I’m happy to announce that my third book of poetry, “Song of the Middle Manager,” has won the 2021 Grayson Books Award.

This year’s judge, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, describes her response to the book: “How in the world of balance sheets, mergers, and slick brochures, does our humanity grow and blossom? I didn’t expect I would fall in love with a book that draws on initial public offerings and cubicles and framed achievements for inspiration. In fact, I wanted to dislike it. But again and again, these poems of sacrifice and salvation pulled me in with their “stubborn harmony,” their tendernesses, their conversations with god, their compassion, their ability to find how ‘this mortal beauty will save the world.’ Song of the Middle Manager is disturbing and utterly beautiful.”

“Song of the Middle Manager” will be published and available in early 2022.

The publisher adds this note: “If you would like to pre-order the winning poetry book, send your name, address, and a check made out to Grayson Books to PO Box 270549, West Hartford, CT 06127. The price is $15.95 per copy. You may omit shipping and handling fees if we receive your order by December 1.”

As a last-of-the-year post, here’s one of my poems now appearing in the Valparaiso Fall/Winter 2020-2021 (Vol. XXII, No. 1) issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review. VPR is one of the nation’s longest running online poetry journals.

A CITY IS THE PEOPLE YOU KNOW THERE

After too many years, I knock
and a stranger appears at the front door
of the creaky white Victorian. No, she doesn’t live here
anymore and who are you?

All my friends have moved away
like me, taking their history with them,
but you and I could never change
what happened between us,
and then we do. Looking for a pleasant wound,
I go back to my private shelf and find
an empty space where my youth should be, with a note
in that still captivating hand of yours—dear,
thought you wouldn’t mind.

Walking in Circles
by Richard Cole

I get lost easily, even now,
entering the dim, allegorical woods
preserved inside our city, always
the faint, white noise of traffic
somewhere beyond the trees as I wander
with diligence down a dirt path beaten
by others and myself. I’m on my way
I think, until I think I’ve been this way
before not twenty minutes ago. I’m never sure.
Nothing is a straight line
or even a labyrinth but a squirrelly maze
I trace and retrace almost every day
for whatever thoughts that might arrive
as I walk in circles, truer circles described
inside of circles, having learned
I need to get lost, a parade of one,
to find my calling, then lost again
to find my own way home.

Here’s one of my new poems, published in THAT Literary Review:

Admission
by Richard Cole

Perhaps in heaven, the blind
will still be blind, the lame
won’t walk, the deformed will not
be otherwise, and it won’t
make a difference. Not a bit. Perhaps
all of heaven is just two
inches away, the earth made
truly in the image of heaven. Hard
to say. If it’s heaven all the way to heaven,
then it might be hell all the way to hell. We see
glimpses in the eyes of the patient dead
walking among us. So too,
in a heaven filled with children
already here. Somehow, this is it. We have all arrived,
a dazzling, infinite world packed
neatly inside our capacity.
If only we could see with both eyes open
what we see with both eyes closed, and perhaps
we always have.

This was a challenge. Well, most of them are. Too much like a Christmas flower. Then the magenta emerged as a kind of protective shield. So there you have it.

I’ve long admired the work of Melissa Weinman, a Washington-based painter who works with images of faith. The image above is part of a series she calls “rosefire,” inspired in part by the last lines of Eliot’s Four Quartets. Image Journal is posting my article that describes her faith journey and how it has influenced her painting. More at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/goodletters/

The poems in Opening Prayer were written after we had moved from New York and landed on the shores of  Austin, Texas. The first section was drawn from my experience in business over the years, including ad agencies, freelancing and four software startups, two of which imploded and crashed, leaving few survivors.

I think it’s too easy to think ill of business. For most of us in this country, it’s where we spend the bulk of our waking hours. It can bring out the best in us, and the early years (or months) in some of those startups were glorious. I remember days when I found myself in the office at 7:00 in the morning and still there at midnight, giving everything I had to something larger than myself. I wanted to believe.

At the same time, believe me, I know that business can be savage. Survival has to be one of its mandates, and in many cases survival trumps decency or even basic morality if it comes to that. I think of business, corporations in particular, with images from ancient Egypt, a society that valued hierarchies and efficient organization, supported by a religion, successful for thousands of years, dedicated to mortal preservation, wealth and deathless monuments. If death is married to business, then most of us, directly or indirectly, earn our living as the necessary offspring of that marriage.

As I jumped from one startup to the next, my life began to feel like a piece of bad writing, like an essay that you get back from your English teacher with comments in the margins: “Be specific!” or “Use concrete images.” I wasn’t going through any crash-and-burn crisis. No divorce or mental breakdowns. I didn’t run off to South America and study with shamans. I just had a sense of creeping mediocrity. I was supposed to be famous by now. What had happened?

One of the last pieces I wrote for this section was “Song of the Middle Manager.” The divided life, the conflict that I felt in New York of art versus business, business versus the human spirit, remained inside me, but here I saw a man who had made peace with what he had done and failed to do. He felt a pride, however battered, in his business career. When I wrote this, I wasn’t a believer, but I wanted very much to give this man something that suggested belief. As in the poems from Success Stories, his career had been measured by subtraction. Despite this or because of it, his dreams were “smaller but stronger.” He was dogged, but he wasn’t a fighter. He “walked through other doorways filled with light.”

***

Approaching 50, I went for a brief visit to a Benedictine monastery in South Texas. Again, something happened. I fell in love, first with the Mass — it was poetry — and then with God and the Catholic Church.

The second section was written after this conversion. What had seemed like a series of dead ends in my life turned out to be, I believe, a necessary preparation for what happened at the monastery — and not just certain events but those events in that order. If I had found the Church at 23 or even 43, who knows what weird little pocket of faith I might have fallen into. As it was, I think everything happened on schedule but God’s schedule, not mine.

The title of the third section, Economy, has a double meaning; economy in the sense of capital economies and economia, the working out of God’s plan in the world. Most of the poems are about a balancing act of some kind. That makes me think of the Taoism I studied when I lived in New York —  not just the balance between yin and yang but the understanding that at the very center of each is its opposite. Actually, I’d argue that Taoism shares that understanding with Catholicism. Faith and reason, the physical and metaphysical, Good Friday and Easter all come as a package deal. No trade-offs. It’s “both/and” instead of “either/or.”

I also discovered as I wrote through this section — and the book is arranged generally in the order that the poems were written — that conversion requires a belief in conversion itself, just as marriage requires belief in marriage itself as a possible institution. I’m not the man I was before becoming Catholic, but on any given day, I shake my head in disbelief at what remains inside me, the person I used to be and still need to acknowledge.

The work in the fourth section took an unexpected turn, focusing on the artist and creation of various sorts. Yeats suggested that if we can’t know the truth we can embody it (a very Catholic, incarnational view, by the way). I would add that we can also attempt to show it. That’s one of the reasons why the book contains a series of paintings. When I was growing up, I didn’t write much at all; I painted. I’ve never been in a writing workshop, I only started writing seriously when I was in grad school, but I’ve taken more art classes than I can remember. . That might be the reason why a poem is always a sort of painting in my mind – a cluster of images that “talk” among themselves, the way a painting works.