Why poetry matters

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.—William Carlos Williams

April is poetry month and I’ve been thinking about poetry and preaching. In college, I majored in English, which meant I read a lot of poetry. My choice of majors also made me part of the tribe of English majors that Garrison Keillor enjoys poking fun at almost as much as Lutherans!

Like artists and musicians, when you major in English, it’s important to have a day job. Mine was being a pastor. The connection between preaching and English became clear to me in the midst of preparing my first sermon. I suddenly realized that my most important task was to communicate the gospel to people I barely knew in the clearest and most convincing way. The only tools for accomplishing this formidable task were words.

The relationship became even clearer under the influence Joseph Sittler, a man I never met but who continues to have great impact on how I see the world. Sittler taught for many years at the University of Chicago Divinity School and then at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. He loved language and God’s creation in equal measures and he saw the two as being intimately connected. When asked what one piece of advice he would give to campus pastors (a group of which I was a part at the time), he said, “Watch your language!”

Throughout his life, Sittler’s focus was on the centrality of grace in our understanding of God and the world. He frequently used poetry in his writing and preaching. When asked, “Why poetry?” he answered, “It is the peculiar function of the poet sometimes to say out loud and with resonant clarity what we all would wish to say had we the dark music and the language.” He encouraged us to read poetry and to make use of it in our own preaching and writing.

It was a lesson that stuck. As I read more poetry, it didn’t take long to realize that many of the lyrics to popular songs were also poetry; sometimes profound. It was poetry that people who claimed not to like poetry and who might never darken the door of a church could relate to and understand. I soon found myself re-listening to songs by Van Morrison, U2, Joni Mitchell, and Paul Simon to name only a few, mining them for memorable phrases and lines that could illuminate the gospel of God’s grace at work in the world. It transformed the way I thought about my vocation. I began to think of myself as a poet—not necessarily a very good one, but a poet nevertheless. I came to see that good poetry, like the best preaching, was about using language to reflect on life in all its complexity.

In his book about preaching in contemporary culture, Finally Comes the Poet: Daring Speech for Proclamation, Walter Brueggemann reminds us that the Hebrew prophets were poets. You can easily see it in the way our English translations of the Hebrew Bible are formatted, e.g,

For as the rain and snow come down from heaven,

      and do not return there until they have watered the earth,

making it spring forth and sprout,

      giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;

      it shall not return to me empty,

but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,

      and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.—Isaiah 55:10-11 (NRSV)

That’s not just a claim Isaiah is making on behalf of God; it’s also poetry—poetry that speaks against what Brueggemann calls a “prose world” in which truth is greatly reduced to a closed and manageable ideology that robs the gospel of its promise of a just, adventurous, and hopeful future that is full of possibility.

Like the prophets, poets are often not welcomed by those who presume to run the affairs of the world. Plato wanted them banned from his ideal Republic and they are often the first to be arrested during revolutionary times because of their inconvenient habit of telling the truth (think of Vaclav Havel, Fela Kuti, Pete Seeger, and the members of Pussy Riot to name only a few).

Regardless of their unpopularity—or maybe because of it—poets inspire us and help us see a world of surprises that dictators and demagogues try their hardest to eliminate. They help us hear the Gospel in new and daring ways and inspire us to leave the security of the “prose world” and set out on the journey of faith. During Poetry Month, thank God for poets! jpr