Moved to minister

John Houghton stands outside the front door of the Memorial Chapel at Culver Military Academy, where he attended high school and later taught for a year. Houghton kneels by the grave of his great-great-grandfather, Thomas Houghton, in Burr Oak Cemetery in Culver. Houghton's family founded the town in the mid-19th century, and many of his relatives still live there. Tribune Photos/ REBECCA BELLING 'Falconry: And Other Poems' John Houghton Unlimited Publishing, $12.99 For more information, visit www.unlimitedpublishing.com.

John Houghton has written more about J.R.R. Tolkien lately than he has about the Venerable Bede.

Granted, not many people write about the eighth-century monk and author of "Ecclesiastical History of the English People," but Bede was the subject of Houghton's Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Notre Dame, and Houghton does make his living as a scholar.

"But they haven't just released three big movies based on Bede recently," Houghton says with his typically understated, dry wit, referring to the trilogy of films based on Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" that wrapped with December's "The Return of the King."

Unlimited Publishing has, however, recently released Houghton's first book of poetry, "Falconry," a compilation of three decades' worth of verse by the Culver native.

"It's a chance to be creative and disciplined," he says of writing poetry. "There's a kind of creativity involved in writing an academic article, but it's a different sort of exercise of the imagination."

Medieval studies interested Houghton as a child, and it was in Tolkien's work that he first encountered the Old English of Bede's time period.

"My earliest interest in Anglo-Saxon came from seeing it in 'Lord of the Rings,' where it's used as a substitute for the language of the people of Rohan," he says.

Although he says it's "self-serving for me to say so," Houghton says Tolkien's work "stand(s) up pretty well under academic scrutiny."

This spring, Houghton will give a paper and organize a session at Western Michigan University's annual medieval conference in Kalamazoo about "the degree to which Tolkien can serve as a gateway to medieval studies," he says. "It's aimed at the middle position that Tolkien is able to take, that on the one hand, it's popular literature, but on the other hand, it's serious enough to lead people into real medieval studies."

Drawn to serving community

Houghton grew up in Culver on a street named for his family, which founded the town -- his great-great-grandfather, Thomas Houghton, was a cousin of Thomas K. Houghton, who platted the town as Marmont in 1851 after buying the land from Thomas' sister, Emma, who had platted it as Union Town with her husband, Bayless Dickson, in 1844.

At the moment, Houghton is the school chaplain and chairman of the department of religious studies at Episcopal High School of Baton Rouge (La.), a K-12 prep school.

He also serves as a Fellow of the Episcopal Church Foundation, an organization that provides financial aid to doctoral candidates and that works to develop clergy and increase the size and number of congregations.

"It's not quite the Episcopal Church's think tank, but it is a national program meant to encourage higher education and provide a corps of people who would teach in seminary or secondary schools," Houghton says.

A graduate of Yale Divinity School -- as well as Culver Military Academy, Harvard University, Indiana University and Notre Dame -- Houghton is also in the discernment process to become a minister in the Episcopal Church.

"Since I was in high school, I have felt that attraction to playing that role in a community and pretty specifically to playing that role in a school community," he says of becoming a minister. "I find that as a chaplain, I spend a lot of time making it possible for the community, in this case, the kids, to participate in public worship. For me, a lot of the ministry leadership is about making it possible for other people to do things in the church."

In addition to teaching at Episcopal, Houghton has taught at prep schools in Indiana and Missouri.

"I like the idea of being a generalist, and you can't do that at universities," he says. "It's nice to be at a school where I'm teaching kids to write and research and be able to show them a manuscript as I originally submitted it and then show them it with the red marks it came back with and then the final draft."

Neoclassical influence

Most of the poems in "Falconry" were written in the 1980s and '90s, although a few date from Houghton's high school days in the early 1970s, and the title poem is about a year old.

Except for a few references to the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon and one poem about Jim Morrison of the Doors, however, the poems in "Falconry" read more like compositions from the first third of the 20th century than from its last third. Quotations from Virgil, Catullus and Augustine give "Falconry" a neoclassical foundation that its sonnets and odes build upon.

The neoclassical influence, Houghton says, comes from T.S. Eliot and the New Criticism of the 1930s and '40s.

Eliot's influence appears "not in the way the lines work but the classical sensibility that Eliot put forward, and all of that heavy allusiveness that we see in Eliot shows up here for good or ill," he says. "I thought I lived through the '70s, but it's all sort of referentially connected to earlier times or other cultures. I suppose that's the thing that's most neoclassical: The effort to re-envision the contemporary world in terms of an older world in order to make some sort of statement about the apparent consistency of human experience."

The poems, too, often investigate spiritual matters, directly and indirectly.

"I'm certainly trying to poke at things, whether they're suggested by the Psalms or the Gospels," Houghton says. "Some of these characters are on the shady side. There's a lot of guilt and hiding stuff going on, and there's an Augustinian theme running through it. ... There's a certain amount in there about the Eucharist and about God, action starting from God's side. These characters are conscious of God breaking through."

His use of the word "characters" is important: Except for a few details, Houghton says, the poems in "Falconry" are not autobiographical. Details such as Houghton's conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War appear in some of the poems, but he didn't have a cousin who drowned in the Tippecanoe River, as occurs in one poem.

"It's more fictional and imagined than it is, 'I write poetry so I can pour my heart out,' " he says. "When Dan (Snow, Houghton's publisher) was looking over some of the poems about divorce and this custody battle (in the sonnet sequence 'Amphibian'), he asked if I wanted to air all this dirty laundry. I said it's an imaginary person's dirty laundry. I'm pleased with that sort of reaction because it makes me think the characters' voices sound credible. Again, that's a very New Critical point to insist upon: Just because the character tells us something, that doesn't mean the author is telling us something."

Staff writer Andrew S. Hughes:

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