Ron Starbuck on Poets Cafe

The following interview of Ron Starbuck by Lois P. Jones originally aired on KPFK Los Angeles (reproduced with permission).

Biographical Information—Ron Starbuck

Ron Starbuck is an Episcopalian, a Poet and Writer, and author of There Is Something About Being An Episcopalian, When Angels Are Born, and Wheels Turning Inward, three rich collections of poetry, following a poet’s mythic and spiritual journey that crosses easily onto the paths of many contemplative traditions.

He has been deeply engaged in an Interfaith-Buddhist-Christian dialogue for many years, and holds a lifelong interest in literature, poetry, Christian mysticism, comparative religion, theology, and various forms of contemplative practice. As the Publisher-CEO of Saint Julian Press we works

He has been a contributing writer for Parabola Magazine. And has had poems and essays published in Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature, an interview and poem in The Criterion, The Enchanting Verses Literary Review, ONE from MillerWords, and Pirene’s Fountain. A collection of essays, poems, short stories, and audio recordings are available on the Saint Julian Press, Inc., website under Interconnections.

Starbuck is also the Publisher-CEO of Saint Julian Press, Inc., a new literary press. Saint Julian Press as a literary and educational organization embraces a vision to create a local and worldwide community, by engaging in an artistic dialogue that promotes world peace, cultural conversations, and an interfaith awareness, appreciation, and acceptance. In our mission as a new creative imprint we hope to identify, encourage, nurture, and share transformative literature and art of both past and living masters.

While giving emerging artists, poets, and writers a place they may come home to and share their work; celebrating the enduring mystery within creation that calls us into relationship with one another. Forming an independent press to work with emerging and established writers and poets, and tendering new introductions to the world at large in the framework of an interfaith and cross cultural literary dialogue has been a long–time dream. Saint Julian Press has just released its fifteenth book of poetry, seven of those books have been published this year, in 2016.

__________

Voices

Like the poet, Rilke, with each breath taken, I have heard
and half heard the angels calling out from the depths;

—let them speak, as the whisperings of holy messengers,

in the unfathomable nighttime before dawn, upon the air,
in a quickening of flesh.

These are the forgotten memories we may all one day
recall, more often than not, subtle and obscure,

—traveling on countless pathways of neural light,

crossing our thoughts with distant remembrances that arise
out of the silence of the saints. These are the voices I
heard once before,

—in a church north of Pienza, when we travelled in Italy,

where lighting a candle and bowing her head, Joanne
offered with a sad smile and a small hope, prayers for close
a friend, who was ill at the time,

—struggling in life, and in death, as we all do.

In every church and chapel, we entered that journey,
she repeated the ritual, and in each one, I heard, the
same order of murmuring voices.

Not that I could understand their musings, far from it,
since they spoke only in hushed tones, in the ineffable and
intangible—tongues of angels and heaven.