A Poem of Common Prayer

Foreword I must have already been fifteen or sixteen by the time I was first confronted by J. D. Salinger's story "Franny," whose setting is over lunch with a boyfriend, Lane, prior to his presumably Ivy League mater's football game against Yale. When she returns to their table after recovering from an episode of dizziness and nausea, he questions her about the small book she has been carrying. She nonchalantly responds that it is titled The Way of a Pilgrim, the story of how a Russian wanderer learns the power of "praying without ceasing." The prayer in play is "The Jesus Prayer," the mantra "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me," internalized to a point where it becomes unconscious, like a heartbeat. So essentially this is the story of a nice Jewish girl from the Upper East Side of Manhattan mesmerizing herself in a Catholic requiem which becomes a Zen koan. When after her disclosure Franny faints, Lane tends to her until she regains consciousness, postpones the weekend's events, hails a tax for her, and leaves Franny, who is still praying without ceasing. This present selection of my poems harkens back to that initial reading of Salinger's story, and to Dante's of "the love that moves the sun and other stars," through a spring semester with Paul Ruggiers, a distinguished Jesuit scholar who taught at the University of Oklahoma at the time. Admittedly, my identification with the Judeo-Christian tradition is largely incidental; had I been born somewhere other than Biblically belted Norman Oklahoma, I might well have been inclined toward Buddhism, Islam, etc. (then again there may well be something nominative going on, Jones being a derivation from John, St. John the Baptist having been the disciple to proclaim Christ, something perhaps both semiotic and symbolic). The eventual assembly of this collection evolved in what educators refer to backward design, an objective for a curriculum being determined and then strategies toward it devised. Just prior writing another of my raunchy" ditties, "Peepshow," I vowed to next subject myself to a sustained, spiritual, interrogation; "five stations," a rather apparent evocation of T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets," followed. The collection then began to reassemble itself along the strata of that sequence. (I continue to find myself amused with the knowledge that Hunter College, my thrice-fold alma mater, declined Thomas Stearns a faculty position early in his career, a history courtesy former Hunter and Princeton professor, and John Berryman drinking buddy, James Williams). And so these were the origins of a poem of common prayer, perhaps best characterized as a collision and collusion between Eliotic apology and Whitmanic queer theory. The impact of my initial encounter with Franny Glass some fifty years hence continues to haunt me in an oddly reassuring way. Yes the possibility of the ability to pray without ceasing, to quote the close to the last line to my last poem herein, "a love poem being a prayer" that, in fact, something, or one, greater than ourselves does indeed love us. L.W.J.