Introduction

By José R. Irizarry, President of Austin Seminary

When during casual table conversation my parents revealed that they intended to name me Carlos William in honor of my two maternal uncles, I went out on a quest for homonymous individuals who have brought fame to that name—a pointless attempt to finding some personal pride in the “what if” scenario of being called other than Jose Ramón. It was then that I discovered the work of a young physician of English-Puerto Rican ancestry, William Carlos Williams. Born into a Spanish Caribbean household and having the language of Cervantes as his primary one, he became one of the most prominent American poets in the English language. One of his most celebrated poems, a brief verse simply titled “XXII” for its position in Williams’s Spring and All collection, reads as follows:

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

Almost one hundred years after its publication, literary critics still debate the enigmatic symbol of the red wheelbarrow and the meaning it purports to communicate to its readers. Eluding interpretation, the poem continues to call into question our need to control words and consequently the world the words aim to create.

Paul Hooker invites us in this edition of Insights to enjoy the beauty of the unexpected even when our minds cannot recover a scintilla of meaning in the things we perceive or even the things that remain hidden to our senses. It is in these places of absence, as our reason is coerced into silence, that we may encounter a speck of the Holy. It is for this gift of profound insight that we celebrate Paul Hooker as a poet and mystic among us. In this edition you can be inspired by Paul’s words and the thoughts of other collaborators as they are distilled in lyrical cadence, dripping kernels of wisdom, at times draped with a cloth of divine mystery.

In reading Paul’s work, I have come to understand why the sight of a red wheelbarrow abandoned in an inconspicuous yard brings me to a halt when everyone else may just pass by. The words of the poem vanish and become irrelevant when the object that calls my attention insists on pulling out traces that remain buried in deep places of my memory, bringing up images of parents at a table divulging family secrets, the names of often forgotten uncles, connecting me to history and ancestry in a faraway Caribbean island where white chickens run free. Or … simply luring me with the glossy luster of a sweet and delicious crimson apple. I did not have the privilege of knowing Paul that closely. But as he suggests, you do not need to witness the “snow leopard” to grasp the influence of its presence among us. For me, Paul Hooker is the man you will see on the path of life picking up remnants of the holy, piling them together with inspiring metaphors, and pushing them around in a red wheelbarrow.

Insights cover: “Birth of a poem” by Serhiy Reznichenko (Lviv, Ukraine): oil on canvas (140 x 120 cm) © 2021. See more of Reznichenko’s work here: https://reznichenko.lviv.ua