SOURCE: "Muse of Danger," in "Lighting up the Terrain": The Poetry of Margaret Avison, edited by David Kent, ECW Press, 1987, pp. 144-49.

The impulse to write a poem occurs in human context—and can be a pulsation in darkness or in light. Poetry in itself is neither "evil" nor "good," in other words.

No fool-proof formula exists for using a poetic impulse to God's glory. The child of God claims the victory of Christ, and yet lives embattled from moment to moment, falling often and constantly knowing no power except through forgiveness. Even so the believer can dedicate his gifts and acknowledge God as their source, and yet can experience much daily struggle in using them. As with poetry itself, the writer of poetry is neither "evil" nor "good," in other words.

Such expressions as "a Christian poem" or "Christian literature" or "Christian works of art" involve shorthand that can be seriously misleading. They imply that good subject matter will ensure good art, or that a dedicated Christian who writes will by virtue of his dedication understand the art of writing well. But it is the word of God alone, the being of God alone, that is good without any admixture—light without any shadow of darkness at all.

In this light all our actions are empowered and judged, including the act of writing a poem. In the steady light of that assertion, we will see some of the questions cleared up that arise when Christians discuss the writing of poems.

CHOOSING THE SUBJECT

First, let the writer who feels the impulse to write poetry accept the activity involved, the fact of the impulse, and himself as writer. No subject matter is ruled out, or in, in advance for the writer (whether Christian or not). No specific "content" can be prescribed for a poem. Moreover, no special training in literature can ensure the writing of poetry.

Yet a poem is not written out of a verbal nowhere. And once a poem is written it takes its place in the context of literature by the very fact of its existence. The body of poetry at large is the range where a writer of poems is free to read, and where as poet he is responsible. When a writer gives his life to the Lord, he admits God's right over every aspect of his energy, imagination, use of time and communication. But there is no conflict for a Christian plumber, for example, where he dedicates his day to the Lord and then goes whole-heartedly about his job, and also whole-heartedly needs and responds to his children's love and their needs. Similarly there need be no conflict between a believing writer's will to serve God and his impulse to write a poem, involving as it can a total absorption in this process for as long as it goes on.

PLAYING IT SAFE

In fact there are points of acute conflict in the experience of most Christian writers. The propositions of doctrine are in words, and there is a verbal world that is "safe." To seek subjects within it, and avoid hazarding statements outside the territory that has been clearly defined, is a natural urge for someone who longs to be used as a channel for communicating the faith, and wants to avoid empty words. Yet this continual checking on one's sure anchorage in each statement is a denial of the writer's spontaneity. Moreover, if only sure words are needed, the Bible is enough.

But in His strange and marvelous mercy, God nonetheless lets the believer take a necessary place as a living witness, in behaviour with family and classmate and stranger, in conversation, or in a poem. Thus each of us may find the Word in His newness through every way and every day. The poem can no more be a "safe" venture than a direct human encounter can. Here, too, the believer is fully involved, all the more fully because of his faith.

The faith still retains first place. Its claims conflict with artistic drives just because both are compelling. This difficulty is real. The writer must accept the plain fact of his total involvement as a writer, as stated above. But the second fact for a Christian writer to accept is the tentative nature of his mortal involvement, in art as in anything else. For all our acts except one (the act of worship) are acts in mortal time. The eternal dimension may alter any of our commitments except one (our commitment to the living Son of God).

IDENTITY AND FAITH

This seems to demand of the writer an absolute artistic identity, and then advises him to weasel out on it. Experience will press home the paradox, however, so it may as well be openly stated. What, practically is involved here?

Writers are sure to know some temptations peculiar to their craft—e.g. writing instead of acting. But as with Shakespeare's Lear, writers can find opportunities to use literature to deepen human awareness. At other times action may be required as when God appoints an hour for two friends to share an anxiety, a joyful discovery or a sorrow. It is a lifelong discipline to learn both to act on impulses to action, and to write when an insight is given to be shared in words.

There is no set of "safe" or "preferred" subjects for Christian poets. Nor is there a set of "safe" or "preferred" daily experiences. You would be presuming to know better than the Giftgiver to preset your range and exclude some truths of experience from expression or to refuse to record some explorings that go on from the sources of poetic energy within.

Poetry is a great boon in testing honesty. Shadows of unsureness, shreds of lingering mist, emotional colorlessness, unexamined phases, empty words: these show up for what they are in a poem. ("'Fool,' said my Muse to me, 'Look in thy heart, and write'" [Sir Philip Sidney, Sonnet I, Astrophel and Stella, 1591]. This is how a Renaissance Christian gentleman urged himself towards the art of poetry.) It is true that a Christian writer may have a strong anticipation of what he wants his poems to be so that they measure up to the rich meaning opened to him through Jesus Christ. But to list the fruit of the Spirit is not straightway to bear it. And poems share something of the mysterious timing of organic processes of growth.

WORDS AND EXPERIENCE

Most writers discover for themselves the distinction between devotional reality and literature. The experience of beauty is not alien to the worshiper's awareness of God (although it is possible for beauty to be cold, and cruel, and arrogant). Certainly out of a morning hour of Bible meditation and prayer, words may be breathed that rise from the deeps and hold the promise of communicative loveliness. Yet how often they need revising, later on, before they are ready for others' eyes. Fervour in worship can so far exceed the power of our words that the words alone will not convey the experience to anyone else. The Christian writer should remind himself to give careful scrutiny to any poems written out of such experiences before making them public. And he should accept poetic impulse from every area of experience, and avoid looking for his "inspiration" only from the moments least accessible to lisping human terms.

IS ONE POETIC FORM "RIGHT"?

No pre-determined range of experience is "right" for a Christian poet's subject matter, and there are no "right" forms. The culturally excellent is not necessarily the spiritually valid. Dante's terza rima, Milton's blank verse, the simple lyric forms of devotional writers in the seventeenth century, the psalmist's parallelism of thought, and the nineteenth century hymnwriter's rhymed stanzas: all have been explicit vehicles for poetry of faith. And each of these forms had its cultural roots and ramifications in many a secular form of speech and writing.

The believer asserts that the Creator called form out of chaos, and draws orderliness out of the otherwise incoherent. These assertions often lure him to seek some definite principles of order (rhyme, regular measure, logic) as necessary to the poetry he will approve. But to do so is to limit the poet. The known, already recognized means of ordering words in poems are not necessarily better than other means that may still be discovered.

Before continuing with the discussion of inter-related form and content, a side issue should be faced. Hymns and songs are a special genre of poetry. Because Christian writers are often responsive to hymns, they tend to identify poetic form with the regular, repetitive word patterns required by the hymn tunes commonly used in congregational singing. Thus a particularly difficult form is often the one first attempted. It is difficult because a repeat without loss of freshness is in itself a forbidding technical undertaking. Good current hymnology involves double awareness, both musical and verbal. And local traditions are confining unless the practitioner is able to work with an awareness of the total context. This is not to discourage anyone from hymn-writing, but only to prevent anyone from backing into it with shut eyes, and to keep him from forcing his poetry into a form inappropriate to it. The hymn-form, per se, is not godly in some special fashion.

WHOLEHEARTED USE OF WORDS

The packaging and the goods packaged may be easily distinguished in a store, but not when words are involved. When you speak, a listener hears much more than the dictionary words you use. There is an individual identity conveyed. Words are in a particular language family, and are learned in a particular family by a particular infant. Then they gather meaning over the years from school, through TV, conversations and reading. You pronounce words the way people in your home region pronounce them. And the way your own mouth and teeth and breathing work make them peculiarly your own. (I have always pictured Edmund Spenser as having a space between his two front teeth, so that "f" would fan a gentle airflow over his lips—his speech seems to me thus individual.) A person's unique flesh-and-blood force is in his own words, in his way of sounding them and using them. His words reveal his family and the time and place he is abroad on the earth. The natural rhythm, the Row or biting off or slow shaping of word, reflect temperament and mood. The "mundane context" of the words becomes, and in a sense is, their sound and sequence. Moreover, the reading of the Bible and the experience of prayer are both part of the "context of language" for a Christian, so that for the believer the language context also can become extramundane.

In prose, a writer or speaker may work against these personal and extramundane powers in language, seeking a detached, logical statement. In contrast, a poet chooses to accept the full halo of values in the words he uses. He accepts the personal identity they reveal. He develops his sense of their echoes across developing centuries, the double or triple meanings, the suggestiveness of vowel-sound and rhythm. No potential effect of any word is irrelevant to the poem where it occurs.

Thus the poet uses language as an artist's raw material. Consequently, his words have potential effect at every level—not only the intentional or logical levels. Poetry is the whole-hearted use of language, then. Let the Christian plunge in if he is given potentialities in reading and writing—and so discover.

The practice of poetry is as dangerous as this next hour of life, whoever you are. Yet its advantages are great.