I suspect you’ve heard that question countless times, usually from a friend you haven’t seen in a while. And likely you’ve used it, too.

One day after kicking around a soccer ball with my son—he was five-ish and we were living in Stony Brook on Long Island—I asked him, Which way is up? Naturally he pointed skyward. Then I asked him, holding the soccer ball between us, If you live on the other side of the world, which way is up? After only the slightest pause, he pointed down. So, I asked once more, which way is up? Without even the slightest pause he responded, Away from the center. And I thought to my stunned self, Duh! Needless to say, I’ve been using his answer to What’s up? ever since.

It got me thinking about other cliche questions we use to navigate our encounters with friend and foe and family. Two favorites of mine since the Sixties are What’s happening? and What’s goin’ on? Maybe it’s obvious, but I was pleased with myself when I thought of this answer for either: Everything all at once, and some of it’s not good.

For every cliche question there’s any number of interesting and/or funny answers.

More times than not, when I deliver the second half of my ha-ha answer to What’s happening?, the person looks concerned and asks something like, Is everything okay? And every time that happens, I’m tempted to say, Are you kidding? Have you noticed how fucked up the world is? To date, I haven’t done so, but my-oh-my, some day I’ll snap back and watch the other person wilt as I enumerate the abominations, beginning “right here in River City.”

Aside (speaking of right here in River City): I am beyond flabbergasted that anyone but Natalie remains glad for the one who currently sits behind the Resolute desk. His corruption is so in our faces that I can’t believe smarter people than I haven’t figured out how to have him and his coconspirators arrested for sedition or some such comprehensive charge. And what’s insane is that because I just typed that sentence, some algorithm may red-flag my account and, if I’m not already there, place me, a life-long pacifist, on the domestic terrorist list. (By the way, my testosterone levels are hugely manly.) Folks, I’m not saying anything new, but the national sickness is deep, and the threat to our democracy—to women, Black and Brown citizens, and innocent sojourners here in America—is terrifyingly real.

But back to interrogating cliche questions.

So, how’s it going? I think I enjoy too much responding with Clintonesque seriousness, So much depends on what “it” is. True, one can be perceived as obnoxious very easily, but for us who love paying attention to language, how it’s used or abused, how it aspires to beauty and truth or gets coopted for telling lies, such interrogation—even of silly, cliche questions—is a critical ingredient in a life well examined and well lived.

I’d be curious whether any of you out there reading this have funny or thoughtfully quip-ish answers to other silly, cliche questions we find ourselves asking our friends and families…, or complete strangers.

So, what do you say?

The greater number of responses in a given measure tend to cluster around the mean, with outlying responses decreasing symmetrically (+/-) either side of the mean down to zero. This shape when graphed has been called (and maligned as) the “bell curve.” When applied to grading in school, this shape would illustrate that only a very few students earn a D grade or worse; the greater number of students earn between a low C and high B; and only a very few earn an A grade.

Over my high school career—a painful, five-year ordeal—my usual position on the bell curve was along the D-pressing side. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) Not exactly college recommendable. In fact, the one college that did accept me did so on the condition that, once I stepped onto campus, I would be on academic probation. Somehow I managed to graduate from said institution with a GPA just under a 3.0. But my academic high point came five years later in seminary when my narrative graduate summary announced me to the waiting church as academically “above average.” I had become better at shutting out the woeful world and rerouting my best energy away from making songs and poems into the Sisyphean demands of graduate school toil.

Then, 15 years later, during my MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts, I rated as having “potential” as a poet and won an AWP Intro Journal Award. The winning poem was subsequently published in Puerto del Sol, a terrific journal out of New Mexico State University. You might say my poetry star began to rise.

The cause of my recent thinking about normal distribution and the bell curve was a conversation I had with a poet friend. As we shared our discouragement with being older/olding poets, the metaphor of the bell curve occurred to me as a way to frame what was happening to the likes of us. When we began making poems and submitting them to journals, the game was to collect and save our rejections…, and then keep on making poems, sending them out, and receiving rejections. Eventually, each in our own time, we began to receive journal acceptances—even major ones—and win awards, and get invited to give readings, lead workshops, even teach in colleges.

As we were hitting our respective high points, the number of Master of Fine Arts programs in poetry proliferated, each one sending class after class of eager, competent, competition-ready poets into the poetry marketplace. And parallel to this growth was the online journal boom. No surprise, journal editors proved happy to focus on discovering these new, emerging or historically overlooked voices. Whereas the established Great Ones continued to maintain their status and presence, those caught in the middle began to feel the pinch.

In my poet friend’s case, his high motivation to hold on to or improve further his established position has been met with an increasing number of frustrating setbacks. I admit to similar frustrations (e.g., my submissions-to-acceptance ratio has fallen off sharply), but I’ve been a smidge better able to roll with it. Maybe it’s the sociologist in me that, having studied the dynamics of social change, finds an experience like mine something that ought to be expected, discouraging as it may become.

I’m not simply acquiescing to the agism rife within our culture—which would be a path of least resistance. I am receiving the new reality as a call to arms. Not that I will now bend every effort to make the kind of poem editors seem to favor these days. Heaven forbid! Rather I am more than ever motivated to keep making the best poems I can, submitting them to journals I admire, and collecting the rejections that this way come. Heck, they’re inevitable—and the poetry marketplace is more competitive than ever.

My plan: to keep working…, and celebrate every little win along the way. Which feels kind of like how I began.

Early this summer, I found myself overwhelmed here in the forest of northeastern Connecticut by the suffocating heaviness of the deep, summer greens that erased the leafless yet exhilarating vibe of winter. This greening of New England happens every year, but never has it affected me so. I’ve always loved winter, especially when we get hit with a series of great snowstorms, as was the case this past winter. But I’ve always loved, too, the annual, pastel transition from early spring to summer’s full re-leafing. This year something other than the seasons changed, and my response to the smothering green has been visceral.

As a consequence, I’ve found myself hankering for local places with a view, whether at the beach on Bluff Point or the overlook at Bull Hill—for getting above or beyond the high wall of verdancy to witness a horizon. Even walking the meadows beside West Thompson Lake provides respite from the psychological oppression. Then this morning I figured it out. I’ve been projecting my political overwhelmedness onto the New England forest, a vast expanse that’s just being its wonderful self, as always. What has changed is in me—as precipitated by the oppressive political chaos created by the Trump administration.

It’s not only the lushness of early summer that I’ve found oppressive, but the sameness of color, the pronounced lack of meaningful variation. Ugh! Good thing the World Cup has presented my eye with a very different world picture, my ear with a very different soundscape. So many gorgeous languages and faces and flags! Even the American team presents as being far more diverse than the greens in the trees along the boundary of our condo development. And of course, that diversity is true of America as a whole. But the impression given off by the country’s reigning, arch-conservative party is that America will only be its truest self when white, evangelical Christians come to dominate every sector of American society—as was intended (so they say) by the founders and God (!).

Political monochromism is a fantasy-become-focal-myth of apartheid defenders, fascists, Southern neo-confederates, and racists everywhere. It wishes the world were ordered in a way that Creator never intended, laying on it a hierarchy of value that’s conspicuously self-serving. And lately I have felt overwhelmed by this myth’s progress in the American public square. Here’s the irony: I’m an honest-to-goodness believer in the resurrected Jesus, his teaching and its eschatological implications, so would qualify as the kind of Christian the far-right might want to court. The problem is that, because I’m a follower of Jesus, I know better than to buy their nationalistic shite.

As I see it (IMNSHO), they who assume they are the rightful, God-ordained rulers of the earth are the ones who need to repent—that is, turn from their corrupted worldview, study the mind and manner of Jesus, and aim at living in step with his teaching and Spirit.

Which, oddly enough, brings me finally to poetry. For I live between an awe-inspiring creation and a perennially irksome national reality—and I’m tempted when writing either to give over wholly to the wonder of the cosmos and this planet or to “rage, rage against the dying of the light” as our democratic republic faces its current crisis. I’m reminded of the counsel I received in the ‘90s from my MFA advisors at Vermont College of Fine Arts, that I should stop preventing my theological worldview from finding its way into my poetry for fear of producing religious drivel—that until I welcomed it, my work would not rise to the Dickinsonian standard of “telling all the truth” (as I see it) slantwise.

Now fear, once again, looms large—and would have me block from my poetry either the natural world (herons, quasars, mosquitos) or the mess of human politics (us versus them, global fascism versus antifascism, MAGA versus anyone to the Left of them). Block the political, and I provoke my fear of being irrelevant; block the natural, and I risk misrepresenting the stage on which human politics struts its fallen stuff. Allow both A and B into my poetry—loving both the glory of nature and the promise of human culture—and who knows what may come of it? I’ve a brother convinced I hate America. I wonder what he means.

And there’s the opening couplet for a poem…

[the end]

Many practicing Christians leapfrog the life, teaching, and resurrection of Jesus and glory in his death and the need for us to be “washed in his blood.” This way of thinking builds from an apostolic metaphor (yes), comparing Jesus to the Old Testament sacrificial lamb, but then weirdly mixes in language that’s clearly Mithraic: blood bathing. Yuck! These Christians have fixated on a perfectly fine biblical figure of speech but from it have fashioned a powerful, repent or perish, death-centered soteriology (gotta love a six-syllable word for the eight-syllable phrase, theology of salvation).

True, the image of the sacrificial lamb appears in the teaching of John the Baptizer when he refers to Jesus as “the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world,” but it is not found in the teaching of Jesus or in the Book of Acts (except in Acts 8 where a portion of Isaiah 53 is being read by a Jewish eunuch from Ethiopia). Later, it becomes a figure of speech deployed by the early church to provide Jewish believers in Jesus with an Old Testament handle for understanding the necessity of Jesus’ death and to identify Jesus as the Passover lamb’s antitype (another technical word): “Christ our passover has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7).

But such a figure—of an atoning sacrificial lamb that has thematic ties to the Jewish Passover—would not have connected with gentile believers (such as I) who had no grounding in or curiosity about or existential need to know the sacred scriptures of the Jews. Sure, the Jewish scriptures were God-breathed and useful for general instruction in doing good (2 Timothy 3:16). But for gentile believers, their “religion” was the resurrected Jesus, his teachings and spiritual presence, he being superior to any angel, any prophet, any Old Order religious structure or practice. They were listening to and learning from One whose wisdom was superior even to that of the great Jewish scholar, sage, and collector of wisdom sayings, King Solomon (Matthew 12:42).

And so I return to the observation with which I began this little series and that had recently startled me: that Jesus’ call to repent was not about demonstrating remorse over one’s wretchedness. Rather his call had everything to do with turning away from whatever had previously guided one’s life and turning to him and living into his idea of a New Order, one that is now and is to come.

Am I misinterpreting what’s there in the biblical text? I’m sure some would say that I am, and they may be right. Or maybe I’m simply building on an idea that I didn’t have when I started out. The dark, fearsome beast on the bike path (repent or perish) turned out to be a friendly (come to me, learn from me) shadow on a rock. [If this is your first stop in my four-part series, that last sentence refers back to my opening gambit in part one.] And speaking of “one,” one thing remains to be seen: whether and, if so, how all this idiosyncratic theologizing influences my poetizing.

[to be continued]

Since 1971 when I began taking Jesus seriously, a foundational word used by those from whom I was learning about him was “repent.” In Mark’s gospel (1:15), it is among the first words out of Jesus’ mouth: “The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news.” On my teachers lips, repentance was a deeply, even darkly earnest matter and, at times, forcefully called for.

I was taught this word meant that Jesus, being God incarnate, knew we are all sinners (“miserable offenders,” Book of Common Prayer), deserving of judgment and the fires of hell. It was haunting. And in order to escape condemnation, I had to humble myself before God: confess my sins, name them, and pledge to live a life in step with the moral norms of God revealed in the Ten Commandments. The good news in all this was that (a) Jesus had died the death that was justly mine, so now I could find new life and freedom through repentance and faith “at the foot of the cross,” and (b) the Holy Spirit would provide me the wherewithal to live a holy life.

And yet this morning, as I read slowly through Mark’s first chapter, I realized that, though personal “sins” played a huge role in the preaching of John the Baptizer (1:4-5), Jesus rarely broached the subject (for exceptions, see Mark 2:5 and John 8:3-11). His use of the word repent did not refer to turning from personal sins (never a bad idea), but implicated a far larger crisis and summoned listeners to turn to him. On the Baptizer’s lips, repent was rooted in Old Testament religion; for those who behaved in ways forbidden by Jewish scripture (think the Ten Commandments and the Holiness Code) or rabbinic tradition, getting right with God meant returning, by way of repenting and offering sacrifices, to the Mosaic and prophetic idea of righteous living. To his Old Order call to repent, John added a signature, symbolic mikvah, a public, open-air bath or immersion—a baptism.

For Jesus, the word repent anticipated a crisis far larger than simply being trapped in personal sinfulness (release from which is always a good idea).

His call for repentance pointed to a watershed moment not only in the history of Israel but in the history of planet Earth and humanity—a moment that hinged on what the divine Voice had said at Jesus’ baptism. Both Mark (1:11) and Luke (3:22) report the Voice as saying to Jesus, “You are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” This declaration was repeated later by the Voice at Jesus’ transfiguration (Mark 9:7), this time said for the benefit of the three disciples who were with him on the mountain: “This is my beloved son. Listen to him.”

The presence of Jesus, Creator’s beloved son, in human history is a unique, pivotal moment, and what matters is not who we are or where we’re from or how we’ve screwed up. What matters is this moment—“the kingdom of God is at hand”—and Jesus’ compassionate imperative that we turn to him—“repent and believe the good news” (1:15). And on his lips, good news refers wholly to him and his message. As well, it embraces (1) his life, suffering, and resurrection, (2) the establishment of a new, post-resurrection community, and (3) a future when, in dribs and drabs and all at once, Creator will make all things new. (I know, as cool as that number three sounds, it’s humanly impossible to imagine.)

Jesus’ most developed invitation to repent is found in Matthew 11:28-30:

	Come to me,

	all who are weary and burdened,

	and I will give you rest.

	Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,

	for I am gentle and lowly in heart,

	and you will find rest for your souls.

	For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

Come, learn, live. And this taught by one who was raised from the dead(?!!). For me, as a descendant of gentiles—one who, in my late teens, was an exhausted, messed up kid—Jesus’ invitation to turn to him for rest and to learn from him hit me existentially as intimate, generous, life affirming, and deeply compelling. You might say I was sufficiently messed up to be thrilled to throw my lot in with him.

[to be continued]

It’s easy, from a distance, to misinterpret what you see. Yesterday on a bike ride I saw a dark shape lying several hundred feet ahead on the right side of the bike path. As I drew closer I thought I saw it move, so slid left and picked up my pace. Turned out to be the shadow side of a large rock intended to slow riders down as they approach a narrow bridge. I could have sworn it was a critter.

The brain is amazing. The amygdala especially for how it watches out for us, setting off a fear response to alert us to possible or real danger, connecting memory—in this case, my past encounters with scary beasts—to the new situation. So I made a plan and, though it turned out to be unnecessary, began to implement it.

When it comes to the interpretation of sacred scripture, so much of how we see a text depends on how we’ve been instructed by the elders we were taught to respect and trust.

For the last decade, I have been attempting to receive the story of Jesus as though having had no prior instruction in how best to sort it out. No easy task, since I was raised in the Episcopal Church, renewed (“converted”) and rebaptised in my late teens, moved deeply by teachers associated with the Jesus Movement of the early 1970s, educated at an evangelical liberal arts college where I majored in sociology, and then schooled for ministry in a conservative Anglican seminary. Following all of that, I served for twenty-five years, in a range of capacities as an Episcopal priest preaching from the official lectionary.

But at age sixty-five, it occurred to me that, regarding spiritual things, I wanted to spend what time I have left zeroing in on what I hold to be the single most important thing—the life, teaching, and resurrection of Jesus—and receive it as though I were listening to him for the first time. I decided that, though the scholars of the church—liberal, centrist, and conservative—are smarter than I, I didn’t have the time or motivation to continue reading their wisdom (or folly). None of them were Jesus, so I focused on reading slowly the gospels of John, Mark, Matthew, and Luke (in that order), which mulberry bush I’ve been going ‘round and ‘round ever since.

And then this morning, while hanging out in the first chapter of Mark’s gospel, I saw something anew; what I’d been instructed was there in the text, in fact, wasn’t. And a scary beast quickly became only the shadow side of a rock.

(to be continued)

Which means he gets pissy about how it’s no longer the case that the new generation of poets reveres the work of their poet-elders. He remembers a time when senior poets were never overlooked for a conference’s featured readers, when journal editors championed the work of established poets and allowed only two or three newcomers into any one issue. He takes umbrage with those journals who use young, inexperienced students (cheap labor) as their first round of readers. No surprise, my friend is now among those senior, well-established poets, and he laments his fast approaching, untimely redundancy. I fear he’s becoming a grumpy old coot.

I get it, of course. I too have joined the company of the overlooked, but I’m trying not to obsess about the bell curve shape of my writing career, which peaked in the mid-90s and carried on into the mid-00s. Over that decade, poems appeared in big name journals, I won prizes for poems and a chapbook, and saw my first books find publishers. I created a signature program in creative writing for a prep school and taught poetry writing at two area universities. And then the decline began, which has felt a bit like the long ramp up to my peak, except in reverse. It’s true, my peak was nowhere near as high as my friend’s, nor as extended, but the shapes of our respective curves appear similarly belled. Much to his chagrin.

I wonder whether my poet friend has grasped sufficiently the two massive developments in America’s culture of poetry: the arrival of the computer age and the proliferation, throughout the country and world, of MFA programs for creative writing. Whereas until the late 1970s there were fewer than twenty such MFAs nationwide, the number has grown to over three hundred, with the bulk of the growth since the 1990s. Add to that the arrival of online submission apps and a wide array of digital journals and new prizes curated by young, ambitious editors who aim to push literary boundaries and laud emerging poets, and you’ve got conditions ideal for sidelining those with pre-digital lit cred.

American poetry culture ain’t what it was even twenty-five years ago, and my friend, seeing the difference, grieves. (The word “glut” comes to mind, and now, with AI making inroads into creative writing, “AI slop.” Submission guidelines now prohibit work created by or in cahoots with AI.) Maybe it’s liberating for poets to pass beyond the lit-darling stage (if they ever enjoyed one), beyond their respective literary peaks, and to keep writing anyway, making their idiosyncratic art, telling the truth slantwise and without rancor—without becoming grumpy old coots.

I’m no deep space physicist, but my understanding of the first Big Bang holds that in the earliest nanoseconds of the explosion, the “light” of it traveled far faster than 186,282 (+/–) miles per second, the speed of light. Then, after those nanoseconds, something (or Someone) slammed on the brakes, slowing light to the constant that made the formation of the universe possible, a formation that then took billions upon billions of years to bring into the shape we now recognize and can measure. And the universe is still becoming itself.

But what if the universe becoming itself requires that every little thing therein must proceed together, nothing anywhere dragging its heels? What if there’s a sentient, carbon-based life form on a minuscule planet in one of the universe’s billions of galaxies that’s not on board and so is holding up the works? What must Creator do to turn these wee beings around and get them back in step with the cosmic plan?

The fix required of Creator (1) an incarnation of divine grace and truth, (2) the delivery of wisdom for turning things around, and (3) an explosion of power that revealed the telos for all creation. A famous verse of Christian scripture—John 3:16—claims that this act of Creator was not one of judgment against the heel-draggers but one of love for them. And one that, in the resurrection of Creator’s incarnate Son, also revealed their telos and that of all created things.

In the infinitesimal earth event of Jesus’ resurrection, the transformational power (that will see to it that the whole universe becomes its fully realized self) burst instantaneously in the Son’s dead body—think Big Bang #2—from the center of each nucleus and cell to the hairs on his skin, and then stopped. Or, rather, was instantly decelerated. Someone (or something) slammed on the brakes, slowing the ineluctable transformation of the whole down to the speed of earth and human history (+/–). And so we see in the uniquely changed and raised body of Jesus the future quality of being that’s in store for all created things.

Yeah, I know. This is quite the metaphysical cartoon. But what if the universe is still becoming itself, as originally intended by Creator. What if, to fix earth-life, the incarnation was necessary? What if the endgame of Creator’s big fix was prefigured in the resurrected body of Jesus? What if there’s actually a place—or multiple places—for all of us, all creatures great and small, in the transformed created order?

As my spouse likes to say when I launch into such wild speculation, “It’s all too big to live inside of words.” So m’thinks there’s wisdom in applying, here and for now, the brakes on my enthusiasm.

The struggle began early in that gap year after I began reading the gospels and seeing in them a radical dimension I was never taught at Sunday school. Turns out the “good news” was not originally meant for affluent suburban preppies like me but for the poor and other “losers” in the confidence game of imperial capitalism. Authors and activists like John Perkins, Tom Skinner, Clarence Jordan, and Jim Wallace set forth a vision of the faith-life that was absent from the preaching of the Episcopalian churches I grew up in and the general evangelical subculture of the early 1970s.

What haunted me was what I perceived as a lack of room—in high society churchianity or lowbrow evangelicalism or right-on radicalism—for a privileged white kid like me whose one life ambition was to make good poems. As a newly “religious” late adolescent, my more-or-less acceptable career-path options included climbing the ecclesiastical ladder, joining an evangelistic organization, or becoming an inner city activist. And if I played it right, maybe I could combine all three and study to become a radical evangelical priest. So I went to seminary and was ordained in The Episcopal Church.

What I never heard from anyone along the way is what dawned on me yesterday, five decades beyond the recentering of my life on the Jesus of the gospels. Until yesterday, I had assumed when Jesus spoke of the works his followers would do—works like the ones he performed yet even greater (John 14:2): preaching good news to the poor, feeding the hungry, and working to bring healing to the infirm, justice for the oppressed—that he had these works in mind and these works only. Thus my struggle: Making poems (or fictions or plays) is nowhere on that list.

But then yesterday: For chief among Jesus’ works as the Sent One of God—and this is what occurred to me—was crafting prose poems and micro-fictions that resonated with truths about what he called “the kingdom of God”—truths about what it means to be fully human on planet earth and accountable to the Creator. In fact, the collated tables in the back of my New Testament list more prose poems and micro-fictions (labeled “parables”) than miracles. And yet no one I had listened to—in church, college, seminary, and beyond—ever included making poems, fictions, or plays as being among the works of Jesus. So naturally, creative writing was never on anyone’s list of works for his followers to do when he was gone.

I know this nagging, existential concern for doing things that get the thumbs-up from Jesus may seem bizarre. Perhaps even a tad neurotic. But for millions of ordinary folk around the world who have experienced the love of God in a Christian context, this desire to perpetuate the works of Jesus is a dream, a way to return love to the Creator for his love toward us.

So, to any and all who share this desire to return love to Creator and thrill to the daily challenge of writing creatively, GOOD NEWS: Poems and fictions were among the most frequent and important works of Jesus, and he would be (is!) delighted that we are attempting them, too. They are not secondary among his works, but absolutely primary—the gospels richly bear this out—so let’s not succumb to another minute of uncertainty and have at it, making, with the vocabularies available to us, such poems and fictions and plays as honor what it means to be fully human on planet earth and accountable to the Creator who, crazy as it sounds, knows us and loves us.

As for me? Better I come late to this freedom than never.

I remember sitting in a coffee shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, pre-9/11, and overhearing a conversation between two tweedy professorial types about something that sounded like physics, it being all mathematical and scientific. Between them on the table, next to their pastries and mugs of freshly brewed coffee, was a small orange box of the sort that might contain hazardous material. Two mysteries were afoot: the contents of the orange box and whatever on earth (or outer space) those two were talking about. Despite my own multiple degrees, their conversation was, for its level of siloed sophistication, utterly beyond me. And yet it did not make me feel stupid.

Rather than feel stupid, I suddenly felt an unexpected surge of deep gratitude. Gratitude that, at the next table over in this funky, upscale cafe, such brilliance was hobnobbing among us and likely in the process of solving one of the thornier problems of our day.

I wish the feeling had lasted longer. No sooner had it arrived that it was replaced by a chilling thought: What if they’re not good? What if they’re serving someone whose vain ambition regards us little people as expendable and our suffering as collateral damage? Try as I might, I could not get back to the simple gratitude of just moments before. The best I could do was figure that if their designs were nefarious, then certainly they would not be discussing them openly in a crowded Cambridge cafe.

One thing for sure, the two weren’t in the least concerned that I might be listening. Which makes their cryptic science chat very different than poets’ deliberately public-facing poems.

•

What does poetry offer us who are willing to listen?

So much depends upon “who” the “us” are. Are ”they” Great Books or Brit Lit scholars, perhaps amateur aficionados of the Western literary tradition? Well, certain kinds of poems can confirm them in their specialized knowledge by dropping all manner of allusions to the literature they love. The problem here is that this kind of poem often makes me feel if not stupid then very poorly read, and I imagine the cognizanti patting themselves on their backs. Yet I also know, because they’ve told me, that even my poems, that intentionally steer clear of highly specialized language (with a few ambitious exceptions), have confirmed some readers’ supposed inability to “get” and enjoy poetry.

But—and this is huge—there are scads of poems out there that offer far more than bafflement or intimidation.

In my own case, when, in the early 80s I was casting about for how to make poems in conversation with theology and faith, I happened upon Denise Levertov’s poem, “Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus.” And then, in the 90s, John Berryman’s poetic sequence, “Eleven Addresses to the Lord.” Though both are major poets who utilize language here and there that could be a stretch for a reader, neither aims, in these poems, at overwhelming their readers with specialized language throughout. Together they pointed the way forward for me as a writer. As well, in the 00s, when depressed after being laid off in the wake of the 2008 recession, it was Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 that in many ways saved my life. Mind you, I’m not a huge fan of Elizabethan literature, but his poem has a clarity and appeal that speaks across centuries.

On the receiving end of poetry, so many poems offer all kinds of comfort or confirmation, guidance or life-saving perspective. On the making end, poems offer poets a way of singing that is particular to their voices, a way to explore what it means and how it feels to be infinitesimal, sentient, carbon based lifeforms…, on a tiny yet glorious, sometimes life-threatening planet…, in an incomprehensibly vast, magnificent cosmos. And of course, there are poems, too, that make us weep or laugh out loud.

Any poet who sets out to write a poem to make others feel stupid, or keep inferiors at arms length, or bless the Muses that they’re not like their lessers, I’ve zero respect for, no matter their “art” or place in the poetry universe.

Such a poem is, IMHO, like an oil lamp—which may be quite spectacular—that has no or precious little oil.

I refer to the grand vision tucked into a tiny verse in Saint Paul’s letter to believers living in Rome: “For the creation awaits with eager expectation the revealing of the sons of God” (8:19). One translation has “waits on tiptoe” for it, which I’ve always liked. Bottom line, it’s a magnificent visionary image of anticipation, awaiting the consummation of Creator’s intention for the entire cosmos. Sadly, I have known of no happy cultural equivalent that mirrors the joyful moment of such a revelation or feeds my sense of anticipation for it.

Until now.

I’m sure most of us internet users have come across heartwarming social media clips or good news stories that make one’s eyes well up with happiness. We are saps, aren’t we? I am, anyway. And one particular type of clip gets me every time: the flash mob that transforms a shopping mall into a concert hall. Yesterday, it happened again, and as I sat there on my couch, all alone and on the verge of sobbing, it occurred to me: this is that!

This is what?

This is a picture of the revealing of the “sons” or children of God. There’s that one performer who starts playing her violin, an ordinary busker with her violin case open on the floor in front of her, a cross section of humanity passing by or lingering unobtrusively to enjoy the moment. Soon there’s a loose crowd attending to her performance. Which is when things starts to happen—other performers, heretofore present as fellow mall shoppers, break out their instruments and join the pioneer performer. The faces of children and adults begin to brighten with surprise, even recognition of what’s actually happening. No one sees the chamber choir descending the escalator, but when they begin singing, jaws drop, smiles become grins, tearducts being producing. Even as type this….

Good lord, I am a sap among saps.

Individually, each artist is a musician who has been working for years alone and in small groups to make such music as may transform the ordinary, mall-going experiences of people like their moms and dads, their neighbors, their friends and beloved others, even their enemies. Enter joy. Enter forgetting where you are or why you came there. And, the last note having sounded, enter wild hoots and extended applause.

Can you see it? The whole of creation overcome with joy at the revealing of Creator’s ordinary children? Can you hear it? The music, the gasps of surprise, the applause? And then you discover that you know the music, too, and join the moment, adding your joyful voice to the chorus of every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea—all together singing for all they’re worth. And is that high humming I hear from the vibrations of one-dimensional strings of energy? That low drone from the resonant throats of galaxies?

Heck, works for me.

First, I want to thank all 101 of you for your willingness to check in, from time to time, on “Poetry & Theology.” I am encouraged by your attention.

Second, the forest is burning, and there’s a man with a gun over there. Which kind of makes it difficult to stay focused on making poems and/or reflecting on the teaching (didache / di-da-kay) and power (dunamis) of a teacher from the first century. True, the Teacher was a poet, too, and partial to peacemaking, and his world was equally if not more burdened by the threat of imperial violence or empire-sanctioned violence, but that past is not our present. So how to be here now, in the thick of our burning moment—and then carry on in the spirit of the Teacher, in step with his didache?

And how to slow one’s dash from (or into) the conflict long enough to consider the beauty of the winter birds congregating around one’s feeder—or of a young man tenderly caring for his aging rescue dog? Yet how crucial, for sanity sake, to look away from the frenzy of the worsening world and settle one’s gaze, even for a minute, on the larger reality of an earth brimming with extraordinary vitality and wonder. A substack that helps me see such sights belongs to Alexander Verbeek, a European writer very cognizant of our conflagration: check out daybreaknotesandbeans.substack.com.

Today, that’s all I got.

Oh, yeah, there’s also what I read this morning in the Gospel of John about the aforementioned Teacher violating Jewish taboo by talking theology with a “half-breed” Samaritan woman and then healing the child of a desperate lackey of Herod Antipas—two stories of transgression and love. They helped.

More so when I write than when I read a poem, I fixate on its form. Not the taxonomic name given to the form or even the shape of its internal rhetorical strategy, but the typography—how the thing looks on the page. Before interrogating the thing, I size it up from a safe distance. Is it threatening? Does it seem welcoming? Or potentially overwhelming? Even when I read another’s poem, I don’t care initially about the thing’s author or title or if anything about it is famous or important. I simply ask, How does it look just sitting there? The poem as an object of perception. This is superficial, but I like to begin with considering how the thing occupies the space allotted to it.

Of course, the poem’s form, the fullness of it, cannot be measured by such a quick glance. Nor is its form limited to what is discernible through close reading and skilled scansion. (Such a limit feels a little like a kind of pedantry.) What my spouse says of God applies as well to poetic form: “It is all too big to live inside of words.” A poem’s truest form exists outside the poem’s cloister of words and lines and rhythms and figures of speech and whatever meanings may stroll inside its walls.

This is not to suggest, when encountering a poem, that scansion and close reading are unimportant. I am glad that, beginning in high school, my education included learning how to scan and follow a poem’s argument. My fiddling around with fourteen line poems stems from early study of the sonnet form and its rhetorical strategies. Likewise my occasional dallying with common meter, rhyme, and the ballad form. But before marshaling those good skills, my experience with the poem begins first with spying it on the page and noting the shape it assumes in my brain—where all visual stimuli imprint and pique a pre-rational response.

If poetic form begins with a glance and clarifies through careful attention, where does it reach its true fullness—it’s end? As important as a thorough analysis of what’s presented on the page certainly is, how does that differ from a thorough forensic examination of a corpse? Again, my spouse: “It is all too big to live inside of words.” In fact, poems do not live inside of words or books but inside of persons and families and cultures. Likewise poetic form lives in the attention of readers and how this attention, from first glance to falling in love, effects a kind of mystic incorporation of the poem and expansion of the soul that then shapes the life of the person, family, and culture.

When I was laid off, a casualty of the 2008-09 recession, I was depressed. Somehow Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 29,” which I did not recall ever reading, arrived into my visual field, and it rescued me. The taxonomic form of the poem was that of a standard sonnet—fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter, with the volta occurring in the ninth line, etc.—but the form it assumed in my soul was like a strong net let down into the turbulence, and, rolling into it, I was lifted to a whole new place, emotionally and spiritually. This is what I’m getting at when I think about poetic form. It is a thing “too big to live inside of words.”

For now I’m separating the new poems into three desktop folders that I’m treating as chapbooks: Erratica, Politica, and Leirotica. Obviously, I’m having fun with their dancing around “erotica,” implying the psycho-somatic appeal of all three attractors.

Yet not all the poems I’m drafting these days arise from these particular attractors. Case in point, this morning’s tanka:

	HVAC ON

	In the breathy space
	between off and off again,
	sunrise with snow.
	And to the south, ice crystals
        in the new day’s light—sun pillar!

Natural phenomena excite me. And the recent discovery of my lifelong Canadian citizenship. As well, theological thinking. Three horizons: surroundings, what moves inside my skin, and Mystery. What I find curious is that, twenty years ago, I very consciously adopted these three “horizons of simultaneous attention” for my strategy as I drafted the poems for the four Antrim House books that became Opening King David (Wipf & Stock, 2011). Now two decades on, I find I have been seduced unconsciously by particular attractors from each of these horizons. What to make of that?

My strategy now? Simply to note the curious nature of the case, and keep making poems. Even if I seem to be going ‘round and ‘round and ‘round the same three mulberry bushes, I intend to maintain momentum until I feel exhausted by it all. Or I get drawn off by an even more compelling attractor or two. We’ll see. I suspect it’s the nature of the artistic vocation: discipline + improvisation, commitment to this + openness to that.

(A shoutout to the app Splitwise for keeping track of expense sharing.)

Of course, highlights were many, but this is not a travel or food blog, so I’ll stay on topic: poetry and theology. First, the latter, since in Exeter and York my old friend and brilliant driver gave us his insider tours of the cathedrals where he had held significant posts: Canon Theologian in York and Dean in Exeter. As we followed his lead, I couldn’t shake the feeling that these cathedrals were gorgeous religious castles built by common poor folk to buttress and protect a worldly church hierarchy that ruled over its membership and, until the 20th century, collected mandatory tithes from those they ruled. It even seemed the cathedrals were in competition for which one had the most elaborate (read ridiculously ostentatious) bishop’s seat. To his credit, my friend was determined, even as he performed all the duties of a resident clergyman, to refocus cathedral business away from institutional maintenance alone and toward community relations, with a special concern for those struggling to survive and those far from being considered for sainthood.

If there’s one thing that characterized the ministry of Jesus (and should therefore define that of those who follow him) it was his preaching and being good news to the poor and suffering with whom he came in contact. The maintenance of cathedrals and other grand religious institutions threatens to scuttle this dominical priority. I’m sure my friend would insist his efforts to keep his congregations rightly focused were incomplete and frequently frustrated, but by my lights, he was leaning in the right direction. Jesus did not live and teach in order to establish a monarchial religion or religious political party or systematic theology. He came rather to call and motivate humanity to take up his cause: that, even in the face of deep difference and conflict, we love one another as he first loved us.

Which brings me to poetry and what I came away with from visiting William Wordsworth’s Lake District home, Dove Cottage, in the rural village of Grasmere. I preface what follows with a disclaimer of sorts: I was not an English major in college and, when I took my MFA in Writing, was regarded by my professors as an “educated nonspecialist.” Sure, I read a bit of the English Romantic poets in high school and loved the little of Coleridge I was assigned, especially his trippy “Kubla Khan.” But I did not learn back then what I learned on this trip: that one of Wordsworth’s principle aims was to make poems in step with the English Reformation’s commitment to do its Word-centered thing “in such a tongue as the people understandeth. [For] it is a thing plainly repugnant to [utilize (in worship)] a tongue not understanded of the people.” (Articles of Religion, Article XXIV)

Wordsworth did not write in a high diction for the academics of his day, but “in such a tongue as the people understandeth.” And by the people think the people in the pews, the common folk like those among whom he lived and worshipped in Grasmere. Yes, his diction was somewhat elevated, but never so much as to render it “for scholars only” and put it out of reach of his neighbors. Which aim puts me in mind of the poet Jesus whose spoken-word prose poems (think parables) had a similar aim: to communicate good things, with arresting wit, analogy, and metaphor, to common folk. Even to the unschooled and illiterate.

But so you may know that our big trip touched more than just my art and philosophy, I’ll mention that I also experienced an evening meal at The Gunton Arms, a pub on the edge of the expansive Gunton Hall deer park, that changed my life. Or at least, on account of the mind-blowingly delicious venison sausage—made from a culled member of the Gunton herd and grilled over an open fire in an 18th century walk-in fireplace—that has spoiled me forever. Seriously, I may never eat any other sausage ever again. Full stop.

Every acceptance by a journal is an encouragement to keep writing. Competition is keen. And to be solicited for a poem? Wow. It is thrilling to get noticed, but the point – the joy – is in making the poems, whether they get picked up or not. And so I’m on to the next one, still aiming, as I began in the late Sixties, to make a good poem.

Hope you enjoy the poem…, and maybe even buy the book 🙂. Cheers!

Funny aside, when beginning with a Creator, one’s encounter with the cosmos and the particulars thereof sets up a possible encounter with the Creator—as may be inferred from Saint Paul’s language in his epistle to the Ephesians: the Creator being “over all, through all, and in all” (4:6), the one who “fills everything in every way” (1:23), filling, yes, “the whole kit and caboodle” (4:10 and obviously, my paraphrase).

Not that every or any encounter with Creator will be recognized as such. Normally, what is experienced in such encounters is, first, creational awe or fear or feeling overwhelmed. More often than not we simply blow right by such encounters, numb to them because they are, in fact, constituent of our daily comings and goings on planet Earth. But were we to slow down and pay closer attention to where we are (“consider the lilies”)—attention being a tell of love for Creator and all that is loved by Creator—our daily encounters with the Creator might become more immediately felt and known than realized upon reflection.

But whether we come by this knowing of Creator immediately or upon reflection, it doesn’t really matter. Saint John quotes Jesus as having said that this quality of knowing is what’s meant by the biblical term “eternal life” (John 17:3). So either way, it’s a very cool thing and the reason Creator commissioned Jesus in the first place (John 3:16).

Granted, you may not buy into all of this specifically Christian stuff. I mention it because it’s how I came to welcome the worldview of a Creator whose word called the cosmos into being (John 1:1-3) and sustains its integrity over time (Hebrews 1:3), and who is Immanuel, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23) and for us, and who is making and will, one day, make every broken thing new (Revelation 21:1-5).

Needless to say, my believing all of this has changed my relationship with my materials, from the paper I use, to the language I’ve inherited, to the reasons I write.

•

These days, the poems I aspire to write incorporate what I found in the wonderful little book, The Necessary Poetics of Atheism (essays and poems by Martín Espada, Lauren Marie Schmidt, and J. D. Schraffenberger).

In its foreword, philosopher Andrew Sneddon calls for making poems that begin with “a way of speaking of the world and of what matters in it that eschews the religiously weighted vocabulary (and concerns, and metaphors, and habits, and so on) and that instead retrains [a] the ear to attend to our fragility and temporality and [b] the tongue to speak of truths, both hard and beautiful, instead of vain hopes and empty fears.” Why do I love this? Because it is the common ground we all occupy, before any religious or philosophical interpretation.

As well, it’s analogous to the worldview I wake up with every morning: this is all there is, and I need to pee. By the time I sit down to read and write—say, between 5:30 and 6:00—and as I nurture first coffee, the glorious peace of the hour (that’s often hung with a garland of birdsong) tips me toward gratitude or praise or an awareness of being upheld, surrounded by more than condo walls and the world beyond our windows.

True, I have a daily process than includes reading and journaling through the gospels. But some (if not many) mornings my felt experience of that ritual is just that, ritual, and I come to it not because I’m animated by lively faith but simply because it’s what I’ve been doing for years—along with making first coffee and taking my blood pressure pill. So it’s not the ritual that sparks my morning by morning “conversion” to theism. It is, rather, a grace that feels more analogous to stepping daily from a glorious, thickly canopied forest, with its diverse critters and stunning erratics, into a broad, lake-side meadow with a view of the bright sky above, a different set of birds, and the horizon beyond.

This has become the rhetorical shape I’m after in my new poems: a movement, be it subtle or sudden, from delighting in “the world and what matters in it”—with language focused on the “hard and beautiful” and free of religious jargon—to intuiting the “something more" which may very well lead to language having a spiritual or overtly religious character. The aim is to make poems that assume the shape of my morning progress toward full consciousness, from bleary-eyed, happy-to-be-here numbness to renewed faith and the seeing that accompanies it.

One might argue that this is the rhetorical shape of a sonnet, with its turn about two-thirds in. Or that of a meditative poem. For me, it’s simply the shape of waking up.

Though sometimes, in early morning, I leap straight into reading or writing or following journalistic bunnies down newsy rabbit holes, there have been other mornings when I begin with stillness or with a brief liturgy that directs me toward stillness. Here are two such forms that I cobbled together a few years ago (and occasionally revise). They’ve been helpful.

1.

REMEMBER:   Creator Abba says of Jesus, 
                          “This is my son, whom I love. Listen to him. 
                                      (Mark 9:7)

BE STILL

PRAY:   Jesus teaches his friends to pray:

	Abba, your name is our treasure.
	Extend your reign throughout the earth.
	Give us the bread we need for today.
	Forgive us our hurtful folly
	and help us forgive all who hurt us.
	In our times of trial, 
	lead us from temptation 
	into the Way of wisdom and joy.

		(Luke 11:2-4, paraphrased)

REMEMBER:   Jesus says, “Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your soul. For my yoke is easy and my burden light.” 
		(Matthew 11:28-30)

BE STILL

PRAY:   Creator Ruah, move among us whom you have made and, by grace, set free. You, divine gift, paraclete, living water, oil of our anointing, fire of charity – you, promise of the Father, sevenfold spirit of God, fill us with your love, quicken our senses, inspire our service. Vulnerable as we are, defend us with your power; drive back the enemy, and grant us peace. With you in us as arbiter and guide, may we persevere along the Way and, by your enabling, hear the Son’s voice and know the Father, ever trusting you, Spirit of grace and truth.

		(ascribed to Rabanus Maurus, died AD 856; translated literally from the Latin at hymnsofthefaith.study; modified, 2020.)

BE STILL


2.

REMEMBER:   Mary says of Jesus, “Do whatever he tells you.” 
		                      (John 2:5)

BE STILL

PRAY:   

        Direct us, Risen Lord, in all our doings with your sustaining word, and comfort us by your Spirit; that in all our works begun, continued, and ended in you, we may honor your name and, by your mercy, live into the fullness of God; this for the praise of your glory and the perfection of our joy.

		(adapted from “A Prayer for Guidance,” BCP)

REMEMBER:   James writes, “If you lack wisdom, ask God who gives generously 			to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.” 
		(James 1:5, personalized)

BE STILL

PRAY:   
        Creator Abba, I offer my body, my life to you. As fish cannot comprehend water, I am blind to my conformity to the pattern of this world. Have mercy on me. By your grace, renew my mind that I may recognize the world’s pattern and understand its hold on us; that I may turn from it, and conform rather to the pattern of your Son; that I may see and be able to test and approve what is your good, pleasing, and perfect will—so that I may live wisely, love deeply, and create well in step with your Word and Spirit; for yours is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever!

BE STILL

In a recent Substack post about poetry, the author made what he thought was a convincing argument for the superiority of poetry shaped according to European forms of rhymed, metrical verse. Without denying the best of that tradition (I’d be a fool so to do) or how easily one can become enamored of its many excellences, I felt, nonetheless, that the author was simply justifying his druthers, his taste in hymns (so to speak). Which would have been perfectly fine, of course, had he been a smidge more humble, more willing to acknowledge, without condescension, the existence of excellent poetries that haven’t any interest in conforming to a European verse tradition. Why would they?

(I pick on Europe because I am thusly descended, with family on my father’s side here in North America since 1633. No doubt there are other non-European examples of such cultural condescension that could be cited.)

There’s been a tendency in European cultural history, as Europeans have come into contact with other cultures and their traditions, to make over those traditions and folkways in the European image and likeness. E.g., with peoples who like to sing, the Europeans have banned the peoples’ traditional instruments, rhythms, languages, and singing styles, replacing these with what was assumed to be superior. Often it was European Christian missionaries who took the lead in this effort; rather than aim at mutual sharing and learning from the best of each tradition to grow in cultural expression, Europeans shut the other down and foisted their way on the “inferiors,” ushering them into “civilization.”

As with music and hymns, so historically with poetry. The most brilliant example of this is the European Christian tradition of turning the biblical psalms into metrical verse so they may be sung by a European choir or congregation. I am not immune to the appeal of such familiarization; I do love the 1868 English hymn version of the Welsh iteration of Psalm 23, “The King of love my Shepherd is,” set to the ancient Irish melody, St. Columba. But what was wrong with the way Jewish congregations had been singing those psalms for millennia? Would not Christians have been edified had they bothered to add to their worship a bit of psalm-singing in an unfamiliar style? How might such learning have affected, for the best, the creativity of European musicians, poets, and other artists? But rather than expand the soul of Christianity, the European church, in its music, poetry, and visual art, remained for centuries bound to the assumed superiority of the European cultural heritage.

And speaking of the biblical psalms, does the author of the aforementioned Substack post actually believe that European metrical verse is superior to Hebrew poetry, perhaps even to all other poetries of the world, ancient and contemporary? Though I truly hope this is not the case, the tone of his post did suggest as much. Had the author been able to edit out the arrogance (perhaps a cover for feeling undervalued by free verse and experimental poetry elites) and merely extol the excellences of his preferred tradition, the article would stand as a reasonable, even persuasive appeal to those of other poetic traditions to “taste and see”—and perhaps try their hand at making poems in a different, even formal European way.