Phil Memmer's "How Many Shapes Must A God Take?" and "Psalm"

Talk About Poetry focuses on two poems by Phil Memmer, How Many Shapes Must A God Take? and Psalm.

Poet, editor and teacher Philip Memmer is the author of four books of poems: The Storehouses of the Snow: Psalms, Parables and Dreams (2012); Lucifer: A Hagiography (2009), which was awarded the 2008 Idaho Prize for Poetry from Lost Horse Press; Threat of Pleasure (2008), winner of the Adirondack Literary Award for Poetry; and Sweetheart, Baby, Darling (2004).


Memmer’s work is centered in an agnostic search for meaning, and his questions return both thematically and formally to the discarded Biblical stories of his youth. In Lucifer, Memmer re-imagines the age-old character as God’s first son, whose rebellion against his Father is an act of self-making, not war-making: confronted with the reality of death in God’s new creation, Lucifer leaves Paradise as an act of solidarity and defiance—a decision he wrestles with throughout the collection. In The Storehouses of the Snow, Memmer writes psalms to a god that is “always ceasing / to be, and then ceasing / to cease to be.”


Memmer lives in upstate New York, where he works as executive director of the Arts Branch of the YMCA of Greater Syracuse. In 2001, he founded the YMCA’s Downtown Writer’s Center, a literary arts center in downtown Syracuse. He also serves as associate editor for Tiger Bark Press.

Participants in the discussion are: Phil Memmer (of course), Executive Director of the Syracuse YMCA Downtown Writer’s Center (DWC); Georgia Popoff, a Community Poet in Syracuse and teacher at the DWC, Stephen Kuusisto, Director of the Syracuse University Honors Program / Professor of Disability Studies for the Center on Human Policy, Law, and Disability Studies in the School of Education, and me, Bob Herz, founder & editor of Nine Mile Magazine, and publisher-editor of the W.D. Hoffstadt & Sons press.

Phil explains the background of On How Many Shapes Must A God Take? this way: A poem in response to the theme of “stranger” and Exodus 3:2-4: There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up.”

When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush,“Moses! Moses!” And Moses said, “Here I am.”