with David Mahan

Abram Van Engen is Professor of English and Professor of Religion and Politics (by courtesy) at Washington University in St. Louis. In addition to his scholarly work that focuses on 17th century Puritans, he is also a promoter of poetry in the public square through his podcast “Poetry for All.”

DM: First, let me thank you Abram for your willingness to do this. We have found that the interview format for Among Winter Cranes can be as substantive as more formal pieces, and also opens a window onto some of the personal motivation that scholars have for the work they do. We appreciate your contribution to the ongoing conversation about Christian faith and literature.

AVE: Thanks for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

DM: As I note in my introduction, one of the facets of your work that I find particularly compelling is your commitment to foster greater attention to poetry beyond the academy. What most inspires you to pursue this?

AVE: When we love something, we want to share it. I think it’s sort of as simple as that. I find poetry personally compelling, and I think the power of poetry is open to all. Poetry reshapes and refreshes our experiences. It opens us to new views of the world. It moves us, and it does so because, in many ways, it is the most physical form of words—not just in how it looks on the page, which is carefully crafted for effect, but also in how it affects the reader. I think of poetry as deeply incarnational because a good poem is enfleshed in the reader who encounters it afresh and makes it live. As Emily Dickinson said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

And there are so many poems to try! There are so many to love and to be moved and challenged by! They come in all shapes and sizes and forms, and they address every imaginable topic from every conceivable angle. I can promise anyone—even those who haven’t read a poem in twenty or thirty years—that there is good poetry out there just waiting for them, poems that will reach them in ways they never expected. As full-grown adults no longer in school, we all have this incredible opportunity to read around, put poems down and try on others, skip poems we don’t like or can’t understand, and find the ones that find us out. And that’s what I hope to bring to readers and listeners beyond the academy—just that simple opportunity to experience poetry in totally new and freeing ways that move and change us and open up our world.

DM: For those more skeptical of poetry, or who haven’t read a poem in twenty or thirty years, what do you tell them to get them started?

AVE: The first thing I insist on is setting the meaning aside – not ultimately, but initially. I think those who don’t read poetry often tend to think of it as a complicated locked box with a special key that opens the inner meaning to a select few people. But think of it, instead, more like music. When we listen to music, we don’t immediately ask, But what does it mean? It may acquire meanings for us to be sure, but it is far more than a complex delivery system of a message. When readers first ask what a poem means, they almost always ask next: Well, why didn’t the author just say that? But again, if we think of poetry more like music, the saying matters as much as what is said. Meaning is important, but poems invite us to ask why this is the only way to say what must be said. If we begin with that assumption, then we can begin to ask why this word, or why this arrangement, or what makes this clause necessary? Listen first for the music of poetry and move from there, eventually, into potential meanings it might convey. That’s one place, anyway, where I begin.

DM: How do you relate this commitment to your work as a literary scholar? Was this also an impulse that arose from your academic scholarship, and in some sense in continuity with it?

AVE: I first went to graduate school to study twentieth-century poetry and literary theory (before I then wrote a dissertation on seventeenth-century Puritans), so the love of poetry has long been with me. My own work has tended to be historical, tracing theological and literary traditions in the seventeenth century and investigating the causes and effects of cultural memories surrounding the Pilgrims and Puritans of New England. I love that work. But all along, I have also loved the occasions where I get to teach poetry. It is not actually that hard to open poetry for skeptical audiences. Students and adults—whether in a university classroom or a church basement—suddenly begin to approach and appreciate poems in new ways and see what a radical effect they can have.

My historical and poetic interests come together through an intense interest in texts. I don’t know how to put this any other way: I just love words. I think they are amazing. The slightest rearrangement of a sentence can have an extraordinary effect. The perfect verb or noun, placed just so, can open an insight never before realized. A subtle rhyme or resonance can turn the heart with a whole new orientation or deepen your commitment to a cause. And words reach us in so many different ways—each reader bringing their own horizon of expectations, shaping the possibilities of the encounter. Poems, stories, theological treatises, Puritan sermons and spiritual autobiographies—all of these texts live and move only in and through those who pick them up, meet them, and bring them fresh into the world. Poems are not the words on the page; they are the encounter of those words with their readers.

DM: Your podcast “Poetry for All” offers a remarkable array of poems and poets from across the centuries and from so many different contexts and worldviews. With such diverse voices presented you speak of wanting to reach religious as well as non-religious audiences, and I wanted to ask you about both. In regard to connecting with Christian or religious audiences you wrote a piece for Reformed Journal in which you said that “poetry has a particular place in the church,” adding that “it responds directly to the call and the invitation of God to ‘sing a new song.’ And in the singing of poetry, the faithful can begin to understand and experience and engage God’s world afresh.” Can you unpack this for us, how you believe poetry participates in and helps to inspire fresh engagement with God and the world for religious people?

AVE: Scripture repeatedly calls us to “sing a new song.” That Hebrew word for “new” can also be translated “fresh,” and scripture seems to give us the image of a God who delights to see how we bring out the riches of his world. We need that, over and over, because our senses so often stale. To see the same things again and again is to begin not to see them at all. That is why fresh songs must be song. We forget. We fail to notice. Our attention strays. But poets point us to what we’ve passed by—or all that has passed us by—in our daily lives.

Yet poetry is more than the singing of fresh songs. It’s more than the art of attention. I think it is also a specific act and art of naming. Scripture invests human beings with the power of naming (see Genesis 2:19), and naming, as we know, is a powerful form of recognition. Names enable us to know, to understand, and to respond. So if we are going to engage God’s world responsibly, we are going to need artists who name it—whether the naming calls us to praise or to rage, whether it points out a glory we have taken for granted, or an injustice we have failed to address.

These fresh songs, this art of naming—for it to work, it often requires words that are themselves fresh and strange. We have a tendency to overlook whatever becomes routine, including simple messages and repeated clichés. Words stale too. Poets are the people who name what we overlook with words that strike us, startle us, and catch us unawares. That is crucially important work for both religious and non-religious people, and I think it is equally accomplished by both religious and non-religious poets. But from my vantage point as a Christian, I also think this is part of our prophetic calling, which some are gifted with more than others. As the prophets of scripture point and name, so do the poets. And just as Nathan had to use narrative art to get David’s attention finally, poets often find that the most direct way to focus our attention on what matters most is through acts of indirection—a winding that wends us to God and all that God would have us see.

DM: Is it your hope that this effort to encourage the church to re-engage God’s world through poetry also has some benefit for non-religious people as they also participate in your “Poetry for All” podcasts? In what ways might your podcast encourage those who do not have religious faith to consider what such faith brings to poetry?

AVE: There is no shortage of working poets who are believers. In fact, sometimes I think the proportion of creative writers who are believers is greater than the proportion of critics who read and comment on their works. Art is capacious. Faith engages the imagination. Artists of faith abound. That said, our podcast is not specifically about Christian poets or for Christian listeners. We tackle poems from different eras and traditions and viewpoints, hoping to reach people across a very wide spectrum. I don’t think the good Lord ever intended the common grace of poetry to be confined to the church, and anyone who tries to confine it to the church usually ends up simply reading or writing bad poetry. Just as believers can learn a great deal from the poetry of someone like Philip Larkin (an ardent atheist), so non-believers can learn a great deal from the poetry of someone like Gerard Manley Hopkins (a Jesuit priest). And the ardent calls of scripture for justice and righteousness are often embodied in political poetry today that comes from the pens of many non-believers. Our podcast is about all kinds of poetry for all kinds of listeners. It is, we really hope, Poetry For All.

DM: I do want to end with reference to your ongoing scholarship, which strikes me in part as a recovery project, specifically how Puritans, including Puritan poets, have been received. The sense that the shaping of a Christian poetics for the 21st century, as we put it, should include the retrieval of past voices who may be neglected or misperceived seems to fit well with the kind of larger project you have undertaken. How do the texts you study and want to recover help us to appreciate what Christian literary writers and thinkers have to say to us today?

AVE: That’s a big question, of course, but let me try to answer it simply. I think one thing to recover is variety. I think sometimes believers can be boxed in by impositions, stereotypes, or assumptions that really are not true. (Christians and non-Christians both do this boxing in.) If we think of Puritanism as one kind of thing, for example, then any Puritan (like Anne Bradstreet) who writes differently will be considered a rebel caught in the constraints of her religious tradition. But in fact, the variety of poems Bradstreet wrote mirrors the variety of poems she read in scripture. It is hard from the Psalms to locate only one way of being “orthodox.” They cry out in anger against God; they lament; they praise; they call for help; they bargain; they proclaim; they name; they narrate and remember—they do all kinds of things. And Christian poets do all kinds of things as well. They always have. Christianity was and always will be capacious. And Christian poetry from the past teaches us just how wide and varied it can be. God is always more than we have ever imagined, never less—which is why we always need more poetry (from both the past and the present, from believers and unbelievers alike) to sing fresh songs and stretch our awareness of God, God’s world, and our place and relation in it to all the rest. Poetry is always in need.

DM: Do you have other books in the works that we should be on the lookout for?

AVE: I’m in the process of writing a book that would serve as an introduction to poetry for the church. There are lots of good introductions to poetry in the world, but I want to write one specifically for church-going people to think about what poetry offers to the life of faith and discipleship—and really just to life in general!—and why it might be worth our while within the church to read it now and then.

In the meantime, I’m also writing a cultural and literary biography of Anne Bradstreet, the Puritan poet, intended to introduce both her world and her work.

DM: We look forward to seeing these, Abram, and again thank you for taking the time to illuminate your work for us and for the multifaceted ways you are nurturing a love for poetry.

Abram Van Engen

Professor of English and Professor of Religion and Politics (by courtesy), Washington University in St. Louis
vanengen@wustl.edu

David Mahan

Lecturer in Religion and Literature, Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Yale Divinity School
Co-Director, Rivendell Center for Theology and the Arts
david.mahan@yale.edu