Opinion | Where Poetry and Faith Meet
One reason I think we keep making poetry is because we are ourselves poems. There’s a verse in the Bible (Ephesians 2:10) in which we are described as the “handiwork of God.” But it’s the same Greek root that goes into the word “poetry.” It means “a made thing.” A more literal translation is that we are, as human beings, the poems of God. So we keep making poetry because we are ourselves poems.
Another way to think about it is that we keep making poetry because it’s part of natural curiosity, exploration and discovery. I trace poetry back to the story in Genesis, when God brings all the creatures of the world before Adam and says, “You name it.” Poetry is created in the world as one of the very first vocations and tasks of human beings, because poetry very often is an attempt to name the world properly, because to name it is to know it. And if we’re going to know it well, we’ve got to name it well, and if we’re going to name it well, we’ve got to pay very careful attention to this world that God has made. So I also think of poetry as the art of attention. It’s the ability to pay attention to the world and produce for the world the name of something that must be known.
How has poetry affected your faith or inspired you?
I think it’s hard to have faith without wonder. You need to have some sense of awe, mystery and not-knowing-ness to have faith in the possibilities of the world and what God has done. And I find that poetry is the art that produces in me the most wonder. If you think about a very simple poem, like “This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams, which is a very famous poem about him stealing plums from an ice box, it’s really a funny “sorry, not sorry” poem. But when I read a poem like that, what I’m really drawn to is its short, plain lines that are meant to draw our attention to the most ordinary things in the world and show us how extraordinary they are.
What are some collections or poets that might awaken wonder for people burned out or discouraged from the past few years?
An easy place to start is with Mary Oliver, who so many people love. She is cleareyed about the horrors of the natural world and also filled with praise and wonder at the beauty of it and describes both with such amazing detail. Another one I would recommend is Li-Young Lee. One of my favorite poems of his is called “From Blossoms.” In the poem, his day is interrupted, to go off on a side trail. In the heat of the day, he finds these incredible peaches and he sort of utterly rejoices in what he calls the “round jubilance” of a peach. That a peach is a peach and can be so amazing on a hot summer day is, to him, astounding. And his ability to describe the experience of it and to be lost in the wonder of it allows you to be transported not just by that, but other experiences you’ve also had. And this great line near the end where he says, “There are days we live as though death were nowhere in the background.” And that experience of joy, which is this sort of breaking in of the eternal into the temporal. That poem just opens into that experience in this most remarkable way.
Tish Harrison Warren (@Tish_H_Warren) is a priest in the Anglican Church in North America and the author of “Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep.”
