Poetry Editor Brad Fruhauff continues our series on the Craft of Chrisitan Writing.

The World We Write In

My original cunning plan for blogging here was to comb through books on craft and selectively cull them for witty and insightful thoughts.  I quickly decided that I didn’t have the time to properly read any of those books and didn’t want to pretentiously misrepresent myself as some expert on the wide world of poetry-writing guides.  I have other ways of being pretentious.

I began this post at a Borders café in downtown Evanston, IL, the well-to-do hometown of Northwestern University.  While I sat with my gourmet iced tea, blithely typing away on my laptop like the very model of a modern metropolitan, a woman sat down at a table across from me with a huge book on witchcraft.  I thought, two hundred years ago we were burning witches at the stake; now we’re marketing to them.  I don’t think this is a phenomenon limited to “liberal” urban centers—it’s just easier to find here, where there are more people who exist together anonymously.  This is the world we live in, a world in which average people think it not out of the ordinary to “explore” alternative worlds, alternative narratives, including those labeled “metaphysical” and “occult” by Borders, Inc.  And this is the world Christians write poetry in...

I don’t judge the woman.  Even after she stood and began to repeatedly cup her left breast, then to pinch her nipple, both of which were, admittedly, new forms of public behavior in my experience, I wasn’t prepared to count her among the crazies.  Not exactly, anyway.  Whatever else she may have been doing, she was certainly looking for some kind of meaningful account of things.  Now, we’ve all heard how this is the postmodern condition (or you have now).  But I don’t think this kind of thing is just a harmless free play of meanings and signs and language, but rather a secretly anxious search for something stable enough to believe in.  We might put on a happy face in public and proclaim the joys of diversity when we see a man with a demon tattoo on his face and two dozen holes in his head, but in private aren't we all pinching our nipples and asking what it all means? (Don’t get hung up on the nipples—you know what I mean).

The attraction to the worlds of magic and witchcraft is complex, but the Christian poet should be interested in the fact that they offer ways of understanding, engaging, and encouraging the human imagination.  Anyone who’s watched Buffy: the Vampire Slayer knows how fun and interesting a non-Christian world of magic, monsters, and destiny can be.  As such,

Poetry Loves the World

I could go on, but the point is this: to write in this world we should understand it for what it is—a world of people like us who desire the same spiritual sustenance that we do (nipple-pinching or not).  We cannot hope to write the “right kind” of thing until we come to terms with this world, until we appreciate that we needn’t judge, condemn, and/or demean it, much less its people.  It seems to me that too much of the “Christian” poetry that downloads to my editorial desktop is written with a grudge against those who don’t share the faith or who are against those who give it a bad name, and so their writing is often marked by self-righteous violence directed toward their supposed enemies.

But an important personage in our faith counseled us not to judge, nor to get angry and lash out to make ourselves feel better for believing in something unpopular (or, in some regions, too popular).  We’re not in competition with those other narratives: we have nothing to prove.  We have only to love, and the best poetry, Christian and non-Christian, loves the world.

Check back soon! In my next blog, I’ll reflect on some of the things “Christian poems” do that I like, as well as explain why I put Christian in scare quotes all the time.

Related Articles:

• Crafting Fiction Series Part Two: The Moral of the Story is . . .
• Introducing our Crafting Fiction blog Series
  

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Coach  - Dude, too funny...     |2008-04-11 21:15:57 You just never know who or what you'll see in coffee shops. Reply | Quote 0   0

Lorrd's Servant  - Poetic Perceptions     |2008-06-12 20:58:25 Hi -- Very interesting blog. I will definately read more. Hey, I live in Northern New Hampshire & when in a smaller (local) version of Wal-Mart, I was in the craft section looking for ribbons and such, when a woman all in black with a pentagram around her neck (very large pentagram, indeed), walked by me, saying she was looking for some cute little things for her children to have a party for the Summer Solstice...Oh brother. I was kind and chatted a bit, but then got out of there. The CRAFT section? hmmmmmmmmmmmm. Reply | Quote 0   0

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