Opening King David
Poems in Conversation with the Psalms
Brad Davis
Opening King David
Poems in Conversation with the Psalms
Copyright © 2011 Brad Davis. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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For Deb, John, and Mariko—and all who struggle and hope
These conjectures as to why God does what He does are probably of no more value than my dog’s ideas of what I am up to when I sit and read.
—C. S. Lewis,
Reflections on the Psalms
Preface
The writing of these poems began on the first Sunday in Advent 2002. Over the next six years, they were drafted (sequentially through 2005) and then revised. The plan was to make a slow, contemplative read (lectio divina) through the Bible’s book of Psalms, one psalm a week, and by each week’s end to draft a poem in loose conversation with the biblical text. The intention was not to create a new translation/adaptation of the Psalms, engage in midrash, or even generate “religious” verse, but to make poems in a conversational idiom that bear witness to an attention to three horizons: the text, my surroundings (natural, cultural, relational, situational), and whatever may have been happening inside my skin at the time of composition. The sequence is an extended ekphrasis, writing that reflects upon and calls attention to another art form, in this case the 150 liturgical song lyrics of the biblical Psalter.
Other than to utilize a generally hospitable idiom (one of the rhetorical strategies in the Psalms), I set for myself no formal parameters though early on enjoyed working with a decasyllabic line and toward a sonnet-like fourteen-line form (in Book One especially) to which I returned here and there throughout the drafting process. Rhyme and regular rhythm happen now and then, but these are more happy accidents I decided to keep than anything else. Likewise, there are lines in which I have chosen to retain words or phrases some may find offensive. As an artist, I paint with the colors available to me, compose with the full range of notes on the scale. That said, if any poem with a “bad word” is also a bad poem, that is another matter altogether.
If there is a reader to whom my heart inclined throughout the drafting and revising of these poems it is anyone whose relationship with “religion” is strained or broken and who is familiar with struggle and the hope for something more or better or more real. I am a believer. This does not make struggle or sickness or layoffs or dying go away. At the best moments, I’ve a lively sense of God’s sustaining love for all things and me right there in the mix; at other moments, there is silence, fear, a sense of vast distances, absence, and I cling to faithful words and sacramental acts that speak blindly of what may lie beyond their otherwise empty occurrences. Early in the composition of this sequence, I drafted a line that captured my sense of purpose for the project as a whole: “Every word, a stand against losing heart.” I still believe it.
A final paragraph about the volume you hold: it is divided into five sections or “books” following the traditional five-book division of the biblical Psalter. The one-hundred fifty poems in Opening King David are in conversation sequentially with the Bible’s one-hundred fifty psalms. As a navigational help, there is, atop the first page of each poem, a quotation or triggering verse from its corresponding psalm.
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Emerald City Books—Ian Creeger, in particular—and to the editors of the journals where the following poems or versions of these poems first appeared:
Anglican Theological Review: “At the St. Francis Yacht Club”
Ascent: “Eucharist”
Christianity & Literature: “A Watchman’s Song,” “Philia”
City Works: “Judgment,” “The Good Life According to Architectural Digest”
Connecticut Review: “Instructions, with a Question,” “No Worries,” “50,” “Genuine Replications”
Image: “Common as Air”
Louisville Review: “Anticipating Our Retirement”
Main Street Rag: “So,” “Answer Me,” “Crossing the Williamsburg Bridge”
The Other Journal: “Praise Him”
Rock & Sling: “Enter God,” “The Centerfielder,” “In Heaven”
St Katherine Review: “Off Jake’s Pier” (forthcoming)
Tar River Poetry: “Neighbor as Theologian,” “Waiting”
The following poems appeared in the chapbook Short List of Wonders, selected by Dick Allen as winner of the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize and published in 2005 by the Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT: “Ashere,” “Instructions, with a Question,” “The Wicked Man,” “Shortsighted,” “No Worries,” “Imitatio,” “Joy,” “50,” “Two Ways,” “The Vulture Tree,” “Litany for an Empire,” “Less is More,” “Sing for Joy,” “Better Far,” “Glory,” “Genuine Replications,” “After a Snowfall,” “No Vile Thing,” “Insomniac’s Commission,” “Short List of Wonders,” “Good Things”
“Waiting” was reprinted on the Verse Daily website, 11 May 2006.
“Procession” won the 2009 International Arts Movement poetry prize (Bret Lott, judge)
“Praise Him” was included in the book, “God is Dead” and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself (Cascade Books, 2010)
Finally, I am delighted to acknowledge poet/editor Robert R. McQuilkin, whose small press, Antrim House, published all the poems (or versions of them) in this volume under the four titles Though War Break Out (2005), Song of the Drunkards (2007), No Vile Thing (2008), and Like Those Who Dream (2008). His excitement for and blessing of this iteration of the sequence is deeply satisfying.
Book One
Blessed is he who meditates day and night.
Psalm 1:1–2
Ashre
This time the collision wasn’t fatal;
I knocked the doe off the road and backed up
to check. In my low beams, her head high,
those giant black eyes blinked slowly, confused.
Difficult this morning to concentrate
on the psalmic text—Happy is the man
whose delight is in the law of the Lord—
which feels irrelevant to everything
that has been flailing at my heart these days.
But how else to learn an answer for how
the tyranny of bleak appearances
drains the soul of all will to persevere?
He is a tree whose leaf does not wither.
I am like chaff that the wind blows away.
Be