Exploring the themes of “Poetry, Poetics and Prayer,” the Wake Forest University Faith Forum, moderated by Dean of the Wake Forest University School of Divinity Corey D.B. Walker, was held on Sept. 16 in the ZSR Auditorium.
Panelists included Kevin Hart of Duke Divinity School, Lucy Alford, professor of literature and Jill Crainshaw, professor of worship and liturgical theology, at Wake Forest University.
Walker opened the panel, stating, “In a world marked by fragmentation, noise and distraction, poetry is a guide that shows us how to attend more deeply; it is a consistent practice of deep attention, of hearing the silences, of discerning the sacred and opening up ourselves to new ways of being in relation to God, one another and creation.”
Hart then read from his latest poetic volume, “Firefly,” set to be released in February of next year. He read two elegies about his father, one written shortly after his passing and one written more recently. For Hart, meditating on the thought of death brought upon the idea that “as soon as one passes away, you’re not old any longer, you become young in death.” In his poem, his father does in fact become a child in the new world.
He jokes he “has a great gift for titles,” as he opens with his poem “Father,” which is a reflection upon how his father develops in the land of death.
The poem is an intensely phenomenological narration of the experience in the afterlife and seems heavily influenced by Heidegger’s unavoidable conditions of human existence, or “Dasein.” In particular, the conditions of “Throwness,” or being thrown into a world and temporal space we did not choose and “Authenticity,” which requires ownership of one’s life, especially in finitude, are present.
Lucy Alford followed Hart. She read from her book “Forms of Poetic Attention,” which “brings both philosophical and cognitive inquiry into conversation with the inner-workings of specific poems.” This was Alford’s first verbal reading from her book.
In a deeply attentive observation of “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” by James Wright, she suggests that “The poem exists only in attention, held in tension; to set apart is the root meaning of the sacred. It is, in this way, not difficult to understand the sacred as preceding and perhaps exceeding its religious uses.”
Seeing poems at variegated manifestations of attention allows us to take into account “the essential event of poesis, of making.”
“At a gut level, I know that the kind of operation writes, therefore, performs in and on my mind is experientially different from the kinds of attention valued at this particular cultural moment,” Alford said. “This difference, and therefore all the differences within it, are, I think, the subject of this conversation.”
Alford suggested that “The practice of reading poems hones our capacities for perception and response, and so far as perception and response underpin our judgment and all of the decisions we make and our relations,” practicing poetic attention is vital for our introspective and interpersonal capacities.
Jill Crainshaw then read her poem “Congregation,” reflecting on “the genesis of her identity as a preacher.” She continued, “I think poetry begins in the body, where silence and sorrow and wonder press against each other, begging to be named.” She closed, “The shards of our fragmented world threaten our capacity to feel, they threaten to break us apart, they are breaking us apart. Poetry calls us back to shared breath.”
Simon Critley in his “Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens,” observed that “yes, poetry is difficult, the difficulty is learning to love that difficulty, becoming accustomed to the experience that thinking and experience reading poetry requires and calls forth,” especially now when so many cultural and material forces drive toward productivity and profile updates and increased public views.
He continues, “What is at stake, and so delicate, is purposelessness.” Examining purposelessness as an act of paying attention to a thing without payoff or profit or publicity. “Perhaps looking at poems for how they maneuver in the medium in our own attention and our own language, for how they shape the contours of our awareness, for how they push the horizons of our noticing, trains us in another mode of being,” one with purpose, one with intent.
Poetic attention is hard. It exercises a range of modes within us. It holds implications for the refining of our judgment, and therefore our ethical groundwork. Though poems sometimes “take us by the nape without much consciousness on our part, they too can be recalcitrant, irritating and violent,” much like people.
But the difficulty is valuable in itself, and the small tears that take place through this effort and exposure are necessary for building stronger cognitive and emotional muscle, for relating to others.
Perhaps learning to love that difficulty is also learning to love.
