The Weekly: August 14, 2023
It's an odd coincidence that two of my favorite poets have both written poems likening their work to their children: Anne Bradstreet and Sylvia Plath.
There's something reflective of the two poets' imaginations in both works. Plath clearly wants to like her work. And in some sense she does. And yet: "These poems do not live."
Then:
It would be better if they were alive, and that’s what they were.
But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction,
And they stupidly stare and do not speak of her.
If you've spent any time with Plath's work—and you should, I think—then the despair isn't surprising. She lived a hard and unhappy life, before ultimately dying at her own hand.
But there's something visceral about her poems that has always grabbed me and won't let me go. So I come back to her from time to time. She's urgent and serious and hopeless and I respect it, even as I pity it. If you read this poem or, even more so, something like "Lady Lazarus" or "Daddy" you would likely predict Plath's eventual tragic end. And this mixture of desire and despair runs through "Stillborn."
Then Bradstreet: Of all the people I look forward to meeting in the world to come, she is near the top of the list. There's a quiet contentment running through her verse. It's not that life is easy or that she is unacquainted with sorrow.
My favorite poem of hers is about their home burning to the ground. She is walking past it and imagining where things used to be, as she looks at the now vacant space. There's an element of it that reminds one of Komunyakaa's poem about the Vietnam Memorial. But if Komunyakaa underlines the tragic, Bradstreet (whose loss, admittedly, is not so great as the loss of Komunyakaa's hypothetical mother staring at the wall) somehow preserves a kind of hope amidst the tragic. There's an undercurrent of health running through virtually everything the woman wrote.
Here are some portions from "The Author to Her Book." And if you've ever written a book or probably even a sermon or essay, you'll relate to this, I promise.
At thy return my blushing was not small,
My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,
I cast thee by as one unfit for light,
Thy Visage was so irksome in my sight;
Yet being mine own, at length affection would
Thy blemishes amend, if so I could:
I wash’d thy face, but more defects I saw,
And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw.
Then:
In Criticks hands, beware thou dost not come;
And take thy way where yet thou art not known,
If for thy Father askt, say, thou hadst none:
And for thy Mother, she alas is poor,
Which caus’d her thus to send thee out of door.
It's not that Bradstreet is blind to the flaws in her verse. She sees them. But she still finds a way of loving them. Sometimes I wonder if there isn't something about it that flows out of Christianity specifically—the ability to hold in tension your affection for a thing with a deep awareness of its imperfections. I don't mean to say such a thing is the exclusive property of Christianity. That's not true. But I think that Christianity is one way of learning to have this spirit within oneself—and it would be the best way, I suppose, for it flows from a true account of reality. And so Bradstreet's spirit in this poem sits somewhere between perfectionism and indifference, able to offer both mercy and a call to loftier things all at once. The name for such a disposition, I think, is love.
Books
I'm still working on Moore, Deneen, Prior, Berry, and Clapp. But I've finished for now with the poetry volume and the Cather. So now I'm trying to resume my reading of Benedict XVI's work on Jesus as well as Twenge's new Generations book.
Periodical Reading
The Weapons of the Weak by Michael Lind
Prologue to an Anti-Therapeutic, Anti-Affirmation Movement by Freddie de Boer
What Was the Fact? by Jon Askonas
The Obama Factor by David Samuels
Fatherhood Requires Fidelity by Leah Sargeant
Elsewhere
We'll have a few more months of good weather for barbecue here in Lincoln. But now's a good time to start stashing some stuff in the freezer so that is what I'll be doing today: I'm smoking a pork butt and then freezing all of it for easy weeknight meals later in the fall or winter. And it's a great easy winter weeknight meal: Take a bag out of the freezer, let it thaw, then heat the meat with a little bit of water in a skillet. Then you can use it for chili, sandwiches, or tacos.
Here's my setup: I use a Weber kettle grill with a Slow N Sear basket inside it so I can cook with indirect heat. Here's a good rundown on how the Slow N Sear works. This is my rub for pulled pork.
What I do is trim the pork butt—you want to remove the large, hard chunks of fat because those aren't going to render—and then salt it generously the night before cooking. This is called dry brining—doing it this way allows the salt time to penetrate the meat, which is going to season it and help with retaining moisture. Just make sure the rub you use doesn't have salt. If your rub does have salt, then you'll want to just apply the rub the night before. But if you keep salt out of the rub, you can more easily control how much salt you use to dry brine.
Anyway: I apply the linked rub above an hour or two before I put it on the smoker. Then you just keep your smoker in the 225-275 range (pulled pork is super forgiving) and cook the meat until the internal temp hits around 200 and it probes like warm butter.
Usually I end up wrapping it with foil after six or eight hours to help speed up the cooking process. If I wrap it, then when it is done, I just keep it wrapped and throw it in a cooler wrapped in a couple towels for an hour or two before pulling. Though I've actually kept a pork shoulder wrapped in foil and towels and resting in a cooler for up to six hours without issue.
Finally, this video is a good rundown on how to freeze large cuts of meat for quick weeknight meals more generally.
The Last Word
This is from Bradstreet and it reminds me of Tim Keller, who went to his rest earlier this year and whose memorial service will be held in New York tomorrow.
The hireling that labors all the day comforts himself that when night comes he shall both take his rest and receive his reward; the painful Christian that hath wrought hard in God's vineyard and hath born the heat and drought of the day, when he perceives his sun apace to decline and the shadows of his evening to be stretched out, lifts up his head with joy, knowing his refreshing is at hand.
Thanks for reading! Until next time,
~Jake