Why we write

“When I started this journey, I didn’t have an agenda,” says author Ben Palpant to poet Marilyn Nelson in An Axe for the Frozen Sea (Rabbit Room Press, 344 pp.). Nelson, a Lutheran and former poet laureate of Connecticut, is one of the 17 poets Palpant interviews in the book. “As an artist,” Nelson tells Palpant, “you don’t know where your artistry will lead. … Don’t trust it to lead you to fame and fortune—especially poetry. You have to do it for love.”

At the beginning of 2024, Palpant set out to meet as many poets as he could and spent an hour with each one. “Not to pepper them with questions,” he writes, “but to have a conversation that would lead us both further up and further in.”

His quest resulted in a volume of 17 interviews with living poets of faith. A single poem by each author appears after each interview—a good springboard for those just beginning their exploration of Christian poetry.

The book doubles as an immersive primer on Christian poets of the past who have shaped the poets of today. Reading this book is like eavesdropping on stimulating Christian poet friends talking about a host of other mutual (but dead) Christian poet friends—T.S. Eliot, Samuel Coleridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins, George Herbert, and others. Many of the interviewed poets weigh in on the same subjects: the Holy Spirit as the inspiration for poetry, poetry as worship, the perceived uselessness of poetry in a world obsessed with utility, and the depressing state of literary criticism today.

But Palpant gives us interviews that are not only readable but hopeful. The poets he interviews sometimes disagree with each other, but they collectively affirm poetry as an essential craft and a God-given calling that transcends self-expression.

The book’s title comes from a Franz Kafka line: “A book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us.” Contemporary literature may tend toward despair, but An Axe for the Frozen Sea leans toward hope, reminding Christians of their rich literary inheritance. That heritage of course includes the Bible. Palpant organizes his interviews alphabetically by last name, because “it allows them to speak to each other and to us without any orchestration on my part.” Near the back, poet Jeremiah Webster says in his interview, “It’s interesting to see how many poets of the twentieth century were pastor’s kids. Even if they abandoned orthodoxy later, they found their music in the cradle of the church.”