Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church

By Abram Van Engen and Edward Field

Have you ever read a book that turned your world upside down? What about a poem?  
 
Poetry has the power to enliven, challenge, change, and enrich our lives. But it can also feel intimidating, confusing, or simply “not for us.” In these joyful and wise reflections, Abram Van Engen shows readers how poetry is for everyone—and how it can reinvigorate our Christian faith. 
 
Intertwining close readings with personal storytelling, Van Engen explains how and why to read poems as a spiritual practice. Far from dry, academic instruction, his approach encourages readers to delight in poetry, even as they come to understand its form. He also opens up the meaning of poetry and parables in Scripture, revealing the deep connection between literature and theology. 
 
Word Made Fresh is more than a guide to poetry—it’s an invitation to wonder, to speak up, to lament, to praise. Including dozens of poems from diverse authors, this book will inspire curious and thoughtful readers to see God and God’s creation in surprising new ways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Jun 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9781467467285

Abram Van Engen

Abram Van Engen is Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities and chair of the English Department at Washington University in St. Louis. His other books include Sympathetic Puritans and City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism. Passionate about teaching poetry to a wider audience, he also cohosts the podcast Poetry for All with Joanne Diaz and directs the Carver Project, a Christian nonprofit that aims to connect university, church, and society.

Book preview

PART 1

How?

CHAPTER 1

Read Personally

But how do you actually read poetry? This earnest question came to me after I had just taught a class at church. I was recommending some books, and I talked about the difference between an anthology and a book of poems by a single author. I like show-and-tell, and I held up several examples. Class ended and people wandered out, but one man stopped at the podium. Sure, he said, "I get it. You like these books. But books of poetry … I mean, if I had one, what would I do with it? How do you actually read poetry?"

Poetry invites this question far more than other genres. The look of it often throws people for a loop. Everyone knows how to read a novel. You open the book and start reading. The same goes for memoirs, histories, almost any sort of bound book, really. We don’t think about how to read. We just do.

Give us a book of poetry, however, and we might feel stumped. Where do we start? How do we proceed? Do we begin at the beginning? Do we flip to the middle? Do we keep reading after each poem, or do we stop and meditate? Is each poem self-contained? Should we read just one poem a day? And what about within the poems themselves: Are we supposed to pause at the end of every line? Are we meant to read out loud or silently? How, exactly, do we read poetry?

Here is my well-studied and expert advice: it doesn’t matter. Just read it. Begin at the beginning if you want. That’s what I like to do. I start on the first page of a book of poems, and I read it to the end. It doesn’t usually take too long. Most books of poetry barely top one hundred pages, and most pages contain very little ink. In terms of brevity, poetry turns out to be easier to read than almost anything else you encounter. In a matter of minutes, you can cover a whole host of poems.

I start at the beginning, but other readers skip around. They choose a random page. They glance through titles in the table of contents and pick a few that seem compelling. Whatever the practice, the point is the same: just read. No flaming sword swings back and forth to guard the entrance. Any way will do.

As for finding which poetry book to read, here again, I have solid advice: any practice will do. Look for one that seems intriguing. Start with a single author or pick out an anthology. You can choose any number of short, cheap collections on various themes, like love poems or elegies. Yale University Press sells two fantastic poetry anthologies edited by Christian Wiman: one on joy and the other on home.¹ Kevin Young recently put together an extraordinary collection of African American poetry spanning 250 years.² You could try reading the supposedly 100 best-loved poems (Dover sells that one for about four dollars),³ or you could look for poems that no one seems to know. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you read. Test the waters. Hop from pool to pool and puddle to puddle. Splash around in the world of poetry. Have a little fun.

Once you begin, keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t question yourself. Read until you find yourself caught by a poem, touched, spoken to, challenged, recognized. We are seeking an instance of resonance. Confusion, boredom, and frustration you will find, absolutely. But pleasure and delight, a sudden movement of the heart, will take you by surprise. Push through the coats and mothballs in the wardrobe of poetry until you find yourself unexpectedly brushing up against real trees, a whole world you didn’t expect, something unpredictably wonderful. That’s the introduction. That’s the inauguration. Mark that poem and remember it. For this poem is the door that opens to all the rest. All you need to do is find that door.

As you search for that poem, you can do no worse than to start with your own personal experience. Though the pleasure which works of art give us must not be confused with other pleasures we enjoy, writes W. H. Auden, "it is related to all of them simply by being our pleasure and not someone else’s."⁴ Our response to a poem involves whatever our own lives have brought to it—the memories, associations, experiences, loves, desires, hopes, and worries we hold. There is far more to a poem than a personal response, but never less.

Because we bring so many different lives and perspectives to bear on a poem, a good poem bears out many different possibilities. Poems have an abundance that spills beyond any particular meaning or point. One sign that a book has literary value, Auden adds, is that it can be read in a number of different ways.⁵ We read it differently because we each read it through our own eyes. We meet it through our own ears. The personal, as the poetry critic David Orr writes, has to do with how we see ourselves, how we see others, how we imagine others see us, how they actually see us, and the potential embarrassment, joy, and shame that occur at the intersection of these different perspectives.⁶ As a result, no poet can know how their poem will land. Every life encounters it differently. We often find more in a poem than the poet knew was there. As Madeleine L’Engle explains, When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist.⁷ That more, that excess and abundance, comes to fruition in the many ways that we, the readers, make a poem complete.

Take my own experience. I grew up in a plain Christian Reformed church set on a flat, nondescript meadow in northern Indiana. Nothing particularly picturesque set our building apart from others. It was built of large squares, probably concrete, nothing fancy, and it had a sharply slanted roof of wooden beams pointed at the sky. Someone passing by would recognize it as a church, but no beauty would compel them to stop.

My own memories of that church fill its absence of architecture with abundant scenes of noise and song and light and life and story. My mother was the director of children’s education, and for a while each Sunday morning, she led all the children with songs from Psalty, the children’s psalter hymnal:

One, two, one, two, three [beat]

I know Jesus loves me!

Four, five, four, five, six [beat]

Ain’t nothin’ he can’t fix!

Seven, eight, seven, eight, nine [beat]

I’ll praise him all the time!

Hallelujah, [clap, clap] I love the Lord!⁸

All the kids would sing and bop and clap and stomp. It was Sunday morning, and the children of the faithful gathered to praise the God they were given to praise.

Amen, praise the Lord!

Amen, praise the Lord!

Glory hallelujah, praise the Lord!

I’m gonna jump down, turn around,

Touch the ground, and praise my Lord!⁹

Exactly as the song says, several pews of hyped-up Dutch Reformed kids jumped down, touched the ground, turned around, and praised the Lord. We sang one exclamation mark after another, my mother conducting the show.

When the singing finished, we filed out the back and broke into age groups for Sunday school. As a kid, I loved Sunday school. It amounted to little more than a series of amazing stories. A rotating set of teachers—all agelessly adult—would set a green flannelgraph on a shaky tripod and pull out felt characters to tell each tale. One by one, The Adult would press them against the board: David on the right (looking no more impressive than my brother), and on the left, Goliath, the giant, looking mean.

This is the way I learned the Bible as a kid. I watched cutout characters slapped onto a green board, sticking just long enough to display some faith-filled moment of glory: Samuel, Saul, David, Solomon the Wise, Elijah, Elisha, and all the other characters of ancient Israel. We met Daniel in the lions’ den and greeted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego strolling out of a fiery furnace. Most of all, of course, we saw Jesus. He had pale skin in our 1980s almost all-white church, and he wore his hair long, with a big, brown beard, a gentle face, and a flowing robe. I saw him in all sorts of scenes, preaching and healing and riding on a donkey down a road stretched like a ribbon on the felt, making his way toward the gates of Jerusalem as my teacher tipped the donkey forward and backward, forward and