In The Conference of the Birds, a Sufi allegory which I summarized briefly in Part One of this series, Farid al-Din Attar calls the penultimate stage of enlightenment, the final one the birds must pass through before reaching their goal, “The Valley of Bewilderment.” In this context, however, bewilderment does not signify mere confusion. Rather, it names a stage […]

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for youAs yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bendYour force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.I, like an usurp’d town to another due,Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;Reason, your viceroy in me, me should […]

The idea of love at first sight has always struck me as a scam. It’s possible, of course, for two people to feel an immediate and intense connection that can go well beyond the physical, but the happily-ever-after we’ve mythologized as the inevitable result of that connection sets up expectations that the often heart-breaking work […]

(Read Part 1 here.) When I was an undergraduate, a man I looked up to as a teacher and a mentor took me to his studio so I could see some of his recent paintings. There was one that I could not stop staring at: a naked man falling through a fractured landscape of colors, […]

That the mystical experience of transcendence exists outside of language is axiomatic to those who pursue it. It follows, then, that such experience also exists outside the network of power relations ineluctably embedded in language—outside, in other words, of politics, in the largest possible sense of that term. While part of me has always found […]

All men and women are to each other the limbs of a single body, each of us drawn from life’s shimmering essence, God’s perfect pearl; and when this life we share wounds one of us, all share the hurt as if it were our own. You, who will not feel another’s pain, no longer deserve to be called human. Written by […]

What I’m interested in here is the way the failure of this poem, which I see as a failure of craft, can be used as an object lesson in how not to write a politically engaged poem, unless of course you want your poem to be propaganda.

That’s the question Tricia Knoll‘s poetry group responded to just before she read my introductory post from last month. She thought it was a pretty cool segue from her group’s question to this blog’s title—Learning To Love The Questions—and she was nice enough to take the time to write me about it. I also thought […]

My name is Richard Jeffrey Newman, author of T’shuvah, which Fernwood Press published in 2023. I’ll be blogging here at Learning To Love The Questions about the work poetry does in the world when it engages, or is engaged by, the political and spiritual aspects of our individual and communal lives. I’ll tell you the […]