shagbark hickory up the rise
skunk cabbage strains its spathe–
early risers awash in sun
A beautiful example of old forest strangely right next to Mitchell Airport–dry-mesic, mesic, and lowland forest. Here’s the skunk cabbage we found!
Thank you, Milwaukee County Parks for tending this patch of earth for us.
To maintain sanity, encounter the natural world in my area, and keep the literary instincts moving if not honed, I’m going to start a new project here and on Twitter. (Yes, I’m on Twitter now at @riyeff–those who know me personally will be shocked, I’m sure!)
I’m going to visit the State Natural Areas of Milwaukee County and the four adjacent counties to practice social distancing but also maintain an intimate connection to the natural spaces around my neck of the woods. Then to try to forge some kind of virtual connection with anyone who’s interested, I’ll take a photo and make an impromptu three-line poem (not a haiku unless by accident), posting them here and on Twitter. Maybe other folks will share theirs from other natural areas?
That’s the idea; we’ll see where it goes…
In this very strange time in the world, I’d like to offer at least a small bit of good news: my new book, an edition of the poems and shorter prose works on prayer and contemplation of Dame Gertrude More, is now available!
Dame Gertrude was a seventeenth-century Benedictine. A great-great-granddaughter of Saint Thomas More, she left home at 17 to co-found the Abbey of Our Lady of Comfort in what is today Cambrai, France. This monastery was part of a movement to revive monastic life among English Catholics after the Reformations and was so successful that the community continues today as Stanbrook Abbey back in England.
Dame Gertrude More was a strong, talkative, and likable woman who, under the tutelage of Dom Augustine Baker, also became a great lover of contemplation. She wrote poems, several shorter prose works, and a longer work sometimes called her “Confessions,” all of which were published in 1658, years after her early death. This book made her one of the earliest women published in the English language.
Her works celebrate and describe the nature of contemplation and divine union. With a plain style that was unconcerned with technicalities and intellectual hair-splitting, Dame Gertrude’s teachings on prayer and contemplation are beautiful testaments to the value of pursuing, as she puts it, “the one thing necessary” (experiential intimacy between the soul and its Maker).
She, Dom Augustine Baker, and the community at Cambrai more generally were instrumental in passing on the ancient and medieval teachings on contemplation in the Christian west, and I am delighted that both the community at Stanbrook Abbey and Gracewing have helped me to make Dame Gertrude’s works more readily accessible to a new generation.
I hope that in this uncertain time, we might find some solace in the kind of unwavering attention Dame Gertrude gives to what is most pressing and important in this earthly life.
You can find a copy on Gracewing’s website and on Amazon. I hope you enjoy!
The good folks at Commonweal just published a short reflection piece I wrote up for the Advent season on their website.
It speaks to the expectant waiting encouraged by the liturgy during Advent, with help from the western monastic tradition’s central practice of rumination.
A big thank you to the editors and readers of Commonweal, and a happy Advent to everyone!
This coming Tuesday, November 26th at 7 pm, anyone in the Milwaukee area who wants to support translators and/or the literary arts in general should come on down to Boswell Book Company on Downer Ave. (more details on their homepage).
I’ll be talking about and reading from my translation of Swami Abhishiktananda’s French poems (In the Bosom of the Father), along with Dr. Lorena Terando of UW-Milwaukee and former Boswellian Caroline Froh.
After brief readings from each of us, we’ll have a Q&A about translation in general and the works themselves.
Hope to see folks there!
If you’re in the Milwaukee area and want to support the arts, please attend a reading that Dr. Tyler Farrell and I will be offering at the Haggerty Museum of Art on Marquette University’s campus. It’s a great space, and free and open to the public! I’m particularly excited about this reading as I’ll be reading from my translation of Dom John Lydgate’s Troy Book (the great and massive fifteenth-century poem about the Trojan War) for the first time in public.
Here are the bios, plans, and contact info for the venue:
Tyler Farrell is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the English department at Marquette University and teaches writing, poetry, drama, Irish and British Literature and film. He also leads two study abroad programs, one to London in J-session and the other to Ireland in Summer. He has published three books of poetry with Salmon: Tethered to the Earth(2008), The Land of Give and Take (2012) and will be reading primarily from his most recent collection, Stichomythia(2018). Farrell is a fan of poetry and art and always feels the wonders that art forms can bring to us. Go poetry!
Jacob Riyeff is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the English department at Marquette University. In addition to teaching, he is a translator, poet, and scholar of medieval literature. Jacob’s publishing projects mainly center on the poetry of the Benedictine monastic community down thru the ages, and his books include a translation of the tenth-centuryOld English Rule of Saint Benedict (Cistercian Publications); a translation of the collected poems of Dom Henri Le Saux (aka Swami Abhishiktananda), In the Bosom of the Father (Resource); and his own poetry collection, Sunk in Your Shipwreck (Resource). He will be reading from his collection and a couple new poems.
For more information, contact Lynne Shumow at lynne.shumow@mu.edu
After several years and help from a number of scholars and monks, I am very happy to announce that my edition, translation, and study of an anonymous fourteenth-century Latin treatise for novice Benedictines, De modo meditandi vel contemplandi (“On the method of meditation or contemplation”), was published last month by the good folks at The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures. The treatise comes to us from the monastery of Bury St. Edmunds, the monastery (dissolved in the sixteenth-century) that was home to the most prolific Middle English poet, Dom John Lydgate.
My thanks to the editors, Christine Cooper-Rompato and Sherri Olson; everyone who offered their help along the way; and to my anonymous reader at JMRC for all their assistance in presenting this work to the world.
Here is the article’s abstract:
This article presents the first study, edition, and modern English translation of a Latin treatise for novice Benedictine monks copied at the English monastery of Bury St. Edmunds in the fourteenth century in Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 240. The treatise is comprised of two primary parts, the first describing a monastic program of meditation or contemplation to be followed throughout the day, the second discussing the benefits and nature of “the discipline” (the practice of flagellation) for curing a lack of devotion to monastic practice. The introduction and notes place the treatise within the larger context of the manuscript, of religious life and history in England and the West more generally, and of the treatise author’s sources, monastic heritage, and a variety of traditional and innovative medieval genres. The text is finally placed in the context of newer historiography on late medieval English monasticism and the relationship of monastics to their lay associates.
Arcane work, I know, but fascinating material!
A short poem for the weekend from my collection, Sunk in Your Shipwreck. Good tea has been one of the most constant companions thru-out my life, from early days going to the Teachery up in Madison, WI on Willie Street, to the long days and evenings I spent sipping at Dushanbe Teahouse in Boulder, CO over two years, to the visits to Red Blossom Tea in San Francisco, to everywhere else I’ve been. Good loose-leaf tea is it: the texture of its leaves, the color of its liquor against white clay, the smells that just don’t stop, the copious array of flavors is like nothing else. Black’s all right, but Dragon Well, Big Red Robe, Cloud Mist—that’s where it’s at.
Here’s a tiny suite of poems on tea culled from two lonely but beautiful nights from years past. (The text follows the audio file.) Happy long weekend—drink some tea!
Tea Poems
I. Dushanbe Tea House—Boulder, CO 2001
The seats are strangely cool
tonight, the tea is not:
its yellow-green mass
coddled in white clay.
New sounds splash on the air,
and still there’s quiet inside.
II. 3rd Street and Highway 101—San Rafael, CA 2005
Alone, I watch my step walking
a familiar street in San Rafael.
The air tonight is oolong tea—
glowing lights wrap me up
and tangled blankets shape the horizon.
The stars of evening shine and I
see them, knowing a moment’s peace.
I am very humbled to announce that my book, The Old English Rule of Saint Benedict with Related Old English Texts, recently won the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England‘ biennial award for Best Translation or Edition of an Anglo-Saxon Text.
I am very grateful to the selection committee, especially because this was Cistercian Publications‘ first foray into the Old English textual world and because the volume attempts to find a somewhat new audience for Old English literary culture. I was also pleasantly surprised because there are especially so many solid and important editions of Old English and Anglo-Latin texts being done by respected scholars every year.
Thank you, ISAS, Cistercian Publications, and Saint Æthelwold!
Are you a Tolkien fan and want to be part of Marquette University’s Tolkien fandom oral history project? Here’s the deal:
Marquette University has one of the most impressive collections of Tolkien writing and materials in the world (including the original hand-written manuscripts of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit!). Luckily, I happen to work within a stone’s throw of this magnificent collection.
The archivist for the Special Collections and University Archives, Bill Fliss, is spearheading a new project that seeks to compile an oral history of Tolkien fans’ testimony on why they find the Professor so captivating (interviews are limited to three minutes). They’re looking to collect “6,000 audio interviews, one for each of the Riders of Rohan that Théoden mustered and led to the aid of Gondor.” (Yes, it’s geeky, but delightful too!) My interview was just posted, and was lots of fun to prep for and do. Very low pressure!
If you’re in the Milwaukee area, you can contact the Archive to set up a time to come in, or if you’re elsewhere, you can give your interview remotely as well.
Wæs þu hal!
Jacob Riyeff 