Language as sacrament

The Image website now includes a new opportunity to listen to poetry, beginning with poems recorded by Scott Cairns at the 2007 Glen Workshop.

Someone once said that "a poem should not mean but be." Scott Cairns prefers to have it both ways. He's long believed that poetry should not merely refer to a prior event or experience, but should make meaning in real time through the sacramental power of words. We think he's onto something.

Also worth checking out on the site is an essay on 'Language as sacrament in the New Testament' by Franz Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of a dozen poetry collections. In searing and musical language, his poems articulate the agony and uncertainty of belief, with touches of wry humor.

Here, in a surprising and vulnerable essay, he considers the language of the gospels, especially the Gospel of John. Like many of us, he grew up hearing the words of Jesus so often that they were in danger of losing their power, and like many of us, longed to hear them again in a way that felt new. “I wanted to experience these words again naïvely, personally, literally, as if I had never heard them before,” he writes. It isn’t easy for a poet—a master of the nuances of language—to learn to read naïvely, but this essay demonstrates an act of spiritual discipline that allowed Wright to do just that.

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James Macmillan - Seven Last Words FromThe Cross, Part III.