{"id":106367,"date":"2026-10-04T09:04:52","date_gmt":"2026-10-04T16:04:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=106367"},"modified":"2026-11-02T09:07:21","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T16:07:21","slug":"alphabet-soup-and-then-some-on-michael-david-sowders-sacred-letters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/alphabet-soup-and-then-some-on-michael-david-sowders-sacred-letters\/","title":{"rendered":"Alphabet Soup, and Then Some: On Michael David Sowder\u2019s Sacred Letters"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A good book can be hard to enter. It is often written at a frequency the mind rejects. That resistance is also where the chance of being changed lives. There is a rarer kind of book that asks you to retune first, so you can digest what is on the page. Sacred Letters<\/em> is that book. It is slow and rhythmic. It wants to be chewed. Read fast and you get an alphabet. Read as Sowder asks you to read, and you get a meal. I resisted it, stayed with it, and was rewarded.<\/p>\n

This is a book of poetry that is not a poetry book. A record of a private heart that is not a memoir. A teaching that is not a textbook. Sowder calls the Sanskrit name for divine play l\u012bl\u0101: something done for its own sake, its own joy. \u201cAll art affirms this,\u201d he writes, \u201cor should.\u201d The book was made in that spirit. I am being taught, but not lectured. I am reading a life, but not a genealogy.<\/p>\n

The structure is simple and strange. Each piece takes a letter of the Sanskrit alphabet\u2014devan\u0101gar\u012b, the script whose name means \u201ccity of God\u201d\u2014and opens it. Pronunciation, root, mantra, story, memory. Personal narrative sits next to metaphysical speculation, linguistic play next to a walk in Logan Canyon. \u2028Sowder anchors the whole in the devotional Tantric, \u015aaiva-\u015a\u0101kta tradition, with its attention to the Divine Feminine, then lets Western mystics wander in: Thomas Merton, Teresa of \u00c1vila, John of the Cross, and Meister Eckhart walk beside Yogananda, Ramakrishna, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. Mary, Sophia, Kuan Yin, T\u0101r\u0101, Durg\u0101, P\u0101rvat\u012b, Lak\u1e63m\u012b, Sarasvat\u012b move through the same rooms as Emerson and Thoreau.<\/p>\n

Sanskrit, he reminds us, is famously polysemous. Roots throw off many senses; the same surface shifts with context. He quotes the scholar\u2019s joke and does not flinch from it: every word means itself, its opposite, a name of God, and a position in sexual intercourse. Hallelujah, he writes. A lingam equals infinity. The alphabet is not a dead code. It is a cipher still in use.<\/p>\n

The man who wrote it has been practicing and teaching yoga and meditation for nearly fifty years. Born in Cincinnati in 1956 and raised from the age of nine in Birmingham, he took a law degree, clerked for a federal judge, and practiced in Atlanta before poetry won him back. An MFA under David Bottoms at Georgia State became The Empty Boat<\/em>, which Diane Wakoski chose for the T. S. Eliot Award. A Michigan dissertation on Walt Whitman became Whitman\u2019s Ecstatic Union<\/em> (Routledge, 2005). Bottoms has called him \u201cone of our finest spiritual poets.\u201d<\/p>\n

He is emeritus professor of English at Utah State University, and affiliated faculty in Yoga Studies and Religious Studies, living at the foot of the Bear River Mountains. In 2014 he was a Fulbright Scholar in India. In Logan he founded the Amrita Yoga Meditation Foundation. Before that, in 1978, he started what he describes as the first meditation program in the Alabama prison system, and later brought writing and meditation into the Pocatello Women\u2019s Correctional Facility and the Cache County Jail. \u2028Sacred Letters<\/em> is the late fruit of a decision, about a decade ago, to stop chanting Sanskrit and start learning it\u2014a poem, or a meditation, for each letter, built by reading the dictionary until something caught.<\/p>\n

What caught, for me, was the poetry of it. \u201cDancing leaves that splinter the sunlight.\u201d \u201cThe ocean adorned with waves.\u201d \u201cClouds that catch their hem on a peak.\u201d He writes of a waterfall: \u201cThe water tumbled white, danced free over the lip of the cliff, into vast nothingness.\u201d On a climb he calls the Theater of Shadows he writes, \u201cTechnically, I\u2019m safe,\u201d and then, if he thinks about it too long, fear rushes the body and he counts\u2014one, two, three\u2014steadying the breath. That one I recognized.<\/p>\n

Place is as present as the saints and mystics. A mother\u2019s kitchen table in June, lemon meringue pies in the oven. A sunny October before the Tetons. Feet wet and sticky with blood on a walk through Kalighat and a tin-roof stone shelter in the Appalachians. Limestone, aspens, and firs in Logan Canyon, gleaming in moonlight. Sowder writes that we do not listen to Tchaikovsky\u2019s Fifth in order to do something else. The same is true here. The book is read for the pleasure of being carried.<\/p>\n

The theology is not shy. God, guru, self. Surrender to the divine. Issa: \u201cThis dewdrop world is but a dewdrop world \u2014 and yet.\u201d Of Ramakrishna: \u201cintoxicated by bliss, thought mad by some, an Incarnation of God by others.\u201d A monk tells him: \u201cWe cannot live without harming. This is the great tragedy of life. So we dedicate ourselves to serving.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sowder never became a monk. \u201cI found another way. A different kind of sacrifice. Partner, children, work, friends \u2014 avatars, your incarnations all.\u201d That sentence is the book\u2019s grounding argument. Contemplative life is not reserved for the renunciate. It can be made at a kitchen table, on a canyon trail, in a prison classroom, over a plate where \u201csweet pickles swam like dolphins.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plato arranged beautiful things as rungs on a ladder toward the Good. Sowder arranges letters. You climb by sounding them. If you want a manual, look elsewhere. If you want a book made for its own joy\u2014l\u012bl\u0101 made manifest\u2014stay. Chew slowly. The nourishment is in the pace.<\/p>\n

Sacred Letters: Sanskrit, Yoga, and Awakening the Divine<\/em>
\nMichael David Sowder
\nMonkfish Book Publishing<\/a>
\n2025
\n112 pages.<\/p>\n

Samantha da Silva is a Salt Lake City\u2013based abstract artist and the author of Fearless Artistry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A good book can be hard to enter. It is often written at a frequency the mind rejects. That resistance is also where the chance of being changed lives. There is a rarer kind of book that asks you to retune first, so you can digest what is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1752,"featured_media":106368,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2589,35],"tags":[1785],"class_list":["post-106367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews-literary-arts","category-literary-arts","tag-michael-sowder"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-11-11 15:45:04","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/sacred_letters.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1752"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106367"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106682,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106367\/revisions\/106682"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}