Healing Power of Art [review] D R A F T

Review of prayer against famine & other irish poems by John Knoepfle. BkMk Press, University of Missouri-Kansas City, 93 pp., $12.95

In 1999, when it was still possible to hope the 21st century
wouldn't be as violent and brutal as the era then drawing to a
close, poet John Knoepfle received an honorary degree from Springfield
College in Illinois. At commencement, he read several poems about
his search for a family history lost in the Irish potato famine
of the 19th century. One, titled "the claire festival of
traditional singing," celebrates the human gift for transforming
sorrow into art:

jewel
box of twinkling notes

controlled
as a bird cage

these
songs without words

the
man taking his own measure

everyones
measure.

Now Knoepfle has collected that poem and others into a book,
prayer against famine & other irish poems. Published
in 2004 by the University of Missouri at Kansas City's BkMk Press,
it celebrates the transforming power of art.

"It seems to me that what is human in us can outlast famine and Holocaust," " Knoepfle told SCI's 1999 graduates, "even as we are coming this day to the end of a century which was the most brutal in the history of the world -- the wars alone have taken the lives of 148 million people. And it may be in some small way each one of you can mitigate the terrible things that happened in this century -- transform them in some way as the singer does in this poem."

Now Knoepfle has collected that poem and others into a book, prayer against famine & other irish poems. Published in 2004 by the University of Missouri at Kansas City's BkMk Press, it celebrates the transforming power of art.

"In this moving book of poems, John Knoepfle transforms
a search for his Irish roots into a meditation on human suffering
and survival," says Kathleen Norris, poet and Benedictine
oblate of Assumption Abbey in North Dakota, in a cover blurb.
"The whole book is a prayer against famine and the gratuitous
cruelty inflicted on the innocent ... These are poems of faith
that take into account the real world, and make us see it anew."

Knoepfle, who taught creative writing for many years at Sangamon
State University, contributes poetry to Illinois Times and
has written or edited more than a dozen books. prayer against
famine grew out his visits to Ireland in the 1990s when he
attempted to trace his ancestors who perished in the famine of
1847 and succeeding years. And it includes poems about American
Indians, sweatshop workers in Honduras and a U.S. sailor whose
death the poet witnessed during World War II. So in a very real
sense it is about how people are caught up in the brutality we
know as history. But it is also about the healing power of human
relationships. Knoepfle recalls a story told by Dominican sisters
in Iraq

... how once on the street

a
stranger came to them and whispered

your
archbishop kassab

I
think he is a good muslim.

There are flashes of elegance throughout the book. One celebrates
Scott Joplin's ragtime

jewel
box of twinkling notes

controlled
as a bird cage

these
songs without words

the
man taking his own measure

everyones
measure.

And there are touches of Knoepfle's trademark wry humor, for
example his description of non-Natives learning an Inupiaq dance,
"keeping time as well as we knew / and awkward as a room
full of bears."

But overall the mood is dark, somber. At the same time, it
is hopeful in a way that transcends analysis. The title poem,
"prayer against famine," asks God to

protect
us when we are tempted

when
we want to make ourselves

the
center of your world

when
we would deny others

a
place in the circle of your love.

When Knoepfle read at SCI in 1999, he spoke of this poem in
the context of peacemaking efforts amid a centuries-long "famine
of the soul" in Northern Ireland.

Now, only five years later, we have entered an era much darker
and more brutal than we could have imagined. Perhaps reflecting
this dimming of hope, Knoepfle ends his new book with a novena
that concludes:

when
there is nowhere to go

it
is possible

the
healing will begin

you
have to believe this.

Just so.

In the end, Knoepfle's poems are more than a celebration of
the transforming power of art. And prayer against famine is
in itself an example of the healing power of faith, of poetry
and human relationships.

To order prayer against famine, contact BkMk Press,
University of Missouri-Kansas City, 5101 Rockhill Road, Kansas
City, Missouri 64110, or on line at http://www.umkc.edu/bkmk/catalogue.html
Shipping and handling is $2. Ordering information is available
on line

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The Sleepy Weasel,
Vol. 10, 2004-05