Author Archives: Myers Benjamin

Benjamin Myers
about Benjamin Myers

Benjamin Myers’ first book of poems, Elegy for Trains, was be published this summer by Village Books Press. Ben, as most folks call him, has gone far in life—approximately five blocks. He lives in his boyhood hometown of Chandler, Oklahoma, where he partners with his wife Mandy in raising three good kids and likes to think of himself as the Okie Wendell Berry in his devotion to localness. Ben is an associate professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University. He has published essays on topics in poetry ranging from the Renaissance verse of Edmund Spenser to the postmodern experiments of John Ashbery. He also teaches Sunday school and occasionally goes fishing. Two of his poems, "Fragments After the 51st Psalm" and "Mid-Winter: Clarksville, Arkansas" were published in Ruminate's Issue 16: Mapping This Place.

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Poetry and Redemption

Poetry and Redemption

The Gnostic seeks to liberate spirit from matter; the poet works in, and celebrates, the union of the two. This relationship is true not only of explicitly or implicitly Christian poetry but of all poetry worthy to be called such, since all worthwhile poetry connects thought or feeling to the material world. Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility,” Eliot’s “objective correlative,” Bly’s “deep image”: all theories of poetry are really theories of how body meets spirit in the written and/or spoken word. Poetry is permanently at war with Gnosticism in all its varieties.

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posted by Benjamin Myers, 14th September 2010 , Categories: Blog Tags: ,