“What makes a poem a poem?” a student in my high school English class asked me last year. “Can anything be a poem?”
I struggled to answer. Poetry is often hard to define, the way abstract art is hard to define, but I did my best. “Narrative writing is an elephant standing on a table,” I said. “Poetry stands on a thimble.”
As someone who takes great pleasure in words and who is always looking for opportunities to introduce poetry to the students at the small, Christian school where I teach, I eagerly read a review copy of “Christian Poetry in America Since 1940, An Anthology.” Edited by Micah Mattix and Sally Thomas, this valuable collection of poems by 35 American poets born after 1940 releases Sept. 6 from New England’s own Paraclette Press.
For those whose exposure to Christian poetry is limited to the sentimental, this collection of contemporary verses offers a diverse mix of Christian thought and theory that both comforts and disturbs.
Take for example the following lines from James Matthew Wilson’s haunting poem “Some Will Remember You,” reflecting on the death of Edith Stein, a Jewish nun who died in Auschwitz in 1942:
“Pressed in the rattling cattle car
Between her sister and rough board,
Drawn through the final smoke of war?
‘Come, we are going to our Lord.’”
Or consider the first few lines of Dana Gioia’s ruminative poem “The Litany,” which contemplates the intangibility of life:
“This is a litany of lost things,
a canon of possessions dispossessed,
a photograph, an old address, a key.”
But my favorite poem in the anthology – the one that caused me to laugh out loud and read it to unsuspecting family and friends – was Marilyn Nelson’s “Incomplete Renunciation,” which I share in full with the publisher’s permission:
“Please let me have
a 10-room house adjacent to campus;
6 bedrooms, 2 ½ baths, formal
dining room, fireplace, family room,
screened porch, 2-car garage.
Well maintained.
And let it pass
Through the eye of a needle.”
An eight-line, 36-word elephant, Nelson’s poem stands on the thimble of America’s capitalistic, consumer-driven culture and exposes the folly of our often-egocentric prayers. This then is what makes a poem a poem – not the number of lines or the style of the verse – but the brevity of words and the duration of their impact.
For this, and so many other poems like it, Paraclette Press’s anthology is worth adding to your shelves. But prepare to be challenged.
Author and educator Meadow Rue Merrill writes and occasionally reviews books from a little house in the big woods of Midcoast, Maine. Say hello and check out her faith affirming children’s picture books at the Third Annual Bath Book Bash, Sept. 17, Library Park, Bath, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., or connect at meadowrue.com
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