Word Jazz for Corita

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(I recited this on 9/3 at the Caruso Catholic Center at USC for an opening reception for a show of the art of the late Corita Kent: nun, famous artist, and art teacher at Immaculate Heart College (now high school) in Hollywood.)

 

Seventeen years old in 1970, Santa Cruz, California:

I received a cardboard tube in the mail from Los Angeles.

I was shopping for a college to attend

And my school counselor gave my name and address 

To Immaculate Heart College.

I read the return address 

On the cardboard tube

With deep bewilderment.

How could this possibly be the school for me,

Just old enough to realize my heart was not immaculate?

How could this be the right college for a young leftish wannabe political activist

Who spoke no Catholic?

I opened the tube and inside were two very cool pop-art posters

Signed in a lyrical liberated script by Corita.

They were wrapped by a quirky come-on letter

From the admissions director.

I concluded that he must have been an old beatnik

Wearing a beret, drinking an espresso, while reading Ferlinghetti.

My mind snapped to the beat of the word jazz on the big colorful posters, 

Hip propaganda for peace and love

Copied from the serigraphs of Sister Corita.

So I hung them on the wall of my bedroom

And, admiring them, caught the groove from which they sprang:

A nun with an immaculate heart

Living, I presumed, in a musty monastery in Hollywood, of all places,

Had eaten a funky communion wafer

Or drunk some trippy eucharistic wine

And leapt out of her black and white habit

Into a Haight-Ashbury wonderland of day-glow color

And lightning-bolt visions of the world that could be

If we could turn the nukes into jukeboxes

And make love instead of war

And get the rich to give to the poor.

Her yellows yelled

Her reds bled

Her hues sang the blues

And howled for hope

And jumped for joy.

Her colors were drawn 

From the raw roots

That sprouted Pope John's Vatican Two;

Her images were abstracted theological derivatives

That met the world where it was

And aimed it at the places where Love wanted it to be.

She made graphic Magnificats

For the nineteen sixties;

She laid bright ink with the stone that was rolled away

From the mouth of Jesus' tomb.

 

There was a lot going on

In those Corita posters hanging on my wall

More than met my eyes at the time.

More than meets my eyes decades later.

I did not apply to Immaculate Heart  

But Corita helped me seek one.

 



 


JIM BURKLO
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM     Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
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Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California















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