Saint Sinatra and Other Poems

Beatifications

Peggy Rosenthal| AMERICA, OCTOBER 17, 2011

Saint Sinatra and Other Poems
By Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
Angela O’Donnell’s new collection of poems is a lives of the saints—of a sort. Nearly every poem is a tribute to a particular saint, but not all are officially canonized in O’Donnell’s own Catholic tradition. Yes, Teresa of ávila, Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis ofAssisi are here. But O’Donnell also boldly proclaims many saints of her own, including the biblical Eve, Emily Dickinson, Seamus Heaney and of course the book’s title saint, Frank Sinatra.

In calling these people saints, O’Donnell—a professor of English at FordhamUniversity—is not being heretical (though heresy does play an intriguing role in the volume, as I’ll discuss below). Rather she is conceiving of sainthood in its core New Testament sense of a “holiness” (hagiasmos in the Greek) that is available to anyone. The early church, as reflected in the Epistles, referred to all members of the new Christian community as hagiotes. The Letter to the Ephesians, for instance, is addressed “to the saints who are inEphesus and are faithful in Christ Jesus.”

What so interests O’Donnell about saintliness that she would write poem after poem on the topic? I think she wrote them in order to explore from the inside the texture of what holy living might mean. Sometimes her vision is consistent with our usual concept of saintliness. Take the marvelous sonnet “St. Vincent,” which rings changes on Van Gogh’s statement that “the best way to know God is to love many things.” But then there is the deliberately shocking poem “St. Eve,” which imagines the biblical Eve in her exile complaining to God, even partially blaming him for her inadequacies: “Ever a disappointment,/ I grew breasts/…/You cut me in two./ I take half the blame.”

Words like this border on heresy; and it is this borderland that O’Donnell chooses to explore in the six poems whose title begins “Heresy,” one closing each of the book’s sections. “Heresy #1” details the mutilations of several female canonized saints, tortured and killed for what their eras defined as heresy. Silently, implicitly, the poem condemns the male treatment of these faith-filled women, and this condemnation is perhaps the poem’s own heresy. In Heresy #3, “St. Ahab,” the primary heresy is the very naming of Moby-Dick’s dark protagonist as a saint. But further, as this fine poem proceeds, all of us are implicated in the angers and hatreds that are Ahab’s very being. “You are us, you heartless martyr,/ we are you through and through.” The final couplet is chilling: “How we bless our horrors with abstraction./ Vengeance. Justice. In Ahab’s Holy Name.”

Another reflection on life’s dark side is “Heresy #5: St. Hawk and St. Shrew.” The poem describes the interrelated God-given roles of the two: the predator hawk and its prey, the shrew. The three-line inter-rhymed stanzas end with a challenging vision of the interweaving of evil and good, weakness and strength, and art itself:

St. Shrew’s the hard and lesser part,

though dying gladly takes more art.

St. Lucifer and Christ watch and weep.

 

O’Donnell experiments with rhyme schemes in many of the volume’s poems, and in a sense the book’s overarching theme is poetry itself. The long, six-part poem “The Conversation,” perhaps my favorite in the book for its brilliant play in the service of a profound vision of life and art, imagines the final meeting between the great poet Czeslaw Milosz and the monk-mystic-poet Thomas Merton. O’Donnell’s poem incorporates not only many of their own words but also lines from other poets, all in a grand conversation celebrating the glory of loving this world and of loving poetry. But is poetry of God or of the devil? Pondering the question without finally answering it, the poem lets its speakers characterize a poet on the one hand as speaking “the language of angels,” and on the other as “A houseful of demons speaking in many tongues.”

The volume’s final poem, also its final heresy, continues the conversation about whether poetry has a divine or demonic—or merely human—source. This “Poet’s Heresy” has an unnamed female poet uttering her desire to feed us with language’s lusciousness:

I want to feed you

bread and wine, fruit and feast,

 

blessed and broken words

to chew, chew, chew.

 

I want you to eat them

purely for pleasure,

 

to put your lips around p,

crack k’s with your crowns,

roll l’s across your taste-budded tongue.

 

Poetry, she goes on, “is lies & truth, death & life/ …/ what you have always/ and have never known.” Finally, the poem closes by making explicit its vision of poetry as eucharistic:

It is my body & my blood.

Here. Take. Eat.

 

Is this heresy, to claim poetry as sacrament? I think not. Language is as incarnational as Christ himself, the Word made flesh: O’Donnell’s whole volume suggests this. She wants in this collection to help us rethink our concepts of holiness, of incarnation, of divinity and humanity intermixed, even of heresy. So she offers for our consideration—indeed as food for thought—a range of representations of all these concepts. Like any fine poet, she will not give answers. Rather, she invites: “Here. Take. Eat.”

Peggy Rosenthal’s books include The Poets’ Jesus and Praying Through Poetry: Hope for Violent Times.

by Glynn Young

 

In his letters, the Apostle Paul usually addresses the churches, such as the churches at Corinth and Thessalonica. In his letters to the Ephesians and the Philippians, Paul speaks to the “saints.” Peter speaks to “God’s elect.” But while different terms are used, all are generally understood to mean the people – the living people – who comprised the churches in these cities. When Paul wrote to the saints in Ephesus and Philippi, he was not addressing people who had been recognized and canonized as something special and different after their deaths. And so too today, in most of the Protestant traditions (Anglican and Episcopal being obvious exceptions), the terms “saints” refers to the living, breathing members of the church.

And then there’s Saint Sinatra.

I have to say that I laughed when I saw the title of this collection of poems by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. I’ve never really considered Frank Sinatra a saint, even in his early singing career when young women (like my mother) swooned over those famous blue eyes. Yet his poem, the title poem, leads this volume. And it should.

It is a collection that is at once serious and humorous, focused and yet playful. It speaks to and about saints who are both familiar and known for being saints (like “St. Kate,” or Catherine of Siena), as well as those who are not – like St. Ikaros, the mythical Icarus who flew too close to the sun. And O’Donnell includes a variety of literary figures to populate her saintly domain here – like St. Seamus (Heaney, the poet), St. Melville and St. Hawthorne, St. Edna (Vincent Millay) and St. Emily (Dickinson).

The idea here seems to be that these figures are all saints, have all been found worthy of sainthood, be that for singing, writing, painting (Van Gogh and Turner) and even playing the saxophone (Clarence Clemmons, who played with Brice Springsteen.)

The poem entitled St. Seamus, for the Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner, is a kind of praise and giving thanks psalm, and is an indication of how O’Donnell has written and organized her poems.

St. Seamus

For years I’ve knelt at your holy wells
and envied the cut of your clean-edged song,
lain down in the bog where dead men dwell,
grieved with ghosts who told their wrongs.

Your consonants cleave my soft palate.
I taste their music and savor it long
past the last line of the taut sonnet.
Its rhyming subtle, its accent strong.

And every poem speaks a sacrament,
blood of blessing, bread of the word,
feeding me full in language ancient
as Aran’s rock and St. Kevin’s birds.

English will never be the same.
To make it ours is why you came.

There is much to plumb in this poem, not the least of which is the connection between art and faith, or how art expresses faith, and how faith is revealed in art.

The poems in the volume are not limited to saints; there is also one called “The Conversation,” which is almost like a news account of the one face-to-face meeting of Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, and the Polish-Lithuanian-American Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz. The two had corresponded for years: their one meeting was a in a restaurant in San Francisco in 1968, and it is imaginatively recreated by O’Donnell here, including these lines:

He made me Milosz, you Merton,
and neither of us home
and sent us on a pilgrimage to find it.
We have seen on our way and fallen in love
With the world that will pass in a twinkling.
The maker loves the maker and the made.

Other poems include O’Donnell’s responses to seeing Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sower with Setting Sun” on the feast day of St. Francis and an exhibition of paintings by J.M. W. Turner at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

O’Donnell teaches English, Creative Writing and American Catholic Studies at Fordham University in New York City. She’s previously published two chapbooks and a full-length collection of poems, Moving House. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Christian Century, Comstock Poetry Review, Potomac Review and Xavier Review, among many others. She’s also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Web Prize, and was finalist for the Foley Poetry Award, the Elixir First Book award and the Mulberry Poets & Writers Award.

And in Saint Sinatra, she’s given us the poetry of the saints, all of the saints, including those who are recognizably ourselves.

TWEETSPEAK, May 25th, 2011

Saint Sinatra & Other Poems

by Catherine Wisniewski

September 25, 2011

RATTLE E-REVIEWS

 

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s latest book of poetry, Saint Sinatra and Other Poems, is at once both meditative and challenging. Throughout the collection, the poet-scholar imaginatively invokes the personalities of recognized and unrecognized Catholic “saints,” while artfully calling into question the traditional boundaries between the sacred and the ordinary. For O’Donnell, holiness is simply beauty, in whatever form it takes: as she observes in an interview with The Weekender, “The ‘Sinatra’ project is really about celebrating the joy and delight that beauty, in all of its forms, brings our lives.” In O’Donnell’s perspective, beauty is found in the untold struggles of traditional saints, while artists and musicians with shady pasts are canonized for the ways in which they make beauty incarnate. Ultimately, this celebration of unexpectedly sacred beauty results in a deeply Catholic poetry that is playful yet respectful, and especially alert to the sacramental aspects of the artist’s vocation.O’Donnell blends the religious and the secular in “Saint Sinatra,” the title poem which is set apart from the book’s other six sections. Here, O’Donnell uses religious imagery against a secular backdrop to paint a new picture of this unlikely saint. It is not legendary self-mortification or remarkable works of mercy that earn Frank Sinatra a place in O’Donnell’s litany—-far from it. Instead, it is Sinatra’s “blue-eyes smiling,” “skinny legs draped/in gabardine,” and “smooth/slide down the scale of desire” that are heavenly. O’Donnell makes the argument in smooth rhythm and original rhyme for Sinatra’s “canonization”: in spite of the singer’s dubious personal life or lust-inducing performance, his music is still beautiful and therefore, in the poet’s view, an instance of art’s holy presence in everyday life.Elsewhere, as in “St. Sinatra,” O’Donnell expands the traditional definition of “the holy” for several purposes: in order to sing the praises of musicians, literary figures, and artists (“St. Clarence,” “St. Melville,” and “St. Vincent,” to name a few) who have contributed to the world’s beauty and sacredness; to meditate on moments in Christ’s life as if she were witnessing them herself (“The Vigil” and “Mary’s Promise,”); and to bless the ordinary moments of days that become extraordinary when God’s grace is revealed (“On Seeing Van Gogh’s ‘Sower with Setting Sun’ on the Feast Day of St. Francis,” and “Waiting for Ecstasy”). But it is in Saint Sinatra’s first two sections, “Sisters” and “Brothers,” that O’Donnell’s poems approach the ideas of beauty and holiness from a decidedly different angle. In writing about some of the Catholic Church’s most beloved saints, O’Donnell adopts a tone of comfortable familiarity, employing dramatic monologue or addressing them as equals. (She even refers to St. Catherine of Siena with a nickname, affectionately titling the poem about her, “St. Kate.”) In these poems, O’Donnell uses her imagination to fill in the gaps in the biographies of these saints, often revealing the more ambiguous, human side of their personalities. She writes of Martha’s projected struggles with jealousy in “St. Martha” and speaks in Thomas Aquinas’ voice to describe a moment of clarity after much despair in “St. Thomas”:“You have set me on fire,/O my Lord, at the last,/after years of scut and cold smolder.” These poems imply that beauty, and therefore holiness, are found in the struggles each saint endures on his or her way to Heaven. These poems also make use of a distinctly Catholic vocabulary, referencing attributes, biographical information, or legends related to each saint, adding a special richness for readers familiar with these traditions.O’Donnell’s best poems are those in which she is able to slip effortlessly into a deep sense of sustained rhythm, unifying sound and sense. While some of the longer poems do not fully achieve this level of rhythmic cohesion (“Letters to My Heart,” and “The Conversation”), this collection contains an impressive number of expertly crafted sonnets which join condensed meaning to pleasing sound. In other poems, such as “St. Lazarus,” O’Donnell creates her own special pattern of rhythm. In this poem, and several others, O’Donnell paces herself well and selects subtle slant rhymes that keep her language fresh. Of St. Lazarus’ waking from the dead, she writes, “He licks his lips and wags his muscled tongue./ Flexes each foot till the warm blood comes…” Ultimately, O’Donnell’s impressively unified book becomes an incarnation of her own creed: the fluent sound and confident rhythms of these poems, paired with O’Donnell’s profoundly Catholic and imaginative worldview, are themselves evidence of art’s compelling presence in our world.