Flannery Comes Clean
Stack Takeover | Angela Alaimo O'Donnell
August 3, 2024, marked the 60th anniversary of the death of Flannery O’Connor. In honor of O’Connor’s work and memory, we have invited Angela Alaimo O’Donnell to take over this Substack for two weeks. In this time, you’ll see a selection of poems from O’Donnell’s book Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery.
“My standard is: when in Rome do as you done in Milledgeville.”
–Flannery O’Connor, May 19, 1957, The Habit of Being
I don’t lead a monk’s or a martyr’s life. Lord knows I’ve courted the Seven Deadlies sure as any other Baldwin County saint. The devil shows up on a daily basis in these parts. The farm is rife with his dirty doings. To know him when you see him takes a cloudless eye. Local folk are forever sniffin’ up sin. We smell it sure as some smell peach pie, the hot sweet fruit of it, the lusty crust. I do what I can and what I must— though I’m still led into temptation whenever I wander beyond these walls. The customs I keep cushion my fall.
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, PhD is a professor, poet, scholar, and writer at Fordham University in New York City, and serves as Associate Director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Her publications include two chapbooks and nine full-length collections of poems. Her book Holy Land (2022) won the Paraclete Press Poetry Prize. In addition, O’Donnell has published a memoir about caring for her dying mother, Mortal Blessings: A Sacramental Farewell; a book of hours based on the practical theology of Flannery O’Connor, The Province of Joy; and a biography Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith. Her ground-breaking critical book on Flannery O’Connor Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor was published by Fordham University Press in 2020. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Able Muse, Alabama Literary Review, America, The Bedford Introduction to Literature (anthology), Christian Century, Christian Poetry in America Since 1940 (anthology), Christianity & Literature, Contemporary Catholic Poetry (anthology), Flannery O’Connor Review, Italian Americana, Italian Poetry Review, Literary Matters, Mezzo Cammin, Peacock Journal, Presence, Reformed Journal, and Taking Root in the Heart (anthology), among others. O’Donnell’s eleventh book of poems, Dear Dante, was published in Spring 2024.
Photo by Islam Hassan on Unsplash
This poem so effectively captures Flannery O’Connor’s masterful use of setting as a tool to examine the perils of a static cultural Christianity. I admire both the passion and humility projected in her voice within this poem and in this passage from her prayer journal—“I want to be a fine writer. Any success will tend to swell my head—unconsciously even. If I ever do get to be a fine writer, it will not be because I am a fine writer but because God has given me credit for a few of the things He kindly wrote for me.”
This rings very true to my southern ears.