I'm back

Hello again, good to see you. It’s been a while! Did you miss me?

 

So I am relaunching the blog, you've probably not been here before so I'm going to treat it as if this is a new blog.

So.

 

My name is Dan, I am, for want of a better word, a ‘creative’. This is a term which I think sounds pretentious but when I say writer, musician, craftsman, etc, I worry that looks pretentious too.

 

Although, the fact I am writing a blog is itself ostentatious but I want to put myself, and the things I do out there, so perhaps I shouldn’t worry about the titles I am using.

 

The main things you will learn about me through this blog are that I am a husband, I am a Christian, I am a poet, I am a comedy writer, I am a novel writer, I write about my faith and about Christianity (not sure what you really call that and feels a bit of a stretch to call myself a bible scholar or theologian, and that does sound pretentious). I am a one time condiment entrepreneur, I am an artist, I am a wood worker, I make musical instruments, I am a crafter, an anxiety sufferer and finally I am an Admin officer who works for the NHS.

 

Why this then?

 

Creativity is really important to me, it is what keeps me sane and it has always been my dream to be able to make a living of my creative pursuits. However, I never figured out how to do this.

 

As a child my passion was music, I wrote songs and played guitar, keyboard and sang in a band. We had some success after winning a band contest judged by Mike McCartney (brother of Paul McCartney of Beatles fame who I once saw walking out of Kwik Save, but that is a different story) and Andy McCluskey of OMD and Atomic Kitten fame. We cut a demo with Andy (in the studio where Atomic Kitten recorded their debut album – that’s right, look impressed!) and there was some interest but the other (better) songwriter left to go to university and it just never happened.

 

I myself went to university where I studied Creative Writing and I fell in love with poetry. I was good at it and received good feedback and encouragement from my lecturers and had a number of poems published in journals and magazines. I also learned how hard it was to become a published poet and how it was a profession that also needed support from additional income, such as teaching. I was encouraged to pursue this and invited to take a master’s degree but by the end of university I could no longer financially sustain a student life and also I wasn’t really interested in teaching so it would have just been a self indulgence.

 

I began work but continued to write poetry and also began recording music to accompany my poetry as I was interested in making poetry more accessible. The result was my project “Inertia” which is still available and which I am still proud of. I also self published books of original poetry and interpretations of biblical poetry. I also ran poetry workshops and wrote a book on how to write different types of poetry, which has sold more than all my other books of poetry put together, (which still isn’t many, I probably make about £10 a month, which is still better than nothing) and proves that people would rather write poetry than buy poetry.

 

I continued to write and perform music under different guises, most recently as The Fall Quarter, a coverall for my music/poetry and general music.

 

In lockdown I have taken on a few new projects, wood craft and making musical instruments (lap steels, fretless bass guitars) and have started renovating guitars.

 

I have also had 3 ideas for book which I have started work on, one of which is well under way, not poetry, not fiction, and based on my faith.

 

By doing this blog I hope to share what I am doing a bit, voice my ideas as I work on different things , and just see what comes.

 

 

Last chance to submit!

Dear all,

Just a quick post to say that there is 1 week before submission deadline of 1 October so if you want to submit to the anthology you need to get your skates on.

If you are only just encountering what this is then you can find out more on the posts below and by visiting the website at http://www.worshippoetryanthology.tk/

I am away for a week without the internet so look forward to coming back and reading the final submissions!

See you on the other side!

September update

Hey all.

So it is now fast approaching the deadline for submissions - I  have two weeks of work and one week of holiday away in York before then so I just thought I would post another update before 1 October as I may not get another chance.

Firstly I feel so humbled that so many people have wanted to be a part of the project and that it is something that many of you are behind. When I started out thinking about this project I worried that I was kind of out on a limb with putting the anthology together, that is wasn't something that people would especially be into but I am glad that I have been proved wrong and I believe that together we are creating something that is going to be something unique.

I also want to encourage those of you who have submitted or who are yet to contribute. The standard of the poetry that I have seen has been great but has largely been from other amateur poets who have said that they have been looking for an outlet for their work. I hope that for those people you be encouraged to do stuff with your poems, we need more diversity in Christian Art and I feel that poetry is often overlooked or under represented and so we need you.

And I hope that this project will be an example that anyone can put out their own work. I am by no means an expert and have only ever independently published my own work, just because I don't know what else to do with it, but I am by no means a professional in this area. I work in the health records department in my local hospital and write my poetry in my lunch break of bits of folded up scrap paper. But I have done it enough now that hopefully I can do a good job of putting a book together. So if you want to publish your own book then I would encourage you to do it!

I am still aiming for a release date of January. From October I will begin editing the anthology and finish pulling together some of the classic poems but I will still try to keep a few blogs going in the mean time and will keep updating on the facebook group (link at the tip of the page if you want to keep in touch with anthology news).

I have a few other things that I am working on as well which I hope to spend some time doing in the next few  months provided I can make the time including recording some of my poetry/music and potentially a creative charity fundraiser - I try to update my own facebook page as much as I can remember but if you are interested then please like me at https://www.facebook.com/danielpaulgilbert/

I thank you all again for continued support, prayer and encouragement! In the final weeks please can I encourage you to share the news of this anthology with anyone who may be interested or if you haven't sent anything but may be interested to visit www.stonesbeforetheocean.tk.

Until next time.

Dan

An Update

Hello all,

I just wanted to write something of an update of what is happening with the anthology and to thank everyone who have got in contact and submitted poems.

I feel truly humbled that people have gotten behind it and understood what I am trying to do with it and it is starting to feel like it will be something really great and unique and different - which has got be a good when we think about fresh ways of meeting with God and expressing how we feel and understand and appreciate who God is. The poems that I have received have been wonderful and varied and amazing and people have been so glad to get involved which is exactly what I hoped for.

I met with a friend last week who is a great artist who is going to help design a cover and it all feels like it is starting to come together.

It feels kind of odd to be putting the anthology together sometimes and strange that it has now becoming a thing rather than just a concept I had in my mind. I have always liked to have a project but this feels like the biggest that I have taken on and the most important as it is not just my writing that I am responsible for and so whilst it is exciting it is now becoming daunting.

I would like to ask for prayer for a few things if I may. I don't want to loose sight of the heart behind this and so I feel that it is important that I put my prayer requests out there. I feel like this anthology brings the writers and readers together as a kind of unique community and so in that spirit I share the following in the hope that you will also pray with me for these things.

1. It is just over 2 months to the deadline and I am still just under half way with the amount of poems that I want to include. I would like to include as many great writers as possible and so pray that the poems will keep coming and that I will be able to include as many great poems as possible.

2. I am leaving my current job and starting a new job next week. I work at the local hospital and have been looking for a new job for a while and a few weeks back I was offered what seems to be a great job. I thank God for it and that the new job involves the minimum amount of disruption as it is still in the building where I work and I have been lucky enough to meet some of my new colleagues. But I pray that I will be able to settle into this new job and give my best to it but also give my best to the anthology and that I will have the time to do both of these.

3. And finally I pray that the focus of the anthology will continue to be  of worship and pointing towards God and that God will bless the work I am doing and those who are contributing.

Thanks all.

Until next time.

Dan

Name

I have been thinking for a while about what to call this anthology. I wanted a name with imagery and intrigue, something that wasn’t a cliché or cheesy or hackneyed, and something that summed up what the anthology was somehow. I have been batting around a few ideas and also discussing artwork with a friend of mine who is going to help with that and so have been putting together inspirational images for that. Thinking about that has also influenced what I have been thinking about the name. Also speaking to the poets who have already contributed has helped and given me a lot of ideas. One of the poets Tami who was one of the first people to submit sent a poem called Song of The Sea which I really liked as a title. I had been thinking about Song of …. Something as I really like the titles Songs of Innocence and Experience (William Blake), Songs of Ascent (from Psalms) and Songs of Faith and Devotion (Depeche Mode album)  but  in the end the idea of song in the title of a collection of poems seemed a little confusing.

But the idea of the sea stuck.

I really like the idea of the sea. The mystery of it. And a few years back I was leading a bible study and asked the question “When you think of God, what image do you think of?”. To which one of my friends answered “the ocean”. I love that image, it was so unexpected but it was perfect, The power, the mystery, the stillness, the might, the unquantifiableness of the ocean. I loved it!

I was talking with one of the other poets recently over email about some of the Orthodox Christian themes I had noticed in his work. Trevor writes poems and hymns that weave together ideas within faith and science which are such huge subjects. He was talking about some of his artwork, paintings of Nebula and about the mystery within the universe and we were talking about the sense of mystery that plays a part in Orthodox Christianity and how our own Anglican/charismatic traditions don’t really deal with mystery.

I really value mystery within faith and I personally find it helpful that I don’t have to all of theology sorted in my head, I now like that it isn’t all tidy and ordered. I prefer not to have God in a box that I can understand, I like that God is the ocean, that there are bits that make sense that you can see and be in awe at and appreciate the beauty of but there are also bits that are completely mysterious and unpredictable and that inspire a different kind of awe.

And so I guess that this idea fits with what this anthology is. This isn’t going to be the comprehensive Anglican, Methodist, Nazarene, Baptist, Adventist, Quaker, etc, anthology. But it is going to be a collection of poems by people who love poetry and love to worship and are offering the best we have in worship and praise.

The final piece to the name puzzle is that I wrote a poem that was kind of about this idea. It isn’t going to be in the anthology because it is too long and so it is going to go onto an album of recorded poetry but the poem talks about mystery and awe before God, as us being grains of sand before the ocean and I think I also like that image as a starting point when it comes to worship.

And so the name is…. drum roll…

Stones before the Ocean

I think the title sums up what this anthology is and I like the idea of that stance when it comes worship. That we stand before a powerful immense, uncontainable entirety  but that as we stand there we are present and we meet and engage with that force, and that the waves that wash over the stones are moved and smoothed, engulfed and washed by the rushing waters. And I also like that it presents a different image, Christian art I fear too often revolves around sunsets, mountain ranges, soft focus pastel colours, doves, which are all fine by the way. But as poets I think it is worth looking for new images, fresh metaphors, and I hope that the poems in this book will resonate with that.

Better than I can say

I have had quite a few responses for the anthology which is very exciting and I am grateful for those who have contributed. The poems have been quite varied which has been great and exactly what i have been looking for and so I hope that the variety will continue.

I have wanted to write something more about what poetry is and was researching when I cam across this list so instead of writing a blog I am leaving the list. These are quotes from other poets and are way more likely to get you thinking than my ramblings.

So read, be inspired and find your way to the website link at the top of the page and get involved!

1. Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes. ― Joseph Roux

2. Poetry can be dangerous, especially beautiful poetry, because it gives the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it. ― Rumi

3. Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ― Leonard Cohen

4. Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ― Dylan Thomas

5. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. ― Emily Dickinson

6. I’ve had it with these cheap sons of bitches who claim they love poetry but never buy a book. ― Kenneth Rexroth

7. Poetry is plucking at the heartstrings, and making music with them. ― Dennis Gabor

8. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. ― Carl Sandburg

9. Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. – Rita Dove

10. Poetry is an act of peace. – Pablo Neruda

11. Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. – Paul Engle

12. Poetry is eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone. – Lawrence Ferlinghetti

13. Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition – Eli Khamarov

14. There is something about poetry beyond prose logic, there is mystery in it, not to be explained but admired. — Edward Young

15. If you can’t be a poet, be the poem. – David Carradine

16. Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does. — Allen Ginsberg

17. The poet is the priest of the invisible. — Wallace Stevens

18. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. – Percy Byshe Shelley

19. Poetry is a language in which man explores his own amazement. – Christopher Fry

20. The poet doesn’t invent. He listens. – Jean Cocteau

21. There is poetry as soon as we realize we possess nothing. – John Cage

22. Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance. – Carl Sandburg

23. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. – Robert Frost

24. Poetry is everywhere; it just needs editing. – James Tate

25. Poetry is frosted fire. – J. Patrick Lewis

26. Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. – T.S. Eliot

27. A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. – Salman Rushdie

28. To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. – Robert Frost

29. Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history. – Leonardo da Vinci

30. Poetry lies its way to the truth. – John Ciardi

31. For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography. – Robert Penn Warren

32. We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. – William Butler Yeats

33. Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers. – Yevgeny Yevtushenko

34. I think that were beginning to remember that the first poets didn’t come out of a classroom, that poetry began when somebody walked off of a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, “Ahhh.” That was the first poem. – Lucille Clifton

35. Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. – Don Marquis

36. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. – Carl Sandburg

37. Writers don’t write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don’t. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy. — Nikki Giovanni

38. But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn’t declaim or explain, it presents. – William Carlos Williams

39. All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, ’Something’s wrong, let’s change it for the better.’ – Sonia Sanchez

40. My role in society, or any artist or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all. – John Lennon

41. If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry. ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb

42. Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. ― Virginia Woolf

43. Writing poetry is a state of free float. ― Margaret Atwood

44. There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it. ― Gustave Flaubert

45. Don’t use the phone. People are never ready to answer it. Use poetry. ― Jack Kerouac

46. A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. ― W.H. Auden

47. Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. – Don Marquis

48. Poetry is the robe, the royal apparel, in which truth asserts its divine origin. — Beecher

49. The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness. ― Christopher Morley

50. The true poem rests between the words. ― Vanna Bonta

Facing the fear

This post follows on from Steve's post below - so if you want a but of context then check that out first.

 

I forget how lucky I am. 

 

In a lot of ways.

 

But particularly when it comes to creativity withing the Church.

 

I think that most of the churches I have been part of have embraced creativity to some extent and I think that a lot of churches are generally open to creative expression. But some aren't and I know that perhaps for some the idea of using poetry in Worship may be a little out there, and consequently this whole project would seem pointless perhaps.

 

I say that I am lucky because the church I am part of focuses a great deal on creativity. People are encouraged to bring songs, spoken word, pictures, we use drama and dance and poetry and art in church services, and we encourage each other in our creativity. A group of us meet every month to share what we are doing creatively, to workshop ideas, to bounce ideas around, to learn more about our craft.

 

And that is what I have never had before in a church. And I feel immensely blessed to have this. But I know that for some it is a struggle.

 

The church I was in growing up in was quite conservative. Worship was hymns sung from books with yellowing pages and archaic print and the music was just piano. As a child I always felt it was quite dreary, especially as it was quite a youthful church, a lot of families. Then when I was about 13 I discovered indie rock music, Oasis, Pulp, Manic Street Preachers and I learned how to play guitar and one of the girls in our youth group played drums and we wanted to put on a youth service, where we played some of the modern worship songs and had a 'band'. And we had to fight for it. And then the next week it was business as usual with piano and hymns. I suppose it isn't too uncommon a story but remembering that makes me feel lucky that I can now experience different types of worship. Because i think that different types of worship help us to bring our praise to God in different ways. God is a creator and God didn't just create one thing or one form of art. In the Old Testament people worship God in all manner of creative ways - singing, poems, art, embroidery, carving, metal work, all sorts.

 

I while back I was going through the bible in a year which meant going though all the tortuously boring bits about building tabernacles and temples and all the details of dimensions and everything and then realising how much creativity is going on within these passages, all of it going towards the glory of God and the people documenting it in the best way that they can - and it made me think about it differently and wonder more about creativity in worship.

 

I don't really where I am heading to in terms of a point... I guess it's just to say that God endorses our creativity and invites God's people to be creative in our worship of God and that we should be open to expression and even if we don't necessarily "get it", it is worthwhile if we accept these expressions as acts to glorify our God. Even if we don't understand them or they make us feel strange or they are too loud or long or abstract. 

We can still learn something of God from them and who knows - art can touch us in the most unexpected ways.