Tucked away in one of last year’s editions of Christian Century – an edition I picked up largely to read articles by John de Gruchy on Bonhoeffer, Clifford Green on Metaxas’ version of Bonhoeffer, and Stanley Hauerwas’ review of Peter Leithart’s Defending Constantine – is a delightful review (pp. 62–5) by Brian Doyle, of Mink River fame, on three books of poetry: Every Riven Thing by Christian Wiman, Swan by Mary Oliver and Walking Papers by Thomas Lynch. Doyle begins by ‘tiptoeing’ towards an answer to the question, ‘Why poetry?’ As someone who reads, and posts, a goodly number of poems, I thought his answer worth repeating:

‘Poetry is “memorable speech,” said the (great) poet Wystan Hugh Auden, “about birth, death, the Beatific Vision.” Or, in less lovely words: good poetry, great poetry, is the distilled salt and song of the way we speak; it is espresso speech, perhaps; it pierces and penetrates and illuminates, it makes us see fresh.

Poetry is crucial to us as human beings, for speaking memorably and listening ferociously is perhaps how we best evolve and pray powerfully and stutter toward grace and peace and joy, toward a world where no child weeps and violence is a dark memory. If we do not, as a species, speak memorably and listen ferociously, we have no horizon, no map, no theme. Think, for example, of a world in which the thin Jewish man Yeshua ben Joseph did not speak so colorfully and memorably of forgiveness and grace. Would we have come even this far toward the Light?

I know there are some among us who court silence as their prayer, but I cannot imagine a world shorn of the music of language, the dance of words, the mysterious ways that lines and sentences and images conspire to awaken and elevate and inspire us. Yes, inspire; how very many times have we been lifted by songs and poems, chants and litanies, a twist of words that exactly caught the way we felt but could not say? More times than we can ever count, yes?

So, if we are serious about attentiveness – which is to say, if we are hard at work spiritually – we read poetry on the chance that it might move and startle and illuminate us, that it might be memorable in ways that other written (and sung) language is not. This is why we are so often left cold by lesser poetry, because many poems are merely precious, allusive, self-conscious and self-absorbed without being memorable, moving, startling or accessible. Sometimes I think that great poetry is the highest literary art because it has to claw past such an ocean of terrible muck’.