Martin Bidney - The Beloving Imaginer Episode 26 - Interfaith Wordsongs

The Be-Loving Imaginer

Interfaith Wordsongs: Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Poems [$12.50]

Wednesday, June16: 12-1 (Rain Date: Thursday, June 17), Lyceum.

Location: Cutler Gardens, 840 Upper Front St, Binghamton, NY.

Presenter: Poet Martin Bidney, Professor Emeritus, English, BU. “Jews, Christians, and Muslims all consider Abraham the founder of their One God religions. The poets I love most from all three intertwining traditions overleap conventional boundaries in the search for an all-enveloping worldview centered on what matters most to the human heart. 'God,' or Ultimate Being, is ultimately unknowable, but if It is the force that imagined our pluriverse, It set the example for imaginative people who wisely reply to that impulse with intensity, calm, and fervor, merged in the rootedness and serenity of unshakable Love. Join us at Cutler Gardens as I read poetry from each tradition.”

Martin Bidney taught at BU for 35 years and has made his 17 years of retirement into a retoolment, publishing 35 books of original and translated verse. Typically, Martin likes to “interview,” in talk-show format, the speaker of a text whom he chooses to be his mentor-friend. To every selection he transcribes or translates, he responds with a “reply” poem of his own.

Today he will sample three books where he has interviewed three thinkers, respectively from the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions. Martin calls himself not a believer but a “be-lover,” and he’s looking for unities within the Judaeo-Christo-Islamic tradition and elsewhere. He likes particularly to choose mystical writers to dialogue with, for they are distinguished by depth of introspection and scope of cosmic awareness. They love what Martin calls “the boundless and the beating heart.” Here are today’s sources:

Part One: Judaism. Wordsongs of Jewish Thought: 108 Tanya Response Poems – lyrical replies to passages in a classic work of Kabbalah with definitive commentary by the world’s foremost authority on the work, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

(Vestal NY: Dialogic Poetry Press, 2020).

Part Two: Christianity. Book of the Dactyl: Third Journal in Verse, Including Poem-Dialogues with the Witty Mystic Angelus Silesius (Vestal NY: Dialogic Poetry Press, 2019).

Part Three: Islam. God the All-Imaginer: Wisdom of Sufi Master Ibn Arabi in 99 Modern Sonnets, with a new translation of his “Three Mystic Odes” and with 27 full-page calligraphies by Shahid Alam (Vestal NY: Dialogic Poetry Press, 2016).