Poetry survives in a prose-prone world, but evangelicals (and many others) remain phobic

By Allan Roy Andrews

In the past month, the Academy of American Poets launched a new page on its Web site devoted to poetry and teenagers. The page, labeled “Poetry Resources for Teens,” is quickly reached by visiting poets.org and pulling down the menu “For Educators.” The resources on the new page include “reading recommendations, writing help, spotlight audio and video recordings, as well as new ways to get involved in grassroots poetry projects,” according to an Academy press release.

Describing the motivation for producing the page, the Academy’s press release sounds much like what could be written by any American church or religious organization. The Academy acted, in its own words, in response to a recent survey they conducted, which showed that over 75% of the people who use poets.org share one characteristic: that they first developed an interest in poetry before their eighteenth birthday. With young people spending a reported average of 16.7 hours a week online, it seemed clear that in the long term, the best opportunity to reach new readers and writers of poetry is in their early years.

In pondering this news from the Academy, I thought again of the importance of poetry and the contrary disdain it experiences in American life and letters, especially among religious movers and shakers, and in particular amidst the evangelical subculture.

I guess my real problem with this push to give teens access to poetry is that it further distinguishes adulthood as a time for generally disdaining and disregarding poetry as unimportant to faith and life in the twenty-first century.

We need more people like John Keating (the fictional English teacher played by Robin Williams in the film, “Dead Poet’s Society”), who told his adolescent charges:

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for . . . .

(Alas, I use a movie to make a point about poetry!)

My wife asked me a trick question last week: “What language is spoken in heaven?”

“Probably Aramaic,” I quipped.

If I had taken, as she did, any course in college offered by Dr. Thomas Howard (author of Christ the Tiger and subsequent others—see http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/authors/thomashoward.asp), she informed me I would have hastily answered, “Poetry!”

If that be so, it’s clear to me that the heavenly language fights for a public voice in today’s prose-dominated world. Oh, to be sure, poetry is available to any who hunt for it, but such a suggestion is a bit like telling sushi lovers in the Dakotas they can find their favorite food if they just search long and hard enough. Sorry, folks, but Fargo ain’t Tokyo!

If poetry is the language of heaven, it still gets short shrift on earth, even among those who claim to be diligent advocates for life beyond our numbered days.

Case in point: Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of Christianity Today International, a moderately evangelical organization that counts as one of its founders the evangelist Billy Graham, recently ran a poll to determine if its readers still counted themselves as “supporters of the arts” in these disturbing economic times. I’m less interested in the results of the poll (Weekly newsletter, Jun 23, 2009) than in the way the question was framed:

Are you cutting back on spending money on the arts (music, painting, movies)?

Please note the limiting listing of the arts: “music, painting, movies.” Poetry flies under the radar in Christianity Today’s perception. In fairness, the survey accompanies a compelling argument by Canadian singer-songwriter Carolyn Arends on why the arts are important; although, she seems to limit poetry’s influence to its aid in worship, comparable to icons.

In other contexts, I’ve chided Christianity Today and other popular evangelical publications for not regularly publishing first-rate contemporary poetry. One can look to Christian Century, Commonweal, First Things, and Sojourners to find a smattering of poets in religion journals, but one must look long and hard to find poets being published in the largest circulation religious magazine, familiarly referred to as CT. Among the magazines I’ve listed here, Christianity Today alone is without a poetry editor.

Almost a decade ago, an English professor at Houston Baptist University, Louis Markos, in a Christianity Today column of open commentary, called evangelicals “poetry phobic.” In the ensuing years, the magazine has done little or nothing to address and attack this phobia. Even Books and Culture, Christianity Today International’s intelligent and erudite collection of book reviews, does not have a designated poetry editor other than editor John Wilson, who often shows his personal appreciation of poetry but does not push for any regular publication of poems.

Let me be clear: I welcome poets.org’s effort to expand the exposure of teenagers to poetry. What I’d like to see is religious publications, who often target teenagers as an audience to be addressed and assessed, spend more time exposing their adult readers to the rising cadre of fine poets addressing questions of faith and the dilemmas of life and theology.

If it is true that evangelicals (and perhaps other religious subsets) are poetry phobic, much of the fault can be laid at the feet of the journalists, essayists, commentators, and preachers whose words fill the monthly magazines and who too often show a disdain for the poetic voice.

Note: Anyone interested in fine contemporary poetry from a Christian faith perspective should visit the Journal of Christianity and Literature hosted by Pepperdine University at http://www.pepperdine.edu/sponsored/ccl/journal/. Another excellent source of such poetry is Image: A Journal of Art, Faith, Mystery at http://imagejournal.org/page/journal/. Image is closely tied to the Graduate Writing Program at Seattle Pacific University and to the Glen Writing Workshop in New Mexico.

Youth on mission to Honduras working through tensions of coup

I share with all this news just released by the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland:

June 29, 2009

A Message from the Honduran Missioners Working in Talanga, Honduras

In the news today (Monday, June 29) are reports of a non-violent military coup in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa, on Sunday, June 28. The Diocese of Maryland is in the midst of its annual high school youth mission trips to the country, serving El Hogar de Amore y Esperanza, an Episcopal orphanage in Tegucigalpa, and the orphanage's agricultural and technical training school in Talanga, located north of the capital city. We are pleased to report that the 13 youth missioners currently working at the training school in Talanga and their adult chaperones are safe, having arrived in the country on Friday morning, June 26, prior to the changing political situation. The group destined for the orphanage on Saturday, June 27, returned to Baltimore after reaching Miami, the first leg of the trip. A phone conversation yesterday with the Rev. Wes Wubbenhorst, youth missioner for the diocese and on-site leader of the mission trips, confirmed the group's safety, upbeat spirit and willingness to stay undeterred. "Everyone here is fine, the city is quiet and we will be in touch with reports as we find out more," Wubbenhorst said. He added that this is the third time in his 20-plus years organizing these trips that something of this magnitude has happened and each time the groups have been safe. Wubbenhorst had been in touch with diocesan point-of-contact the Rev. Canon Mary Glasspool by Sunday afternoon, who in turn contacted the parents and spouses of those on the trip. Many of the parents were unaware of the political situation and all were glad to have been informed. There are three overlapping mission trips to Honduras. The first group arrived in Talanga on June 19 and returned to Baltimore on the 26th. The second group, also in Talanga, arrived June 26 and will return on July 3. The group headed for the orphanage would have arrived June 27 and returned July 4. To learn more about these and other mission opportunities for youth in the Diocese of Maryland, visit http://youth.ang-md.org/index.php/missions.

===================== A quick way to keep up with what's happening in Honduras is to visit http://news.yahoo.com/world A note: Wubbenhorst, the diocese of Maryland's youth missioner, is a former Peace Corps worker in Honduras.

Snippet scholarship: being at ease

Snippet scholarship: A note to the likeminded

By Allan Roy Andrews

I consider myself a snippet scholar.

While not a perception I particularly desire or encourage, I confess being a snippet scholar can often be thought pejorative. Snippet scholarship could be construed as my being a connoisseur of television sound bites or street-side church signs or as the way of one born to think as a Jeopardy! contestant.

What I speak of is not exactly an attraction to trivia; it is more of a resistance to lengthy expositions. I once heard a teaching colleague describe an administrator as one who “When you ask a question, you get a pageant for a reply.” I do not easily suffer pageantry in conversation or exposition; I want to get through explanatory prose as quickly as possible.

My discovery of my own predilection for what I call snippet scholarship arrived late in life when I became consciously aware of a lifelong attraction to so-called “handbooks.” In fact, I might better describe my leaning as more of a handbook scholarship than a snippet scholarship.

On my living room bookshelves as I write, an “accidental sample”--as the data buffs might say—reveals about 40 such volumes, not including dictionaries (such as a Dictionary of Symbolism), or grammar and style tomes on the order of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style and the less sparse volumes produced by Theodore M. Bernstein, such as The Careful Writer. My quick count runs a gamut from Kathleen Norris’s Amazing Grace, subtitled, A Vocabulary of Faith, to Rabbi Joseph Telushkin’s Jewish Literacy, subtitled, The Most Important Things to Know About the Jewish Religion, Its People, and Its History. And this count does not include the row of dictionaries and writing guides that adorn my desk.

One must understand: I do not simply refer to these books, I read them. The latest of my snippet guide devourings is something of a best-seller, ’isms and ’ologies: The 453 Basic Tenets You’ve Only Pretended to Understand, by Arthur Goldwag, who says his book “can serve as an intellectual and social shorthand.” A few months ago I finished reading (in its entirety) Nathan P. Feldmeth’s Pocket Dictionary of Church History: Over 300 terms clearly and concisely defined.

It would be easy for me to lay my snippet penchant at the feet of a college professor of psycholinguistics who habitually encouraged students to read—actually read with care and in detail—dictionaries. (I confess to being one of a handful of students who took his admonitions to heart and developed a habit of perusing—in the true sense of that word—dictionary entries.)

However, I have to go further back to account for my snippet tendencies. I have always been a slow reader. My wife, for instance, can devour a Dick Francis novel in a couple of hours that would probably take me a couple of weeks to complete.

I went through high school in the days before CliffsNotes, Spark Notes, and most of the other “shortcuts” that secondary school teachers disdain. Had I access to them, I would have been a grateful champion of their snippet approach. Instead, I had access to Classics Illustrated Comic Books (to get the best flavor of this treasure trove, I recommend one visit this site: http://www.tkinter.smig.net/ClassicsIllustrated/index.htm and its links.)

By the way, my high school teachers held these graphic adaptations of the classics in disdain as well, and that inculcated guilt in my consciousness that took a long time to shake. Even after learning in college that most literature students were more familiar with Masterplots than with original editions, I always felt I was somehow cheating by taking the “shortcuts.”

It has taken decades for me to be at ease with my snippet tendencies. One cannot imagine how vindicated I have felt with the invention of the hyperlink and the ascendancy of Google as a way of scholarship; alas, many of my colleagues and many of my son’s high school teachers have nothing but disdain for Google. Be at ease, they will learn.

I am now a proud snippet scholar. Perhaps that’s why I’m so attracted to blogging, as you also must be! Be at ease, my snippet friends.

Cowboy Contemplative: Heaven or Home?

Cowboy Contemplative: Singing our way home

By Allan Roy Andrews

[in memory of Mom]

Years ago a popular country song recorded by Tanya Tucker extolled the bliss of Texas. The song was “Texas When I Die,” and was written by a Tennessean (born in Arkansas), Ed Bruce (along with a couple of collaborators). Bruce actually cut a much better version of the song than Tucker’s, but her version moved further up the charts.

It begins with this repeated quatrain:

“When I die, I may not go to heaven;

I don’t know if they let cowboys in.

If they don’t, then bury me in Texas

‘cause Texas is as close as I’ve been.”

I have no connection whatsoever to Texas [other than an out-of-touch first cousin in Amarillo], so when I heard and fell in love with Bruce’s song, I toyed with the lyrics and made it my own.

“When I die, I may not go to heaven;

I don’t know if they let cowboys in.

If they don’t, then bury me in Brooklyn

‘cause Brooklyn is as close as I’ve been.”

New York actually gets dissed in Bruce’s lyrics, as does Detroit, Milwaukee, and—one could extrapolate—also Hell, while San Antone and Willie Nelson and Texas beer are given a treatment close to apotheosis. But no matter, for me Brooklyn—with or without Schaefer or Rheingold beers—is sweeter than San Antone or Houston or Big D.

One could, of course, plug in one’s own place of heavenly memories: “. . . then bury me in Boston/‘cause Beantown is as close as I’ve been.” Or, for less urban devotees, how about, “. . . then bury me in Springfield /‘cause Main Street is as close as I’ve been.”

For me, it was living in Brooklyn, believe it not, that drew me as a teenager to the thrall of country and western music. At the time, a New Jersey radio station, WAAT, beamed Don Larkin’s “Hometown Frolic” into the region with its theme song, the Gene Autry standard, “I’m Back in the Saddle Again.” (Nora Ephron and Tom Hanks proved that song a favorite even to the Sleepless in Seattle!) If confronted with the quasi-Biblical query, “Can anything good come out of Jersey?" I would have quickly and confidently responded, “country music.”

So while my high school buddies in Brooklyn were losing themselves in Alan Freed and the rhythm and blues music that evolved into rock ' n’ roll, I was steeping myself in Hank Williams, Webb Pierce, Faron Young, Hank Thompson, Eddy Arnold, Hank Snow, Slim Whitman, and cowboy favorites such as Autry, Tex Ritter, Ernest Tubb, Roy Rogers, and Rogers’ original compatriots, the Sons of the Pioneers. My adolescent fantasy of singing on the “Grand Ole Opry” ranked second only to playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and I learned about five chords on the guitar and about 500 country and western songs.

At that time, the only thing truly cowboy about that line-up of singers I mention is that several of them wore cowboy hats and occasionally appeared in chaps and spurs. Over the years, I’ve come to recognize that “cowboy” is an attitude and a mindset more than a way of life or vocation; like me, most of the singers I mentioned above probably weren’t comfortable around horses, steers, or ranch waste; nevertheless, they extolled the way of the cowboy.

I think what cowboy singers promoted and what appealed to me as a boy was what I now can identify as the life of a “cowboy contemplative.” My heroes didn’t respond to life with Clint Eastwood macho aided by a big six-shooter; they backed off, rode alone, extolled the trail, preferred the dogies to the barroom, and sang quiet ballads.

Even when they did have to turn to the gun, they acted and then, like Alan Ladd’s “Shane” or the legendary Lone Ranger, rode into the distance to be alone with themselves—and perhaps, with God—and to sing a song (I just know the Lone Ranger sang when he was alone).

And they may well have asked the question repeated in Bruce’s “Texas When I Die,” which wonders if cowboys get to heaven (they do, as surely as ragamuffins enter God’s kingdom) and asserts that dying cowboys are ready to accept the next best thing: home.

Though she was neither a cowgirl nor a singer but surely a psalm-loving contemplative, it’s no wonder my mother always said of those who’d recently died, “They’ve gone home.”

--------------------------------------

Writer’s Note: Ed Bruce, the writer of “Texas When I Die,” and the writer and original singer of “Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys,” in the twilight of his career has cut two successful gospel albums—“Changed” and “Sing About Jesus”—and, as noted on his official Web site, has become an ambassador of God’s life-changing love in Jesus Christ.

P.S. If you’ve read this far and would like to know more about my own cowboy contemplative life, you can click a link on this blog for “Poetry by ARA” to find my poem entitled, “One of Their Kind.” Or, just click here.

The Power of Tears: My April Showers

By Allan Roy Andrews

I’ve never bought into the adage that “real men don’t cry,” and thankfully Jesus belies those words by showing his manly humanity at news of the death of Lazarus (John 11:35).

My wife likes to tweak me occasionally by telling others I’m the only grown man she knows who cried during Disney’s “101 Dalmatians.”  (Damn you, Cruella de Vil!)

I’ve simply never tried to hide my tears at poignant movies, and I discovered more than a decade ago that tears are basically uncontrollable as I delivered a eulogy to my mother during a family memorial service.  I was fine about two-thirds through my prepared remarks.  Then my mouth started quivering uncontrollably, my tongue turned to Styrofoam, and deep sobs broke from my soul, interrupted only by my sniffling apologies to the gathered relatives.

Something similar occurred years earlier when while visiting friends in Philadelphia I read the newspaper at bedtime and discovered an obituary of a college friend who had been killed in Vietnam.  I fell back on my pillow and cried deeply for 10 or 15 minutes.

Over the past three or four weeks, I’ve found myself moved to tears on numerous occasions, and all of them have come as a result of my reading or viewing.

I picked up a 2008 book of poems called America at War (NY: Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2008), and cried over a poem by children’s poet Rebecca Kai Dotlich.  Perhaps it was the cumulative effect of these fine poems gathered by Lee Bennett Hopkins; nevertheless, by the time I read Dotlich’s poem, “My Brother’s Shirt,” the futility and injustice of war had overwhelmed me as I read,

It is mine now,

one stiff Army shirt,

THOMPSON printed

on the pocket.

United States Army

sends something home;

gives part of you back.

The part that cannot

breathe, or speak

or tease me

anymore.

 

Memory and a fictional voice triggered my tears a few days later.  Reading Bernice Morgan’s novel of Newfoundland, Random Passage (St. John’s, NF:  Breakwater, 1992), I came across this pedestrian declaration:  “We’ll have hot bread for you before you leaves.”

It was my Aunt Eva speaking, or it could have been my Aunt Jen, or my Aunt Mary Winsor, or my cousin Frances McGowan—Newfoundlanders all—expressing hospitality in dialect that I’d known as a boy, never questioning their grammar.  Now I heard them again, and cried.

I cried last week reading the sports pages and watching televised accounts of baseball in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s as the nation celebrated Jackie Robinson Day.  I am a boy who grew up in Brooklyn and has never been able to get the Dodgers out of my fan’s consciousness.  I can recite the uniform numbers of the stars of the Brooklyn Dodgers in Robinson’s era:  Duke Snider, 4; Pee Wee Reese, 1; Carl Erskine, 17; Preacher Roe, 28; Billy Cox, 3; Carl Furillo, 6; Junior Gilliam, 19; Gil Hodges, 14; Roy Campanella, 39; Clem Labine, 41; Don Newcombe, 36; Johnny Podres, 45; Jackie Robinson, 42! 

As I watched clips of Robinson as a revolutionary rookie, I realized again how his story defined race relations for me as a teenager.  To see every major league player, coach, manager, and umpire wearing Robinson’s number 42 on April 15 was a sign of hope and progress and unity that rarely appears in the modern world, and I wiped tears from my eyes.

Finally, I confess I was moved to tears (not unlike Demi Moore) when I watched the YouTube performance of a Scottish woman singing before a panel of judges in an audition for “Britain’s Got Talent” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY ).  By now, Susan Boyle has become an Internet and entertainment celebrity.  What moved me to tears was the triumph of her strong and pristine voice in the face of disdain and cynicism from the audience and the judges.  

Then, the honest confession by the judges of surprise, delight, and as actress Amanda Holden put it, her “complete privilege” of hearing this wonderful voice.  I was witnessing a triumph of grace, and it made me cry.

In these episodes of April I’ve had to confront my own humanity, and I better understand the power in tears and the wonder of knowing that Jesus wept.