Welcome to the fourteenth email in a series looking at Marden J. Clark’s collection Liberating Form: Mormon Essays on Religion and Literature. In this email, we’ll cover: “In the Midst of Miracle—So What?”
As always, the in-depth treatment of this week’s essay, including discussion questions, is at the end of the email and the discussion post for it can found on AMV.
Snapshot: Clark compares the way language, and more specifically, art can communicate between a writer and a reader to a miracle. He notes that in order for any miracle to happen, you often need to put in most of the work. And he suggests that a good way to find your way into a literary work is to ask yourself three questions: What? Why? So What?
Best Lines: [on why poets write poetry as a response to some experience, thought, emotion] “They want to explore its meaning, deepen their experience (having learned long ago that the process of writing is the process of exploring, discovering, defining, deepening), they want to share their experience, to create art, they want, I suppose, to make a difference. Where something was not they want something to be” (197).