David Craig
Список книг автора David Craig
Trouble in the Diocese
Trouble in the Diocese is a petulant, funny book of poetry. Its contrary protagonist/antagonist, the Apprentice, embraces life in both the large and the absurdly small. At the same time, he emphatically rejects the easy rigidity of doily-headed orthodox Catholics as well as the impulse in the Catholic literary Pixar world that seeks to serve two masters. Jesus and his Church are lifted up here, but so is the cross. Discipleship necessarily involves dis-ease, purgation, and if we as readers have any sense, we will–more quietly perhaps–do well to listen (with patience) to his rants.
Social Media Entertainment
How the transformation of social media platforms and user-experience have redefined the entertainment industry [b][/b] In a little over a decade, competing social media platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat, have given rise to a new creative industry: social media entertainment. Operating at the intersection of the entertainment and interactivity, communication and content industries, social media entertainment creators have harnessed these platforms to generate new kinds of content separate from the century-long model of intellectual property control in the traditional entertainment industry. Social media entertainment has expanded rapidly and the traditional entertainment industry has been forced to cede significant power and influence to content creators, their fans, and subscribers. Digital platforms have created a natural market for embedded advertising, changing the worlds of marketing and communication in their wake. Combined, these factors have produced new, radically shifting demands on the entertainment industry, posing new challenges for screen regimes, media scholars, industry professionals, content creators, and audiences alike. Stuart Cunningham and David Craig chronicle the rise of social media entertainment and its impact on media consumption and production. A massive, industry-defining study with insight from over 100 industry insiders, Social Media Entertainment explores the latest transformations in the entertainment industry in this time of digital disruption.
Jesus
Jesus is God, and we as necessarily devotional Christian poets must not shy away from that fact. These poems try to celebrate that reality, who He is, without sacrificing literary quality. They are distinctly American (baseball, jazz, and free verse) in form, Beat in the line of Mary Fabilli, Thomas Merton, and Daniel «stick it to the man» Berrigan. And they try to accomplish this without sacrificing humor and romp. May these, and all Christian poems, both now and in the future, wave that flag of freedom–no matter what our personal struggles. Our lives, our poems are about Jesus finally, the One who is mercy itself. May He look kindly upon us, and give us His peace.
My Barefoot Rank
Though we are all sorry sinners, not worthy to sing God's praises, we must. The trick is to not let concerns for «Christian stealth» transform us into poets who end up serving a second master. «Platform» has its draw, but we can't let a wide concern for Catholic culture become no culture at all. We can't be so concerned with success that our poems lose their distinguishing content. Jesus is Lord of all the earth. Using a conversational style lifted from Collins and Coleridge, these poems seek to bring a world to light where He has always been alive and active, where he reigns in complete power, worthy of all our praise. May He forgive us all our sins and change us in the twinkling of His eye before our journey ends.
Mercy Wears a Red Dress
The work of a wonderful secular poet, Billy Collins, provides a great model for Christian writers. His Coleridge «conversation poems» allow for real play and comedy, all in the service of profundity. These are veins that have not been suitably mined by poets who have access to the larger humanity that only Jesus can provide. But there's more than comedy in this collection. The Sorrows of Mary offer a sober truth, as do the four Gospel sonnets; both sections provide a bracing interlude before we get back to high-spirited comedy in the St. Anthony poems–where the sainted speaker disdains direction and instead carries on about whatever is on his mind at the moment. In all, Mercy Wears a Red Dress offers a slice of the abundant life, a knowledge echoed in a Protestant hymn: «I read the back of the book and we win.»
Pilgrim’s Gait
In the last twenty years, Orthodox Catholics have come to expect their art to be necessarily about beauty. They expect it always and everywhere to lift one up, to be tinged with, to linger in the dimly-lit rooms of old-moneyed Europe, to be passed around among the best families, among like-minded gnostics, generous Jansenists. But these expectations have nothing to do with reality. In fact, most of the real contributions during the postmodern period have come from blue-collar poets–influenced by the Beats. A line can be drawn from Kerouac to Karr, with Merton, Everson, Levertov, Dylan, Berrigan, Cohen, Springsteen, Mariani, Waits, Wright, and Daniels tracing the way. This book celebrates that line, one that Holy Father Francis would surely endorse.
St. Francis Poems
After Mary, St. Francis is clearly the most popular and influential of all the disciples of Jesus Christ. He embodies the spiritual poverty, humility, and childlikeness which are absolutely essential for anyone who wants to grow. And it is fitting, too, to examine his life in poetry, since Francis is considered by many to be the father of Italian poetry. In these St. Francis Poems, David Craig gives us what literature should: slices of Henry James's «lived life» as they move past sentimentality to get to the hard-edged, visceral realities in the original texts–though they never lose sight of laughter or of simple joy. These poems invite us to celebrate with Lady Poverty around her meager table, which is fitting, since that is the only place we will ever be fed.
This project itself revisits the haunts of David Craig's first book, The Sandaled Foot (1980). But here St. Francis seems to come even more deeply alive–next to shelves of cool, protected water, in the red meadows of praise.