,” two years ago. That led to several discussions with Noam Chomsky who wrote a blurb for the book. We were both deeply concerned with what was going on globally and shared many of the same values. Also, I had gone to Bolivia as a consultant and saw what was happening there and was invited to a globalization conference at Boston University. Finally, I had an opportunity to spend three consecutive summer writing at the beautiful campus of Salve Regina University in Newport, RI, which is the setting and also as you say, my old hometown which I had not spent any time in for over forty years.

KIRPAL GORDON: What’s next and how do Giant Steps readers stay in better touch with you and your projects?

MICHAEL HOGAN: My next project is a more light-hearted book called “Growing Up Catholic.” I think it will amuse my readers. I am also continuing to write articles on globalization, the Church, gangs in Latin America, the failure of global economic systems, and the future education. Many of my articles appear on line in Alterinfos and Z Net. All of my books and some articles can be accessed on my home page www.drmichaelhogan.com. There is also audio so you can hear some of my most anthologized poems. I also have a Facebook page for the “Irish Soldiers of Mexico” where one can hear Irish music, visit Mexican museums, study the history of the Mexican War and the Irish participation. It is www.facebook.com/IrishMex.