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. "Pilgrim's Gait is a multi-faceted, comic, Beat-like, dizzying pilgrim's progress in which two, three, and four roads (and more) diverge and we are taken down all of them. . . Craig invites us to follow him as he slogs and dances on in his own inimitable gait--equal parts St. Francis and Jack Kerouac--in a language which points beyond language to a vision with heaven's gate in view."--Paul Mariani, Poet, Professor of English, Boston CollegeDavid Craig has taught Creative Writing at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, where, for twenty-seven years, it has been his good fortune to labor in the salt mines of art with so many outstanding students. He cannot repay what they have given him. This is his twenty-first book.