Annunciation

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ANNUNCIATION
72 pages, softcover, 8" x 10", $20.00
November 2015
ISBN 978-1-927496-08-4

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10% of the proceeds from this book will be donated directly to refugee relief for women

Readers write:

What a rich variety of poems.

It is GORGEOUS!

I am enjoying it immensely.

Perfect for the season.

What a beautiful book!!

You are a true artist; your work is really beautiful.

... a lovely book, very thought provoking poetry, and beautifully illustrated.

I love what I've read so far and already see some poets I want to get better acquainted with.

One copy is a gift, and I'm so excited about giving it that I may explode before Christmas!

ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATIONS
Annunciation is a collaboration between the invited poets and the artist and editor, Elizabeth Adams. The project began when she made a linocut relief print of the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary, inspired by a famous painting by Fra Angelico. The other illustrations were inspired by the poems themselves, and the rich imagery they contained.

Making relief prints is a labor-intensive multi-step process, dating back to the earliest days of printmaking and, eventually, book printing.

It begins with a drawing that is transferred to the block of linoleum or wood. The parts that the artist wants to remain unprinted are carved away.

Then the block is inked, with the raised, uncut areas receiving a smooth coating of ink. Paper is placed in contact with the inked block, and rubbed by hand or the block-and-paper sandwich is put through a press.

In the Middle Ages, these sheets became part of the actual book, often in combination with printed wooden type. In the case of this modern book, the art prints were scanned, and the book printed from digital files.

Now in its third printing:
Annunciation
Sixteen Contemporary Poets Consider Mary

Poetry by
Ivy Alvarez, Rachel Barenblat, Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Chana Bloch, Leila Chatti, Luisa A. Igloria, Mohja Kahf, Vivian Lewin, Vinicius de Moraes (Natalie d'Arbeloff, trans.), Roderick Robinson, Nic Sebastian, Claudia Serea, Purvi Shah, Rosemary Starace, and Marly Youmans

Illustrated and Edited by
Elizabeth Adams

A beautiful book that's more human and personal than religious, in which the enigmatic and universal figure of Mary helps us find common ground.

A year ago, Phoenicia editor Elizabeth Adams invited a diverse group of poets - Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and secular; mostly but not all female - to consider the story of Mary and the angel Gabriel for an illustrated collection. She wrote:

"The annunciation story is a complicated foundational story in western culture. Patriarchies have used Mary as a model for ideal female acceptance, faith, and submission to authority, while at the same time millions of people have identified with her courage, suffering, and patience, and accorded her their personal devotion and deep respect.

I suspect that if we look closely, most of us may have been touched by her story in some way. I want to encourage you to look at the annunciation from a modern point of view, as contemporary poets of different cultural backgrounds. Your work can be religious or secular, traditional or decidedly not, written in a feminist light, a current-events light, a personal light. I'm not looking for any particular type of thrust or interpretation, but rather a broad range of responses to this story and this person we know as Mary. I want to encourage you to think deeply and fearlessly, and to write from your hearts."

The result of this invitation is a volume filled with creative, surprising, moving, modern and personal poetic responses to the Annunciation story, with illustrations from original linocut relief prints made for this book. It is produced in a beautiful edition with a generous page size, and careful attention to materials and typography. We hope you'll consider Annunciation as a special gift for yourself or others, or as a basis for discussion in your reading group or classroom. And your purchase will also directly help present-day women, with 10% of the proceeds going directly to refugee relief.

PROCESS NOTES
We invited the contributors to write a short "process note" about how they approached this project, and hope you'll find their answers as illuminating as we did. The process notes, along with short biographies, are also included in the book.

photo by Rachael Duncan

IVY ALVAREZ : It was editor Elizabeth Adams’s request for modern perspectives of the Annunciation that caught my attention. Modern. The now. But how to approach this deeply significant religious moment?

Do I write allegorically about the scene wherein an angel tells this young woman that she bears God’s son within her? Perhaps I could write ekphrastically about Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting “The Annunciation” (1898). What about resurrecting my grandmother, making her young again, with her first child, and the equivalent to Mary? (She probably wouldn’t have liked that, and would’ve considered it blasphemous. Oh, well…) What about those seconds of disbelief, just as the angel tells Mary the news?

Such possibility. In the end, I wrote all four poems. In every one, the woman remained central.

All the while I wrote, I interrogated myself. What would I do in this situation? What if it had happened to me? In all honesty, I still don’t know.

NATALIE D'ARBELOFF I have loved Brazil and Brazilian music for a long time so of course Vinicius de Moraes was a familiar name but it was only recently that I discovered this poem when searching for Brazilian poets to translate for Dave Bonta’s online project Poetry from the Other Americas. A Anunciação appealed to me because of its unorthodox, sensuous and playful interpretation of the traditional annunciation story - the angel plays a much more active role in this version!

RACHEL BARENBLAT Spending time with Mary was a new experience for me. Of course I know the story of the Nativity -- who could fail to know at least its outlines, in a time and place where Christianity is presumed to be normative? -- but I'd never thought much about the woman at the story's heart. I began by exploring her name in Hebrew. It's traditional in Ashkenazic (Eastern European) Jewry today to name our children after loved ones or ancestors who have died, so I imagined Miriam's parents having named her after the previous great Miriam in the Jewish story, the sister of Moses. I found myself drawing on classical midrash (interpretive story) about that first Miriam as I imagined this later Miriam or Maryām seeking to find her place in the world.

JEANNE MARIE BEAUMONT I had nine plus years of Catholic schooling, during which Mary was a seemingly constant hovering presence. Every night of my childhood I went to bed consoled by a night light that was a white porcelain figure of her. Years later, as I was readying for my first trip to Italy, excited yet a little overwhelmed by the amount of art I was about to view, I was advised to concentrate on one Biblical scene or event as I moved through churches and museums. I chose The Annunciation as the scene I would pay special attention to. I think I was first attracted by the presence of a book in so many of the paintings. As I traveled, I also collected postcards of the Annunciations so I would remember them. From contemplating and comparing various depictions of this pivotal moment, in particular the range of Mary’s expressions, postures, and gestures, the poem began to form. I hadn’t written much ekphrastic work prior to this (it’s since become a favorite mode), but it felt a natural way to discuss the variants and the constants among the various artists’ interpretations, while also trying to imagine the person herself in this improbable situation. The poem thus moves from inside the physical moment to Mary’s widening perspective on the depictions of it and the repercussions of it.

KRISTIN BERKEY-ABBOTT When I was a child, a Sunday School teacher asked my fifth grade class how we thought Jesus would be received in our modern world. We had a rollicking discussion and then moved on to other topics. But I’ve come back to this idea again and again, and twenty years ago, I started writing poems that imagined Jesus moving in our contemporary world: Jesus who shows up in the bowling alley, Jesus as new kid in your high school, Jesus who comes to help with hurricane clean up, and all sorts of other situations. However, until very recently, I didn’t do the same thing with other figures from the Bible.

In January of 2015, shortly after Epiphany, I had a day where I saw the angel Gabriel at every turn. It seemed that with every tenth website or so, I saw some sort of image of or reference to the angel Gabriel. I had an idea for a poem: the angel Gabriel moving through our modern world, looking for the Virgin Mary. I needed to narrow the focus, and so, I chose Miami, and the poem tumbled forth.

photo by Peg Skorpinski

CHANA BLOCH When I was pregnant, I thought of myself as special; to paraphrase a line by Adrienne Rich that makes me smile: “Like everyone else, I thought of myself as special.” At that time, I may still have thought that I was an active agent of my own destiny—choosing, not chosen. By the time I wrote “Annunciation,” I was a mother of two sons and had come to understand that I was a vessel for life, which wants above all to perpetuate itself. I don’t say “merely a vessel.” To see oneself as a vessel for life is at once ennobling and humbling. The annunciation in my poem may appear not sacred but secular to readers of this book, but I believe that the secular too is sacred.

LEILA CHATTI I was raised in a Muslim household, by a Muslim father and a Catholic mother. My childhood was spent reciting the Qur’an in Sunday school, my small finger following along beneath the smooth, inky letters. This experience greatly influenced my love of rhyme and music in language, and was my first entry into poetry. When I grew older and learned the stories behind the words, I became particularly interested in Mary, the woman revered in both my parents’ faiths. I had seen her picture many times, on walls and candles and in windows in bright colored glass. I was fascinated with the idea of Mary before Jesus, Mary as a young girl—one who, like me, had possibly been in love, had possibly wanted to be touched. I wanted my life to be extraordinary, to be the next girl picked by God, and so whenever the blood came late, for a few breathless days I half-hoped.

photo by Rich Joseph Facun

LUISA A. IGLORIA I was born and raised in the Philippines, which has the largest Roman Catholic population in southeast Asia. I attended a Catholic school from kindergarten to my freshman year of high school, after which my father decided I should transfer to the University of the Philippines high school in Baguio, where we lived. Ours was as Catholic a household as any in that cultural context--- we stopped to pray at 6 pm when the sirens sounded the Angelus throughout the city, attended Sunday mass, went to Novenas, prayed the rosary, did the obligatory rounds for "visita iglesia" during the vigil after Good Friday and before Easter Sunday each Lent. In their bedroom, my parents had a little recessed space, above my mother's shoe cabinet and flanked by the his-and-hers set of built-in clothes cabinets. Everything was painted green. They'd transformed this little alcove into a shrine of sorts. A plaster statue of the Sacred Heart held court in the center--- Jesus seated on a throne, one hand raised in blessing and the other drawing aside his red velvet robe to show a glowing heart wreathed with a crown of thorns; to his right was a statue (also in plaster) of the Blessed Mother, robed in blue and white, one bare, white foot visible and crushing the head of a serpent beneath the hem of her gown. On the other side was a statue of St. Vincent de Paul, patron of our parish church. This altar also shared space with the sundry items of their daily life--- it's where they lay their watches or eyeglasses before they went to bed, where pens would likely be found, where receipts of one sort or another were likely to be stashed. In the days when my father still smoked, I remember seeing a carton of Salem menthol lights there too.

When I was very young and my mother still helped me get dressed for school, I remember that she would pin a medallion of Mary on my camisole, under the crisp white blouse we wore with a navy blue skirt as our uniform at Holy Family Academy. At school, Religion was one of our required subjects, and it was also there I first learned the formal catechism about Mary; but the stories we were told more often than not placed her firmly in the radius of domestic/family life, and it is that maternal side which I've found somehow enters poems, especially when I am writing about my birth mother and my adoptive mother (who are sisters); this part of my personal history is still full of gaps, and it has been a subject surrounded by such a sense of taboo as I was growing up (I did not find out for sure until I was 28, but I don't have all the details). The sense of mystery in Mary's Annunciation story--- the story of a virgin birth, the story of Joseph stepping in to "make things right" in the earthly and conventional sense--- find much resonance within me for these reasons.

photo by Russell Cothren

MOHJA KAHF I've been writing Mary poems for decades. My second book of poetry, Hagar Poems, is forthcoming from the University of Arkansas Press, and contains more of my Mary poems as well as poems about Hagar, Sarah, and other figures from the scriptural heritage.

VIVIAN LEWIN A locution is only one sort of spiritual experience, and Mary's IS perhaps the model, archetype, origin of what is possible.

RODERICK ROBINSON Beth Adams, whom I've known and liked through blogging, mentioned the provenance of this book and I was struck by two things: the presumed seriousness of the contributors, and that the relevant passage in Luke refers to Mary's troubled mind. I am an atheist but like many Britons of my age I had a glancing Christian upbringing; passages from the Bible, the liturgy and Hymns Ancient and Modern are tangled up with what passes for my cultural development. I am not an overly serious person but the combination of those two factors had a rare attraction; I felt I might have something to say and, for once, not in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet.

CLAUDIA SEREA I don't usually write poems on religious themes, but I researched The Annunciation and I found a topic layered with meanings and symbols. I decided to approach it from various angles, so I wrote four poems with different POVs. Here are some of the questions that prompted my poetic responses: What would the messenger Gabriel say? What if I had the chance to question the Holy Ghost as if it were a man? Did Mary know what would happen, and did she really have a choice? What about every woman's annunciation, the simple moment one finds out she's pregnant? And how did the celebration translate through centuries in Romania, merging with rituals of fertility and renewal? I hope I answered some of these questions in my poems, offering the reader a new perspective.

PURVI SHAH I had been pondering this poem for months. How to write of the Annunciation from within my own spheres – a social justice activist, a spirit-seeker, a mother-to-be (a hope), a Hindu.

This poem seeded in the wake of the Charleston murders, at the throes of America’s national independence celebration. During the July holiday weekend, along with my parents, I took a family road trip to Chicago & Pittsburg. I thought about incarnation, coming into a body, my own longings for birth & re-birthings. The current war on women’s bodies. The current war on black and brown bodies. While on this trip, I began to e-mail lines to myself. I pondered what it meant to carry a body, to carry history, to carry time, to carry revelations.

Before writing, I researched. I started by reading Annunciation poems – pieces written by Denise Levertov, Marie Howe, John Donne, Jean Valentine. In a hotel elevator, I heard Billie Holiday sing of a love who would certainly return. I thought of grief, an unfairness of death, an unfairness of abbreviated living. In the car, I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Letter to My Son.” I read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. I asked myself: how do I mark this time of our nation? What does it mean to be marked via our bodies (as women/as people of color)? What is it I seek to birth? What does it mean to love?

And as someone who is always thinking of time, I read of Kali, of original creation. The blackness of my heritage. The way that time is a transport. The way you can travel in a car parallel to so many other travelers – and encounter beautiful mysteries alongside harsh truths and scenes. The way that human history often erases those of us at the margins. The ways we need to claim history through artistry, through creation and re-creation.

This brew revealed poems. This brew revealed.

A revelation is now in your hands.

ROSEMARY STARACE I have always loved Mary and her story. In childhood, I set up shrines in my bedroom, and hoped ardently that I would wake one morning to an apparition, an annunciation of my very own that would prove I was special and loved, and called to some great purpose. In adulthood I became aware of the archetypal psychologists, post-Jungians, who speak of an angel or “daimon” that belongs to each of us, and compels us towards the fulfillment of our own deep purpose. James Hillman famously asked, “Who is your angel and what does she want?” This intrigued me. But it seems that what the angel wants is often disruptive of our goals and plans, of the ideas we have about ourselves.

I have long enjoyed studying paintings of the Annunciation scene. There are many that portray Mary with her book and many that render the lavish light of the Archangel entering the space. The one piece I know of that includes the image of a recently extinguished candle is the center panel of Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece), ca. 1427–32, from the workshop of Robert Campin, currently held in The Cloisters Collection in New York City.

MARLY YOUMANS The grain that surrounds and invades Mary in "Mystic Journey" strikes me as having emerged from particular bits of my past and present. As a child, I moved from South Carolina to Louisiana and then on to Kansas, where I met a spare, unfamiliar world. The seemingly infinite wheat, shining in the sunlight and moving as one, often resembling the way an animal flicks and shivers its fur, was fascinating to me. I think also about a piece of stained glass, a sheaf of wheat that glimmers near the altar in Christ Church, Cooperstown. A womb-seed that is itself and is also the field appears related to the mysterious idea of the Trinity. In the poem's opening, the field seems placed as in a fairy tale, where events may take place East of the Sun and West of the Moon. (Similarly, "a thin place" is where Mary may receive the unexpected visit of an angel.) The poem can bind together the field, the seed, Mary, and the narrator, but only if the narrator gives up what she knows of words, time, and place.

ELIZABETH ADAMS As a lifelong choir singer, I've sung about Mary and heard her story in various forms forever, and it has both fascinated and disturbed me. How was I, as a child of the 1960s, supposed to relate to Mary? And yet, I found myself sympathetic and curious. Since moving from the largely-Protestant US to French-speaking Quebec, where Catholicism once exerted tremendous control over people's lives, I've become a minority churchgoer in a society that has all but rejected the institution -- but in a city where "Notre Dame" and "Ville Marie" are still everyday terms. In Mexico, where I've traveled in recent years, Spanish Catholicism, folkloric indigenous religion, and a long history of violence have given rise to a quite different view of Mary that I'm just beginning to grasp: it's an extremely personal relationship where women identify closely with her suffering and her sacrifice, and both men and women turn to her daily as their protector and benefactor. In both cultures, her image and name are everywhere.

I'm not a mother, and don't accept the virgin birth literally, but I keep returning to representations of the Annunciation, especially those by Flemish and Italian Renaissance painters, and they always touch me. A year ago I finally did an Annunciation print of my own, trying to delve deeper into this story. I considered doing a series, but then thought how much more fun and rewarding it would be to do a collaborative project -- and this is the result.