Christianity and Poetry:
A Symposium

The Participants–

Jennifer Atkinson’s newest book is The Drowned City (Northeastern University Press, 2000), which won the Morse Poetry Prise. Her poetry also appears in Field, New England Review, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.

Scott Cairns is the author of several books, most recently Philokalia: New and Selected Poems (Zoo Press, 2002) and Recovered Body (George Braziller, 1998)

Fanny Howe’s Selected Poems appeared from The University of California Press in 2000 and won the Lenore Marshall Prize. Her newest book is Gone (University of California, 2003).

Among Paul Mariani’s many books are Thirty Days: On Retreat withthe Exercises of St. Ignatius (Viking, 20002), God and the Imagination: On Poets, Poetry, and the Ineffable (University of Georgia, 2002), and five volumes of poetry, two with Norton Press.

Eric Pankey is the author of six collections of poems, among them Oracle Figures (Ausable Press, 2003), Cenotaph (Knopf, 1999), and The Late Romances (Knopf, 1997).

This symposium took place via email between October 25, 2002 and April 29, 2003. It was moderated by Claire Hero, Wayne Miller, and Kevin Prufer. New work by the participants appears in this issue, after the symposium.

PLEIADES: Not too long ago, one of our editors was giving a reading at a large university. At the dinner party after the reading, he wanted to recommend your book Recovered Body, but your name had momentarily slipped his mind. "He's a fine poet, recently moved to the Midwest, a Christian poet," our editor said. There was laughter around the table and someone suggested that if he is a Christian poet, perhaps he wrote verse for Hallmark. Our editor, a little annoyed, kept eating. After a while, your name returned to him. "The Christian poet," the editor said, "is Scott Cairns." Several of the people at the table knew your work. "He's not a Christian poet," one of them said. "He's a poet who sometimes writes about religion."
       It was this comment that prompted us to put together this symposium. Why do you think the statement that you're a Christian poet met with such disapproval and suspicion when, had the editor been referring to Dante or Gerard Manley Hopkins, the tone of the response would have been quite different? What do you think has happened to the way contemporary readers and writers think about Christian poetry?

SCOTT CAIRNS: This is, of course, a huge question, and any satisfying answer will have to take into account a complex array of recent cultural history. So it's a very good thing that you've put together this ad hoc brain trust to wrestle the matter into something like intelligible shape. Hope you'll forgive a shot-gun approach for starters; I'm guessing we can narrow the gauge as we proceed. I'd like to start by suggesting that the current climate isn't necessarily the fault of the secular reader. My sense is that 20th Century American Christianity–its most vocal elements, anyway–has been a largely anti-intellectual endeavor, largely suspicious of art in general, and pretty much dumbed down in comparison to earlier epochs, making what usually passes for "Christian poetry" to be pretty thin soup. Moreover, the apophatic, parabolic, essentially poetic character of traditional theological discourse itself has been eclipsed in the most visible Christian communities by a reductive literalism, and by a disposition that has substituted arrogance for mysteries, substituted allegory for metaphor, substituted zeal for love, substituted earnestness for joy. As if that weren't trouble enough, I also sense that poetry in general has undergone a similar diminishment, wherein the poem has come to be understood as a document of experience, rather than a scene of revelation, retrospective rather than prospective. So, on the one hand, most readers have come to perceive poetry as a primarily documentary genre (a perception that I resist, you might notice) and, on the other hand, most readers have developed an expectation, quite understandably, that the "Christian" version of this undertaking is less likely to document anything of interest to the non-Christian.
      In my own experience, the documentary "Christian poem" isn't likely to generate much of interest to me, either; but then, the popular mode in general–that of the poem-as-document-of-personal-experience–is hardly more interesting. In my case (and I do think of myself as a Christian poet), it is my developing sense that words have agency, my developing sense of language-as-agent-of-mystery that enables me to be a poet in the first place. I think I am a poet because I am a Christian, not in spite of that identity. I'm pretty sure I'll have a chance to further characterize the sacramental quality of the word as we visit here, so I'll leave it there for now.

ERIC PANKEY: I agree for the most part with Scott's analysis. The nature of categories and taxonomies (whether Christian poet, confessional poet, avant garde poet) is that they define and limit possibilities. We can see the thing as typical of its group, while ignoring its peculiarities, its originality.
     Early on in English poetry we see "religion" satirized. We have Chaucer's Prioress, who feeds delicate tidbits of meat to her lapdog, while complaining about the burden of the unkempt poor. Her story, a righteous one in her eyes, is a story of anti-Semitism.
      The news makes us aware daily of the abuses of religion, whether it is the intolerance and blind judgment of fundamentalism, (the Christian Right, the Taliban. . .), or the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church's hierarchy regarding the priest sex abuse scandals.
     "Religion," like any organization of humans, is ripe for power grabbing, for dishonesty, for secrecy, and for failing to uphold the very tenets of compassion upon which so many faiths and practices are based.
      What the news does not report in headlines is the daily generosity and compassion of individuals who have chosen not to follow in the Prioress' footsteps, but have instead committed themselves to providing food, shelter, health care, education, and assistance to those in need. Nor does the news focus on individuals who see non-violence and diplomacy as viable options.
      I am a poet who is a practicing Christian. I teach church school to 7th and 8th graders. I am on the Board of Christian Education at my church. But I see myself as a meditative, and not a Christian poet.
      My meditations upon questions of the spirit, of faith, and of immanence, are attempts to approach the unsayable (foolishly as it would seem) by way of language. I do not wish to preach, evangelize, convert, or sway, (to do so would suggest a confidence and certainty in a way that I do not possess, believing that there are many paths).
      But through the act of the poem, through the vehicle of the poem, I hope to come closer to that which remains a mystery for me as an individual. Often in the meditation those moments of closeness and insight are contingent. Thus I return the dwell in the indwelling of the next and next meditation.

PAUL MARIANI: Two shots fired off in rapid succession, both on the mark. I was thinking about the guy who made the remark that this "Christian poet" probably wrote for Hallmark cards. It seems like a well-aimed barbed witticism, but it could just as easily boomerang back onto the speaker. But if it did raise the issue of the place of Christianity in contemporary poetry, it may have done its job better than its speaker knew. The question is: "What do you think has happened to the way contemporary readers and writers think about Christian poetry?" The problem–as both Scott and Eric have pointed out–is what the so-called "contemporary" reader makes of a term like Christianity, which itself–as Hopkins said in another context–"plays in ten thousand faces."
      At the moment, one thinks of–and shudders at–the anti-intellectuality and self-righteousness of the so-called far right. As a Catholic who not only tries to live (however haltingly and imperfectly) his faith, but who delights in the glories of 2000 years of tradition, I am of course deeply troubled by the recent scandals the Church here in the States has suffered in the past year, by which I mean the innocents. But, as Eric points out, do we ever hear of the good–the heroic good–that thousands of Christians (as well as others) do each day? None of that sells newspapers, friends.
      So where do you get the good news? One place might well be the poem, the despised poem, as Williams says. And where, really, are the audiences for that? Even teachers are afraid of poems, or bored by them. In any event, they avoid them. But the poem is an extraordinary vehicle for containing mystery. All sorts of mysteries. Which is why I'm so attracted to the poem: to get said what I didn't know I knew. I wouldn't come down as hard on the narrative or confessional poem as Scott does, though I know the kinds of limitations the form can bring with it. But the thing is this: American poets, writing in the shadow of Emerson and Whitman and even Dickinson (those spoiled priests of the Christian imagination), have used the poem as a form of self-discovery. So with myself. And because I have had intimations of some great mystery at the heart of Christ's message and example, I find those preoccupations and concerns staining or saturating whatever I think and do. It being the case that part of this mystery–let's call it an extended Communion of Saints–involves saints like Paul and Francis and Ignatius and Catherine of Siena and John of the Cross and the Teresas of Avila and Liseux, as well as Job and Isaiah and Homer and Catullus and Dante and Villon and Baudelaire and Hopkins and Lowell and Williams and Eliot and Bishop and Berryman and Hart Crane and Phil Levine and Bob Pack and Ed Hirsch and Yusef Komunyakaa and on and on, each after their own sense of the mystery, well, then let me throw my own mix into the poetic minestrone. There's plenty to go around. Why have so many been present at the dismantling of the churches, borrowing these sacred metaphors or those sacramental images for their own ends? And what if a mystery still clung to these things, a kind of luminous plasma, the finger of God? What if?

FANNY HOWE: It was good to read each of the responses to your interesting question. I think it might become even more interesting as we go along, and if we are honest. For me the word "Christian" is fraught with ugly connotations, many of them historical, prissy, close-minded and self-promoting. It is a "white" word, no matter how many people who are not physically white call themselves by that name. I know that Jews,Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus also fervently advocate charity, altruism, and prayer. So these would not be characteristics that would separate a Christian from any other religion or transcendent philosophy. I don't like to use the word "Christian" unless I am feeling hostile to right wingers who call themselves by that name. And I am sure that they would say I was a bad Christian, or not one at all, given my history and behavior. I do identify with the word Catholic, on the other hand, even while I know I am not a good Catholic but a rebellious one (as so many of us are). I would never call my poetry Catholic any more than I would call my cooking or my child-care techniques Catholic. So what part of my thinking is Catholic, if not the parts that adhere to the same ethics as Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus? What part of my being behaves in a Catholic way? Is it innate to all that I am trying to figure out? I don't know, so ultimately I am with those who suffer from a perplexity that is overwhelming and who understand the necessity of atheism. In this way I could not call myself a "Christian" in the sense of being sure of what the name itself meant. We are Western, which must mean we are saturated in a legal and social system that evolved simultaneously with theology.
      Since all three major religions have sunk into the most profound ugliness and hypocrisy in recent history (Israel, the Vatican, Islam) and continue to be dogmatic and violent, in contradiction to their own religious laws, there must be a general social breakdown that has cracked apart all the institutions together. One cannot say that one of them is more ethically clear than the other. A lot of Catholics don't ever refer to themselves as Christians, and I wonder why. And more people hate Catholics than they hate Christians. I would love to think about the difference between a Catholic and a Christian ethos and literature in this time we live in. Is there such a difference? How would it show itself? It was good to read the other three writers and to think of the depths we could plunge together, if we can and dare!

JENNIFER ATKINSON: First, let me say that I'm honored to be included in this conversation. So much has already been said in round one, that, like Fanny, I'm excited to see how far our honest if meandering meditation can take us. I say meandering, because I keep coming back to that original phrase, Christian poet, and the dinner party's assumption that its two terms are oxymoronic. Have you noticed that spiritual poet elicits no snickers? Everyone, it seems, wants to be known as spiritual or visionary, but Christian, whatever denomination, is suspect. I'm wondering if at least part of the reason is that, for a general American population, being Christian seems to mean being certain of the Truth (i.e., some recitable creed) and equally sure of the right way to apprehend it (i.e. swallow)? I think this same general American population would also assume that a creed (dutifully believed in, duly recited) would prevent the possibility of uncertainty or mystery or anything like doubt. It would make an individual's, including a poet's, search for a truth or a partial understanding of things needless and irrelevant, like barking up a tree when the stuffed cat is right there on the ground. On the other hand, I bet being a poet for most of that same general population means being an individual with an open mind and a willingness to live in mystery, doubt, and ambiguity without too much "irritable reaching after fact & reason." That's where the oxymoron comes in. If a Christian is one who believes in a doctrine handed her from somewhere on high, then she can't also be a negatively capable poet, and if a poet is someone who is willing to live in "uncertainties, and Mysteries," then she can't be a (creed-reciting) Christian.
      So not only is a Christian poet burdened with all the church's past and present errors, but she's also thought to be narrow-minded, certain of the truth, probably self-righteous and unwilling or unable to handle ambiguity and doubt. In other words, an impossible bore or a Hallmark hack. But who would call Gerard Manley Hopkins a bore or a hack? Who finds his great dark sonnets narrow-minded or without mystery? Or his joyous, celebratory "Pied Beauty" boring?
      I came late to Christianity, well after a Santa Claus childhood (not that I disapprove of the man in red!) and after a brief investigation of Buddhist texts and practice. (Maybe because I am a late comer, church life still bewilders me at times with its mundane committees and its Sunday school puppets, even though it's me at those meetings and me with my own hands in those felt puppets!) Poetry led me and leads me still to and from belief. I go back and forth, approach and withdraw all the time, rarely at rest. Sometimes I can read the creed along with the rest of the congregation and other times I have to stand silent or skip parts, but whether it's a read-aloud day or a stand-dumb day I'm trying to live and work in grateful awareness of and alertness to the mysteries. I just reread that last sentence and it sounds like we do the creed every week in my church. We don't–only about 2 or 3 times a year.

PLEIADES: It seems that much of this discussion revolves around the perception that Christianity today is an "anti-intellectual" endeavor. Does some of the fault for this lie with poets who have shied away from the term "Christian poet" or, in other ways, have allowed this misperception to dominate the discourse? Where/How could "Christian thinking" potentially engage today's intellectual discussions, and how can poets, Christian or not, work to bridge the gap between Christianity and the way poetry is discussed today?

ERIC PANKEY: So much of theory and criticism over the past thirty to forty years has ignored "subject matter," Christian or otherwise. I am not sure how to bridge the gap you describe or if it need be bridged outside the act of a poem itself. T. S. Eliot's work not only embodies the gap, but offers as well three interesting methods of bridging an approach to the sacred:
      1) The prophetic, apocalyptic, eschatological voice (or voices ) in The Waste Land, written when he was not a Christian, I know, but when he was using such texts as Luke's Gospel, and a good bit of Western, Christian-tinged literature, both Catholic and Protestant, for collage and sampling.
       2) the mystic/visionary voice in "Ash Wednesday" and to some degrees in "Marina" and "Journey of the Magi," evocative in its mystery, its intensity and in its liturgical echoes.
      3) the discursive meditative voice in Four Quartets, with its ruminations on timelessness, history, "self," and the lapse of the Edenic realm that is memory. These worked brilliantly in the 20th century and I don't believe their methods are obsolete. And, of course, re-combinations of these three methods will lead to surprising variation. These methods could be applied to many poets prior to Eliot. Donne, Blake, and Dickinson come easily to mind. And these methods are still in use by Richard Wilbur, Brigit Kelly, Jorie Graham and Geoffrey Hill, to mention only a few.

FANNY HOWE: In all the above responses I see some real agreement about the problem with being identified as Christian in one's work. The poem as "language as agent of mystery" is what Scott Cairns prefers to call it. "Meditations approaching the unsayable" is what Eric Pankey calls poetry. Paul Mariani calls the poem "the vehicle for containing mystery." And Jennifer Atkinson refers to "uncertainties and mysteries." So all are agreed on the impossibility of being described as Christian, because this implies absolute certainty. I am with all of them. And to put it my way, I will just conclude: The nature of the lyric is that it is restless and questing. This is what "lyrical" means and produces in matters of sound and tone and closure. A lyrical line veers from side to side, pauses, looks around and up, and continues until it finds a very temporary spot to breathe. It bounces against space. Then it continues again and often finds its way through a number of words that might contradict the meaning of the first lyric. At this level it doesn't matter if one has belief in one set of laws or another. It is faith in the footstep that counts. Daring to take it.
      Plot and the poetic form are both ways of path-finding and path-making. They emerge out of not knowing what is to come but daring to go see. Even if you know that the goal of the story or poem you are writing is to show that God exists, you can't do it without entering into the abyss of not knowing. And not pretending. Otherwise, the poem will lack the very faith it is planning to demonstrate through true hesitation.
      If a person believes that the story of the life of Jesus and the way it plays out is the template for all human lives, then a narrative is provided in advance. It infuses forms. There are stations that you can see ahead and count on stopping at. But that same narrative is steeped in suffering, disappointment, ridicule and loneliness. These can't be faked. So the paradox is structural. The narrative doesn't know itself until the end, no matter what the ending hopes to be.

SCOTT CAIRNS: Well, hardly a word has been uttered here that hasn't had me nodding in agreement, even if I might prefer, here and there, to tweak the perspective some. I should confess that my own journey has led me to spend a great deal more time with the discourse of, the texts of, early Christianity (our common inheritance prior to 1054) than with latter-day expressions of the faith, which often hit my palate as thin soup; that said, you all may find it less surprising that I'm willing–even eager–to accept the designation "Christian poet." I agree with Jennifer that the term is problematic largely due to popular (if ill-informed) assumptions that "Christian" somehow equates with blithe certainty, or callous indifference to the facts, or some species of tribal self-concern.
      I suppose I'm less willing to relinquish the definition of things "Christian" to those looking in from the outside (or to those on the inside) whose historical sense is confined, say, to the modern era, or confined to such aberrant epochs as the Crusades, Nazi Germany, modern fundamentalism, or confined to newspaper accounts of any number of contemporary aberrations. The heart of our faith is both creedal and conciliar, both cataphatic and apophatic, both Hellenic and Hebraic. The heart of our faith provokes a willingness to utter propositions and a concurrent willingness to apprehend any such proposition as provisional.
      Whatever our various journeys, each of us has insisted upon a sense that the language of poetry and the language of faith are conditional, suggestive modes of apprehending, of glimpsing the essentially irreducible mystery of human experience. Each of us has, evidently, approached his or her vocation as a means by which he or she comes to terms with the suspected ineffable. From outside the faith (and often, apparently, even within the faith) the terms to which we come can appear static, definitive, conclusive; such a disposition is not only apoetic, but constitutes bad theology as well. Me? I savor Mystery. I suspect that there is always more to say, and that it should always be said in humility, said provisionally, said while leaning in to glimpse, as well, what is not said. In my own, adopted tradition (the Eastern Church) the apophatic is understood as superior to the cataphatic; that is, the via positiva is understood as the beginning of the road, and the via negativa is understood as leading one somewhat farther along the way. The Truth, of course, is irreducible, is abysmal; but I suspect that it is less an abysmal emptiness than an abysmal Fullness. This is the disposition by which I proceed; it strikes me as very likely to speak of that disposition as one efficacious for a "Christian poet," which is what I'd say I am.

PAUL MARIANI: Like Scott, I find myself nodding at nearly everything that's been said thus far. One could take almost any statement we've been given, savor its implications, and make a satisfying discussion–to my way of thinking–out of that one statement. Besides, there's something deeply resonating for me about this topic, sharing it with four other poets who are at least willing to talk about it. It's a topic I don't often have a chance to talk over with others. Certainly there are Christian communities I can share my faith with–whether with Jesuits or Franciscans or the Sisters of St. Joseph or my largely working-class parish in Turners Falls. And there are fellow poets with whom I have spoken endlessly on all sorts of subjects–from prosody to biography to the ramifications of the geopolitical scene. But how often do you get a group of poets together who are actually willing to discuss something as close to their hearts as the contemporary faces of Christianity and the actual making of a poem?
      I remember–when I was writing my life of that young, fire-breathing Catholic C.O., Robert Lowell–the Lowell who wrote the extraordinary "Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket"–how he decided to shift the terms of poetic discourse from the New Criticism of the time to include terms culled from his reading of Catholic theology. It was only an experiment, he told Randall Jarrell, and one which might just enrich the possibilities of literary criticism. Of course, Jarrell came back with his own topoi, culled from his own Protestant tradition. Fair enough. That would have no doubt enriched the mix had they followed up on it. In any event, it seems to me that Lowell's sentiment in suggesting this "fresh" terminology is not really all that different from what Harold Bloom has done in crossing his deep understanding of the western literary tradition, especially the Romantics, with terms lifted from the Gnostic tradition.
      And so, when I hear Eric Pankey speak of three major literary discourses found in Eliot–the prophetic, apocalyptic, and the eschatological voices of The Waste Land, the mystical and visionary voices of "Ash Wednesday," with their rich liturgical echoes, and the discursive and meditative voices threaded like leitmotifs through the Four Quartets, I know we're in rich linguistic and poetic territory, that we have here a number of crossings where poetry and theology have for centuries addressed each other, and continue to do so.
      Add to that mix the theological terms Scott offers–the apophatic and cataphatic traditions: meditation without images, as in–say–the Buddhist tradition or in St. John of the Cross's poetry of luminous darkness–versus meditation with images, as St. Ignatius (seeped in the Incarnation as he was) urges us to employ in the Spiritual Exercises, and which one of his great followers, Hopkins, used to such brilliant ends. All of these terms are, of course, provisional, Hegelian signatures that clash and I think ultimately mix one into the other (however dissonantly) in the actual experience of the poem, as they do in the lived life.
      Which brings me, finally, to Fanny Howe's insistence on Keats' preference for living in uncertainties, without striving after what he called life’s so-called certitudes. The truth is that no poet can afford to undertake the writing of a poem knowing where the poem is actually going to take her or him. No surprise for the writer, Frost said, no surprise for the reader. Still, one can sign on to a creed as one signs on to a marriage or a job or a philosophy, to see how that creed skates like a piece of ice across the top of a hot stove. Plot and poetic forms constitute a map of sorts, but there's a whole world of difference between one's Aquinas map and one's journey by seaboard–as the Pound of the Cantos well knew.
      From the perspective of poetry, I like to think of myself as a poet who is also a Christian in the Catholic tradition. All of that is there when I begin to write a poem, just as being an agnostic or a Buddhist or an Asian American or a woman will also be there for other poets. But then there's the poem that needs to get written, a poem that often as not surprises you by where it insists on taking you, which is seldom (thank God) where you thought it was going to take you.
       Here's a secret I'll share with you. Remember how Keats wrote in a letter once how he liked to dress up and then sit down and begin writing? Well, one of the things I find myself doing is praying before I sit down to write, asking the Mystery–God, the Ineffable, the Creator, the Holy Spirit–to lead me deeper than I might otherwise go if I relied simply on my own imagination. Call it something like the kenotic imagination–an emptying of oneself in order that a deeper, Spirit-driven response might come out of the act of writing. Like Berryman telling the young W.S. Merwin to get down on his knees and pray for inspiration before he wrote a poem. It's not–I suspect–what most creative writing instructors tell their students, and you won't find this advice in most poetry manuals. But for all that it's not bad advice, to judge from the poems Berryman and Merwin have written.

JENNIFER ATKINSON: I find myself at a loss–so much has been said and so well that I'm not sure where to take the conversation. I find myself moved by Scott's conviction and eloquence, by Paul's humbling (to me) metaphors of how one accepts a creed as a guide for one's life and work, by Fanny's passion about faith and not-knowing and how they are enacted and mediated in the writing, and I would add, reading of a lyric poem, and finally, last but hardly least, by Eric's proposals for a Christian poet's approaches to the sacred.
      Part of why I'm at such a loss is that I'm distracted. I keep thinking about this war our president insists on waging. There's so much to do. The Bush administration has invoked the terrible old words "evil" and even "crusade." Not to mention the terrible new words "shock and awe campaign," "WMD," "preemptive strike." Such words demand a response. It's a relief to act–to march, to sign petitions, to tape downloaded posters on car windows. We live in this historical moment with all its cruelty and compassion, its stupidity and its beauty and we have to do something. We also live in the ahistorical moments of meditation, prayer and Silence, and never have those actions been more necessary and valuable. Still, lately, in the meditative moments (or when I ought to be considering the nature of the Christian lyric) it's easy to get distracted by an inbox full of petitions and forwarded speeches.
       Scott said in his last statement that he believes that epochs such as the Crusades, Nazi Germany or modern fundamentalism are "aberrant." Maybe so. But it seems to me that we are always living in such aberrant times. Jesus is always hunkered down beside us, writing with a finger in the dirt, listening to us as we contemplate throwing the first stone.
      Can you believe it? We are contemplating throwing the first stone.

PLEIADES: The issues Jennifer Atkinson raises about the political and moral responsibilities of Christians and poets are interesting. As poets, what are your Christian responsibilities to the world? Or, as Christians, what are your poetic responsibilities to the world?

SCOTT CAIRNS: As a Christian and a poet, I'm guessing that my responsibilities include–though they are certainly not limited to–my attending to the language of the tribe. Obfuscation, euphemism, and specious argument are, of course, commonplace in the political sphere, forever misrepresenting the facts, forever insinuating their fog over the events we witness, forever setting up false dichotomies, false choices.
       I'm fairly confident, even so, that "the poem" is not exactly a likely venue for addressing the matter–unless one is content to preach to the choir alone. It could be that at times like the present, poets might turn their skills to more popular, journalistic forms as well. It could be, moreover, that poets should include this sort of "non-literary" production throughout their writing lives as an ongoing corrective to the vagaries of habitual political discourse.
        That said, I know that I struggle, personally, with a chronic sense that the situation is hopeless; even so, I suspect that this uncommon attention to language is the one thing that poets are obligated to sustain, regardless of the outcome. In any event, I'm convinced that an uncommon attention to human community, to peace, and to love are matters that Christians are obligated to sustain–also, regardless of the outcome.

JENNIFER ATKINSON: I guess I like to think of the poet's role as more analogous to the choir's than the preacher's. (The poet singing to the choir?) Song doesn't seek to change its listeners' minds as much as it seeks to affirm their faith in singing, in music, and in the human voice as well as the values of gratefulness, compassion, justice, peace–all those matters that, as Scott says, we as Christians are obliged to sustain.
       I like to think of the poet's role that way and I'd also like to see poet-journalists filling the papers' op-ed pages with their responses to falsehood and injustice, but I'm not altogether ready to give up on poets speaking in poetry on such issues. Maybe poets do need to take up the preacher's role even in their poems and even if they suspect the audience is a choir of assenting voices. So back to that phrase about the preacher "preaching to the choir," back to the preacher's job. I suppose she or he is called to persuade us, the congregation and choir, to think hard and then to act in accordance with that thinking. The preacher composes and reads a sermon that affirms shared beliefs and calls us to act like committed believers. The assumption is that the congregation shares its leader's faith, though not always its leader's conclusions about how to live out that faith. So the preacher may use the space of the sermon to argue against a war or in favor of protecting a wildlife refuge without any assurance that the choir or anyone else in the pews agrees. If the congregation—and the choir—does agree, is the sermon wasted? I sure don't think so. For one thing the sermon (and, of course, the poem) is more than an argument for or against something. It's a meditation, a way of thinking enacted right there before your eyes. The journey it guides you through relies on not-knowing, indirection, and mystery as well as shared faith and a call to action. So the congregant who agrees with the preacher from the start is enriched by the path the meditation has taken. Not only that but the sermon as a form has been affirmed as valid, intimate, flexible, truthful, vital, and open to spontaneity and experience.

FANNY HOWE: In reality I think I have nothing to add in response. I could only repeat myself. The triumph of capitalism, embodied in the attack on Iraq, is so revolting and worthy of revolt that I will devote as much active time to that as possible. My poetry is, for me, part of a mysterious vocation that includes African, Chinese, Arab, European and Indian poets as well as North and South Americans, etc. Catholicism is for me a necessity more than a conviction. Blake in his gnomic verses says it best:

     The Angel that presided o'er my birth
     Said, Little Creature, form'd of joy and mirth,
     Go, love without the help of anything on earth.
.
ERIC PANKEY: "Go, love without the help of anything on earth," is either a great blessing or a great curse. I am not sure which. The verse does capture the difficulty of living under the teachings of Jesus. How do we love our enemy? If we love them then how can we call them enemies or even think of them as enemies? To these questions, a thinker like Jesus would probably reply, not with an answer, but with a parable. Parable does not necessarily answer, but often validates the complexities of the questions to which the parable responds. There are times when poems open before my eyes like parable and, by them and through them, I am more at home in my questioning.
     If poetry is, as Wallace Stevens argues, a means of redemption, we must keep clear that it is "a" means, one of many. For me, poetry is such a means whether I am in the presence of poetry, or in the act of making poetry. Such a means, though, does not exclude other ways toward redemption. The habit of art is wholeness. Our habit of turning to art is a longing for wholeness. Sometimes wholeness is achieved by a dab of paint that transforms a curve into a circle. Sometimes wholeness is achieved by facing the dislocation of the fragmentary and seeing within it order or the dream of order.
I admit I do not know where my faith ends or begins. Several years ago I wrote that, "I am like the man Flannery O'Connor describes in her essay, 'Novelist and Believer,' who 'can neither believe or contain himself in disbelief and who searches. . . feeling about in all experience for the lost God.'" Things have not changed much. The poem, for me, is the locus of such "a feeling about." I am almost as comforted by Wallace Stevens' formulation as I am by almost any holy text: "The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly."

PAUL MARIANI: And so we come round to something like a momentary closure. It's interesting to see how the conversation has turned and twisted like some mighty river, shaped in part by the larger forces of history that as always threaten to make our individual voices inconsequential. Perhaps once again the Republic begins to assume the form of an Empire, we as a nation having once again (perhaps) crossed some Rubicon, and that—as Jennifer says—we find Jesus, if we find him at all—in some far-off mideastern province squatting in the precincts of the Temple area, drawing something in the sand that we poets—Christian or otherwise—are desperately trying to make out, hefty stones or missiles in our disbelieving hands.
And when has the language of political discourse not been a vehicle of disinformation? Saddam's regime was deeply corrupt, by almost any analysis, and part of me wanted to see him toppled. But at what cost? I think of that photograph of a boy in Baghdad who lost not only his family but both arms as well, as his house went down around him after one of our missiles destroyed it. Or another photograph—this one of a young boy walking in a field after they had buried his Marine father, killed in the advance on Baghdad. So many things get in the way of clear thinking, and meanwhile—inexorably—there are the earth shakers making the life-and-death decisions while we stand paralyzed or frustrated by our impotence. But, we say, all of this happened elsewhere, in some distant province. We still have our jobs, our homes, our shrinking incomes.
     Still, it roils back on us, this violence, and coarsens and depresses us. And, alas, I am not in any serious way an activist, in part because I don't trust the purity of motives of most activists. Viet Nam taught me that. Granada and the Gulf War taught me that. And Guadalcanal and Belleau Woods and the Wilderness. And on and on, down the vortex of history. And then of course, more directly, there is the poem—the made poem—which somehow, if it stays honest to itself in its form and phrasing and deep images, is still able to somehow touch the deeper wellsprings of our psyches. Often the response comes dreamlike down to something as elemental as light or water or wind or darkness. Or the yelp of a dog, or the face of a loved or feared one re-forming itself out of the shadows.
     Yes, I too, like Eric, have been tempted by Stevens' formulation that "the final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else," where "the exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly." And then—usually at three in the morning—I will glimpse Christ's eyes probing me, and I know that Stevens' Paterian formulation, even with the esthetic tang of that word, "exquisite," is not—finally—enough.
     So, then, what is enough? I don't know. But I do know that for me it involves feeding the hungry or comforting the sick as much as it involves sitting down to write. Because—in the final analysis—what we bring to the table must be for the Christian more than just a word hoard. When the judgment comes, Christ won’t be asking how many books I wrote, but: "Did you offer me food when I was hungry? Or a cup of water when I was thirsty?" I think of Fr. Hopkins tending the sick, or thanklessly teaching Greek and Latin to dispossessed Irish undergraduates in Dublin. Or Williams stoking the furnace of one of his elderly patients, to make sure she was warm, before he left again on his January rounds. It's ourselves we bring, in all our brokenness and shattered brilliance, when we sit down for the thousandth time to begin again to form a word and a word and a word, hoping—if we are lucky—to resonate with something dark and luminous and mysterious that somehow keeps the spirit level in line with our essential selves.