It’s been a good week for poetry. That’s not something that you can say most weeks. You’ve heard about STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math). STEM will save the world, we are told. I sometimes pick up a sense that many smart people think that STEM is the only education worth pursuing. I love the things that STEM brings, but perhaps STEM is not the best at helping us learn what it means to be human.
It turns out we also need poets. It turns out that we also need words for healing and future.
You have already likely watched the Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman read her poem “The Hill We Climb” at the inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. It was amazing, one of the highlights of the ceremony. It was a good day for Amanda Gorman who now, at 22 years old, has two bestselling books. Gorman was a guest on pretty much every news and tv show in the following days.
It’s been a good week for poetry, but we can see already what our culture tends to do with anything that becomes well known or popular. We so often move from the content of the thing to the conferring of celebrity status. Amanda Gorman is a celebrity now. That’s not terrible, but we can forget what it was that connected with us in the poem. She spoke of shadows and shattering of fear and hate, and she spoke of love and light. She put a call before her country and before the world that we can draw out the best in one another, not the worst.
You can find the entire poem here.
A podcast that I help host and put together (The Rector’s Cupboard) happens to have recently recorded and released an episode with a well known poet (what is a “well known poet”?). Pádraig Ó Tuama is a poet from Ireland who was a wonderful and thoughtful guest. He spoke about words of hate and words of healing. An upcoming episode of the podcast will feature an interview with a local poet. Susan Alexander has also won a number of awards for her writing. Her poems have been featured on buses in Vancouver and in the woods of Whistler.
One of the blessings of an evangelical background is that, if there was openness to it, you could pursue an interest in the power of words and language. The evangelical church as I knew it did not necessarily encourage great literature or poetry. Like in most parts of our world, in entertainment, in news and in commerce, words were often seen to be more transactional than creative and evocative. The Bible itself is in large part, poetry, but I can’t remember a single instance of a preacher or teacher in the church when I was younger teaching me and others how to read poetry (unless you count telling me what a parable was). I did pick up a love for words in reading and I did pick up a love of reading from some mentors in the church, but for the most part the words of the Bible were presented as being instrumental, meant to achieve one thing or another. I suppose that the key areas of achievement were speaking the faith and hoping people would come to faith and speaking some kind of moral expectation. The Bible itself was taught as if each verse had one meaning which could be discovered. This meaning aligned with the way in which the evangelical church would interpret the text. So it was a gift that came with a price. I did pick up a love for scripture, but I also picked up a sense that often I was being taught in a way that actually curtailed the text from speaking. Words were treated as descriptive, not evocative.
Creation itself, according to Christian and Jewish scripture, is the speaking of words. Words make a world.
God “breathes”.
God “speaks”.
“In the beginning was the Word.”
Amanda Gorman clearly loves words. She told Anderson Cooper that she finds meaning in words more than in the visual. This is something extraordinary in our world.
Our way forward includes uncovering the healing and creative power of words.
Maybe read some poetry. If you’d like some help with some suggestions on where to start, just post a comment.
I offer a couple of poems from a writer/pastor/priest who died at the age of 40 in 1633.
If you want to read more of his work, find “George Herbert: The Complete English Poems.”
The first poem is one that I think of often as I turn the bedside light off each night and have that sense of, “Another day gone. Just like that.”
I especially remember the lines that begin with “Successive nights …” and “Man, ere he is aware …” and of course, “Yet Lord, instruct us so …”
Mortification
How soon doth man decay!
When clothes are taken from a chest of sweets
To swaddle infants whose young breath
Scarce knows the way;
Those clouts are little winding sheets,
Which do consign and send them unto death.
When boys go first to bed,
They step into their voluntary graves,
Sleep binds them fast; only their breath
Makes them not dead;
Successive nights, like rolling waves,
Convey them quickly, who are bound for death.
When youth is frank and free,
And calls for music, while his veins do swell,
All day exchanging mirth and breath
In company;
That music summons to the knell,
Which shall befriend him at the house of death.
When man grows staid and wise,
Getting a house and home, where he may move
Within the circle of his breath,
Schooling his eyes;
That dumb enclosure maketh love
Unto the coffin that attends his death.When age grows low and weak,
Marking his grave, and thawing ev’ry year,
Till all do melt, and drown his breath
When he would speak;
A chair or litter shows the bier,
Which shall convey him to the house of death.
Man, ere he is aware,
Hath put together a solemnity,
And dressed his hearse, while he has breath
As yet to spare:
Yet Lord, instruct us so to die,
That all theses dyings may be life in death.
Lots of talk of death, for sure, but in the poem we see that death is overcome by life and winds up in service of life itself.
I will include another Herbert poem next Tuesday with the “Evangelical Word of the Week”.
Yesterday I went for a bike ride in the woods. I wound up at a river with a rocky beach. I took a photo of the rocks. Later I thought of Herbert’s poem, about the “successive nights like rolling waves”. In prayer I recalled with gratitude to God, that the constancy, the sameness is not curse. It is also blessing. Those beautiful rocks are still there, just there, almost the same as they were yesterday.
Amen.
Blessed are we that love poetry. My first favorite poem was read to me by my mother.
I learned it as a small child and still can recite The Children’s Hour. I still can see “the round tower on the Rhine” and can still imagine the “steel” across the sky..
My Grade eleven teacher, Sister Therese Josephine, further instilled in me a love of words.
Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley and My Last Duchess by Robert Browning were brought to life by her.
Amanda Gorman plans to be in the White House by 2036. I most enjoyed James Corden’s interview with her.
I, too, love rocks.....probably the rocks I loved first were tyndall stone in Manitoba.
I have rocks from Switzerland, Mexico, North Carolina, Hawaii....from Ireland I have a few colored pebbles from a walk on a beach..
Love reading your words Todd.
Lynda Sharpe