DM: Thank you, Ben, for taking the time to interact with us about your work for this special series.

BE: Thank you, David. It’s wonderful to have the opportunity to talk with you.

DM: I want to begin where our relationship began, your doctoral thesis “The Way It Maps Two Worlds,” which included not only an extensive treatment of Michael Symmons Roberts’ Drysalter but a companion collection of your own poetry in conversation with that work. In light of this dynamic, how do you envision the ongoing interplay between the creative and scholarly tasks?

BE: Do you mean my creative and scholarly tasks, or their interplay more generally? For me, one is informed by the other. It’s a conversation. R.S. Thomas said that “poetry is that / which arrives at the intellect / by way of the heart”. I was talking recently to a friend and bemoaning the amount of research I have to do to write a poem! Because poems need to make sense and they need to be ‘correct’. They might require a suspension of disbelief, but they have to commit to their own internal consistent logic. And where those poems inhabit the ‘real world’, they need to be fact-checkable. When I’m working, there are tabs and tabs open in my browser. All this stuff I need to be aware of as I write: like, what cicadas eat, or the month Monarch butterflies migrate, or the name of the salvage company that raised the Mary Rose. And that’s just the factual stuff. But poems inhabit a space between fiction and non-fiction (if, indeed, they are helpful labels) and so they are, as Mark Oakley says, less about information and more about formation. And this, for me, is where scholarly work is so helpful.

Reading and writing about other poets’ work gives me such insight into how they do it, perhaps – speculatively – why they do it, what working out and ideation is happening. And I’m interested in the ‘what’, too, the relationship between the poem’s wonderings and its build. The technical details, word choice, line constructions, and so on – things helpful for understanding poetics and the creative process, or even providing models for poems. But it’s the explorations of other poets’ and other poems’ arguments, their questions, their resonances, that I’m inspired by and drawn to. Not necessarily about faith. I recently finished Caroline Bird’s The Air Year – a remarkable collection – and I marvel at her ability to contain opposites within one idea – “We just want to land or / be landed on” – and I think, “how can I do that?”

DM:  In that thesis you also raise issues about the voices of faith in modernity, asking How can contemporary poets explore faith in a post-secularised language and culture? Can you talk more about what you mean by ‘post-secular’ and the challenges as well as the opportunities this moment holds for the poet of faith?

BE: I borrowed that question from Michael Symmons Roberts’ himself. He asked that question of other poets, and I wanted to examine how he does it – if indeed he does do it – by pulling apart his work in Drysalter. 

‘Post-secular’ is one of those difficult and slippery terms that can mean different things or look different according to where you are in the world. Broadly, I think the consensus is that it talks to a re-emergence or “new visibility” – as Graham Ward calls it – of religious (not necessarily Christian) language, symbol, and sentiment in contemporary Western conversations – be that at a public, political or societal level, or something that goes beyond, or springs from, private, personal relationships and practice. 

For me, though, and I might come back to this later on, it’s a sense of it now being okay to admit where you’re from, who you are. I can somehow bring my faith into the conversation. In some senses we’re now ‘post-‘ in many arenas, some of which we may feel warrant further interrogation: religion, industry, capitalism, communism, gender, Brexit, pandemic… For a poet who has a Christian faith, to be in a post-secular age is slightly odd because much of the history of Western poetry, if not directly religious, is certainly that of employing and appealing to Christian imagery – but imagery that is losing, or has lost, any real sense of religious connotation. We understand ‘Eden’ and ‘paradise’ as synonymous with unspoiled beauty or use ‘grace’ to describe movement or good manners, ‘bless’ to describe good fortune, without ever necessarily making any biblical connection. 

The poet David Jones grappled with these issues of adequacy of language to explore or write faith. He talked of “The Break” when religious language lost its capacity. And he wondered how a poet might use a “current notion to express a permanent mythus”, how or what new language might be forged to articulate Christianity (in his case, the Catholic tradition). And I think that’s where the answer lies. What is the current notion? What’s my current notion? For me, that current notion includes what I’m grappling with, the questions I have. In my collection The Seed Drill, I explore male infertility and God’s faithfulness. Modern medicinal science offers me new language and construction for asking these questions. 

The challenge, I suppose, is one that all poets have – religious or not – about resonances of language and image and how and where they land. For me, does what I’m writing somehow offer a sense of the argument I’m having whilst – at the same time – connect onto the wider world and perhaps shared experience? Does a poem, whilst for the most part concerning itself with the minutiae of my wonderings, lie open – somehow – to the possibility of God? Can a poem operate horizontally and vertically, a 3D poem(?), that’s my challenge…

DM: Your image of a ‘map’ that charts the intersection of the religious and the secular seems especially apropos of a poet’s interest to inhabit a liminal space, not at sea but moored somehow to both geographies. How does that liminality also reflect your own spiritual sensibilities, especially given the pressure to confirm traditional orthodox beliefs as still viable in our present moment?

BE: Yes, and that’s where the idea of a poem straddling the fiction and non-fiction worlds is useful. A poem keeps a foot in both worlds and probably doesn’t commit to either! I wonder if that’s me too… 

And that’s an interesting question about traditional orthodox beliefs. I increasingly find myself asking how ‘useful’ the notion of orthodoxy is. Was there ever a single orthodox Christianity? I’m going to mix my metaphors here, but perhaps we’ve painted ourselves into a corner by reducing Christianity to one particular set of propositions or experiences. On the other hand, this post-secular age has its own orthodoxies, ones that interrogate the packaging and presentation and communication of some of our expressions of Christianity. I empathise with ‘exvangelicals’, for example, and I think many models of church and church leadership are less and less useful. Perhaps “permanent mythus” is unhelpfully conflated with a particular notion rather than a current one. “Current notion” doesn’t undermine what I consider to be the ever-present ‘truth’ of Christ. 

That said, when I find myself at my most doubting and disbelieving, my poems can articulate faith better than I can. Likewise, I find that when I’m more resolute in my faith, my poems can have arguments – and use certain language! – that I perhaps wouldn’t with my church friends. Maybe poetry is a refuge for my cowardice and hesitancy…?!

DM: That may be too harsh a self-criticism, as all of us find ourselves in a constant state of negotiation. I suppose what is most important is that the arena we inhabit includes important matters, including matters of a faith we value and believe speaks to our own generation, however fraught our efforts to engage this moment may be.

BE: Absolutely. And that’s what’s exciting about a fresh visibility of religion or religious language, in whatever form that may take. Let me offer an example, one akin to the idea of faith being part of a wider conversation in, and with, our own generation. Here in New Zealand there was a recent high-profile public conversation after scientists at one university claimed that Māori knowledge – mātauranga Māori – is not ‘proper’ science. Māori are the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand. In a letter published under the title “In Defence of Science”, the scientists claimed that, whilst mātauranga Māori contributes to the understanding of the world, it falls short of what science actually is. There was vociferous opposition to the scientists’ position from all parts of New Zealand, and from abroad – including from the science community. 

This, I think, lends credence to the idea that different ways of understanding – beyond a particular narrow secular and empirical perspective – are increasingly acknowledged as viable and complementary. We can include faith here too – on matters of climate change, beginning- and end-of-life ethics, gender, education, immigration… But I must also be cognisant that there isn’t a single, perhaps equally narrow, ‘Christian’ view on any of these either. If anything, the post-secular age invites me – perhaps other people of faith too – to think critically and receptively about my position on contemporary issues, to put myself in an arena where I can explore and contribute to all secular and religious perspectives. Dialogue goes both ways. And poetry has a place in this conversation.

DM: You focus on the poetry of Michael Symmons Roberts in your doctoral work. Are there other poets who have influenced your own ambition to find new ways to wed poetry and faith?

BE: There are a few, yes! The Anglo-Welsh poet Edward Thomas was killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917. After he died, jottings and lines from unfinished poems were found in his notebook, one of which reads “I never quite understood what was meant by God”. I love Thomas’ poetry and prose work – the liminality that you talked of earlier, for him, was straddling the pastoral and modern, war/peace, living with depression, the (disappearing) natural world/(encroaching) mechanised age, the dislocation of being a non-Welsh-speaking Welshman born in England – that acute sense that home is elsewhere. Many of those ideas remain contemporary. And I love the Christian resonance of home being elsewhere. Thomas also grappled with his atheism in an age of a late-Victorian/early-Edwardian cultural Christianity. Thomas, for me, in many ways is a model, not least in the admission – in all its senses – of not necessarily understanding God.

And there are others – often poets who probably wouldn’t describe themselves as Christian, nor subscribe to any faith position – who write with an awareness of what’s missing, and write with an attunedness to something beyond what can be seen. Caroline Bird, who I’ve mentioned already, Alice Oswald, John Burnside, David Harsent. Michael Symmons Roberts’ two collections since Drysalter are worth a read. John Burnside is interesting when considering faith and poetry. There is, I think, a legacy of his religious upbring. What I imagine to be booming-from-the-pulpit sermons of his youth echo still throughout his work. His use of Christian symbol and image is not altogether in the service of faith and doubt, but more as a device to open up the possibilities of what he sees in a post-Christian world.

DM: Many of our readers wrestle with what all is meant by a Christian poetics, and it does seem most promising to regard this as an ongoing conversation rather than an effort to fix definite coordinates. It seems that the shaping of a Christian poetics as a process fits well with literary creativity especially, which is ever in search of new languages and forms. Would you say that you are consciously working out a Christian poetics when you compose? How might we see that in your forthcoming collection The Seed Drill?

BE: No, I don’t think I’m consciously working out a Christian poetics at all. Not anymore. When I first started out (to be honest, I came to writing poetry very late, perhaps only ten or twelve years ago) I was trying to be a Christian poet – my poems were intentionally aiming to be Christian poems with a message. Not necessarily devotional, but they were pretty heavy-handed and on the nose. And they were, of course, lack of technique aside, all the poorer for it. 

It’s been interesting watching my poems change over the years, like I’m somehow a detached observer! I’m immensely grateful for the guidance of the poet Chris Price, my MA and PhD supervisor, for her patient teaching and craft over the years. 

I can’t say, now, that I set out to write Christian poems. I think I reject any suggestion that I’m a Christian poet. Rather, I’m a poet who is a pretty terrible Christian. As I mentioned earlier, my relationship with my faith informs my poems and sometimes the poems themselves have more faith than I do. 

One of the things I tried to pin down in my PhD work was the idea of Christian poetics: what is a Christian poem? Does such a thing exist? After all those years writing the thesis, I still don’t know. I just have more questions. I suppose that if I’m sure I’m not writing it, then I must have an idea of what Christian poetry is. Some of my friends and fellow readers of my work would suggest The Seed Drill is Christian poetry because it mentions God, or alludes to biblical images, calls to mind scriptures, explores concepts of promise and salvation and so on. But The Seed Drill talks historical England and Pompeii, and contemporary New Zealand, it explores ecology and the natural world, and childhood and death, and has questions about what happens next, and it has hope. Hope always finds a way in. 

But if it means that I’m finding ways to articulate my wrestling with God, then perhaps I am writing Christian poetry. Or is it that because poetry is ‘showing your working’ and I’m uneasy and I show my working about lots of things, and my faith is one of those things? I don’t count that as Christian poetry; that’s just poetry!

DM: You are also a devoted educator. Looking at the contemporary situation of literary studies and criticism, the ‘maps’ of the secular and the religious in tension at many institutions of learning, and declines in our estimation of the value of literature, how do you seek to inspire your students through the study of works of the literary imagination? How does your faith inform or influence your pedagogy?

BE:  My day job at university is to teach students to become primary school teachers. 

There are lots of characteristics for what makes a good teacher. There are lists! Just a quick online search will reveal many, many different thoughts about what teachers should be and do. Ask ten teachers, you’ll get ten different sets of characteristics (a bit like asking ten people about post-secularity). For me, being a ‘good’ teacher is about helping school children (indeed anyone!) make sense of their world – in all the ways: through language, literature, and science, numbers, play, collaboration, belief, other people’s beliefs, myth, construction, creativity… This isn’t a million miles away from what poetry is about. This sense of truth-seeking, meaning-making, questioning, arguing and interacting, exploring the mysteries of life. 

Part of the educator’s job is to show students some of the ways other people have gone about it – and that’s where literature comes in, along with all the other forms of exploration and creativity. I think we have to be wary when holding up one literary tradition or set of authors over another, or appear to value one set of cultural knowledge and expression over others. People at all times and in all places have asked questions and sought to make sense of their worlds, and expressed their thinking. I’m not sure how much of what’s currently going on is devaluing, and how much of it is making the necessary elbow room for literature that has hitherto not been given a seat at the table

For me, where faith and pedagogy intersect is that instruction is not about didacticism, it’s about questions and wonder and deepening ourselves (and inviting others) into the mysteries that are belief and life: not ‘what’ but ‘how’ do I know? ‘why’ do I know? Of course, there are constraints in teaching – the administrative tasks, assessment, professional learning, reporting – but, I suppose as in poetry and faith, these ‘constraints’ should be in service to the wider purpose of facilitating wonder and creativity.

DM: By way of introducing your essay “Getting the angel to speak? Poetic constraint and spiritual practice,” in this piece you give keen attention to the creative process and its formal practices and how these become ways to nurture faith for both writers and readers. It brings to mind the essay “Facing Altars” by Mary Karr, the altars being poetry and prayer. In that essay Karr argues that poetry, like prayer (or prayer, like poetry) can bring comfort, healing, illumination and, often enough, provocation. In your own efforts to write ‘poetry of constraint’ you draw similar parallels between the work that poetry and poetic creation do and that of spiritual exercises, such as prayer. Are there, however, ways that you might want to maintain a distinction between them? Thinking of poetry as prayer is not the same thing as saying ‘poetry is prayer’ …

BE: I’m less minded to consider poetry as inherently comforting. Although it does, of course, bring comfort. There’s comfort in the content of poems, but there’s comfort in being able to return time and again to a particular poet or poem – even if it’s for uncomfortable purposes. Perhaps I’m a little cautious of the connotations of the word ‘comfort’. 

Poetry, like prayer, is provocative. My personal prayer life is often argumentative, but it’s often also pretty tame. As I’ve written elsewhere in Among Winter Cranes, I often pray and run. I often run and compose, too. I have an idea for a poem, or I’m meditating on a line, and I take it onto the hills to see where it and I go. Mostly I’m none the wiser when I return, but sometimes I’ll type something into my phone when I get back to the car, and that something becomes something. 

I’m shy when it comes to praying. I guess this is one of the distinctions. If I’m praying in church or at Bible study, my prayers – whilst still sincere – are pretty tame. The language, structure, requests are all predictable. They’re safe. I do wonder sometimes if God is even impressed with my conventional attempts. And that’s one of the differences between prayer and poetry. I would like to think that my poems have the time in their gestation to play with the possibilities of language.

On the other hand, my ‘running’ prayers are often spontaneous and conversational and internal, whereas poetry is designed to be read by others, to be shared, and often heard. It’s a shared experience. Much prayer – even congregational prayer – is expressed individually. With individual prayer, one person talks to one person; corporate prayer, lots of people talk to one person; whereas poetry is one person (hopefully) speaking with and to lots of people.

Way back when I was a boy, I remember my dad saying to me that the reason God wants us to pray is not so God can answer our prayers by giving us something, but it’s so we might be part of a conversation. We talk to our friends because we enjoy them and their company, we don’t just always want something from them. When considering prayer, I always come back to the Psalms. Sure, the Psalmists asked God for lots of things – more often than not to get revenge on enemies – but they’re an insight into conversations with God covering all aspects of human experience. 

I don’t know. The Psalms are poetry as prayer and prayer as poetry. But, you’re right, thinking that poetry is prayer is unhelpful. My poems, unlike my prayers, can be pretty high stakes and explicit. And there are things I’ll write in poem that I probably wouldn’t say to my friends or family – or to God. Poetry is a very useful distancing device. “It wasn’t me who said that,” I can say. “It was the poem.”

DM: Thanks for offering such thoughtful reflections, Ben, and for your inspiring example of a poet and scholar who cares deeply about how faith and literature relate.

BE: Thank you, David.