Rethinking poetry

Imagine hearing “Be Thou My Vision” for the first time, then being asked, “So what do you think it means?”

It’s a shame this is how many of us are introduced to poetry when we first read something like William Blake’s “The Tyger” or Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall.” Unlike listening to music, something we are encouraged to enjoy and participate in, reading poetry too often is taught as textual analysis.

Perhaps this is why the average American listens to music for 20–30 hours per week but fewer than 15 percent of Americans read any poetry. Abram Van Engen suggests in Word Made Fresh that if we first approach a poem to figure out “what it supposedly means” then our “time spent with poetry may be short-lived.”

A professor of English at Washington University and co-host of the podcast Poetry for All, Van Engen encourages us to think of poetry as an experience rather than a text or an object. Poems, like prayers and songs, are fulfilled only when they are acted out, when someone speaks (or sings) the words.

Word Made Fresh is an impassioned invitation, particularly to Christians, to rethink how we read poems and how valuable they can be to our experience of the world. Poems are filled with “an abundance” of human experience, packed into a very small space. As we read them, poems can conjure memories, transport us across time and space, convict us, terrify us, make us roar with laughter, and turn our world upside down.

Perhaps most importantly, Van Engen’s book demonstrates that poetry is essential to Christianity. Poetry fills the Bible, from the Psalms and apocalyptic prophecies to the Magnificat and the angelic annunciation of Christ. Poetry helps us explore important aspects of the Christian faith, from the role of language in Creation and the image of God in humanity to the devastation of sin and our need for redemption.

To unlock poetry’s abundance, however, we need to rethink how we approach it.

Word Made Fresh is an inspiring primer on how to read poetry. To begin, Van Engen offers the refreshing instruction to “just read” and read “for the joy of it.” Read personally and for pleasure. Understanding will follow when we find poems we like. So, read broadly.

Poetry, according to Samuel Coleridge, is “the best words in the best order.” Because of this precision, some poems can be challenging. Van Engen encourages us not to worry if we don’t get it. Also, we should feel free to stop reading a poem if it bores us. The secret is to keep reading until we find poems that “land”—that strike, challenge, move, amuse, and confound us.

These moments, when words are made “fresh,” can come from anywhere, from a poem about eating plums, one about the sound of rain on the battlefield, or even a poem about poetry. Van Engen reveals that the poem “Church Going” by the agnostic poet Philip Larkin strikes him, because it “revives in me the churches I have passed through … filled with so much community, so much worship.”

Word Made Fresh looks at timeless poets like John Donne, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, as well as more recent ones like Anna Akhmatova, Dana Gioia, and Richard Wilbur. The poems Van Engen discusses are not necessarily the best poems. They are simply some of his favorites, and he wants readers to find favorites of their own.

Van Engen encourages readers to experiment with how they read poetry, as well as the types of poems that they read. Read out loud and in groups. Read poems slow and read them fast. As the poet Billy Collins noted, it is perfectly fine “to waterski / across the surface of a poem.” Skimming can be just as powerful as sinking into the depths.

For readers who want to plunge deeper, Van Engen walks through how to analyze different forms and rhyme schemes as well as what questions to ask the poem. His exercise of “erasing” is particularly enlightening, allowing readers to focus on the verbs or nouns or words that share similar sounds, which can expose the hidden magic baked into a poem.

At the end of these deeper dives, it is important to return to the surface, “to read it again.” Poems come to life in the reading and the hearing.

For Van Engen, poetry is about the human experience of reality, whether it is reveling in the glory of Creation or mourning the desolation of the Fall. Rather than analyzing poems to death, Word Made Fresh calls us to join in the experience, to find joy in the “new songs” that Psalm 96 exhorts us to sing.