Poetry Editor Brad Fruhauff continues the series on the Craft of Christian Writing with part two of "Writing and the Christian Poet."

Preliminary: Why I Scare Quote Christian

I’m sure I’ve said elsewhere that I don’t think Christian poetry is so different from other kinds.  I prefer to think in terms of Christians who write poetry.  When I say things like this I’m getting at two main ideas.  First, I don’t think “Christian” poetry will always be recognizably religious.  A Christian poet may write about her dog, or sex, or murder, or an Italian restaurant, and never say God or Jesus or pray or grace—and that’s okay.  Second, I don’t often like much of what passes for “Christian” poetry.  Much of it is violent and vengeful, as I complained in my previous post, and much of the rest is pedantic, schmaltzy, simplistic.  Relief was founded in part because they stuff we accept in our definition of Christian isn’t sterile, cautious or safe enough compared with what we see in the Christian bookstores.

So I scare quote Christian to literally scare people away from deciding too easily what it means that we’re a “Christian” journal that publishes “Christian” poems.  I am not interested in a poem that has nothing else going for it than that it is “Christian.”  I want poems that do things I like.

Things “Christian” Poems Do That I Like

Despite what I’ve said above, many of you will still be hung up on explicitly religious poetry.  That’s all right—I like religious poems, too.  So, what do I like in a “Christian” poem.

Well, before I tell you, you have to promise that you aren’t going to take me too literally and thus send me hundreds of poems that all do the same thing.  One of the great pleasures of poetry is surprise, as in surprise that you like something you didn’t know you liked—and that requires something new.  

That should be the first thing I like, in fact: to be surprised.  And what I find surprising is not, for instance, that Bruce Willis was dead all along and all the red objects should have clued me in—that’s just a clever and elaborate trick—but that you took something I am not familiar with and made it real to me, or took something I am very familiar with and made it seem new and wonderful, or strange and disturbing.  I am surprised when a poem plays with language so to make me feel words differently, or when a pattern of images suddenly congeals into something marvelous and greater than the sum of its parts.

I like a poem that transforms something into something else, or that brings its subject near another in a way that enriches both.  A poem that imagines some other world that makes our world more intelligible—or less so.  A poem that explores an emotion in a real and personal way.  A poem that redeems an emotion, or uncovers it from decades of cliché build-up, or attaches it to an unusual object, or makes it burn with a new energy.

Christians often speak of their art being sacramental, a visible pathway to invisible grace.  This is perhaps a major way poetry can become Christian in distinction from secular forms.  Flannery O’Connor said that one can make distinctions among realistic novelists by what their view of ultimate reality is, and something similar seems to go for poets.  A secular poet will often write about emotions, sensations, meanings, and politics, but a Christian poet is compelled by mystery in a way his skeptical peers may never be.  I like mystery in a religious poem, rather than solutions and satisfactions.  Solutions in a religious poem make the spiritual life seem like a problem of too little information, but whenever I have discerned the workings of God in my life I have felt if anything more mystery than before.  I’ve never felt self-righteous and smug except when I was being a jerk.

I said in my previous post that a poem should love the world, and I think that to surprise, transform, play, redeem, or sacramentalize all require love.  Christian poetry isn’t just about seeing God through all the misery, poverty, injustice and pollution of the world, or about pointing to how God will save us from this world; it’s also about seeing the world how God sees it, and as we all teach our children, God loves the world...a lot.  We adults are often the ones who have a problem with love.  

We’re familiar with the man in the Bible who prays, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”  A good Christian poem helps all our unbelief.

Until Next Time...

In my final post of this series, I will offer a couple thoughts on how to write religious poems such as I’ve been describing that don’t look like everyone else’s religious poems.

Related Articles:

• Writing and the Christian Poet, Part I 
• Introducing Our Crafting Fiction blog Series
  
• Crafting Fiction, Part II
  

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Renee Matheny  - Nicely said, Brad     |2008-04-24 21:58:20 Yay to Christian poems that surprise us, embrace mystery, and dare us to love. Scott and I are enjoying Mary Karr btw. Hurry up and write your next post so I can finally write some good poetry. Hehe. Reply | Quote 0   0

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