A Christology rooted in the Incarnation clearly offers numerous insights for the study of Christian poetics; yet even the most fitting and generative metaphor can become a blinder. This is not to belittle the excellent work that has been done in the field of theology and literature by way of reflection on the Incarnation, nor is it intended to suggest that scholars have somehow exhausted the metaphor. But Christianity has more than one theological lens at its disposal, and I wonder if the attractiveness of incarnational or sacramental or Christological hermeneutics sometimes prevents those of us who work in Christian poetics from considering other interpretive possibilities. Over the last several years, I have become particularly interested in the promise of pursuing Christian poetics in a pneumatological register, mindful of what theologian Elizabeth Dodd describes as a fundamental “interdependence” of word and breath in both poetry and theology: “There is no word without breath, while breath has no form without the word.” Breath, Dodd observes, is not “the silence or gap between words,” but rather “the body or substance of words.”⁴

  As is well known, the biblical term for “spirit” [ruach in the Hebrew Bible, pneuma in the New Testament] is the same as “breath” or “wind.” And this Spirit/breath/wind hovers over the primordial chaos prior to any divine speech-act. Christian tradition speaks of the Spirit in diverse ways: as third person of the Trinity, as chief agent of sanctification, or, simply, as love, to cite just a few examples. For the purposes of this essay, I am interested in the way that the Spirit bestows breath as the gift of life, and what this means for theological interpretation of literature. In a post-Covid, post-George Floyd era, Christians are summoned to attend to, and indeed address, the politics of breath in the public square, which is also a matter of concern to many contemporary poets. This begs the question, How might a distinctively pneumatological Christian poetics speak to the most pressing theological-ethical concerns of today? The remainder of this essay seeks to sketch an initial response to this question in light of two contemporary poems that draw our attention to the dynamic interdependence of word and breath, and in so doing, open a space for transformative encounter with the divine Logos and Holy Spirit in the reading of literature.

  Poets, of course, are always attentive to the dynamics of breath, as word and breath are intimately bound together in the making of a poetic line. But since We Are All God’s Poems originates in a pandemic era and against the backdrop of the Black Lives Matter rallying cry of “I can’t breathe,” it seems likely that breath will be present on the pages of this anthology in more apparent ways than is usual. That is certainly true of Metres’s poem, where breath forms a central motif in the speaker’s effort to articulate what it means to find hope in the bleakest season of life:

all I crave is light & yet
        winter
sky is busy imitating milk
frozen in an upturned bowl

to be a person is a sounding
through,
    host of breath
rehoused & rib-scribbled inside

you there above
     the page
casting your gaze over us
wanting us to be your mouth

& what would you say
     with my body
bowed to bear the weight
of a line so taut it sings⁵

Metres notes that this poem was inspired by many years of living through Cleveland’s “desperately gray winters,” always on the lookout for signs of renewal. In the opening stanza, the speaker expresses this longing for illumination in darkness: “all I crave is light,” he pleads, yet the “winter / sky” is indifferent to his desire. It is instead “busy imitating milk / frozen in an upturned bowl,” a description which captures not only the brutal cold itself but also the inertia such cold inevitably produces. The dense cloudscape forms a barrier between heaven and earth, reinforcing the speaker’s sense of isolation, much as the word “winter” stands isolated as a solitary indented word on the second line of the stanza. What hope for connection, for animation, can there be in such a setting?

  The next stanza seems to lift the reader into an entirely different atmosphere: “to be a person is a sounding / through.” There is a correlation between form and content in the line break between “sounding” and “through,” as the pause between the two words allows space for half a breath. This is followed by a further half-breath after the word “through” where a comma appears as the poem’s only punctuation mark. These pauses have a thawing effect, drawing the reader out of the frozen winter landscape into a new and vitalized territory animated by breath. In ancient Rome, the persona was a mask worn by an actor, indicating their particular role in the drama playing out on stage. Though the mask was designed to cover the actor’s face, it had an opening through which the voice of the actor would “sound through” to the audience. The Latin personare is literally “sounding through,” and the modern term “person” retains this etymological link to the principle of an authentic voice “sounding through” the mask of a player.⁶

  Metres’s invocation of this etymology could be read in multiple ways, but what interests me is the potential for a pneumatological interpretation. The stanza’s remaining lines seem to allow this move. A person, the poet writes, is not only a “sounding / through,” but also a “host of breath / rehoused & rib-scribbled inside.” A “host” is one who receives a guest into their home for a temporary period. As “host of breath,” the human person receives breath into his or herself as a host receives an outsider into their most intimate dwelling. Where the previous stanza isolated the word “winter,” here it “host of breath” receives its own line, underscoring the significance of the phrase in the stanza’s schematics. Breath is “rehoused” again and again as each person inhales and expires air, and in this process each person becomes “rib-scribbled inside” with air bestowed from one being to another. Read pneumatologically, this line also recalls Genesis 2, where divine breath enters Adam’s lungs, giving life to the dust out of which human beings are formed. The allusion rebounds on the stanza, so that earlier descriptions—the person as a “sounding / through” and “host of breath”—take on a distinctively pneumatological inflection as well, indicating the human person may be a “host” of an animating “breath” or Spirit. This Spirit “sounds through” with each inhale and exhale, uniting each person to all others while also suggesting a kind of cooperative agency between divine and human breath.

  Moving into the next stanza, the reader marks another shift as the speaker of the poem addresses himself to a mysterious figure whose identity is not immediately apparent: “you there above / the page.” Is this the poet speaking to the reader? Or might this be the voice of the speaker addressing God? In either case, the figure holds a God’s-eye view, hovering over the text and making demands: “wanting us to be your mouth” echoes “sounding through” in the previous stanza. Again, who is the collective “us”? Might it be the poet speaking on behalf of his guild, in response to a perceived expectation that poets act as the mouthpiece of their readers or, perhaps, of God? Or does the “us” represent wider human address of the divine? In either case, whereas the far-off “you” of line 9 hovers above the material world of the text, the collective “us” is firmly embedded in the corporeal, offering form and substance to words by way of the body, represented here by the “mouth.” As Dodd observes, “Human participation in the Spirit requires another metaphorical field, one that addresses the interplay of breath and body.”⁷ Read pneumatologically, this stanza underscores the embodied action of the Spirit “sounding through” human persons in the endless exchange of breath that binds us to one another and to God.

  This connection between body, breath, and spirit is carried forward into the final stanza of the poem, where the speaker reflects on what happens to the words of a poem when its language is subject to extreme pressures. Here, poet and poem are united as body and speech, with both “bowed to bear the weight / of a line so taught it sings.” The image conjures a stringed instrument so stretched to capacity that mere breath or wind will set it singing. If the first stanza conjures images of a frozen and inert winter landscape, the final stanza offers a glimmer of hope in finding that vital voice to be a “sounding through” of something beautiful beyond the self. A Christian poetics rooted in pneumatology suggests the Spirit may be the animating force that pulses through these verses, illuminating connections between self, other, and God.

  Metres’ poem first appeared on the website of the American Academy of Poets in December 2021, two years into the Covid-19 pandemic that robbed millions of people around the world of the breath that animates all life. It asks us to consider what it means to be a host of breath in an age when so many are denied breath, whether through illness, injustice, or societal indifference. Read pneumatologically, it also asks readers to attend to the essential role of the Spirit in bestowing and transmitting the breath of God to and between persons. To be a person is to be a “sounding / through” of the divine breath that creates and sustains all life, transforming frozen milk into “a line so taut it sings.”

“A Small Needful Fact”

Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.⁹

This beautiful fourteen-line poem is written in honor of Eric Garner, who was brutally murdered at the hands of Staten Island police in 2014. The entire incident was filmed and shared across social media and news networks. Viewers around the world watched in horror as an officer placed the forty-three-year-old African American in an illegal chokehold while attempting to arrest him for allegedly selling illegal cigarettes. Garner gasped “I can’t breathe” eleven times before losing consciousness. Paramedics arrived late and failed to act quickly, while officers made no serious attempt to revive Garner as he lay dying on the ground.

  It is hard to imagine a more dehumanizing, unjust, or violent end; yet coverage surrounding Garner’s murder was far from sympathetic. A 2019 study of media reports shows that news outlets very quickly began to frame a narrative built on racist stereotypes, presenting Garner not as a victim of police brutality, but as a dangerous criminal and absentee father who chose not to work.¹⁰ Furthermore, the study found that “stigmatizing and coded language” around disability reduced Garner to his medical conditions of asthma and obesity, deflecting blame away from the officers responsible for his death and back onto Garner himself.¹¹

  “A Small Needful Fact” restores to Garner an essential dignity that has been denied to him, first in the manner of his death and then in the subsequent media coverage surrounding his murder. Gay places Garner in an ecology of breath and presents him as a cultivator of life whose horticultural legacy endures even beyond his lifespan. Written as a single sentence proceeding from its title, the poem forces readers to attend closely to the dynamics of breath in the act of recitation. The combination of urgent subject matter and formal structuring via breath makes Gay’s poem an ideal test-case for understanding how a pneumatological poetics might elucidate fresh insight, even in works that are not explicitly religious.

  The poem’s title announces its theme: “A Small Needful Fact” is concerned with setting the record straight. The word “needful,” as opposed to “necessary,” conveys moral weight, signaling to the reader that there is a part of the story which has been hitherto suppressed or ignored. Meanwhile, “fact” conveys a central concern with truth-telling. In this sense, the poem may be read as embodying a kind of prophetic speech. And the “small needful fact” announced by the poem’s title is, at the most fundamental level, “That Eric Garner worked.” The line break after “worked” invites readers to pause and reflect on the significance of this simple yet subversive corrective to the misleading account of Garner as an unemployed criminal. Instead, the poet reminds readers that “for some time” Eric Garner served in local government, laboring as a horticulturalist for the common good.

  In lines 4-8, Gay summons readers to imagine what such working life might have entailed. This part of the poem is punctuated with interjections such as “perhaps,” “in all likelihood,” and “most likely.” On one level, these serve as an invitation to simply imagine a new narrative; on a more formal level, these interjections create room to breathe, forcing the reader to slow down and attend to the words of the poem with the same care that Garner showed to plants he tended as a gardener. As a community gardener and eco-activist, Gay finds the image of Garner cultivating plants deeply compelling. In referencing Garner’s “very large hands,” the poet once again boldly resists the stigmatization of obesity that dominated media discourse in the wake of Garner’s death. Garner’s sizeable stature ceases to be a threat, and instead the reader is invited to imagine his large hands nurturing “some plants,” placing them “gently into the earth” to grow and thrive. At a more subtle level, this image also quietly undermines the false media narrative that Garner was an absentee father who neglected his duties as a caregiver. Gay’s re-telling of the story celebrates Garner’s innate tenderness and devotion to caring for plants and, by extension, for his community.

  Line 9 marks a decisive shift from setting the record straight on a detail from Eric Garner’s life, to reflecting on his enduring horticultural legacy and the ecologies that bind the living and the dead. Gay abandons the interjections of lines 4–8 in favor of a new, more fluid cadence, where a catalogue of the things “plants do” is propelled by the rhythmic repetition of the word “like”. At the heart of this catalogue is a sense that Garner’s life work and legacy exist in a vital ecosystem, where the plants he cultivated have become shelter for “small and necessary creatures” and a source of delight for those who “touch and smell” them. The description of photosynthesis in line 13 suggests a touch of the miraculous in even the most mundane biological processes that we take for granted.

  The underlying implication of these lines is that Garner played a small but needful part in a wider social ecology where all are called upon to protect and preserve the inherent sanctity of life in all its forms. There is no life without the gift of breath, and the bestowal of breath is a wonder to be celebrated just as the denial of breath is a tragedy to be mourned. Hence, the poem concludes with a powerful invocation and transformation of the last words Garner uttered before his death. Rather than a suffocating victim crying out for breath, Garner is reimagined as a nurturer whose horticultural work continues to make it “easier / for us to breathe.” The final word of this poem resonates back up the text and situates all of Garner’s actions as a horticulturalist within an ecology of breath that invites pneumatological interpretation. In the simple act of cultivating plants, Garner becomes a custodian of breath and cooperative agent in the action of spirit, bestowing to others the very gift of life that was so cruelly and unjustly denied to him.

  At a more formal level, this poem enacts a subtle transformation within the reader that opens further possibilities for pneumatological reflection, as each line of the poem is carefully calibrated to draw attention to breath. As noted previously, the entire poem proceeds as a single sentence extending from the title into the first line of the poem, suggesting that the whole piece ought to be read in one breath and, at the same time, that to do so would leave the reader breathless. The first half of the poem is punctuated with interjections—“perhaps,” “most likely,” etc.—that invite the reader to pause, perhaps even take a breath, while in the latter half these adverbial phrases disappear so that the cadence accelerates and becomes smoother. By the time the reader arrives at the final word, “breathe,” she will have become breathless, requiring a long respiration that instantiates a new awareness of breath in the reader. We leave the poem transformed by a renewed understanding of the breath that binds humans to one another, and—for the Christian reader—by a renewal of our breath in conformity with the life-giving breath of the Spirit.

¹ Malcolm Guite, “Through Literature: Christ and the Redemption of Language,” in Beholding the Glory: Incarnation through the Arts (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 23.
² Michael Edwards, “Poetry Human and Divine,” in Poetic Revelations: The Power of the Word III (London: Routledge, 2017), 22.
³ Michael Smith, “The Disincarnate Text,” Christianity and Literature 66, no. 3 (2017): 363.
⁴ Elizabeth Dodd, “Spoken Word and Spirit’s Breath,” Literature and Theology 33, no. 3 (2019): 295. For an extended treatment of the interrelation between Word and Spirit in systematic theology (without direct reference to its significance for poetics), see Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), especially Chapter 4, "Trinitarian Life.”
⁵ Philip Metres "We Are All God's Poems" (2021), published at Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/poem/we-are-all-gods-poems (accessed October 15, 2023).
⁶ The image has inspired numerous thinkers from Boethius to Hannah Arendt to Cardinal Josef Ratzinger.
⁷ Dodd, “Spoken Word and Spirit’s Breath,” 294.
⁸ See Gay’s interview in Broadview magazine, January 2021: https://broadview.org/ross-gay-interview/
⁹ Ross Gay, "A Small Needful Fact" (2017), published at Academy of American Poets, https://poets.org/poem/small-needful-fact (accessed October 15, 2023).
¹⁰ Lydia P. Ogden, Anjali J. Fulambarker, and Christina Haggerty, “Race and Disability in Media Coverage of the Police Homicide of Eric Garner,” Journal of Social Work Education 56, no. 4 (October 18, 2019): 655.
¹¹ Ogden, Fulambarker, and Haggerty, 656.