B. W. Jorgensen

Gathering Apples in First Snow

This year October takes us sudden, breaks 
The honeylocust leaves with a parching frost 
And casts them, ashen green and clattering, down
On sidewalks still glaring as white as summer. 

Proving Subcontraries: In memoriam G. Eugene England, 1933–2001

Imperceptive Hands: Some Recent Mormon Verse

Thus Clinton Larson in an interview published in Dialogue for Autumn 1969. Dr. Larson, whom Karl Keller has described as the first “Mormon poet,” also affirmed a hope that “If . . . literary artists . . . take their work as seriously as they should, and by ‘seriously’ I mean that they become professionally responsible, then a significant and coherent literary movement can begin.” Whether a “literary movement” in the church is possible, or even desirable, I wish to leave aside. Good poems, however, should be possible and certainly are desirable; they are, as Larson suggests, “part of the spiritual record” of this people. The recent books of three young writers, who might be thought of as second-generation L.D.S. poets, exhibit the grounds for both the hope and the negation in Larson’s remarks. 

On Second West In Cedar City, Utah: Canticle for the Virgin

Ave Maria, plena gratia!

One street west, in the ward chapel,
I reinforce with paper thimble
of water and shard of bread
my bond to God:

For No Dreams

Are you afraid again, 
Doing without end? 

Listen into stone. 
Shut your skin to the sun.

Syllables for a January Thaw

Unseasonable 
Heat exhumes the stiff 
Earth. In the house’s 
Shade, scurf of snow; lawn 

Weight of Glory

Those I must leave 
Are all that I would have 

Opening Lunch on Getting to the Office

The sun this morning 
through a peanutbutter jar of 
frozen lemonade 

Near an Abandoned Canal Bridge in Southern Utah

Infinite distance: old conceit. 
These hills bound sight, define the length 
Our fathers, innocent of defeat, 
Might seed their strength. 

“No Continuing City””: Reading a Local History | Marilyn McMeen Miller and John Clifton Moffitt, Provo: A Story of People in Motion

In its almost-square format, in its design and layout, its good-sized type and sepia toned pictures on stiff, just about grocery-bag-brown paper, Miller and Moffitt’s Provo is easily the most attractive and readable work of local history I have come across.

Digging the Foundation: Making and Reading Mormon Literature

As an epigraph to their anthology A Believing People: Literature of the Latter-day Saints, Richard Cracroft and Neal Lambert quote Orson F. Whitney’s 1888 Contributor essay, “Home Literature”: 

We shall yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own. God’s ammunition is not yet exhausted. His highest spirits are held in reserve for the latter times. In God’s name and by his help we will build up a literature whose top shall touch heaven, though its foundation may now be low on earth.

Come Into His Presence with Singing

Brothers and Sisters, I have been asked to talk on music as a form of worship, or on the significance of music in worship.* I found in reading some scriptures trying to prepare for this talk that I needed to narrow things down, so my real topic would be something like the religious or spiritual significance of song, and if I were to give a title for it, I would paraphrase Psalm 100, verse 2: “Serve the Lord with gladness: come into his presence with singing.” 

The Vocation of David Wright: An Essay in Analytic Biography

[1]David L. Wright did not begin to exist for me until more than a year after his death—in 1968 when I saw his play, Still the Mountain Wind. For other portions of the Mormon audience,…

Almost But Not Quite | Herbert Harker, Turn Again Home

“A novel,” Randall Jarrell once wrote, “is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.” There is a notion abroad in Mormondom (one I doubt Herbert Harker subscribes to) that there…

In the Cold House

On the hearth kneel astride; 
Now bend, so light laps your 
Body. Set loose your hair: 
Now from the fire’s throat it 

“Herself Moving Beside Herself, Out There Alone”: The Shape of Mormon Belief in Virginia Sorensen’s The Evening and the Morning

What do the phrases “Mormon novel” and “Mormon novelist” mean? Maybe in the first place we are incautious not to separate novel from novelist. Suppose a “Mormon novelist” in a quite strenuous sense: nominally and actively Mormon, a baptized member who accepts Mormon scripture as canonical…

Maverick Fiction | Levi S. Peterson, The Canyons of Grace

For once the language of bookhype might ring true: the publication of Levi Peterson’s Canyons of Grace as one of the four volumes this year in the Illinois Short Fiction Series can be called “a…

Groping the Mormon Eros

When Levi and I presented earlier versions of these papers at the 1986 Sunstone Symposium, the moment had already acquired an appropriately symptomatic quality by being given two titles: Levi’s too-brave or even brazen “In…

Scriptural Chastity Lessons: Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife; Corianton and the Harlot Isabel

I’m going to risk starting with an impression I will not try to document but suspect many Mormons would share: that in the church, when we attempt to teach chastity to youth (say in Sunday…

Measures of Music

It came then that Sara dreamed of the flood. It had been the news for weeks, cities all along the Front sandbagging streets, sidewalks, driveways, window wells, a mudslide that made a lake over a…

Toward a “”Marriage Group”” of Contemporary Mormon Short Stories