("Florentine Poet," by Alexandre Cabanel, 1861)
(Update - after writing this tortured confessional essay on my lack of poetic genius--see below--I discovered that I had written essentially the exact same thing, but as a poem, a decade or so ago. Guess I haven't made much progress. 😉 You can read the poem version here.)
I have a curious confession
to make. Despite the fact that I have a major work of poetry about to be
published by a large-scale, reputable publisher—a work I consider perhaps my
most significant project to date—I hesitate to call myself a poet. And the nearer
I get to publication, the more that hesitation curdles into something closer to
nerves. It is a fairly safe thing to write poems in the quiet of your own
study, where no one but you and God is in any position to judge them (or to
post them on a blog that offers no avenue for leaving comments). It is another
thing entirely to send them out into the world and wait to find out what the
world thinks they are worth.
What makes someone a poet? I’ve
been writing poetry for most of my life, but it has always been a side pursuit,
and only intermittently. It has never been my main vocation, and maybe that’s
part of my hesitation. It’s not the thing that comes first to mind when people
think of me (those few who do!). I imagine most think of me primarily as a
pastor, which I primarily am. A few rare souls might think of me as a
theologian, a historian, a missiologist, or an author. But a poet? No. Robert
Frost was known for his poetry; he was a poet. Edna St. Vincent Millay was
known for her poetry; she was a poet. I don’t think the same is true of me.
But there’s a bigger reason
why I hesitate to call myself a poet. It’s because it feels a little bit like I’m
an outsider claiming an insider’s stake. I’ve never felt at home in the
sensibilities of the literary world. Despite all my background in writing, I
tended to avoid writing classes in college, and I never submitted poetry to the
student journals in my day. The kind of poetry that poetry-inclined people
appreciated was dark, raw, moody, and disjointed. It felt edgy and experimental
in an artsy sort of way. My poetry was exactly the opposite: clear, articulate,
and aiming at soaring grandeur. Even when I would write free verse, my poems
would often end up leaning toward rhyme and meter, as if they were aspiring to
ascend to a higher plane. To many literary-minded readers, I expect, this carried
an air of not-quite-getting-it: rather like wandering through a modern art
gallery and running into an artist still trying to sell 19th-century
landscapes.
There was something in the
modern world of poetry that I just wasn’t getting. And yet, I also noticed that
there was a curious dichotomy emerging—while I felt rather distant from the ethos
of the literary world and the forms it valued, quite a few ordinary people
seemed to enjoy my sort of poems. My art, whatever its deficiencies, was seen as
accessible and useful. Though I hadn’t formally published any poems while in
college, I was nevertheless called upon to write the responsive litany for our
graduation service. The poetical aspects of liturgy and congregational song
called to my gifts, and I was able to set them to good use there. Yet while
quite a number of people have come to think my poetry charming and useful,
there still remains a missing bridge of understanding yet to be built across
the chasm between myself and the literati.
Given these things, when I
write and publish my poems, there’s a secret fear that the people who really know
poetry will think it’s not very good. Rhymed and metered poems have often been
seen as passé, or at the very least sequestered to a few narrow niches
(specifically, songwriting and children’s books). Poems of that sort can be
wildly popular—looking at you, Dr. Seuss—but if Dr. Seuss tried to do the same
with serious, literary poems, his works would likely have sat, dusty and ignored,
in the “rejection” tray on an editor’s desk. Rhymed and metered poems, because
of their current association with children’s verse, now sound childish to many
people, despite the fact that many of the best poets in history employed the
very same forms. And it’s true that such poems, when done poorly, feel
cringingly amateurish. But when done well—think Shakespeare, Tennyson, and
Longfellow—those carefully-structured poems rise to heights of elegance that
nothing else can match. I don’t say this to claim that my own poems belong in that
company; only that the form itself was never the disqualifying feature so many
now assume it to be. But, regardless, the majority sensibility of the poetry
world has moved on. My poems might have done well enough two centuries ago, but
it’s not the early 1800s anymore. I just have to hold onto hope—and there are a
few encouraging signs in this regard—that the pendulum may be starting to swing
back the other way.
But why don’t I try to write
edgy, experimental poems? Or poems that break open the ordinary container of
form and pour themselves out into new and unexpected shapes? I can’t. It just
isn’t in me.
But here I have to be
careful, because there are two different objections tangled up in that
question, and I don’t want to be found guilty of the one I don’t actually hold.
It isn’t really the newness of the form that troubles me. Poets have always
been breaking open old vessels to pour out new wine—Whitman did it in his own
way, Hopkins did it in his own stranger and holier way, and for that matter so
did the psalmists. The spirit that animates a poem can clothe itself in a great
many forms, and I don’t doubt that it has, in hands more skilled than mine,
found a true home in free verse and broken lines and all the rest.
What troubles me is something
underneath the form: an atomized individualism that has made the poet’s own
fractured experience the first and final subject of the poem, with no
redemption offered and, all too often, none even sought. It isn’t the shape of
the container I object to; it’s what so often fills it. A poem can be formless
and still be full of grace, the way the Spirit moved over the formless waters
before the world had any shape at all. And a poem can be perfectly metered and
still be as empty as a whitewashed tomb. So when I say I can’t write the poems
the literati prize, I don’t mean I’m unable to write in their forms—forms are
just forms, and I’ve dabbled in more of them than I let on. I mean I can’t
write from inside a posture that treats human brokenness as the final word,
with no window left open for anything to come in from outside it. That might be
the real distance between us.
Now, that sense of distance likely
also owes a good deal to my own deficiencies in perception. But I think there’s
something bigger at work here too, something that more than a few people have
noticed in modern art galleries: there’s a note of anxious despair that has
crept into the art world. There’s an emptiness there, a sad soullessness that
only those who have experienced the fullness of grace can perhaps still
recognize as such. The worlds of art and poesy, by and large, have lost
something that once lay at the center of our highest works, and the lack of
that something often makes the whole enterprise ring desperately hollow.
The great art of a Christian
civilization—our paintings, music, architecture, and poetry—was not merely “original”
in the way that modern art insists on atomistic originality. It was equally
original and imitative, and it produced great works because what it was
imitating was far grander than anything that any individual artist could
produce. The refrain of the grace of God, full and vibrant and earth-shaking,
echoed through every new wave of art and writing, pushing up cathedrals from
the broad green fields of Europe, filling the halls of princes with unimagined
symphonies, and setting forth words that danced, aflame with eternity, through
the minds of readers. But then, when the modern world collectively decided to
set the limitations of our own experience as the keystone of authentic art, our
works gradually became a carnival hall of mirrors, reflecting back our
brokenness in ever more distorted forms. (I’m painting with a broad brush here,
and no doubt there are exceptions—but the overall sense of this portrait, I
think, is recognizable to many.) For any who know the sweet fullness of grace,
it’s hard to step fully inside those explorations of brokenness, at least not
without a significant tinge of sadness—and not the sadness the artist intended
to convey, but something deeper and more troubling: a lament for a civilization
that cannot remember where beauty comes from, nor summon it back again.
All that to say: I can’t
write those kinds of poems. Even poems about my own brokenness always end up
throwing the windows open so that the grace of God can come streaming back in. Like
David in the Psalms, I can’t bring myself to just quit the scene in the midst
of all the wreckage without at least pointing toward the rising pathway that lies
beyond. Why? To borrow the modern artist’s own language for a moment: because
that’s actually what feels real to me. That’s my experience, unfiltered and
authentic. Grace has the final word. But that, I think, may be part of the reason why my poetry, beyond all its other imperfections, will not be hailed as great. To those who have not shared my experience of grace, my tendency to include a perpetual shift toward redemption, toward seeking the resolution of a brighter ending beyond the chaos, will be seen as a weakness of my verse, not a strength.
So having addressed the
spirit of the age, let me come back now to the question of form. I’ve
gravitated ever more toward rhyme and meter for my own part, because when done
well it bears an inherent movement and aspiration that echoes something far
beyond its lines. To write a rhymed and metered poem is an act of faith that
the world is intentionally structured, meticulously ordered, and beautiful in
its design. Its cadence stirs something in us, reminds us of the intricate
arrangement that forms the framework of our lives. I don’t say this to claim
that rhyme and meter are the only forms capable of bearing such witness—clearly
they aren’t, since Scripture itself sings in cadences our ears can barely
track, and many poets have found other ways to make the shape of a poem preach
its own small sermon. I say only that, for whatever reason of temperament or
gift, rhyme and meter are the forms in which I feel the pull of that order most
directly. Rhyme and meter call attention, gently and subtly, to the patterns by
which the great Poet himself has written the story of our lives.
So it comes to this: I don’t
hold out great expectations that my poetry will be appreciated as poetry,
at least not by those whose business it is to judge such things professionally.
And I say that not only because the values by which poems are judged are not always
the values I choose to write toward, but because my poetry is quite probably
not good enough, considered on its own, to make a masterpiece. If I’m honest,
the comparison that keeps coming to mind these days isn’t Frost or Millay at
all, but Thomas Kinkade—a painter beloved in a great many living rooms and
almost nowhere in the galleries that decide what painting means. His canvases
will probably never hang beside the ones the critics call great. But his
paintings still light up a lot of ordinary rooms with a warmth their owners are
glad to come home to, brightening the plain and honest hours of real people’s
lives. I would be more than content if my poems did something like that: to
hang, however modestly, on the wall of someone’s ordinary evening. I do hope (quite
honestly and sincerely for all my self-doubting) that at least some people will
find in my verse a deep and refreshing plunge into the heart of reality. I hope
it will echo through hearts and minds not as something that calls my artistry
to mind, but as something that orients the beholder toward the one true Artist.
So am I a poet? I suppose I
could call myself that, nerves and all. But more important than the label is this: I am an apprentice in the
Artist’s workshop. His is the true art, and mine the imitation—an imitation
that, on its best days, draws attention back to him.
