Expansions of the Dazzling Darkness...

Last month, Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age received a generous notice by Steven Toussaint, native of Chicago, citizen of New Zealand, and presently residing in Cambridge. Steven mentioned the book as part of the "Reading List" feature connected to Poetry magazine. Here is what he said:

"Do we have a functional grammar for theological reflection in poetry today? This question has served as a guiding principle in the choice of much of my reading lately. Peter O’Leary’s recent collection of critical essays, Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular Age, is doubly ambitious. He not only conducts original, searching readings of nine contemporary poets—among them Geoffrey Hill, Fanny Howe, Robert Duncan, and Nathaniel Mackey—but also convincingly argues a “way forward for poetry” that would honor twentieth-century experimentation and pioneering, while at the same time refashioning a language within which intimations of anagogy and apocalypse might seriously contend. O’Leary’s definition of “religion” is capacious enough to include all manner of syncretism and heterodoxy and yet restrained enough to serve as a transformative (even troublesome) force in the poetry he examines. His critical style is refreshingly personal, even anecdotal."

On March 1, I delivered a talk on Thick and Dazzling Darkness for the Lumen Christi Institute at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. The talk was video recorded. You can watch all 82 minutes of the thing on YouTube. (The talk is forty-five minutes long; a half-hour of questions ensued.)

Thick and Dazzling Darkness/Lumen Christi

I also conducted an interview with Mark Franzen for the Lumen Christi podcast. Stay tuned for that!

Immanentizing the Eschaton.

Two upcoming appearances. Well, actually three. The first is two-for-one.

On Friday, February 23 and Saturday, February 24, 2018, I will be participating in two panels at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900.

On Friday, February 23, I'll be a respondent on a panel including the work of the great poet Márton Koppány. Here's one of Márton's poems.

And here's a photo of Márton at Lake Balaton in Hungary.

Photo by Gyöngyi Boldog

Then, on Saturday, February 24, I will be participating on a panel in honor of Nathaniel Tarn's ninetieth birthday, which is coming later this year. I'll be speaking about Messianic Time in Tarn's late poetry, which is magnificent. (The late poetry, that is. Messianic time, which I've only ever intuited, will also very likely be magnificent.)

Here is a photo of Tarn and myself, taken in Santa Fe in July 2016. Look at that beautiful Cultural Society t-shirt.

Back in Chicago, on Thursday, March 1, 2018, at 4:30 p.m. in Swift Hall at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, I will be speaking about Thick and Dazzling Darkness for the Lumen Christi Institute. Here are the details for the event. There's a full Moon opposed to the Sun conjunct Neptune, so it's bound to be mystically potent. I'll be speaking among other things on the work of Frank Samperi, Fanny Howe, Joseph Donahue, and Pam Rehm.

So, what are you waiting for? HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME.