“City of God” by Bill Lavender

I am tired of blurbs with their inflated claims of greatness.  “Not since so and so have we seen such amazing thus and such” etc.

Yet, in turning to the daunting task of reviewing Bill Lavender’s City of God (MadHat Press, 2026), his book, which, let me get it said sooner rather than later (in case you don’t read the entire review) is truly a work of genius.  His book, before it begins, takes us through a set of lengthy, insightful blurbs.  Since the world of meaningful reviews of poetry has contracted considerably, sometimes blurb-writing (which often requires as much time and care as a review) replaces the thoughtful review with a compressed, concise response.

Since I began writing this review, an in-depth, excellent, insightful review of the book has appeared: Lisa Pasold’s essay-review at Seneca Review (On Bill Lavender’s City of God — Seneca Review).  What I am writing will not be anything approaching the depth of her review, so, please take a look at it too.  And now, we also have city of god, read by the poet bill lavender  6.5 hours video of Bill reading the entire book in various locations in New Orleans. [Please note: I have known Bill for more than 30 years, and Lavender Ink has published several of my books.  Even so, I would have to say that I was not prepared for or expecting a book like City of God.]

What I have to say is that City of God is a major work in all senses: superb scholarship; great piercing humor; epic scale; a serious reply (section by section) to Augustine’s work (and thus a major piece of philosophy & theology in its own right); a chronicle of our times from the January 6^th insurrection almost to the present; a story of family (marriage, love, grandchildren); a compassionate encounter with homelessness; an in-depth portrait of New Orleans; and POETRY, of a documentary dailiness with a variety of tone and attention.  Bravo, Bill!  It is almost unthinkable to imagine the dedication and commitment to sustain and complete such a work.

From the book’s Foreword, we see the important framing of this big book:

I conceived this project as a spiritual exercise, fitting for a poet of a certain age (by chance, the same age as Augustine when he composed De civitate Dei contra paganos), assuming I would find in City of God meditations of lyrical beauty and philosophical contemplation similar to those in The Confessions.  When I actually opened the text, however, I was surprised to encounter a vicious polemic delivered in a tone of cynical derision and condescending parody, reminiscent of the radical right-wing polemics we see in popular media today, like the (ostensibly) new movement of Christian Nationalism.

Coincidentally, I began the reading on election certification day, January 6, 2021, and was almost immediately distracted from Augustine’s opening descriptions of rapine in the streets of Rome (during the sacking by Alaric in 410) by images of the insurrection in Washington on TV.  The two appalling spectacles of Trump’s attempted coup and Augustine’s moralist, hypocritical rant, set the tone for this book, as when I began the writing I realized I was describing both scenes at once.

And it is, in some sense, an unusual spiritual exercise.  Rather than an exercise in introspection and mindful self-awareness, Lavender’s spiritual exercise is more of a reply (to Augustine), a radical questioning, and a critique of our own cultural, political time.  A spiritual exercise more in the domain of ethics: how to live in these times, how to see clearly and honestly what is going on, and how to disentangle ourselves from the poisonous, distorted version of Christianity espoused by Augustine.

Earlier, I said that this a work of a genius.  A work also BY a genius – someone who has helped to shape the entire ecosystem of New Orleans poetry including development of the New Orleans Poetry Festival; directing and developing UNO’s innovative low residency MFA program (in Madrid, Edinburgh, San Miguel de Allende); a period of editing the University of New Orleans Press (without much, if any, staff); publishing Lavender Ink / Diálogos Press (with the latter’s emphasis on translation, particularly of some major North African texts) – and Bill has been so forward-looking in how to publish and sustain a small/independent press (now, over 200 titles in print, surviving the demise of Small Press Distribution); while being quite an accomplished musician (guitar) and manager of large construction projects.

Bill began his poetry life in the wonderfully rich poetry world of Fayetteville Arkansas, at a time when Frank Stanford and C. D. Wright were young, energetic, brilliant presences.  And Bill absorbed that scene and gradually became the amazing poet he is today.

At times, the questioning can be quite concise:

4.04

if an empire

is robber gang

with the “addition

of impunity”

what is the

church

what is

the city?

 

I admire Lavender’s ability to develop philosophical questioning side-by-side with family memory.  Haven’t all of us who have chosen a life in poetry (and been called to that life) faced skepticism and warnings from our well-meaning parents (especially if one does not come from wealth)?  Lavender’s book, mostly indirectly, prompts us to think of that fundamental question, what is poetry for?  Or, as Heidegger developed the question, what is poetry for in a destitute time?

8.13

plato precurses christ

along with Augustine and my

old man when he bars

poets from the republic-

an party (though he does

leave the door open to reconsider

if one would ever come out

for voting restrictions)

for the silent majority that

will never drag a finger across

a page of unwrapped text –

on the way to church one

sunday poppa warned me

“there’s no money in it,”

I countered with

spiritual quest, purifying

the language of the tribe, feeling

things more deeply, etc., stuff I’d

read in honors english (the only

honor I would finally find) &

felt I’d won the fight (& we loved

to fight) though went on

to fail even at the quest

for failure, my mini-

scule vote that even then

wasn’t counted

 

It amounts to the risking or ad-venturing of a life to stick with poetry, which actually does (in spite of its discredited romanticism) deepen a life, deepen our feeling for language and consciousness (in all its peculiarities and miraculous ongoingness), and asks us (if we let it) to consider how to live in such a perilous, confounding time.

Part of the beauty of Lavender’s ongoing double-vision – Augustine’s time and ours – is that it provides perspective on our present moment.  Our own decline is seen in the light of its “rhyme” with other times, as well as being heard in the rhetoric that is peculiarly of New Orleans.

10.07

“glorious things are spoken” of

new orleans &

lots of other cities

aspiring to be god’s

with well-dressed people posing

in front of churches

for the tourist brochures

but

in case you haven’t noticed

truth and happiness don’t really

mix, if you want to be

happy trust in god

or lithium but leave truth

to the pros, those who take

pride in knowing

all hope has been extinguished…

that’s a new orleans tradition too

 

In 10.18, Bill even apologizes for the length of the work:

I apologize

for its length –

I know your

time is valuable too

Though, in spite of the accumulation of pages and pages of writing, Lavender remains absolutely committed to completing the project in its entirety: a complete, sustained reply to every section of Augustine’s book.  This kind of persistence is worthy of praise and is exemplary.  That persistence and fulfillment of a form and vision reminds me of Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet – a similarly dogged relationship to a self-assigned and self-created form.  One might think of Ezra Pound’s Cantos as another comparison, especially as an epic work that presents ancient history as shedding light on the present moment of composition.  And it was Pound who wrote that “an epic is a poem including history,” a definition which Pound used to describe his own Cantos and to differentiate it from prior versions of the epic which tended to rely on narrative (fictional or otherwise) as the poem’s guiding force.  If there is a particularly noteworthy difference between Lavender’s work and Pound’s, I would suggest that Pound’s work remains committed to melopoeia – the kind of lyric beauty that we associate more commonly with shorter, lyric poetry – and to a radical collage-fragmentation and a kind of jump-cut assemblage to compose each Canto.  Lavender’s work is declarative: almost exclusively argument or critique-based as the impetus for the writing.  Perhaps one other comparison worth making: Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts, which often incorporates responses, critiques, and interpretations of prior poetries.

From 11.27:

augustine further affirms:

“the very fact of existing is by some natural

spell so pleasant, that even the wretched are,

for no other reason, unwilling to perish”

A noteworthy perspective on how one survives in these brutal, unjust, corrupt, violent times.  We humans so love this life that even in times of oppression and serious illness, we fight to stay alive.

Throughout the book, a one-armed lady who is asking for money appears again and again, and Bill see her clearly, as a person, as an individual, not simply as another instance of homelessness, and he gives her some money whenever he encounters her… She is seen in her particularity, not merely as a “problem” or a person belonging to set of similar people.  I admire Bill’s compassion and clarity.  Clear-eyed vision. Daily, practical, immediate ethics.

A book, too, of sophisticated, often scathing, humor:

15.14

for his six

hundredth birthday god

gave noah his

flood and a promise

he’d make the latin

translators pay

closer attention to the hebrew

in the future and be more

careful with their math besides,

and after two short

millennia he’d give us

google translate and

the atomic clock, &

auto-correct which virtually

eliminates transcription

errors in the celestial city

 

A modern Melville-like riff on the inspired, Pip-like prophecies from the so-called periphery (of human being) as empires (ours too) are in transition, as seen and felt and expressed by those who speak in tongues:

18.27

in times of trans-

ition, these inter-

stices between empires,

when the old city

wanes and a new

one waxes, prophets flower

and spread,

set off with their

shopping carts

for new neighborhoods,

speaking in tongues, speaking

in a language that

never had to be learned

 

Christ and the orange-face ghoul are linked in Lavender’s vision:

20.02

good falls to evil &

evil to good which “seems

unjust” but that’s just

because we can’t see

the big picture

and when christ

comes back to give

everyone their just

deserts then we’ll see

just how lucky he was

to be crucified and just

how close to hell it would be

to live at mar-a-lago

 

And one of the very finest poems in the entire book concludes Lavender’s implicit reply to his father.  Indeed, this is an amazing, noteworthy book of spiritual questing, perhaps redefining the language, candor, and tone of that epic journey:

22.04

that bodies like ours may rise

up to heaven should surprise

us no more than spirits like theirs

coming down to animate flesh, he

argues to his old mentor

cicero, for how could we enjoy

heaven without a body to feel

the joy, happy ending

to the long story

of our life on earth?

 

history plausible to the

point of certainty points

to a certain future,

distracts

from the mystic con-

templation of the present moment

(twitter of bird feet

on the tin roof, or a

distant train whistle) where

the actual god

might actually wait

 

crack the language

like an egg &

today falls out

 

that bodies like

ours may rise

Bill Lavender

Bill Lavender is a poet, novelist, musician, carpenter and publisher living in New Orleans. He is the author of fourteen published books. His ground-breaking verse memoir, Memory Wing, called by Rodger Kamentetz “a contemporary autobiographical masterpiece,” was published by Black Widow in 2011. He founded Lavender Ink, a small press devoted mainly to poetry, in 1995, and he founded Diálogos, an imprint devoted to cross-cultural literatures (mostly in translation) in 2011. He is the co-founder, with Megan Burns of Trembling Pillow Press, of the New Orleans Poetry Festival.