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.