Greetings to you all,
All I’d like to say about the Oscars is that Kenneth Branagh has had a hand in many movies I adore, and I am very happy that he finally won an Oscar after being nominated so many times. Once more, with feeling:
The Part Where There’s an Essay:
I was amazed and thankful to be able to sit under some poetry teaching from Malcolm Guite last week. If you don’t know of him, I’ve taken to calling him the patron-Hobbit-saint of the Rabbit Room. He is an Anglican priest, poet, and singer-songwriter. Why a hobbit? Because LOOK AT HIM:
That is a very specific style decision, don't you agree?
When it was time for his session, he walked out on stage carrying a rainstick. If you aren’t familiar with what that is, it’s a hollowed-out bit of wood or cactus, filled with pebbles, beans, or rice, so that when you turn it over, it makes a sound like rain falling.
The first thing Malcolm said when he came out on stage was, “I feel as though since I am a priest, I should perform a minor exorcism.” He then proceeded to send all the bad English teachers who made students feel as though they “couldn't do poetry” to eternal detention. “Depart from here, ye workers of iniquity, and return from whence you came.”
He then proceeded to teach us a brilliant lesson on the Seamus Heaney poem, “The Rainstick.”
I have loved poetry for a long time, at least since middle school. I remember falling in love with Edna St. Vincent Millay as a young teenager. She provided a lot of opportunities for teenage angst to really let fly. And of course, in 1989 the movie Dead Poets Society was released and made us all fall in love with poetry, uppity tragic private schoolboys, and rebellious English teachers. (sidenote: I am a little afraid to rewatch Dead Poets nowadays because I am terrified that I will side with the parents now that I am old.)
More than one-third of the Bible is poetry, yet here is the genre that we as modern American Christians avoid the most. Poetry demands much of us: it makes us slow down to understand; it forces us to consider things from an alternate perspective; it may elicit emotions we weren’t prepared for. It makes us notice words. It makes us notice the world.
I once heard someone say that she didn’t like poetry because she didn’t want to be told “how to feel.” This broke my heart a little bit. Poetry doesn’t tell us how to feel, of course; it tells us how the poet feels. We are able to respond to that emotion however we see fit: with empathy, with confusion, with anger, with affirmation.
John Piper says:
Paradoxically, poetry is an expression of the fact that there are great things that are inexpressible. There is no one-to-one correspondence between the depths of human experience and the capacities of language to capture that experience. There are experiences that go beyond the ability of language to express them.
For the poet, this limitation of language does not produce silence; it produces poetry. Poetry is a kind of verbal resistance to the impenetrability of human experience. The poet will at least try.
As we enter the holiest of weeks on the calendar, I encourage you to let some poetry into your space. It could be Isaiah 52-53: one of the most beautiful poems in the Bible, in my lowly opinion.
Next week I won’t be writing an essay; I’ll be sending you a poem.
Related: God Filled Your Bible with Poems
For the Anglophiles
As long as we’re mentioning him, my favorite piece from Malcolm Guite may not be a poem at all — it’s a story. On the occasion of Prince Philip’s death last year, Malcolm told the story of how he once was handed a sword by the man himself. “I was wearing the scarlet and palatinate Durham doctoral gown, which, someone once remarked, made me look like a cross between a flamboyant pirate and a dodgy Renaissance cardinal.”
Reads & Listens of the Week
I continue to love the substack To the Shire. The author is reading Lord of the Rings for the first time and reflecting as she goes. This week’s entry is excellent: What is Mordor, Part I. “When I choose books to read to my children, I think about what I want them to know about the world, what I want them to believe about it. I want my children to know that their actions matter, of course. But I want them also to know that darkness does indeed exist, and that it may exist even in their hearts.”
If you’d like to read a little more about the conference I attended last weekend, here’s a bit from the local news.
I finally met Leslie and Ned Bustard from Square Halo Books last weekend. Leslie has been a social media friend for a while, and you might recognize her husband’s name as the illustrator of the Every Moment Holy books. Square Halo is on the cusp of releasing Wild Things and Castles in the Sky: A Guide to Choosing the Best Books for Children. If you have children in your life, you should order it! A couple of my brilliant friends contributed to it.
This American Life was a real journey this week. I don't even know how to describe it, but if you’re in the mood for a few stories that range from information about the war in Ukraine to a guy that speaks on behalf of the deceased at funerals — give it a listen. Here’s a sad bit about the elephant at the zoo in Kyiv.
Closer to Home
A long time ago I wrote about the tradition of “Spaghetti Mondays” and the glory of ho-hum routines.
Cynic: A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing. — Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray