Eight.
Seven Deadly Sins,
Eight Evil Thoughts.
How often do we break these rules?
Seven men will die,
But not eight.
Eight will have a feast.
Eight will find love in coition.
Eight will be found hoarding their wealth.
Eight will have the arrogance of a lion.
Eight will envy their enemies good fortune.
Eight will feel great anger.
Eight will brag of their riches.
Eight will show weakness from their despondency.
Eight.
But not Seven,
For Seven is a Christian.
For this blog post, I have decided to write a poem based on the last poem of Percival Everett’s poem series titled Logic. In his novel, re f(gesture), there is a blank final page, and I took it upon myself to write a poem for the final page, hopefully in true Everett fashion.
In my poem, I wrote about the Eight Evil Thoughts, which is what the Seven Deadly Sins in Christianity was based upon. The Eight Evil Thoughts consist of: Gluttony, Prostitution, Avarice, Pride, Envy, Wrath, Boasting, Dejection, and these are linked to the fourth-century Monk Evagrius Ponticus. Although these ideas did not originate during the Greek and Roman empires, they are credited with the precedents for the ideas. Aristotle had also brought up the ideals of positive and negative virtues, furthering the birth of the Seven Deadly Sins, which has turned into a capital vice for Christian teachings. Many of these hold true to the Christian faith still today, and many people follow the pathway that the Seven Deadly Sins paved for things to follow as a Christian.
In the last line of my poem I stated “For Seven is a Christian”, and in doing so I alluded to a critique of the Christian faith. I tried to show how many people of the Christia faith preach in following the Bible and God’s words, but many do not truly follow the Christian ideals. For example, it states in the Bible that we must love one another and accept one another, but there may be some people who follow the Christian faith, but dislike the gay community. Also, I personally believe that the Christian faith offers structure for people’s lives, but not necessarily a soundly made one. I think that often this structure can become corrupted by the leaders and the followers of the faith, and the true intentions of the Bible can be overlooked in the name of gaining power.
In relation to this, Percival Everett also seemed to critique the Christian faith and church in his novel I am Not Sidney Poitier. Everett gives a band of nuns that Not Sidney runs into along his journey in the novel names that belong to extremely powerful Saints, while giving them little to no power in their roles in the story. These nuns receive any power that they may hold from Not Sidney’s very own wealth. Religion throughout history has given many people power, and in turn created a very ironic power dynamic for the nuns in the novel; since they are offered so much power with their names, yet they hold no power in their town.Along with these power dynamics, comes structure to hold it all together. In writing my poem, I used the abstract structure, but there are many more structures within poetry. I am in a creative writing class, and we learned of sonnets, odes, and ballads, all of which have a rigid structure that the writer must follow. The structure that is in those kinds of poems could be paralleled with the structure that religion produces in society. Poetry, depending on the type of form, can be governed by the same principles that govern each and every different type of religion. The power and structure that religion can offer is also limit that can be put upon people, such as the Seven Deadly Sins which is something that people of the Christian faith are supposed to follow in their everyday lives. The rules of poetry are also something that poets are supposed to follow fairly strictly in their writing, much like the rules of religion.
In writing this poem, I aimed to show the structure that religion may hold over someone’s life, but I also wanted to show that there is fluidity, by writing it in a free form that offers no rules over the structure of the poem. I also tried to capture the essence of Percival Everett himself, by finishing the blank page of his poetry book with something that might reiterate the meaning of all the poems within the book. Looking at the power dynamic within the life of Not Sidney, we can see the structure that he was also offered throughout his life by using his wealth to his advantage. We can also see the corruption within that structure, since it was run by his wealth.