Don't have it in front of me right now, but one thing I'm meditating on today is the interview Eve Grubin conducts with Fanny Howe in that new issue of Lyric I received yesterday: how Howe seems to think of poetry primarily and brodaly as a means of mental organization, a structure similar in kind if not degree to organized religion. Some fascinating comments on being a half-atheist Catholic as well, and how in spite of everything she believes the Catholic Church still offers one of the most workable maps of human reality. As a three-quarters atheist Jew I have a little trouble with Howe's Catholicism except as a kind of organizing fact for her poetry, an interpretation she herself might endorse. She's a convert so her Catholicism is really a peculiar mutant thing and not the catalogue of bizarre imagery and the palpable presence of God that I find usually characterizes Catholic writers. Maybe I just expect a Catholic's actual writing to be lush and tangible yet freighted with a burden of numinousness. Howe's severity and restraint align her more with a mystic like Simone Weil, while her investigative moralism reminds me of Graham Greene. Her book The Wedding Dress is illuminating in these respects and her career as a whole provides I suppose a welcome example of leftist religiosity. Religion in general as a rigid means of organizing mass mentalities continues to give me the jibblies. But when an individual makes use of doctrine to organize her own idiosyncratic experience I get more interested.