It was the first week of my marriage. We were honeymooning in redwood country because that’s where Jonathan grew up, and I’d always longed to see the trees. As a child in Louisiana and North Carolina I’d walked in quiet pine forests carpeted by decades of their needle-leaves, and when I think of home, I remember the smell of sunlight on pine.

Still, those forests did not prepare me for the redwoods, which John Steinbeck calls “ambassadors of another time.” To walk into a redwood grove is to walk into a forgotten age of the earth, when the world was much larger, palpably animated with a strange magic called life. They say a medieval forest would tower above its modern offspring. Young redwoods feel medieval. The old ones are prehistory’s giants, columns holding earth under sky. If you saw a knight or a dinosaur beneath a redwood, you wouldn’t be at all surprised.

We drove down to Founders Grove for our first short hike. It’s a friendly grove and makes for an easy introduction to the living myth. We parked our little rental car, and at first I was afraid there were too many families with rowdy young children for me to have the mystical experience I’d come for. But while a cathedral amplifies noise, a redwood grove absorbs sound like incense into air.

It was a warm day. We exited the car, and the earthy smell of sunlight on red dirt and red trunks was deep in my lungs as we walked. Children were shouting, laughing, but the trees caught the noise and muffled it almost lovingly. The children belonged there. We were all children, standing beneath a sky held far from us. The earth was our home, and there were wild things in the air, angels and demons, perhaps, far away.

Redwood trees grow a few hundred feet tall. In a building that would be around 30-35 stories, significantly taller than most of the buildings downtown where I live. American cities are full of odd noises and feel both young and cynical, life and filth and sterility blended together. But redwoods, there on our western shore, move slowly and slow time down. Beneath them the earth feels deep like a well, and between their branches, the sky steps down in golden light.

When John Muir went to the California coast, he said that it was no wonder the hills and groves were God’s first temples.

Sequoia Sempervirens

The Online Etymology Dictionary, one of the best online resources for a poet or any writer, tells us this about the word sequoia:

It’s one of my favorite stories in taxonomy. The naming of the redwood after the half-historical, half-legendary figure Sequoya has puzzled scientists for a while because, they say, it makes little sense. I suspect Endlicher had some poetry in him, as everyone does when they encounter real majesty.

If you listen, the redwoods seem to be speaking to each other and to mountain and sky and God in a language you can almost understand.

Sempervirens simply means evergreen, semper, “always, forever, once for all,” and virens, from virere, “to be green.” By connotation, the conjugants and derivatives of virere also have to do with flourishing and youthful vigor.

Language that is always green. Words that forever flourish. Vigor, once for all.

The redwood is one of those trees that belongs to the place where it grows. More specifically, it belongs to foggy, mountainous coasts. This is what the University of California tells us about the redwood tree’s reliance on the coastal region of California, where it grows in a 30-mile corridor:

Redwood trees are fed by fog. Isn’t that one of the most marvelous things you’ve ever heard?

In their canopy high in the air, watered by fog, redwood trees can create their own ecosystem of living soil. When their leaves fall they often don’t reach the ground but decay there in the sky. Ferns and huckleberry bushes can grow in the soil of the canopy, and salamanders and voles feed on the insects that help decompose the leaves. In their canopies, hundreds of feet from their roots, they recreate the earth in the sky.

Redwoods feed the fog as well. They release a range of chemicals called terpenes. Pinene, the most prominent, is responsible for that classic conifer scent, as the name indicates; the trees also produce limonene, myrcene, and terpinolene, which add citrus, musk, and herbal layers for your nose to uncover. The terpenes do several things for the trees, including protecting them against fungus, but perhaps most interestingly, they condense the moisture that’s carried on the wind from the ocean and literally form fog and clouds, and thus a slow trickling rain, to water the redwood tree’s roots.

Many people know that the world’s largest tree is a redwood called Hyperion. Could they have chosen a better fitting name? Hyperion was a Titan, one of that race of gods fathered by Uranus, lord of sky, fog, and rain, and mothered by Gaia, the earth.

When you stand in the midst of a redwood fog, it seems Uranus himself or some other god made the trees for his own special purposes. They are enchanting. The fog tells you that strange other worlds coincide with our own, the redwood standing in between.

I said that the Founders Grove was a friendly place make your introduction to redwoods, and it is. Days later we drove north to Redwood National Park. There the ocean rolls over the harsh slope of the beach in lethal waves. Gray ocean, gray sky, and trees so deeply green you think you’ve never really seen the color before.

I’ve only been to the park once and have no photos of it. Pictures were far from my mind. It would have been like raising your phone up during mass.

We came across a herd of elk grazing in an open meadow, and I felt how animal I was beside them. They had come down from the mountain slopes, from beneath the green silence, to eat the late summer grasses that could only grow under a more open sky. How strange it is, I thought, all the curious ways that life exists. Green and brown, young and old, marvelous and dangerous. And above all, gratuitous.

Any writer will tell you those are silly questions. The Chronicles of Narnia certainly would not exist without C. S. Lewis, but he is not his work. Neither was he content to go on existing without sitting down and beginning, “Once there were four children….” Jack fell in love with Lucy and with Narnia and with Aslan, and so he wrote the book, and it would be unmannerly to say, “Well, I know Jack, so why bother with those things he loved enough to write into being?”

You see the thinness of my metaphor, of course. I confess I don’t think it a metaphor at all, merely the truth. Pseudo-Dionysius wrote that God was beguiled by love and so created his cosmos.

Here, many Christians who do their dutiful best to believe in a staid, tame God will properly shudder and shake their heads and go on speaking about divine simplicity and about a God without emotions and about goodness which is predicated not at all upon God’s character but solely on his commands. Many people are Christians because they seem to think God says it is right to be one, and that is all.

Yet our Holy Scriptures do not speak of a cold, distant god, but of a Lover romancing his beloved. In Genesis he cries “Tov!”, crafting five-petaled daisies in chains of thousands because he delights in each, cajoling the sun to rise each morning because he exults in vigor displayed in majesty. In the Bible’s poetry he whispers in our ear, “Come live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove.” In history and in prophecy he returns triumphally to put his land and his home to rights and to slay all his bride’s unworthy suitors.

His goodness is adorned with his beauty so that we will long for him as he yearns for us.

Though sometime corrupted with darkness and our sin, creation yet remains an epic and a love poem penned by a divine Lover. But it is not at all a jumble of esoteric mumblings that are to be read out of themselves, meaning wearing the unlikely clothes of matter. God created daisies because he likes daisies, beetles because he likes beetles, people because he likes people.

Likes is too weak a word for a passionate God, but the limp language is more comfortable for our watered-down sensibilities. If I were to say to you that God is sent by himself into transports of ecstasy, moving away from himself as he is beguiled by love in order to create every individual thing, and if I were to say that we, if we are to be perfect as he is perfect, ought to respond with such ecstasy over anything which has the good grace to exist—well, language fails, and the mind boggles.

This brings us to my new project.

The Quiddity Journals will be nothing more than an effort to pay attention to those things that God found worth his attention. To call a thing by its name and to see it participating in the logos of existence. So they are also intended as a spiritual exercise, an effort to move away from myself toward the good of something other—the best spiritual exercise of all, which is to fall in love. God did it, you know.

The first Quiddity Journal, which will come out this week or next, is dedicated to an old favorite of mine, the redwood tree. Afterwards I have a few guest posts lined up. Regular posts from guests is one of my goals. Share with me what you love, and help me to love more and to love better!

I’m more than willing to entertain suggestions for topics, by which I mean things. You’ll get the idea, or see what sort of thing I mean, rather, as this goes on. I do reserve the right to say, “I don’t think I could do this thing justice.” However, if you could do the thing justice, by all means, tell me!

A last word, to reiterate what has been said: The Quiddity Journals are not about worshiping things, only loving them. They are about what God saw fit to create, and some things too that we as sub-creators have brought into the world. The curse we perpetuate is a lack of love. Meanwhile, God continues to hold the world in existence, for reasons best known to himself, but not entirely unknowable by his children.

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.

Today I bring to you a swan poem. It’s a ballad-form retelling of an Irish fairytale, The Children of Lir (or Lear). King Lear’s first wife Aoibh, whose name is pronounced just like Eve, dies in childbirth, and his jealous second wife transforms his children into swans. After long lives wandering as swans, the children come to Inishglora, where they hear bells tolling for matins. They sing a song of the sidhe (“shee”) with the tolling bells and are found by St. Mochoemoc, whose name I’ve no idea how to pronounce, and under his protection their feathers fall away, revealing three very old men and a very old woman. St. Mochoemoc baptizes Aoibh’s children and buries them not long after.

Animal transformations happen often in fairytales for various reasons; swan transformations seem particularly associated with suffering and sorrow. I find it interesting that swans are beasts, but beasts that carry themselves with such elegance that we have linked them with the beauty of dignified suffering.

Well, here is a poem about all of that. It first appeared in back in 2024 as the second or third poem I’d ever had published, but since then it’s been totally reconstructed because I felt the story behind the poem needed to be worked into the poem itself more. And probably also because writers never know when to let a thing rest. Below is the newer version.

Enjoy, children of Aoibh.

Aoibh’s Children in Expectation 

At Inishglora by the sea 
   four children flew to die. 
The grey waves hush and beehives hum 
   for them a lullaby. 

Held in a silver chain, they cry 
   their swan tears to the sea;
they’ve lost their father-king on this
   tide of eternity. 

The Castle Whitefield’s fallen down.
   It is their curse to bear
their wings without a dwelling-place
   over the current air. 

For though the swan-road takes you far
   it cannot take you home.
They watch the sea-long centuries roll
   feather and ocean foam.

Let the unhappy children cry, 
   for none of us can make 
our beast-hearts boy or girl again; 
   and let the breakers break. 

Swan wing, wave fall, and beehive hum. 
   Man’s ruptured dignity 
finds simple solace in the low 
   sweet music of the sidhe. 

Can Aoibh’s unhappy children know
   that death will make them whole?
At Inishglora of the saints,
   someday, will a bell toll? 

This is just one of many lessons I learned through my MFA program with the University of St. Thomas, Houston. This program is an oddity and wonder. Several years ago, our chief conspirator (Cullen Foundation Chair, ) was bethinking himself of an MFA program focused on apprenticeship in craft, both with living and dead masters. Did such a program exist? Where could he send students who asked after such a program? Necessity mothered as she usually does, and he and Joshua Hren (fiction) founded an MFA program after their own hearts. Two more faculty joined around the time I became a student, the inimitable and Ryan Wilson, and has taught one of our poetry workshops. The program of course was small when it began, but now classes must be purposefully kept on the smaller side to continue fostering real growth and community. As it’s online and becoming increasingly well-known, people from all over the country, and some even outside it, are studying under James and Joshua.

I won’t go into all the logistics of the program, but know that it’s changing the writing culture of this country, especially its poetry. The vision of the program is oriented around Truth, Goodness, and Beauty as ways to know God; transformative encounters with texts; and dedication to writing as an artistic craft. At UST we turn out anti-Gnostics: the material of your craft, the medium of your art, is meaningful, and its meaning is not incidental. All art is revelatory. Our role as artists is a reflection, through a glass darkly, of God as Creator. His creation reveals himself; similarly, even in its darkest moments, art reveals beauty, drawing the soul toward him who is Beautiful.

Each summer students and professors from the program gather for an (optional) eleven-day residency and writer’s institute in Houston, and I concluded my required credits with the residency a week ago. Each morning we gathered for seminar, and each evening we attended a reading from a great writer. This year’s speakers included , Ron Hansen, , and Kevin Hart, to name just a few. In the afternoon the fiction writers and poets divided for their separate workshops. For ours, Ryan Wilson invited Chris Childers, Matthew Buckley Smith, Catherine Tufariello, and Brian Brodeur to give a reading and take questions from us for the first hour; on alternate days he lectured to us about the importance of loving the things of this world and paying attention to them, rather than asking the world to pay attention to us.

It would be remiss not to speak about the friendships I’ve made through the program, for friendships are the sweetest form of apprenticeship, in which we lovingly forge each other. was perhaps the first good friend I made through the program; he and his wife even drove up to my wedding two years ago. Chris loves sonnets and has made me love sonnets more, and his devotional, lectio-divina style has often inspired me. Then there is , one of the most encouraging people I’ve ever met, whose ability to turn life’s griefs into poignant lyrics always astounds me. At residency I got to meet , and in between frolicking in the rain and singing “How Great Thou Art” under the moon, we discussed everything from God’s love of daisies as daisies to Jane Kenyon to the dark night of the soul. Then there is , who has taught me more about God than I could ever teach him

These are just a few of my kindred spirits and bosom friends. I hate to stop there, but I don’t suppose you came here to read an encomium for everyone I’ve ever loved.

Obviously I’d encourage anyone interested to apply to the program, but more than that, seek out those people in your life who are good for you and for your writing, and read more of those great writers you love. You don’t need an MFA program to pay attention to and to study people. Write out poems by hand and memorize them. Go get coffee with a friend. Take a walk and listen to what the birds say. Make yourself a student of life. It’s all a kind of Nicomachean ethics. Your soul is being forged, and you are imitating other writers, one way or another. Live purposefully, and you will find that golden world where beauty comes from and carry her images back to us.

I’ll conclude with a poem from another friend, whose criticism and sound advice I could always rely on, and whose mustache puts all other men to shame. Here is “Memorabilia” by , written in double-dactyls, of all the insane unlikely metrics to choose from.

May your mentorships and friendships be as filled with beauty, laughter, and good books as mine have.

My father’s childhood couldn’t have been more different from the one he gave me. Life dealt him about the worst hand it could. But my father has always been a fighter, and he has fought for the goodness he wanted to see in the world, and he has made it a better and more beautiful place. That’s as much as can be said for anyone.

This poem isn’t explicitly religious, and maybe it’s a bit more angsty than my usual content. It’s also a slightly longer blank verse poem. Still, I hope you’ll give it a read. My father paved the way for peace, and this poem was written to help explain what that has meant to me.

Being a father means carving out a home on this earth. The world is full of violence and evil; fathers make goodness possible for the rest of us. And even if they don’t write it themselves, they are the ones who make room in this violent world for poetry.

I love you, Dad. Thank you for everything.

Among the Powers of the Earth
Ft. Sill, Oklahoma

Summer had leased to us an easier month
while paintbrush grew along the interstate, 
until a too-warm day, when southern winds 
rose up to chase the sun out from the west. 
That afternoon I’d driven from the city
between low cattle-dotted hills, turned green
with late-sent rain, and swathes of oak-crossed plains. 
Tuesdays I drive an hour just to speak 
to kids on the significance of art, 
beauty and other nonsense that they tell me 
is just a tool that’s funded by some vague
elite to set the terms for peace for us. 
The kids have asked me how I can believe 
the propaganda still, and little do they know 
my graduate classes ask the same of me.
And what do I know—living with my parents 
through breaks and holidays in Oklahoma, 
backwater place the wider world ignores.
But as I drove, I thought, if they would watch
the sunshine and the wind-fall wavering 
across the liquid sweetgrass, they would see, 
and I would not be troubled to explain. 

When I was young, my father was deployed 
for eighteen months. The towers had fallen five years 
before—you know the story. When he returned, he brought 
a picture of a girl with bangs like mine, 
but black as coal, of course, rather than blonde. 
She clutched a soda, smiling up at him. 
The soldiers always brought along the food
young mothers here don’t let into their houses,
the trashy stuff you crave in no-man’s land,
and village children ran beside their tanks 
laughing to see the men with chips and guns. 
My father noticed her, gave her the Sprite 
he drank to calm his stomach while they drove. 
His unit left—only an hour passed—
the men who championed her country came. 
The village splinters lie beneath the sand.
The mighty neither look on nor despair, 
and time spills over dunes without much thought.

I think of her each summer, when we go
into July’s damp evening heat to watch 
the sky. My father came home and was sent
to a command position at Ft. Polk, 
that place where no one ever wants to go—
all forestry or swampy bayou land, 
mosquitoes longer than a grown man’s thumbnail. 
But there the summer’s always wet enough
for fireworks that take up half the sky
in memory of those old terms for peace
set in a hot July. Cicadas shrieked
their romance over limbs of steaming pines,
and evening slid across the neighborhood
in light as blue as if we’d gathered down
beneath the surface of a swimming pool. 
The kids chased swarms of jewel-bright dragonflies 
across our lawns, thinking that we could catch
them with our hands, while fathers congregated 
in circles to discuss their TDY, 
a rattlesnake that lost its head last week, 
their 9mil glocks, and .22s they bought 
to teach us how to shoot down at the range. 
We ate our chips and soda and sat down 
on tattered lawn chairs—some brave kids on grass, 
which rustled with wolf spiders all night long.
My father always passed me earplugs then.
He didn’t like to hear the fireworks either;
once, he had been too close—an IED 
had blown up just behind them on the road.
Yet he stood there, unbothered as a soldier. 
I’d only seen him shaken when he held 
that picture of the girl with coal-black bangs. 

And he’s remained the same for twenty years, 
though now I’m old enough to tell these kids,
whose parents are not keen to deal with them 
all summer long, about unlikely things 
like art and love—and yet not old enough 
to teach them what I mean, or to explain. 
	 
That day, after I’d made my long drive home,
I tried revising poems distractedly
while images of yellow sunlight stuck
like backlit cobwebs in my mind. The house 
began to darken as grey evening came, 
and thunder shook the nearby hills and plains. 
In Oklahoma, when a summer night 
breaks with a violence, we check our phones 
to see what size they say the hail will be,
or if the radar’s purling to the west. 
That day, it said “severe,” like every storm, 
and I ignored the churning yellow front, 
until the power sputtered, and then failed,
just as a warning came for Cooperton.  

Our neighborhood went out to watch the sky. 
I stood behind my father, who raised up 
his hand to point out dropping walls of cloud.                        
Behind the door, our Pyrenees was howling; 
my mother didn’t think to quiet her. 
She and my brothers watched my father’s hands
leveled from cloud to cloud, and as that sky
hung low across his shoulders, he said to us
that we must feel the thunder still belongs 
to violence too divine for us to know. 
And in that moment, I began to think 
I understood, and went inside to scratch 
lines down within the smoking candlelight
and by the drumming rain. Tomorrow, all
the paintbrush would be lain across the road,
and soda cans crushed sideways in the mud
of lawns, and wet green oak leaves plastering
the car, the house, the fence. And Cooperton,
already a forgotten place to those 
who sit among the powers of the earth,
would be laid down into the thick red clay 
from which it came. But if my students saw, 
then I would not be troubled to explain
on Tuesdays in July what beauty means 
to us who are left in the wake of peace. 

My thanks to David Gosselin and ; this poem was originally published in The New Lyre’s Spring/Summer 2025 issue.

“The best thing you can do for you fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is—not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself.” George MacDonald, “The Fantastic Imagination”

Have you ever wondered what makes a poet? I’m only twenty-five but feel due for a little retrospection and reminiscence. Forgive me.

My story is unextraordinary. I’ve toyed with rhymes and words since I was about five and in kindergarten, but most children with some exposure to books and nursery rhymes do so. I’ve come to much the same conclusion as Dean Young: most of us are born with a poetic impulse that is educated out of us. A real poetic education is either a preservation or a recovery of that impulse out of our childhoods.

Here’s the theory behind that thesis. In Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (which I’ve only read pieces of, having been a girl of very little brain lately), Jacques Maritain notes of the intellect and imagination together, “Poetry obliges us to consider the intellectual both in its secret wellsprings inside the human soul and as functioning in a nonrational (I do not say antirational) or nonlogical way.” Something in the act of poetry engages those parts of the mind and soul which lie beneath surface consciousness. That’s probably why poets like Yeats had such success (at times) with automatic writing, and why there’s something to Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” But as Maritain states, the nonrational is not antirational. The deep subconscious is organized around aesthetic impulses cultivated by childhood and religion, and when powerful feelings overflow from an aesthetic impulse, they are guided into poetry by the rational intellect’s imposition of form.

In other words, when a poet senses something beautiful, he doesn’t simply vent his emotions onto the page. That’s journaling, a healthy and constructive exercise, but an exercise that is not quite art. A poet’s sense of beauty could also be called a sense of harmony, an ability to look into the disparate things of this world and to hear or feel what resonates between them. Then he tries, very purposefully, to bring language into harmony with that beauty.

But how does a person cultivate that sense of harmony or beauty out of their childhood wonder? Now I can only speak from my own experience and from it point toward that which seems to be universal among poets and artists.

The making of a poet begins, as I’ve mentioned, in childhood. Some impulse guides us to the discovery of harmony and beauty, an impulse formed through experiences we might not even remember. When I was a baby and would wake throughout the night, my father took me in his arms so my mother could sleep and carried me outside to look at the stars, softly murmuring a ditty about walking in the night to see what we could see. Somehow those moments I don’t consciously remember stayed with me through my childhood and into my adult years. We were an Army family, so we moved frequently. The stars went with us. At night I would stand on a new front lawn, searching for Orion’s belt and bow, and when I found it I knew that some beautiful things could follow you even across oceans.

I’ve always loved patterns, particularly patterns that vary slightly across repetitions while maintaining their integrity. Mozart is my ecstasy. Around four years old, I discovered that letters formed discernible patterns and taught myself to read with Bible stories and Dr. Seuss. Before I entered second grade I attended public school; between it and very Protestant post chapels, I was exposed to hymns and to the occasional halfway-rendered nursery rhyme. It was enough to spark my imagination. My games were always stories enacted in multiple-part dramas, and my friends would chant the songs I made up while we tidied the play area at the end of the day.

In 2008, my parents pulled me out of public school for the usual reasons, and an otherwise staid curriculum1 introduced me to something intoxicating. Suddenly a good ten or fifteen minutes of my day was dedicated to the memorization of poetry.

The poems I memorized were delightful. Some were deceptively sweet, like Blake’s “Little Lamb who made thee?”, and some were pulled from unlikely sources to support the school’s fundamentalist narrative—“I never spoke with God/ Nor visited in heaven,/ Yet certain am I of the spot/ As if the chart were given”.2 Still, I delighted in this new-to-me discovery that a person could play with words in such a way, arrange them to produce all manner of delicious sounds on the tongue and wild emotions in the heart. “The gingham dog and the calico cat/ Side by side on the table sat” springs to mind to this day whenever I see a clock in chimney piece and makes me laugh, and I can’t begin to tell you what good company Longfellow is of a rainy day.

I knew nothing about iambs or anapests and wouldn’t until college, but around third or fourth grade I began writing my own very silly attempts at poetry. Well, silly in that I’d be ashamed if anyone ever read them, but crucial in my life nonetheless. What strikes me if I think back on those attempts is a strong sense of rhythm (most of them sustained a meter, that I consciously knew nothing about, for at least half the poem before dissolving) and a surprising dedication to metaphor.

Now, thinking back on these disjointed impressions and memories, I suspect that most children have an instinctual love of the ideas I’ve mentioned, pattern and sound and metaphor. A child finds every day filled with the same images, sounds, and patterns, but he finds them fresh, like a young god stepping out from eternity into time again and again: “Life is a continual progress to a child. He does not go over old things in old ways; his joy is to go on.”3 With the good gifts of mimicry in his mind, mouth, and hands, he indulges in wonders at every turn. Sadly, the child is often educated out of his natural love and delight, educated out of wonder.

Thankfully enough poets seem to survive that process of education anyway.

Well, I’ve offered you a string of impressions and musings, but while the above is necessary to make a poet, it isn’t quite sufficient. To all this must be added a creative impulse.

The creative or poetic impulse begins well before putting words onto a page. It came before Bach sat down at the organ, before Turner picked up his watercolors, before God spoke into the dark, “Let there be light.” The impulse begins with the apprehension of some deeply felt, inaudible harmony, and it urges the artist to fashion in his chosen medium a melody after that harmony. Maritain tells us that it is to this hidden music the poet as poet attends.4

One’s emotions are usually stirred by that harmony, but they neither produce it nor are sufficient to replicate it. To produce the melody, or the work of art, all its parts must be both organized and unified. It does no good to speak about things like meaning and clarity or even truth, in a certain sense, until we’ve discovered what does and does not belong to the work of art, which notes participate in the melody and which are extraneous to it. Maritain defines the work as the “final objectivization of poetic intuition,” the poetic intuition being that which apprehends the music, and continues: “Any poetic work is a revealer.” By remaining true to the beauty of that hidden music, what it is and not what we would have it be, the unseen and unheard is revealed in the physical world of the medium.

This replication or instantiation of beauty in a particular form would not be possible without the sort of childhood education described above. Poetry, like philosophy, begins in wonder. The greatest gift that books and poetry gave me was a more porous self. They taught me that isolation was the real intellectual, creative, and spiritual prison; to forget myself in pursuit of the beauty of the other; to see and to love, and to be changed. No one can be a poet without that.

The reason you are a poet, after all, isn’t to make yourself estimable or grand, or to rake in cash, or even to be remembered. We know little about Homer or Shakespeare, but we know more of beauty because of them. The reason you are a poet is to wake people up to the music you have heard deep in the essence of existence.

So, what makes a poet? An ear for music, and a heart for wonder.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown. 
T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

"Walking," Thomas Traherne

To walk abroad is, not with eyes,
But thoughts, the fields to see and prize;
Else may the silent feet,
Like logs of wood,
Move up and down, and see no good
Nor joy nor glory meet.

The beginning and the end of man’s being is his attention. I pay attention to what I love, and what I love, I am—or, at least, I am becoming. Man’s chest is hollowed out when he suffers a deficit of attention to things worthy of his heart, and his humanity is unmanned when he lets his attention rest too long on the unworthy.

My generation, the much-deprecated Gen Z, has been served an ill turn; I probably don’t need to cite the effects of screens on our capacity for attention.1 I was given a smartphone at 12 years old but, as my parents mostly disapproved of the internet and social media, managed to escape with my humanity intact. My parents gave me (sometimes against my will) the gift of boredom, and when I was bored, I read a book or drew maps of my own fantasy world. I learned how to pay attention. But most of my peers and almost all their younger siblings have been distracted from boredom by television and iPad screens from the time they first learned to complain. Their brains were addicted to overstimulating colors and sounds. At school, when they complained that the assignments were boring or difficult, the standard was lowered. Books were exchanged for chapters, then chapters for excerpts. After school, they were given busywork (homework) and a screen as a reward. And so the suburb sidewalks have quieted. The swings hang still in the park.

But at some point each person becomes responsible for his own mind and soul. Occasionally I’ll come across a Substack post where someone admits to forcing his way through what are at first excruciatingly dull books because he knows it will do him good.2 There’s a movement, a minority but growing movement, in my generation to reclaim our attention. More than that, to reclaim the joys and the glories that were denied us.

Ev’n carts and wheels their place do change,
But cannot see, though very strange
The glory that is by;
Dead puppets may
Move in the bright and glorious day,
Yet not behold the sky.

In his Metaphysics, Aristotle tells us that philosophy begins in wonder. Man, having been given senses which take in data from the physical world, cannot help but wonder over his discoveries. Wonder is his most natural state. Think of a baby continuously throwing toys to the floor, not in a tantrum, but amazed by the perplexities that adults have called thermodynamics and gravity. Why should the ball always be stopped at the carpet? Why should it roll away sideways?

This same childlike wonder animates both the true arts and the true sciences. Bad art and bad science construct unlikely categories then go in search of experiences, images, connections, and explanations that fit this presupposed mental world. But the good artist and the good scientist both approach the world in openness and wonder. They study it, but they are also willing to be changed by it. They love.

The artist and the scientist have cultivated a habitus, a disposition toward the world and an ability to contemplate the things they have seen.3 They strive for a unified vision, but not an artifice which they impose over reality. Rather they allow the things of this world to speak to them of truth and of beauty.

And are not men than they more blind,
Who having eyes yet never find
The bliss in which they move;
Like statues dead
They up and down are carried
Yet never see nor love.

The same principle holds true over all our lives. We surround ourselves with the experiences, the sensations, the data that we value most dearly. Some people give that love almost exclusively to streaming services, 20-second videos, celebrity gossip, pornography, mass-produced nonsense novels, and online fora dedicated to an impassioned defense of this way of life. Since childhood they have been taught that to live a good human life, they must surround themselves with cheap mental thrills and empirical junk food. Most of us live somewhere between that kind of hedonism and the pursuit of things worthier of our love, yet the struggle to live well is just that, a struggle.

Can you remember the last time you were bored and didn’t reach for your phone?

Boredom, or leisure, as the philosophers might call it, is the impetus of contemplation. Contemplation draws a person out of himself toward the good that is the other. And in beholding that goodness, contemplation transforms us by our love.4

To walk is by a thought to go;
To move in spirit to and fro;
To mind the good we see;
To taste the sweet;
Observing all the things we meet
How choice and rich they be.

To contemplate is to mind the good we see.

We have created a simulacrum, a false reality of internet, screens, celebrities and online personalities, brand deals, and hyper-sexuality. To reclaim our humanity, each person must daily choose to remove himself from the pseudo-world so that he may pursue the real.

Of course, if matter, the material of this world, has little to no real meaning—if a daffodil as daffodil is incidental and reveals nothing of truth, goodness, or beauty in itself—you can make a case defending the simulacrum. If, however, the things of this world were created in truth, goodness, and beauty, speaking wonder to us and drawing our hearts to the source of all that is beautiful, good, and true, the simulacrum which distracts us with the ugly, the immoral, and the false becomes an evil to be carefully mitigated.

To note the beauty of the day,
And golden fields of corn survey;
Admire each pretty flow’r
With its sweet smell;
To praise their Maker, and to tell
The marks of his great pow’r.

To fly abroad like active bees,
Among the hedges and the trees,
To cull the dew that lies
On ev’ry blade,
From ev’ry blossom; till we lade
Our minds, as they their thighs.

We’ve taken the long route, but all this brings us around to walking. It is possible, as Traherne has earlier noted, to walk without paying attention. In my walks around the neighborhood, I’ve seen children on their way home from school staring dumbly into the emptiness before their eyes where a screen will be in a few minutes, looking neither left nor right, perhaps unaware that another person is there. But people who deliberately choose to walk are choosing to leave that isolated self behind in pursuit of the other. They are seeking out a world worth paying attention to. A walker goes in quest of wonder.

Walking allows us to lade, or load, our minds, just as the bees lade their thighs with pollen that they will turn into honey. In contemplation, we take the things of this world into our minds and transform them into what is sweet and good for the soul, thoughts of what is good and beautiful, of the everlasting drawn into a love affair with the temporal. Or perhaps we do not transform them, but instead we are brought back into the harmony at the root of all things. Trees become the columns of a holy temple, changing their paraments through the liturgy of the year. The raucous, undifferentiated birds you heard from your house become various voices in a choir. Your neighbor becomes an immortal treading the paths of God with you. The world is charged with grandeur, and your heart feasts on splendor.

Thus, walking allows us to reclaim our humanity.

Observe those rich and glorious things,
The rivers, meadows, woods, and springs,
The fructifying sun;
To note from far
The rising of each twinkling star
For us his race to run.

There’s a kind of curiosity that seeks only “radical insights,” a curiosity that loves only what it can possess and weaponize. There is a kind of person who glories in knowledge because of how it can serve him. He believes his curiosity makes him a kind of master over the world.

Nature contains no radical insights, but it does contain wonders. When a man attempts to possess its riches and glories he usually destroys it, just as too much analysis of a work of art turns into the dissection of a corpse. But the earth keeps her mysteries well. For many people, she contains no wonders at all. A bird is only ever a bird; a star is only ever a star. When a sparrow lifts its wings, they do not witness the miracle of flight, the kiss of feather into sky, the airy weight of bones lifted by wind. If they were to travel to the world’s end to meet Ramandu, they would see only an old man.

Walking asks us to pay attention to all the miracles and wonders we call Nature. She regulates these miracles with the rule of an Artist, but they do not belong to her. In our contemplation of her riches, she draws us into a presence beyond herself, “and in the wondrous light of that great Presence, all human life lies like a book before us, and we know that Pain and Sorrow are but the angels of God.”5

A little child these well perceives,
Who, tumbling in green grass and leaves,
May rich as kings be thought,
But there’s a sight
Which perfect manhood may delight,
To which we shall be brought.

While in those pleasant paths we talk,
’Tis that tow’rds which at last we walk;
For we may by degrees
Wisely proceed
Pleasures of love and praise to heed,
From viewing herbs and trees.

On Wednesday afternoon, I took a meandering sort of hike through a park with a friend. She’s a birder and stopped every few feet to listen to birdcalls my ear couldn’t distinguish, hunting avidly with her eyes for tanagers and warblers. Meanwhile I found a new flower to wonder over as often as she would pause to hear a birdcall. She told me of the birds, and I spoke to her about the flowers as we wended slowly through the wood.

My sick, world-weary soul felt like a child again, as if we were two girls clambering along the mosaic steps of a throne room, drawing ever nearer to something ineffably, unspeakably beautiful, waiting for us to look up.

Such is the pleasure of love and praise to heed from viewing herbs and trees.

Methought I saw my late espoused saint
       Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,
       Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave,
       Rescu'd from death by force, though pale and faint.
Mine, as whom wash'd from spot of child-bed taint
       Purification in the old Law did save,
       And such as yet once more I trust to have
       Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind;
       Her face was veil'd, yet to my fancied sight
       Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin'd
So clear as in no face with more delight.
       But Oh! as to embrace me she inclin'd,
       I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.
John Milton, "Sonnet 23"

Last year while I was teaching prosody to 9^th graders at a classical school, they said something that startled me while also confirming some ideas that had been germinating in my mind. They remarked that they (almost) always appreciated the poems I had them read because, “The poet doesn’t seem like he’s trying to be smarter than us.”

Really? Even the Donne and Eliot I’ve had you guys read?

Yes, really.

Of course, like any good teacher, I hadn’t thrown them off the deep end with poems that were too difficult, but, again—Donne, Eliot. That year we also read Chaucer, Milton, the Brownings, Longfellow, Christina Rossetti, W. H. Auden, and Edwin Muir. Not the simplest poets out there, but also not the thorniest.

Take Milton’s sonnet, for instance. I didn’t ask them to parse out the allusions to Alcestis or the Old Testament law, although many of them could have. I asked them to tell me the action, real or imagined, of the poem, and the poet’s response to it. One or two who had a knack for understanding poetic language explicated the situation for the class, and those who hadn’t been in tears yet, were then. We read it again. Sniffles from the girls, and many a ducked masculine head. We moved through some of the more romantic details (Why does he call her his saint?) and the technical (Where does the volta typically occur in this sonnet form, and where does it occur here?), and that was it.

Even in its more allusive lines, even through Milton’s usual staid dignity, something of the profound grief of lines 13 and 14 suspends the entire poem. The aesthetic imagination carries us through what we may not at first understand and to some degree interprets the poem for us. If with our intellect we read more deeply, we are delighted and rewarded, but it is the delight of a continually animated aesthetic imagination, and not an interrupted one.

And there was little for me, as their guide, to add to that.

At some point in the semester, we discussed quatrains and ballad form, and we read Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening,” which I encourage you to read if you haven’t. This one struck many of them as rather bizarre on the first reading; some found it delightful, others, just weird.

The temptation every teacher must combat every day is to overexplain, especially in a literature or an art class. Again, we identified the situation and the reaction. At that point, judging by the general widening of their eyes, most of them began to understand. I identified “Love has no ending” as the first (unsatisfactory) possible philosophy the poem puts forward. They told me how the clocks respond. I led them to the end, where Auden responds to both Time and the Lovers with Christianity: “You shall love your crooked neighbour/ With your crooked heart.” We read the poem slowly once more. Then, like the river, we moved on.

I often wondered if I were going about things the right way. I was using a method that had worked well for me and for other students in high school and undergrad, specifically avoiding those methods that I had seen fail; but I continuously evaluated myself and sometimes doubted. After all, there were some students who came into the class despising poetry, and for all my efforts, they would probably leave despising it still.

One day I was walking through the halls and came across some collage exhibits from the elective art class, which many of my students were also taking. I stopped to look over their work, at first delighted by the colors and various themes. Quickly I realized that each collage was inspired by a poem, many of them with lines hidden throughout the work. Some were inspired by the sort of Instagram fluff that I don’t consider poetry, but my students? Well, Auden and Milton and Rossetti were all looking back at me. I can picture one Auden collage to this day, with its topsy-turvy grandfather clocks and chipped teacups and salmon beside stars. I remember the lush velvet blue of the background sky. I saw Auden’s poem the way my student had seen it, and thought, maybe we were doing okay.

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
Geoffrey Chaucer, "General Prologue"

One of my students in particular hated poetry. He had a brilliant, analytical mind, and poetry, especially the way I taught it, insisting on mysteries and paradoxes and profundities, simply drove him nuts.

Another teacher would have taken offense. At times, I almost did. But could I really blame him? There’s not much room for poetry in our modern world. Poetry asks us to understand without understanding. To know without knowing. It makes a mess out of true/false binaries, leaps when you think you can hold it, dances when you wish it would be still, is still when we look for movement to escape.

We were making a meandering course through the history of English prosody. Imagine my surprise, one morning, when I began reading Chaucer’s prologue in Middle English to them, and this student began reciting it with me. A previous teacher had made a game of memorizing the first several lines of the Canterbury Tales, and he’d taken to it like a fish to water. Translating from Middle to Modern English is a bit more like code and a bit less like poetry, and that appealed to him.

Of course, it’s only more like code on the surface.

Since this was a prosody class, the students had to write a good deal of poetry as well as read it, a practice which annoyed this analytical genius to no end. We came to an agreement. Instead of coming up with his own images and metaphors and flights of fancy, he could translate Chaucer, preserving rhyme and meter while also making it as generally interesting as he could for a reader.

He loved the assignment. I gave him access to a Middle English dictionary and otherwise left him alone. I didn’t pester him about his feelings for poetry or expect him to take me seriously when I babbled on about multiplicity of meaning or anagogical readings. Slowly, over several weeks, he began to confide in me that he liked Chaucer (I suspect every fourteen-year-old boy is surprised by how much he finds to enjoy in Chaucer) and to make a few insightful comments during class discussion.

His mom approached me one day. “He’s stopped complaining about your class,” she said, “which I think means he likes it.”

These are just a few instances over a long semester dealing with prosody and fourteen-year-olds. I’ll leave you with the general impression that that semester left on me. Teachers should make poetry less complicated. Poets should take poetry less seriously.

Now, given that I do write poetry, I hope you can figure out that I also take it seriously. I’m by no means advocating for doing away with the images and metaphors and allusions that my students sometimes found difficult to tackle. What I’m advocating for is this: remember the delight you experienced when you first read a poem that moved your heart. Remember those poems that brought you to laughter or to tears, those lines that echo in your mind for years because they’re delicious. Encourage that.

Don’t try to make people like poetry. Read good poems out loud. The rest is not our business.1

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
"For Once, Then, Something" Robert Frost

May has germinated. I’m slowly recovering from a nasty head cold, emerging out into the newly green-dappled sunshine and counting lilies of the valley that have bloomed along my back fence. Northern Ohio has embraced verdure seemingly as slowly as I’ve recovered from my cold; at least, that’s how I perceive it, having grown up in the South. But now that it has—how lovely things have grown again.

The liturgies of the earth impress upon my spirit a little more every year. Maybe that’s because in states like Louisiana and North Carolina, I didn’t see much of them, broadly speaking, and Oklahoma and Texas have grungy fits of winter, just as we get head colds or the flu, then turn back toward summer before it’s decent to do so. Now in Ohio I’ve watched the earth relishing itself through four real seasons, and I think I’m a better person for it. I’m reminded continually of the delight God takes in his creation, of his continual providence and mercy, of the strange hardships and beauties that make up our present existence. I feel so much more human, and that I understand both art and religion better.

Our society is quick to undervalue the effects of environment on both the body and the soul. I blame Descartes. A little mind-body dualism, and suddenly the West can’t parse out why it is that our surroundings matter, if matter matters at all. I don’t intend to wax philosophical at length here, but I do mean to say that Christians and poets both suffer from a crippled metaphysic. Many Christians are materialists, with a vague idea of God controlling things behind the curtain, and many poets are materialists with an even fuzzier idea of transcendence.

And so we ache for enchantment because we’ve divorced matter and meaning. Meaning sits behind things and isn’t inherent in them. Transcendence hovers like a cloud, amorphous and surprisingly insubstantial.

I’m an odd duck; I live in a world where spirit informs matter, where spirit and matter aren’t separate, distinguishable, parse-able, but rather live and breathe through each other. The meaning is there in the thing, immanent, and also beyond it, informing it, transcendent. I don’t find truth, goodness, and beauty to be incidental; rather they are essential to all the cosmos, though the cosmos is not their essence.

There’s a lot of rhetoric floating around about why people don’t read poetry.1 The root of the matter may be that readers are longing for enchantment, for things to matter. I’d argue that’s why we see lay people not only engaging with but even memorizing2 poets like Longfellow, Dickinson, Tennyson, and Keats, while most good poets today are read only by other poets. My manifesto is this: most poets today desperately need to get over the Modernist aesthetic. Imagism had its moment but is dysfunctional at its core, unable to sustain itself with any healthy metaphysic, and Modernist poetry at large is defined by an unwillingness to commit to any meaningful ontology. Think of Wallace Stevens’s supreme fiction, or of Robert Frost, plagued by doubt. Then think of Robert Frost at his best, in those poems still lauded today, perhaps still confused, but more importantly in love with the world and its wonders.

In May of 2024, I was as shocked as anyone to learn that a poem I’d submitted had won the Frost Farm Poetry Prize.3 I hadn’t written my phone number on the submission form, not seriously thinking I had a chance, and Bob Crawford was reduced to emailing to ask me to ring him up so he could share some good news. As usually happens in life, the timing couldn’t have been more ironic. That May, I was going through a rough patch in my relationship with Robert Frost.

Frost wrote many of my favorite poems. He is an easy poet to love, with his colloquial language and deceptively simple style masking profundities. His poems that seem the simplest lurk in the mind like lovely ghosts. But toward the beginning of my graduate studies the previous autumn, I had been introduced to one of his poems which I have not loved so well. “For Once, Then, Something” takes its title from the poem’s final harrowing line, offering a grim reflection on the state of truth in modernity.

I was not unacquainted with this disillusioned and world-weary Frost, but I had made somewhat of a point to avoid those poems which spoke loudest in that voice, the quintessential Modernist voice. I feel at home in Middle English lays, Arthurian romance, fairytale, and allegory, and at his best—which is often—Frost reminds me of those old stories of enchantment by speaking of a wonderful mystery-of-things which suspends our lives. But in poems like “For Once, Then, Something,” Frost turns away from the wonderful to the confounding mystery. Is, he asks into a well, the white object he sees for a moment “Truth? [Or] A pebble of quartz?” Either way it is “For once, then, something,” to be contrasted with most of the time, when there is little to be discerned.

The Modernist aesthetic undoes much of what went before it and leaves, for what comes after, little room for breath. When the Modernist gives us mystery, he gives us not mystery as it once was but as a modern reworking, mystery as cognitive doubt or confusion. Mystery, from mystērion, a word Paul makes good use of in describing the gospel, came into late Middle English having not much to do with cognition and much more to do with God revealing his inscrutable self through his more-scrutable creation and the Church’s rites. Again, when the Modernist gives us Truth, he acts as a modern, appealing to cognition. And when the Modernist reaches for enchantment, he thinks that he is grasping at faerie stories, at fiction.

“The Dispossession,” which won the Frost Farm Prize, is largely a response to Frost’s own poem.4 It’s also a promise or a threat, depending on how you read it. If you seek enchantment, if you seek the world for what it is, not plain material but material formed by the mind of God and animated with his love and love for him, you’ll be dispossessed of a lot what you hold dear.

You’ll lose your comfort, to begin with. With an ancient near-Eastern God demanding love and worship, the stakes are raised well beyond comfort. Then you discover some disturbing realities. Suddenly, a phone is no longer just a phone. No screen is just a screen, but (not to be trite) an evil robotic sorcerer casting degenerative spells over you. Modern architecture becomes a symbol of corrupt hearts. You’ll start seeing malls as heathen cathedrals and public schools as factories.

The flip side is this. You’ll fall in love with the created world again. Trees become columns in the temple of God, the morning and evening sky his stained glass, through which we see darkly. Men will no longer be men but immortals, gods. The Bread becomes both bread and Body, the Wine, both wine and Blood, as there is something about the bread and the wine themselves, as material things, which illuminate a spiritual reality in their physical form.

And, all ye poets, the flip side for you is this. When you offer people manna, they’ll eat, especially when everyone else is serving moldy leftovers.

I don’t mean to say I have things figured out. Far from it. I look forward to finding out what my poems will be like five, ten, thirty years from now; I’ll have learned so much more and loved so much more. This is all theory, after all, not craft. But I suspect the craft will follow close behind the theory. It usually does.

For now, as May dimples in the woods, I return to Herrick:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
   Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
   Tomorrow will be dying.

The Dispossession

If clouds are hovering on grazing cows 
and, ponderous with its sleep, morning allows
beguiling fog to warp the interstate; 
if you should hear out of it, “Be still, wait;”
sanity and mortality suggest
you should not stop. Let old enchantments rest.
The road will curve, bare as a fingerbone
into obscurity, where birds have flown,
their black wings worrying the silent sky.
But if you hear them in the wood, go by— 
yes, hurry by—and do not contemplate 
divergence from the easy interstate.

Although coyotes cry beneath the dawn, 
when you have looked, their shadows will be gone.

But should you stop your car beside a hill
which slouches toward the waiting wood, you will 
follow, like others who have gone before, 
familiar words too lovely to ignore.
Go by, and let the old enchantments sleep.
And if you think you hear the dogwood weep, 
pay no mind; that is only fallen flowers
discovering they are what time devours.
Below, the desperate thorns and bracken lie
preoccupied with excerpts of the sky, 
and lower still, there stews the fungal deep
where toadstools pilfer life and blind worms creep; 
and should you linger here, you will soon know
why this decaying earth should call you so. 

There is a world, perhaps, past fog and road, 
a world where time and busyness corrode 
all mysteries into a tarnished science, 
where you are spelled for corporate compliance. 
But that world is not here, and if you rest
a while, you may find you are dispossessed 
of all except the worm, the flowers, the tree,
and take a bite of past eternity.

Yes, if you hear the grim coyotes cry
at dawn, they cry for you, grey passerby.