Poetry is an aspect of the Arts where the influence of Christians has been felt particularly strongly. In thinking about why that might be and also why you might want to come to our Celebration of Christian Poetry event, the following thoughts from the US poet Gregory Orr may be of interest:
“The making of poems is the making of meanings. To write a lyric poem is to take the confusion and chaos inside you and translate it into words. Those words get organized onto a page; and if they’re being organised into a poem as opposed to a novel, they’re organized into an intense pattern, a concentrated coherence. When you suffer trauma, you mostly do that passively, as a victim. But when you translate that experience into words and shape it, you become active. You are no longer a passive endurer of experience, but an active shaper of it. You’ve redeemed something from that chaos.”
“We, as readers, most need poems, during our crises. We need poets when we’re deliriously happy, and the delirium threatens our stability, when we’re crazy with love. We need them when we’re crazed with grief and despair – then they’re a momentary stay against our confusion, a momentary clarification. Then they have the power to re-stabilize us. Wordsworth has a beautiful insight when he defines poetry twice in his “Preface to the Lyric Ballads”: first as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” – that would be a poem written in crisis – and than a few pages later as “emotion recollected in tranquillity” … “trauma revisited when it’s safe to remember it.”
For all these reasons “writing a poem can save your life, and reading a poem can show you that you are not alone. Someone else felt this. Someone else went through what you are going through and they survived, even triumphed. The poem is the proof of that survival and triumph.” Orr quotes a wonderful line about lyric poetry from Stanley Kunitz: “It’s the voice of the solitary that makes others less alone.”
If you are being drawn to poetry, as a reader or a writer, then he suggests finding out about your imaginative relatives – your poetic family – including “Great-great-grandfather Wordsworth, or mad Great-great-uncle William Blake, or strange and amazing Aunt Emily Dickinson.” Our Celebration of Christian Poetry event will be that kind of evening - an introduction to a poetic family tree offering the opportunity to “find your spiritual kin” and be “reborn into poetry” – through readings of poems from featured poets, favourite poems introduced and read by local clergy, and choral recitals of well known poems.
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Christina Rossetti - Love Came Down At Christmas.
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