Sheila

I am a poet, and one of my Baptist pastors did see my writing as a spiritual gift. He encouraged me by having me read a poem during the morning worship service, and the choir director even gave me tips to make my reading more effective.

Like most poets, I have been surprised at what people find in them, which is probably one strength of poetry.

I have given up on trying to become published because there are not that many outlets; I don’t have the desire to self publish and/or self market. I also look at what is being published and wonder.

David

You wrote:

I wonder what it would take for the average church to allow a poet regular access to the congregation, in order to write, read, share and facilitate reflection on life via poetry? What kind of church would invite the poets to come and tell us what they see and feel? Could we ever be open enough to the spirit to let the words of the poets come into our communities to describe what our tired rhetoric can no longer communicate? What kind of generous, expectant mindset does it take to realize that the language of the traditional Protestant sermon isn’t always the music of our lives? That sometimes, the poet is the one who has the word or the Word?

I’ve been seeking to publish lately and I wrote Christianity Today to see what their guidelines were for accepting poetry because I didn’t see any (silly me) and this is the reply I received:

“Dear Sir or Madam:

Thank you for your recent submission. We appreciate the time you put into your work, as well as the fact that you thought of our magazine.
Unfortunately, CT is not a market for poetry or short fiction. Perhaps you might try Guideposts or Christian Century as other options. We wish you well
in placing your work elsewhere. Although we are sorry that we cannot help you in your efforts at this time, we appreciate your interest in CT.
Best
wishes.

Sincerely,

The CT Editorial Staff”

This was my reading between the lines and my frustrated thinking as I ranted to my mentor:

Don,
You know I write poetry and I have been looking to publish some. Back in May I sent a letter to Christianity Today asking if they accepted poetry and the answer below is what I got. I checked out Christian Century and Guideposts like they said and what I eventually figured they were saying essentialy (although not maliciously) :

“There is no place for Poetry in Christian thought and life because we don’t think it’s serious enough which is why we don’t accept it. Why don’t you try the thoughtful liberal folks down the way or the saccharine sweet positive thinking folks. We’re serious Christian publishers”

I just found this email as I was trolling through old email and decided to check Guideposts and Christian Century out. The more I think about it the more incensed I get. Where can a theologically conservative poet get a break? The church used to lead in the arts and creativity but now we have banished it to the realm of the theologically weak-minded and the gay!”

Anyhoo,

That is the state of poetry as far as mainstream evangelical Christianity goes.

V

And it’s fun to have stuff like that but it seems to require a certain administrative creativity and good will that I’ve seen at my church that I haven’t always seen at other churches. Plus, at the risk of conforming to some stereotype, I’m a Northwesterner and have lived in Seattle for years. As bad as they often are poetry slams show that the local culture has more interest in poetry than my home town down in Oregon.

In the same way that a church musician should modulate or adjust musical style for what a congregation can get a poet should consider writing poems that may best serve the congregation. Something I learned from my music teachers in college is that this is what really separated the great composers from the average–the ability to distill your artistic skills into any skill level your audience or performers may have. THAT takes a lot of work!

But I think that the reasons it’s hard to get this to happen are fairly self-evident: most people perceive poets as weird, which is why they don’t trust them. And on the principle that we usually get the best results by looking for a fault in ourselves rather than in others, it behoves poets to ask themselves why that should be, rather than just to complain about it.

Now I am absolutely no expert on poetry — I’m the one who couldn’t understand the Wheelbarrow poem a couple of months ago. So you should take anything I say on the subject with a shovelful of salt. That said, I think the problem is the idea of Poetry as a separate discipline. I really have no desire to sit in a congragation while someone Does Poetry at me, and I am quite sure the same is true of the great majority of the people I’ve been to church with over the last decade or two. (By the way, that includes Plymouth Brethren, independent charismatic, Pentecostal and English Baptist churches, so I don’t think this can be explained as denomination bias.) Poetry as a distinct art-form is alien to my generation, as other commenters have pointed out. But what everyone can respond to — can hardly help but respond to — is the poetic applied to other forms. I’m talking about poetic insight in sermons, and maybe most of all about poetic words for worship songs: words that go beyond retreading the same P&W cliches we sing all the time, and that show us a fresh angle on the God we love.

So if Clay is looking for a church where he can stand at the front and recite to an enraptured congragation, I think he is going to be looking for a long time But if he can work his poetic insight and expression into his preaching, then that preaching will be much the stronger for it. And if he can collaborate with a talented, hard-working and sympathetic musician, then maybe he can help to create some of the deep and insightful worship songs that I and others are longing for.

In summary, I call on Christian poets to be prepared to sacrifice Big-P Poetry and instead to focus on bringing the poetic into existing areas of church life.

Perhaps this is a result of our exaltation of reason and science as the sources of truth. Perhaps this is due to our love for—and dependence on—technology. Whatever it is, pragmatism and minimalism often seem to rule our day.

Thank God for the coffee-shops and pubs. Maybe the poets will eventually turn the tide of our society!

That’s to say nothing of the fact that poets aren’t given proper respect in society as a whole, either. Part of this might be that too few people these days have been trained to recognize good poetry. I just think of all the farm boys from World War I who were excellent poets because their generation was taught to read, memorize, recite, and write poetry from an early age. We need that back in our schools.

In any case, all Clay needs to do is stay honest, never stop writing and keep letting people read, and the church will have her poet, even if she doesn’t exalt him as she should.

As an aside: Michael, you mention your work and preparation as keeping you from enjoying poetry as much as you would like. When I see how much you write and how many fascinating Web links you’re able to point people to (here and at BHT), and when I read about all the stuff you’re up to, I wonder how you have time for it all. I seem barely to have time to read my favorite blogs, much less explore new ones. I’d be interested to read something about the typical day or week of the Internet Monk and how he manages to be so doggone efficient. Has this already been written?

God bless

For me some of the challenge was that I was raised being told some poets were great poets who I just couldn’t get into. Milton and Shakespeare are good and all that but they just don’t interest me at all compared to John Donne or Edmund Spenser. And my favorites are more recent like T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Frost, bits of Levertov or Stafford. I don’t read poetry much anymore but I don’t regret steeping myself in it for most of my teens years and early 20s.

Did Donne read his poems from the pulpit? Probably not but even if churches don’t always incorporate contemporary poetic works into liturgy I think we can benefit from finding ways to encourage poets to do something. I think evangelicals have drifted so far afield from liturgical cusoms in which new librettos can be composed that you end up hearing about N. T. Wright writing a libretto for a cantata and no comparable effort coming from any officially evangelical author. Maybe that old Credenda article has it right saying Protestants just stink at literature.