Do you read poetry? If so, you are in the minority. Recent data shows that less than 12% of American adults read or listened to poems in the past year. Yet roughly a third of the Bible is written in verse. In today’s world, what does poetry have to offer believers?

In his new book, Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church, professor and author Abram Van Engen shows how poetry is for everyone–and especially for Christians. He shows us how we can learn to approach poetry with joy, and have our time and attention richly rewarded.

We held an Online Conversation with Abram Van Engen on Friday, August 23 to explore the role of poetry in the church.

Thank you to our co-hosts, the Carver Project and Eerdmans Publishing Co. for their support of this event!

Online Conversation | Abram Van Engen | August 23, 2024

Tom Walsh: Hi, everyone. Welcome to today’s Online Conversation with Abram Van Engen. It’s really wonderful to have so many of you here and to see your locations as you add them in the chat box. We’re delighted that we’ve got about 900 people who’ve registered for today’s conversation. That’s really wonderful. And especially we’d like to welcome our over 90 first-time guests and over 100 international guests from at least 19 different countries that we know of, ranging from Rwanda to New Zealand, where a little quick research reveals it’s 5:30 a.m. Saturday. So they are getting a head start on the weekend with us at the Trinity Forum. Thanks for letting us know, all of you, in the chat where you’re joining us from.

If you’re new to the Trinity Forum, we work to cultivate, curate, and promote the best in Christian thought leadership and to provide a place where leaders can wrestle with the big questions of life and come to better know the Author of the answers. You may or may not realize our work spans three areas: faith in public life, spiritual and character formation, and the area that’s our principal focus today, arts and humanities.

And as it happens, several of our most popular conversations this year have been around poetry. We spoke to Malcolm Guite, to Philip Yancey about the poems of John Donne, and with Christian Wiman. And so our guest today is in wonderful company.

Abram is the professor in the humanities and the chair of the English department at Washington University in Saint Louis. His work there focuses on religion and literature, and especially on the Puritans and how they’ve been remembered and remade in American culture, including in his book City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. Abram hosts a podcast called Poetry for All, and I think today’s conversation will motivate you to check it out. He also coauthors a Substack column on meaning, morality, and markets called “A Rich Life.” So Abram’s interests are very wide-ranging, and I think our conversation today will be as well. His latest book is Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church. And as we begin, I should add that we’ve told Abram that anytime he wants to share a poem as we talk, he should feel the freedom to dive in or anything else.

Abram, welcome.

Abram Van Engen: Thanks. Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Tom Walsh: Well, it seems like a good place to start might be your own story. As you look back at the early part of your life, tell us a bit about some of the roots of this interest in language that you’ve developed and in poetry in particular.

Abram Van Engen: Yeah. I mean, I’m one of those folks who has always been a reader. I love words, I love language, but I should say that it wasn’t always just language. I went to—like a good nerd that I always was—I went to math camp growing up. So I love a wide range of interests. But I do remember maybe fifth or sixth grade, we had a poetry assignment in which we, of course, read poetry and so on, but we had to produce not just a poem, but a packet of poems. And I was so drawn to this and to the possibilities of these really short poems that it just kind of, the exercise stuck with me. And, of course, I’m sure that I thought my poems were genius as a sixth grader. They have thankfully all been lost. But nonetheless, it got me started on this interest of what can language really do when you start to work out its kinks and its possibilities and all the different meanings and layers of it?

Tom Walsh: Well, when you do your book on math camp, of course, let us know. So, for those who haven’t read poetry since school, which I suspect is quite a few of us, really, I can report that this book is a great way to get back into it without worrying about a test at the end or getting in trouble. And it really comes through in the book that you’re someone who loves, just loves teaching, really, because that’s what you’re doing, I think, in this book. So what are some of the settings in which you have taught poetry, and what are some of the things you’ve learned through those experiences about helping people find a way in?

Abram Van Engen: Well, I think one of my favorite things in life to do, as a humanities professor, is to teach the humanities and what it can do to people who don’t typically think of themselves as humanities people. And so poetry is just an extension. I love especially teaching poetry to people who never read it. That’s like my favorite audience. I also love teaching poetry to people who love poetry. That’s also great in its own way.

But of course, at Wash U, I’m an English professor. I’m chair of the English department there. I do a fair bit of teaching of poetry in those kinds of settings. But one of the places where I’ve loved teaching poetry the most has been in churches. I’ve got some videos online with the Carver Project. We did teaching poetry for churches, but I’ve also gone around from congregation to congregation, and teaching adults poetry in those settings has been really fantastic. And what always happens is you teach the first day and people say, “Oh, it’s a class on poetry. It’s not for me.” And then the second class comes around and it’s a little larger, and the third is a little larger. And by the fourth class it’s like packed out. And I think the reason for that is because people don’t realize how amazing and accessible poetry is. They just need somebody to open the door for them. And really, all I’m doing in those classes is opening the door and explaining, “This is how to get into it. This is how to think about it. This is how to read it. And you can take your time and have fun with it.” And especially as adults, nobody’s going to ask you to write an essay about it. It’s fine. You just read it, and if you don’t like it, put it down and move on to the next thing. It’s fantastic.

Tom Walsh: In your own youth, would, in the Christian communities you were parts of, was this an interest that was in any way evoked or nurtured, would you say, or was this something you really had to kind of find on your own?

Abram Van Engen: Yeah. I mean, that’s an interesting question. I grew up in the Christian Reformed Church, and that has a lot of variety across the different congregations and different settings. But the one that I was in was at Notre Dame, pretty much, because my dad was a professor at Notre Dame. The church was filled with professors from Notre Dame. And so that was a special kind of setting in which to have adult education classes. Right? And other ways of sort of nurturing a love of the arts.

But I would also say that I was having this conversation just yesterday with somebody who was asking whether the church as a whole is sort of less poetic or less open to poetry than it used to be. And I said, I think it really depends on the kind of denomination or tradition that you come from. That might be true in some cases. In the Dutch Reformed tradition that I grew up in, the arts were sort of under suspicion 100 years ago, and through the work of people like Calvin Seerveld and a bunch of others, they’ve really begun to flourish. And so in many ways, there are other denominations where the arts have newly surfaced as super important. People want to do visual arts and poetry and bring it into worship and think about it as part of who we are and who we’re made to be. So I think I was always nurtured in that in my particular congregation, but a lot of that is church specific.

Tom Walsh: And it’s a bit of a digression, but you mentioned the Carver Project, and I imagine a lot of our listeners won’t be familiar with that. So maybe you could just fill us in on what that is.

Abram Van Engen: Oh, sure. Yeah. So the Carver Project is a nonprofit organization. I’m the executive director of it right now. And the goal of it is to empower Christian students and faculty to serve and connect university, church, and society. So basically building bridges between university and churches and society for the good of all and finding the common ground, working on it together. We do amazing things. And it’s rooted, it’s grounded, it’s rooted in Christian faculty at Wash U. This is where it started. But we have, as fellows, we have about 25 Christian faculty members. On our listserv, we have about 75 Christian faculty members. And then we go around and we have host speakers. We go and talk with churches. We host events for local churches. We draw people together. And it’s really meant to be a way in which Christian scholarship and Christian teaching can flourish in the modern world, especially in a pluralist setting.

Tom Walsh: One of our Trinity Forum senior fellows is John Inazu, who’s a fellow professor of yours there at Wash U. And I believe he was involved in launching this. And so for folks who haven’t seen it, we’ve done a couple of conversations with John this year that are on his book Learning to Disagree, that I would really recommend. So turning back to your book, I found it, I think it’s one that would be very accessible to everyone, really. But you did have Christians in mind in particular as you wrote. So, what is there in poetry for Christians in particular? What’s a distinctive Christian way to get into it?

Abram Van Engen: Well, I think that— so one of my favorite ways to open class when I teach in churches—and by the way, I’m teaching online next month. So if you want to take a class with me on poetry, you can. It’s through Image Journal. They’re hosting this seminar that I’m going to teach online, so feel free to join if you want. But one of my favorite questions to ask at the beginning is I ask people, when’s the last time you read a poem? And if people are thinking of poetry as the stuff that happens in the books that they dropped, you know, when they left high school, then they say, “I don’t know, 20 years ago or something.” When I ask that question in general, that might be true. But when I ask that question in a church basement to a church audience, then the next question is, “Well, when’s the last time you were in church? Or when is the last time you read the Bible? Or when is the last time you read the Psalms?” And so one of the openings for Christians when it comes to poetry is the fact that it is in religious traditions where the practice of poetry is actually alive and well. It’s practiced every week, in fact.

And they have done these surveys, like, the National Endowment for the Arts has done a survey, it says, how many people have read poetry in the last year? And the answer that came back, this was 6 or 7 years ago, was 12 percent. Twelve percent of Americans said they had read a poem in the previous year. That’s not a lot of Americans. My guess is that most people were not thinking of the hymns that they sang on Sunday, or the Psalms that they read throughout the week, or any of the passages in Scripture that are poems. Right? So Christians actually have a leg up when it comes to poetry because they’re already practicing it without even knowing it.

Tom Walsh: Well, it seems maybe many of us are walking around with just too limited a definition of poetry, of our understanding of what it is. What is your working definition to help us distinguish what is poetry, for example, in passages in Scripture? How do we— other than the way it’s printed on the page looking a bit different, what is it that makes something essentially poetic?

Abram Van Engen: Yeah. I mean, this is an age-old issue. How do you define poetry? What makes it distinct? And so, you know, it could be the rest of our conversation to talk about that. But I will say this; this is one way that it works for me: If what is being aimed at is not primarily the delivery of information or a narrative story, then it is poetry. So poetry aims at something that’s not quite a story. There are narrative poems. There are poems that are stories. And it’s not the delivery of a message. We have lots of great genres for delivering a message. Sermons are a good genre for delivering a message, right? It is much more about generating an experience. That’s what poetry is about. It’s about communing in the reading and the hearing of the poem at that moment. And surely it has to do with meaning and the meaning that you get out of the poem. But it isn’t primarily about meaning. It’s not like the poet has sort of wrapped up some complicated message in an unnecessary way, and then locked it in a box and asked you to see if you had a key. That’s not the way it works, right? Poetry is putting words in a certain kind of way to produce a certain kind of experience. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. And that’s okay, because there are lots of different kinds of poems for lots of different kinds of people.

Tom Walsh: Well, you structure your book around, first, how we can read poetry and then why it’s worth doing. And so I’ll kind of be jumping back and forth around those areas. But your first exhortation is to understand that poetry is for us, the reader, not for the poet, not for some other, you know, exalted personage. So what is the way of thinking that you’re really trying to correct in putting it that way? And what difference does it make if we think the poem is for us?

Abram Van Engen: Yeah. So when I talk to folks about poetry, they say, “Oh, that’s not for me. That’s just too hard.” Or whatever. Right. And there’s often a kind of, I think, unstated principle that poets write poetry for other poets. But that isn’t—that can be true, unfortunately—but it isn’t always true. Most poets are actually trying to reach the reader, and they’re using different methods for doing it. Now, the methods of some poets are not going to work for you, the methods of other poets will. And so when I talk to folks about getting started on poetry, one of the main messages I give them is that it’s okay to dislike it. I think we have this notion that people think, “Oh, I’m supposed to read a poem and then have this mystical experience and it never happens for me, so just forget about it.” Or they start with the super famous poems, the ones that they were given in high school, the ones they are supposed to know are great. And they don’t do it for them, T.S. Eliot or whatever. They’ll read it and they’ll think, “I don’t know what he’s talking about.” And then they’ll think, “Well, if that’s great poetry, it’s not for me.”

I think that’s a mistake. I think the thing to do is to realize that all kinds of poetry exist for all kinds of people. If T.S. Eliot does it for you, that’s awesome. If he doesn’t, then just you don’t have to read him. Like, you’re a full-grown adult. Read other poetry. It’s fantastic. There’s a whole world of poetry out there. And if you start to just read around in the world of poetry, you will find the poems that really strike you, find you, resonate with you, and reveal to you a whole different world and a whole set of experiences you never saw coming.

Tom Walsh: Yeah, the way you put it in this opening chapter of your book is to read personally, by which I think you mean, read as ourselves, encounter it as ourselves. Is there a particular poem that you would point to just kind of bring this concept of reading personally to life?

Abram Van Engen: Yeah. I mean, so I will read to you, if I can find it here, the last stanza of Philip Larkin’s “Church Going.” Now, the last stanza of Philip Larkin’s “Church-Going” has been for me, just a super important way to think about what church is. And the important thing to know about Philip Larkin is he was a really outright, forthright atheist. I mean, he really thought that religion was doomed. It was over. We were done with that. And yet in the poem “Church Going,” he can’t help coming back to church. He keeps coming to these churches as museums and wondering what was going on here. And one of the things he notices in the poem is that this was a space in which all of the most sacred and important moments of life were dignified. So birth with baptism, marriage, death with funerals, all of it was brought together, and all of it in a secular world has been separated. And so he says there’s something special about this space, even though he won’t give in to it, even though he won’t believe in the God behind it. And this last stanza of his has been, for me, a kind of definition of what church is, written by an atheist, that has traveled with me all my life.

So this is this is what he says.

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

“A serious house on serious earth it is.” I mean, we had a guy who attended a church, he was also an atheist, but he came every Sunday, and I asked my pastor about it once. I said, “You know, why does this guy keep coming every Sunday? He has other things to do on a Sunday morning. He doesn’t believe any of it. I’m happy he’s here, but I’m just sort of curious.” And the pastor says, “Oh, he comes for the conversation.” He says, “Here is the place where serious conversation happens every week, and I want to be there for it, even if I don’t believe it or can’t believe it.”

Tom Walsh: Well, turning to taking a Christian standpoint, one of the reasons you argue for reading poetry, in this part of the book on why read it, is to name creation. And that’s a striking concept, I think, for a believer. Can you unpack what you mean there?

Abram Van Engen: Sure. Yeah. I pull this from Genesis, as do many poets. So if you look at Genesis, Adam is created, he’s given dominion. And then his first task is to name creation. And many writers have looked at that first task and realized it is a task of language. And it’s kind of remarkable, right? Like, God uses language to create. And then he loans that language to Adam in order to name creation, to be, at a certain sense, a partner with him in the creative act. So if you don’t mind, I’ll just read two quick paragraphs about that that gets into this idea that poetry is the art of naming, and naming comes from creation itself.

“The story of creation reminds us of the communities that lie in and behind each poem, but it also does more. It gives us a story of vocation that makes sense of poetic endeavor. Creation anchors this art in the beginnings of human speech. Poems participate in the act of creation as they take up the first task of Adam, the attempt to name what exists, all that has come before and all that might yet come to be. This moment in Genesis is startling, and it bears close attention. Just after making human beings in his image, God gives them dominion and stewardship. He tells them to take care of the earth, and then he assigns the first duty. He brings every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens before Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.

This moment has vast implications. The language of God creates the whole world. And then in the second chapter, God loans that language to human beings so that they can know the world in which they live. Not only that, but God takes delight in the names that we come up with. In this moment of creation, he bends in to listen with eager anticipation. He pulls up a chair. He watches and waits. He wants to hear what Adam will say. Genesis 2 gives us the picture of a God who desires partnership with human beings in and through the creativity of language. As God made the heavens and the earth and everything in them, he could have declared the names of all things from the get-go, assigning Adam the task only of memorizing and repeating what had already been ordained. But that is not what happens. The words of creation pass to human speech. ‘You say it,’ God declares. ‘You name creation.'”

Tom Walsh: Let me remind our audience to feel free to ask questions there in the Q&A box. I see some are coming in, and we’ll be getting to those shortly. And also feel free to like the questions others post, which helps us figure out which ones to use. So there you talk a bit about the delight of naming creation. And one of the themes in your book is about reading poems for pleasure, and taking some and dropping others. But, of course, people, again, are very accustomed to looking at them as hard work. So, really, how do we find pleasure in poetry? How would you help us with that?

Abram Van Engen: Yeah. One great poet, Marianne Moore—who, by the way, is a Presbyterian here from Saint Louis, here all her life—she was a modernist and kind of a difficult poet, but a really good poet. She has this poem called “Poetry.” And the first line of it is “I too dislike it.” And I just find that amazing, right? This is a very accomplished poet. And that’s the first line of her poem called “Poetry.” But I really do think that people have to give themselves the freedom to dislike it in order to like it. And what you have to do— and you could do this in any number of ways, right? You could use anthologies. You could go to a bookstore, you could sit in the library, whatever. You just start reading around. And you allow yourself the freedom to realize that a lot of poems are not going to work for you. But if you set them aside, pick up a different poet, pick up a different thing, eventually you’re going to find a poem and you’re going to find it amazing.

And then the question becomes, what did I find amazing about this poem? Are there others like it? Are there more by this poet that I might like? What’s it doing that I really care about? And that’s, I think, the way into the world of poetry. You’ve got to find that door that opens. Later, down the road, if you want to, you can begin to ask, “Why do other people like the poems that I don’t like?” That’s a great question to ask if you want to, you know, learn more about the world of poetry.

The other thing I would say is that every poem has depths to it, but not all depths need exploring. That is to say, if you really like a poem, you can begin to ask questions of it. You can begin to know it more fully. But sometimes all we need from a poem is just to skirt across the surface and that’s it. So I compare—in the book I do this and elsewhere when I teach, I do this—I compare poems to pools, because sometimes all you really need is the shallow end to be refreshed. And that’s good enough. And sometimes you need the deep end to really go swimming. And that’s kind of how poems work. Sometimes all you need is the shallow end, and that’s good enough.

Tom Walsh: Yeah. Speaking of water metaphors, you have a poem from Billy Collins in there where he talks about urging people to water ski across the surface of a poem and wave at the author’s name on the shore.

Abram Van Engen: I love that poem.

Tom Walsh: A great way to enjoy a poem, but one of the ways that we might not think of. Well, another question that comes to mind: you’ve got a chapter where you kind of challenge us to think of poetry like friendship. It’s a really striking image. So can you tease out what you mean by that and maybe give an example of what that could mean in action?

Abram Van Engen: Yeah. So I take this imagery from C.S. Lewis, and I’ll just read this one line from him. He says—and this is in The Four Loves—the typical expression of opening friendship would be something like, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.” And I take that to be also the typical expression of an opening relationship with a poem. You read it and you say, “What? You too. I thought I was the only one.” But the thing about friendship is that it changes with you, right? So you might have a friend who you’ve traveled with for 20 years, and it’s not the same now as it was before. And poetry is the same way. And so when I talk about poetry as friendship, I talk about the way that even though the words on the page stay the same, the relationship changes over time.

And you can think about this in relation to the Psalms, right? You read a psalm when you’re 20 and it does one thing for you. You read the same psalm when you’re 40 or 60 or 80, and it’s almost like it’s a completely different poem. But the words haven’t changed. They’re still the same. The relationship changes over time, even as the text stays the same. And I use that to talk through—and in the book, I talk about a couple of poems that have been particular friends of mine over time—but they change as you move. And it also brings out other things in you as you get to know the poem more and more.

Tom Walsh: Would you like to share one of those?

Abram Van Engen: Sure. Yeah. I mean, one of the poems that I have always loved, loved intensely, is this amazing poem by Robert Hayden. And this is a poem about a father and a son, and the son has grown up and realized what the father did for him as young. Now, when I first encountered this poem, I was in college, and I was thinking about my own father, and I was thinking about myself as the son. Now I have three kids, and I think about myself as the father. So the poem itself has flipped on me. But here’s the poem. This is probably my favorite poem. “Those Winter Sundays”:

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

So a poem about sort of recognizing much later the work of love, even when it isn’t expressed.

Tom Walsh: Well, in discussing that particular poem, which is really such a powerful one, I found it a good way to get into some of the poetic devices that the poet uses, that probably people wouldn’t have caught on a first listening or first reading. I wonder if you’d take a minute or two to unpack a few of those.

Abram Van Engen: Sure.

Tom Walsh: See how much is going on just in what, in some respects, seems fairly simple.

Abram Van Engen: Yeah. I mean, if you’re asking me to teach a poem, I’m here for it, man. So, just so you know, for those who— you don’t have the poem in front of you, but it’s three stanzas, and there’s one word repeated across the three stanzas, which is cold. And it starts off as “blueblack cold” in the first stanza. Then it it’s cold that splintering and breaking in the second stanza. And then it’s cold that’s driven out in the third stanza. So there’s a narrative built into the three different stanzas. And one way to, by the way, think about stanzas, the word “stanza” is Italian for room. So when you have different stanzas in a poem, they’re different rooms, and each room has its own function, even though they’re all part of the same house. And so it’s always worth asking, what’s the function of this room in this poem. And that’s one way that those tie together.

But I’ll just say one more word. I’ll go on forever if I do this. But I’ll just say one more word about the— of course, the sounds are amazing in this poem. He’s just an incredibly powerful poet with sounds. But here’s one way that he makes the sounds work for him. So in the father’s labor to get the fire going, it’s hard labor, right? And he uses words that make you slow down. So “made banked fires blaze.” I ask a class to say that as fast as they can, and they can’t say it that fast. Right? “Made banked fires blaze.” But then the son not noticing happens in a sentence that you can say super fast, right? So the next sentence of the poem is “no one ever thanked him.” Well, you could say that really fast. “No one ever thanked him.” Right. And so the words themselves are slowing you down, speeding you up, and producing the effect that’s built into the story itself of the poem.

Tom Walsh: That’s really helpful and interesting. I think one of the areas that people sometimes struggle with is the idea of form in poetry. People find it baffling or obscure. And, of course, poetic forms range from ones that are quite clear and obvious, like a sonnet—although, as we learned, there are lots of different kinds of sonnets, lots of different ways to do it—to ones that are just free-verse or doesn’t have a form that’s obvious. So why think about form? Why can that increase our enjoyment and satisfaction and engagement with poetry?

Abram Van Engen: Yeah. So form is really great to think about. It’s also one of those things that you don’t have to think about unless you want to. So a lot of the book is an invitation to “if you want to think more about a poem, think this way; if you don’t, move on.” But form is one of those things. And the best way to think about form is that every poem has a kind of container. That’s the form. And containers, we know, have lots of different functions. A Tupperware container and say a pitcher of water are both containers, but they have really different functions, right? They’re not going to have the same kinds of effects. That’s the way poets think about form. How do I get the right kind of container to produce the effect of the poem that I want it to produce? Do I want this poem to be flowing? Do I want it to pour water out? Do I want it to tightly seal something? What do I need this poem to do for me? That’s the kind of form I need to find for it.

I’ll give you just one example of this. So, many people will have encountered at some point in their lives Walt Whitman and his poetry in school. Some people like it, some people hate it. Whatever. But what he did that was quite genius is he said, none of the existing forms work for me because what I want to do, said Walt Whitman, is talk about the expansive democracy of America, the hugeness of it, the bigness of it all, the variety of it, just the enormity of America, which he loved so much. And so what he did is came up with enormous lines, lines that are enormously expansive. They roll down the page, they can barely be contained in between the margins. And they produce these lists, these catalogs, these “and and and and and and and and and,” in order to move through all these varieties of democracy and all the people within it. So he created the form that would produce the effect to convey the meaning of America that he wanted to produce. So that’s just one quick example.

But other people use really tiny short lines. And their goal there oftentimes is to get you to sit up and pay attention. Why are there only three words or even one word on this line? It forces you to notice it, and that produces its own kind of effect. So that’s one way to think about form. It’s a container and each container has its own function.

Tom Walsh: I’m going to start drawing some questions in from our viewers because they have a lot, a lot of good ones I see already. So one of them refers actually to a chapter of your book, which is on the question of why read poetry and “To Tell the Truth” is the title, and you cite in it Emily Dickinson’s famous line to “tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” And so Sandra Fox asks, “In that chapter you talk about poetry telling the truth slant. Could you comment more on this?” And I would add, nowadays we expect truth to be packaged in simple declarative sentences, and the more [inaudible] the more we doubt it or distrust it. So what can poetry add?

Abram Van Engen: Yeah, I mean, I tend to be skeptical of simple declarative sentences. So that doesn’t tend to work for me. The truths that we really care about tend not to be able to be packaged or reduced in such a way. I mean, what is the truth of God or the truth, for example, when we say to someone, “I love you” and they say they want to know the truth of that. Well, how do you convey the truth of that? What is the truth of that? So much of truth is so much bigger than can be contained in a principle or a statement. And that’s one of the sort of central insights of poetry, so that what you’re trying to do is work your way into a vision that allows you to see things newly and therefore truly. And so, you know, what Dickinson goes on to say in that poem: “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant— / Success in Circuit lies / Too bright for our infirm Delight / The Truth’s superb surprise.” In other words, the problem is with us, we’re not able, as the great movie had it, you can’t handle the truth, right? It’s too big. So what we need is poem after poem and way after way of getting us to see things with fresh eyes, to know them as true and to begin to understand them.

And so this is one of the ways that I sort of unfold in that chapter. And the basic idea here is that if God is truth, he is by definition more than we can understand, more than we can imagine. And therefore all truth which is pointing back to him has to keep coming at us slant. I mean, one of the images I talk about in there is the way that God never shows his face directly. It’s too much for us, right? So on Mount Sinai it’s hidden by a cloud. When Moses wants to see him, he says, “No, you’ll die. It’s way too much for you. But I can hide you in a rock and show you myself in passing.” And that’s, I think, a kind of guiding factor for the work of poetry and its relationship to truth.

Tom Walsh: We’ve gotten a couple of questions on this theme of poetry and message. And I think it’s understandable because it’s a somewhat subtle point or maybe a new one. So let me just try to weave two of them together. Sure. Bob Krulwich says, “Most poets are trying to reach the reader, not to create experience, not a message, but to reach the reader seems to beg this question. Reach with what? Wouldn’t it be to reach with a message?” And then a related question from an anonymous attendee, “When you define it as creating an experience rather than a message, haven’t there been Christian poets like William Langland, John Donne, John Milton, who really did very clearly offer messages to their audiences?” So again, how do you sensitize readers to literary form, which itself is content, and helps to create both a message and an experience?

Abram Van Engen: Absolutely. So I’m not trying to say that poetry has nothing, no message or no meaning. Of course it does. But why poetry? I mean, if the point is the message, why have you written a poem? And that’s, I think, the key question. When I teach literature classes, I use a quote from Sam Bankman-Fried, the one that the big scandal was about. And I love it because he says, “I would never read a novel. It’s too long and what’s the point? Boil it down to six bullet points, and that’s all I need.” And I think, okay, you clearly have problems, but one of them is that you don’t understand what a novel is doing.

Well, in the same way, poetry, yes, it has a message. But to boil it down to the message is not the same thing as the poem itself. So this morning we were recording a podcast episode for Poetry for All, and we were doing Mary Sidney’s translation of Psalm 52. Now, Psalm 52 is a pretty clear message, right? Evil tyrants will fall and God will come to the side of the just. And the whole beginning of that. Now, why have there been so many translations and so many attempts at poetry with that psalm? Why was Mary Sidney retranslating that psalm? Well, in part to produce the experience of the confidence of that poet in God’s care for the just and God’s hatred of the evil of tyrants. Right? And it requires a sort of careful use of language to do that again and again.

So I happen to have this up because we just recorded this, but this is her first stanza. I’ll just read her first stanza. “Tyrant, why swell’st thou thus, of mischief vaunting, since help from God to us is never wanting?” Now there are all kinds of ways in which what she’s doing with the language is producing the confidence in God that the poem’s message is about. “Tyrant,” she’s calling him out, and then she pauses. “Why swell’st thou thus?” There’s this incredible bravado in that first line, and you get the experience of it because of the way the line is written, because of the poem itself.

So I always say, yes, absolutely. Take the meaning from poems, for sure. It matters. But if you want to experience what poetry is about, you’ve got to go read the poem again. Which, incidentally, is why we keep reading the Psalms again and again and again.

Tom Walsh: On a related note, an anonymous viewer asks, “How did the Puritans understand poetry and the Bible? Did they take it more literally than contemporary readers?”

Abram Van Engen: No, I don’t necessarily think so. I mean, the Puritans were a mixed bag, of course, but they had more artistic sensibilities than we often give them credit for. Their Bay Psalm Book, which translated the Psalms so as to be able to sing it, was the first book published in New England. That’s not such great poetry. But somebody like Anne Bradstreet, for example, I mean, she is deeply invested in this sense of the effects of poetry produced in the ways that things are written.

So Puritanism was very much a religion of the heart. We tend to think of them as a sort of rigid intellectual tradition, but it was definitely, it turned— I mean, this is what my work is about. I will not go into my academic work, but this is a lot of what my academic work is about, is the role of religion, of the heart, of the sympathies, of the emotions, and Puritanism. And the Psalms were definitely one way of getting there. So they actually had quite a capacious sense of it. I mean, Edward Taylor was this incredible minister, late 1600s. And to prepare for every communion Sunday, he wrote sonnets and poems, really incredible metaphysical poems. And that was the way that he prepared his heart. And he wrote them for himself. He kept them in careful handwriting. We found them in 1939, and now they’re some of the best poetry from the 1600s that we’ve got.

Tom Walsh: Wow. Wow. One of the questions we’ve gotten that really relates to a chapter of your book. You have a chapter in the section on how to approach poetry on asking questions. And so the person asks, “When you approach a poem, are there any universal questions you ask? If so, what are they? What kinds of questions do you ask when you read a poem that help you experience and/or understand it?”

Abram Van Engen: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think what I try to do in that chapter is just give some simple questions that nobody needs a PhD to ask. Just simple ways to understand a poem more. And again, what I emphasize there, what I emphasize here, is that these are not questions you’re going to want to ask of a poem unless you want to ask it of a poem. That is to say, I think in the same way that desire draws us to God to get to know more of God. So, you know, the motto at my college, Calvin College, was “faith seeking understanding.” You’re drawn to God; therefore you want to understand God. Well, when you’re drawn to a poem and want to understand a poem, there are some simple questions you can ask.

One of them is about lines. Poets spend a lot of time thinking about lines and where they break, and what gets contained in the unit of a line. Is it long? Is it short? Why? Another thing is to think about stanzas. Another thing is to think about sounds. What are the sounds that rhyme or almost rhyme? Where is the repetition of sounds happening? And another thing, of course, always to think about, is repetitions. Are there any words repeated? My colleague on the Poetry for All podcast has this great line about sonnets. She says “sonnets are limited real estate.” Because of the form. You got 14 lines and ten syllables per line, which means any time you’ve got a repetition in a sonnet, you’ve got somebody focusing your attention on that in a particular kind of way, because the real estate is so limited that everything is pricey and you’ve given double room to something, you’ve repeated it. So even in that poem that I read, “what did I know” gets repeated. “What did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?” And you can imagine how much less effective the poem would be without that repetition. So these are just a few things: line unit, stanza units, sounds, repetitions—I go through a bunch more in the book.

Tom Walsh: So we’ve gotten a couple of questions about children and how to inculcate a love of poetry in children. One comes from Abigail Watrous who asks, “Can you give advice for encouraging young children, say ages 1 to 6, to learn and love poems? And then Jonathan King asks, “How would you guide a seventh-grade student in learning to love reading poetry?” So I happen to know you have kids in both categories yourself. So maybe a few thoughts on these different ages and stages.

Abram Van Engen: I really think that people have to grow out of a love of poetry. I think it’s sort of natural to love poetry, which is why there’s so many children’s books that are written with bad rhymes. Because kids love rhymes, they love meter, they love rhythm, they’re built for it. And it’s only later that we sort of say, “Oh, what’s the use of all of that?” And so tons of children’s books will get kids into poetry. Easy. And of course, there’s the fun ones, Jack Prelutsky and Shel Silverstein and all of those things. And I think those are great places to start. I used to chant poems at my kids. So the Dickinson “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” You know, I would wake up Grace from a nap, turn the light on. Of course it’s too bright, you know. So then I would say, “ah, too bright for our infirm delight the truth’s superb surprise!” So I actually don’t think she’s a big Dickinson fan because of that. But anyway— so that may not be the best approach. But I think that kids love the play of language and the sounds, the music of language, and it’s only later that we have to sort of give that up, and all you really have to do is keep it going.

As for seventh and eighth graders, there’s the cool/uncool factor you got to work through. But I just taught a whole auditorium full of eighth graders about poetry because my son was in eighth grade, and they were there for it. And one of the things to do is to read them poems that they will get and like. So Maryanne Moore again, same poem, “Poetry.” She says, “I do not admire what I cannot understand.” Right. Well, I think people tend to think that that’s all of poetry, but it’s really not. There’s tons of poetry that’s just super accessible and super easy to understand and doing what poems do. And so you find the poems that reach eighth graders at their level, and suddenly they’re there for it, right?

But I also think that poetry is much more alive and well than we tend to give it credit for. I mean, I meet tons and tons and tons of college students who come in and want to write. And they have— and poetry is, for them, it’s just this method of understanding experience and getting into it. Which is why at least at Wash U, our English major is growing so much because people want to be in the poetry. They want to be in— they want to participate in this art. And it hasn’t left them yet.

Tom Walsh: Well, that’s super encouraging to hear, really. An interesting question on a note related to that, of writing poetry, comes from an anonymous person who says, “As someone who writes poetry, I often feel like the question of how do we get the church to read poetry is the reverse of what needs to happen. The real question seems to be, how do we get people to write poetry? Because if someone doesn’t value playing with language, maybe we should give people space to play with language. ‘Maybe you’ve put this together in the wrong ways. Try it again the right ways. Try different forms.’ How have you tried to approach teaching poetry like this?”

Abram Van Engen: Yeah. I mean, I think that one of the great ways to understand what poets are doing is to try to do it yourself, right? I mean, this is true of anything, right? If you try to take piano lessons and then you see a concert pianist, you’re like, oh, now I get why that’s hard, right? So I do think there is that. I do think churches have a variety of approaches to the arts. Some really encourage it, some are less so. Some have room for writing poetry. I know one poet who basically was commissioned by her church to write poems for the church, and the church spread that practice to others. So she could teach others how to get into this.

I know a person who came to poetry late in his life. I tell his story a little bit in the book, but this is like a financial guy. So sort of a high-stress position, right? Comes to poetry in his late 40s, maybe 50. And what he discovers in poetry is the art of slowing down and paying attention. And it makes him so— it’s so useful and important to him that he’s basically taken up not just reading poetry, but writing poetry and writing poetry now in order to get himself back into Scripture. So he’ll take a passage of Scripture that he reads and he’ll write a poem about it to get his own sort of experience of that passage down.

So I do think that the writing of poetry can be encouraged in the church. I will say as well, I run into a lot of the other side of things, which is a lot of people who want to write poetry but don’t want to read it. And those people confuse me. I don’t understand them. But I do run into them, and they’re a special breed. So we get plenty of them. But I do think just more poetry in general is definitely worth it. And again, I would just say the church, it’s such natural home for this because poetry has always been alive in the church. So why not practice it more sort of consciously?

Tom Walsh: We got a question from Michael Santa Rosa asking, “Are there particular poets whose poems stand out for their potential to draw nonbelievers, particularly faculty or students”—but I think this could go for anyone—”to Christ?” Any that kind of build that bridge to faith, perhaps, for people who otherwise struggle to access it?

Abram Van Engen: Yeah. I mean, I would recommend Mary Karr. She has this amazing poem called “Who the Meek Are Not.” And she is a poet and a memoirist. People probably know her memoir best, if you know who she is, but she’s a poet and a convert to Catholicism. She has some amazing poems. But basically what I would say is the folks who have the— you’ve got to have this earned credibility, and then you turn out to be talking about things of Christ, and people are willing to listen. And so some of the classics are really effective in that way. I mean, Auden and Eliot, some of those folks. Hopkins. So many people love Hopkins, and I love Hopkins. He’s probably my favorite poet. And people want to read Hopkins because his language is just so stinking beautiful. It’s music on the page. And if you’ve got that kind of beauty right in front of you, you might start asking yourself, what is the source of all this beauty? And he’s got an amazing poem about that called “Pied Beauty.” So anyway, I think some of those would be places to start.

Tom Walsh: Some of the questions are about just the why, really, in a very fundamental question. Natasha Paquette asks, “How can poetry help foster our sense of wonder?” And Martha Ekblad asks, “Why would I care to find poetry I might enjoy? What about poetry makes it worth it?” So in a very big— you’ve addressed this in various ways, but maybe take another run at why. Why even do this? When it’s such a countercultural thing to do? We’re all so distracted and living perhaps lives that sometimes feel rather superficial. What’s in it to make the investment?

Abram Van Engen: Let me answer that in a couple of different ways. One is I think one of the things that poetry does is it makes things fresh, things that became too familiar to us, things that we no longer notice, things that we no longer pay attention to. I mean, this is the preacher’s problem every week, right? How do you take a piece of Scripture that people have read over and over and over again and make it new, make it fresh, make it interesting, make them realize what the depths are that are going on here. There is a passage from G.K. Chesterton about that, and I use it in the book because I think it is what poetry is so much about. But this is what G.K. Chesterton says; this is from his book Orthodoxy:

It might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due not to lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence of life. Because children have a bounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore, they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again,” and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “do it again” to the sun, and every evening “do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike. It may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our father is younger than we.

And what I use that passage to talk about is the way that the monotony that numbs us to the world is broken by poetry. It is poets— I describe poetry as the art of paying attention. It’s poets who slow us down. It’s the art of poetry that allows us to see the wonders that God has set up around us. And so much of poetry is an invitation to care about the things of God, as if for the first time, or to see the things of God as if for the first time. So that’s why I think it’s just such a necessary art for all of us, but also in particular for Christians.

Tom Walsh: There have been a few questions about the relationship between poetry and song lyrics. For example, one of them is Madonna Hamel saying, “I was first moved by poetic language through hymns, then the songs of Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, etc. How do you think about lyrics, the relationship between song lyrics and poetry?” And hymn lyrics, I should add, to be clear.

Abram Van Engen: Yeah, I’m sure there’s a very long and complicated debate about this, but I just think they’re poetry. I mean, yes, they’re poetry that’s set to music, and music does its own thing. And I know very little about music, and so I’m not going to comment on the music; it does make it different. But they’re poems; of course, they’re poems. Hymns are poems. Absolutely. And, like if you think about the classic song “In the Bleak Midwinter,” that was a poem long before it was a song. And so many of the hymns and songs that we have were poems long before they were set to music. The music does change things, for sure. It does. It’s not quite the same thing as it was before, but absolutely all the lyrics, all the hymns. There’s been a lot of talk about the way that a certain kind of poetry, basically where it lives and thrives the most today. And then the most popular way today is in rap music, which is this incredible verbal play, and incredible rhyme and rhythm, and that is intense poetry with its own tradition and one of the most popular places you’re going to find poetry today. So yeah, absolutely. I think they’re intimately related.

Tom Walsh: And another interesting question from Jonathan King: “Is there something different happening in free-verse or modern poetry generally than in classic forms? What do we need to pay attention to when looking for good poetry? Or is all poetry subjective and able to be taken up by the good if our eyes and ears are open to it?”

Abram Van Engen: Yeah, I mean, I do definitely— I don’t want to be totally relativistic about this, right? I do think there are better and worse poems. But I also want to say to folks that at some level that doesn’t yet matter. I mean, if you become a scholar of poetry that might matter, or a teacher of poetry that might matter. But what matters most for anyone who takes up reading poetry is what works for you. And forget it. Who cares what anyone else says, right? Does this poem do it for you? Do you get the experience out of this poem that the poem is driving at?

But in terms of forms, you know, one of the things about free verse— there’s a lot of poets who talk about this. In some ways it’s more difficult than traditional forms because you’ve got to find the form in free verse that will fit the content, whereas in other cases the form is given and you’re working the content into the form. Here you’ve got a certain kind of content you want to get out, and you’ve got to find the form that’s going to actually match it. And a lot of people, I think, fail to do that or don’t do that well. Some poems go on too long, some stop too short. Some don’t have, you know, the right kinds of line lengths to produce the kinds of effects that they want. And this is one of the things that poets practice and work at. So one thing to think about with free verse is did they get it right? Did they match this form to this content? Did they find the right link between the two?

Tom Walsh: Well, thank you for that, Abram. In a minute, we’ll give Abram the last word. Let me just offer a few concluding thoughts first. Immediately after we conclude, on your screen, you’ll see an online feedback form and would be really grateful for your thoughts on how we can make these conversations even more valuable to you. And as a small token of appreciation, everyone who does that will get a special gift for a free digital copy of the Trinity Forum Reading of your choice, and some of the ones that would really chime with today’s discussion are some of our readings on “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom Abram was just mentioning. “Bulletins from Immortality” by Emily Dickinson, mentioned earlier. “Devotions” by John Donne, also “Sacred and Profane Love” by John Donne. So we’ve got a lot there to choose from. Thank you for doing that.

Tomorrow we’ll send you the audio and video links of this conversation. Please do share them with others. We know there are many others who aren’t available at this particular time on a Friday or in New Zealand Saturday morning. So please share freely.

We’d love for you to get involved with us and become a member of the Trinity Forum Society, which helps support events like this through membership. And you can join today online on our website. You’ll see it there in the chat box. A special incentive we’re offering now is a signed copy of Abram’s book, Word Made Fresh, when you join us with a gift of $100 or more. And if you’d like to sponsor a future Online Conversation, please let us know. We’re really grateful to today’s co-sponsors, the Carver Project and Eerdmans.

A word about our upcoming events. We’ve got quite a few in September. They’re really exciting ones. You can sign up for them right now. On Friday, September 6th, we’ll have Knox Thames and Nicole Bibbins Sadaka talking on religious freedom and whether Christians should support it for all. And then the week after that, September 13th, we’ll have an Online Conversation with Dr. Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project and the National Institutes of Health, on his new book, The Road to Wisdom. And then, for those of those of you who are in or near Washington, DC, on September 30th, we’ll be hosting James Davison Hunter on his new book, Democracy and Solidarity: The Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis, and David Brooks will be along to offer a response. This is an in-person event, so come if you can. And if you’re not in the area, we’ll make the video available to everyone afterwards. And of course, you can find all our past conversations and our podcasts too, on our website.

With that, over to you, Abram, for the last word.

Abram Van Engen: Well, first I would just say, if you want to get into talking about how poems work and you want to take that class with me in September, you should check it out because it’s going to be fun. But I’ll just say this for a last word. You know, in the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus dies on the cross, the last words he speaks are, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And a lot of us know that that’s a citation of Psalm 22. And we can get into why is he using that psalm? What does that psalm mean? What’s he getting at by saying that psalm? But the important point to me in relation to this conversation is that the last words of Christ are a poem. He dies with a poem on his lips. And I have known so many people who, when they have been dying, the last thing that they can remember are the hymns that they sung all their life. And there’s a reason for that. Poetry runs deep in us. And one of the things, one of the reasons I think poetry runs so deep in us is because we are described in the Bible as the poems of God. So if you look at Ephesians 2:10, most people translate that as “we are the handiwork of God.” But the handiwork, that word “handiwork” is the same word as “poems,” poiesis. It comes from the same Greek root. So a better literal translation of Ephesians 2:10 is that we, us, human beings, the image-bearers of God, we are the poems of God. And that strikes me as a good reason to figure out what poetry is all about.

Tom Walsh: Indeed. Thank you so much, Abram, for joining us. It’s really been a pleasure. Thanks to all of you who’ve joined us and have a great weekend.