Making Nothing Happen

Five Poets Explore Faith and Spirituality

Gavin D'Costa, Eleanor Nesbitt, Mark Pryce, Ruth Shelton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351920834
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Making Nothing Happen is a conversation between five poet-theologians who are broadly within the Christian tradition - Nicola Slee, Ruth Shelton, Mark Pryce, Eleanor Nesbitt and Gavin D'Costa. Together they form The Diviners - a group which has been meeting together for a number of years for poetry, and theological and literary reflection. Each poet offers an illuminating reflection on how they understand the relation between poetry and faith, rooting their reflections in their own writing, and illustrating discussion with a selection of their own poems. The poets open up issues for deeper exploration and reflection, including: the nature of creativity and the distinction between divine and human creation; the creative process as exploration, epiphany and revelation; the forging of identity through writing; ways in which the arts reflect, challenge and dialogue with faith, and faith can inform and challenge the arts; power and voice in poetry and faith; and ways in which race, gender and culture interact with and shape poetic and theological discourse. This book will be of interest to poets and theologians, to all who read poetry and are interested in the connections between literature and faith, to those seeking inspiration for preaching, liturgy and pastoral care, and to those committed to the practice and nurturing of a contemplative attitude to life in which profound attention and respect are offered to words and to the creative Word at work.

Chapter 1
(W)riting like a Woman: In Search of a Feminist Theological Poetics

Nicola Slee

Introduction

In what follows, I want to tell something of how poetry and faith have been significant in my life and how I perceive their interrelationship. Underlying this story is a sense that both poetry and theology have funded and nourished my sense of self from earliest days – taught me who I am, where I belong in the world and how to speak into and of the world. At the same time, poetry and theology have been arenas in which I’ve struggled to come to authentic speech as a woman – a pervasive theme in much second-wave feminist writing from the 1960s onwards, where there has been considerable debate about what it means to write, think and speak (even throw and climb!) ‘as’ or ‘like a woman’.¹ The debate has centred around women’s struggles to find an authentic female tradition or traditions of writing, to take up a subject position (rather than be the object of the male gaze or male writing) and to develop distinctively feminine forms of literature without buying into limited, essentialist notions of gender. My own struggle has been to find traditions of theology and poetry into which my own particular voice can speak and to find a way of integrating poetic and theological discourse, without prioritising one over the other or re-inscribing oppressive dualisms – emotion versus intellect, concretion versus abstraction, feminine versus masculine – onto the poetry/theology relation. In this piece, I seek to write in a way that is confessional and reflexive, as well as thematic, as a way of honouring this struggle and attempting to hold the tension between different modes of thinking and speaking. My aim is to stay close to my experience of both reading and writing poetry, as well as to draw on my commitment to prayer and public liturgy, my work of teaching theology and spirituality (in which poetry has a place), and my research into women’s faith lives (which employs ethnography in ways that link with poetry), for it is out of these contexts that my own writing has been shaped and to which it seeks to speak. I shall also make some reference to the wider feminist literature that has pursued the discussion about what ‘writing like a woman’ can mean.

Poetry and Prayer: Language of the Depths

Poetry and faith have always been there, from as far back as I can remember, and have always been intertwined, though it is perhaps only with hindsight that I can recognise how significant have been their interconnections – and these have not always been capable of articulation, precisely because the roots of each go deep and have been as much lived as reflected upon, wellsprings of vitality and creativity that have not required inspection. Part of the attraction, as well as the challenge, of writing this piece and engaging in the collective enterprise of this book, is to seek to find a way of unearthing and articulating the relationship between poetry and faith which might go at least some way towards doing justice to their depths, without killing off what remains elusive, mysterious and properly beyond rationalisation.

I wasn’t brought up in a particularly literary household, but my upbringing was one that gave me an instinctual, uncomplicated love of language, poetry, rhythm and music. Both my parents were compelled to leave school in their early teens, but both sides of my family held as precious the written and spoken word, and handed on to me different forms of literary and religious tradition which shaped my sense of self, community and world. My Scottish mother came from a generation that learnt poetry by heart and recited reams of the Border poets to me and my siblings, as well as classics of the English canon, in her broad brogue. I didn’t understand much of it, but I loved the sound of it and the way it made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck; I imbibed the sense that words are visceral things, and can do things – charm, sooth, rouse, amaze, infuriate, lodge in the body and subconscious in such a way as to continue their mysterious reverberations. From as far back as I can remember, I was taken to the Methodist chapel a mile along the road from where we lived – largely peopled by my Devonian father’s relatives – where I heard the King James Version read Sunday by Sunday and sang rousing Wesley hymns. I learnt something about the reverence and holiness of words, the respect sacred texts were accorded, but also the love of scripture and hymnody.

These early formative experiences root the sense I have always had that poetry and prayer are very close to each other, are both forms of speaking that, as Dorothee Soelle puts it, ‘place us into relation with the ground of the depth of being’ (2003: 32). There is a quality of attentiveness, of language honed to the essential in both poetry and prayer that I recognised in the rather motley mix of Robbie Burns, Moody and Sankey hymnody and the cadences of the King James Bible that made up my child’s repertoire of tongues. In each of these different forms of oral poetry, I experienced something of the out-of-the-ordinariness of poetic diction, the denseness and compactness of words working at full tilt, the intricacy of sound patterns and rhythms that didn’t need to be spelt out to me because they were doing their own magical stuff. They also taught me something of the discipline and restraint of poetic speech, of language working with the spaces, pauses and silences between and beneath the words.

Both poetry and prayer are more than the words themselves – they call us to something else, someone else perhaps, above and beyond the words – and they do this as much by what is not said as by what is said, by their rhythms and sounds and patterns as well as their obvious content. The gaps and pauses in poems, as well as in liturgy, are breathing spaces, fertile places where the words take on extra freight. For me, the sound of poetry is extremely important and I often hear the first line of a new poem, as if spoken to me from another source (although it is, of course, my own self speaking); the sound of the line leads me into the whole poem, often without any conscious sense of what it is I am writing until after I have written it. There is a sense, which perhaps all poets feel, that one’s own work comes from a deeper source than the conscious self and knows more than the conscious self knows. As Adrienne Rich has written, ‘poems are like dreams, in them you put what you don’t know you know’ (1980: 40). The poetic word, like God’s creative dhabar that utters the world into being in Genesis, is a fiat, a performative word that does what it speaks. Thus a poem works, as much through its subliminal impact on the ear, the memory and the unconscious as on its appeal to the rational mind. I have learnt to appreciate that the ‘meaning’ of a poem is far more than any moral, religious or political ‘message’ that might be summarised on the basis of the poem. Any poem that can be translated into prose terms without loss, is hardly a poem worthy of the name. The poem is a totality of sound, rhythm, association, image and voice, of which the surface ‘meaning’ is only one perhaps relatively insignificant dimension – which is why, perhaps, ‘nonsense’ poems have such appeal on the one hand and, on the other, it is more or less impossible to say exactly why and how a poem makes an impact on one person but not on another. David Constantine (2004: 326) suggests that: ‘A poem, like the clitoris, is there / For pleasure’. The sensuous discourse of poetry by and large eschews abstraction and philosophical distance (although plenty of poems are intellectually demanding) in favour of concretion. ‘For all the history of grief / An empty doorway and a maple leaf’ (MacLeish, 1985: 106). Constantine’s sexual metaphor also suggests that poetry belongs to the realm of the feminine and to the female body – themes to which I will return.

We could speak of this sensual particularity of poetry in theological terms as coming close to what Christians understand by incarnation and sacrament, themselves an outworking of the doctrine of creation² which speaks of the physical world as an expression of the being and longing-to-be-in-relation of God. The universe is created, not as some kind of extension of God, but as something that is truly its own self, multiple and various and complex as it is, free to be separate and apart from God, and yet imbued with the qualities and characteristics of its maker. All artists know something of this relation between themselves as creators and the work of art as an independent, separate thing-in-itself which must be let go to live its own life in the world, and yet which has emerged from the being of the creator and is an authentic expression of the person. In incarnation, as in creation, God gives Godself to the created order without reservation, in total vulnerability and trust, in openness and in commitment, in self-giving and in love – and this giving is expressed in God being born in human flesh, becoming a discrete, particular, embodied part of the creation, subject to all its limitations and laws. The God who is the source and origin of all that is becomes a newborn whelp, utterly dependent on other creatures for very existence. This bespeaks a divine self-offering that gives to the uttermost, that risks not only rejection but annihilation. If there is some kind of aesthetic parallel to incarnation in the work and life of the poet, it is perhaps to be seen in the costly struggle the poet must wage with the slippery and intractable stuff that is language in order to compress the most profound experiences and apprehensions of the self into a frail, limited body that is the poem. Every poem, we might say, gestures towards incarnation and has a sacramental quality about it, insofar as it succeeds in becoming a vehicle for revelation, a place where grace and truth are compressed and encountered.³

This is the kind of second-order theological reflection on poetic creation that has only come later, after decades of writing and reading poetry, as I have learnt to stand back from the process in order to reflect on it. Nevertheless, it is clear to me that my own poetry is deeply embedded within, and nurtured by, the specific forms and texts of the Christian scriptures and liturgy, particularly Anglican forms of worship but also other, more experimental and ‘alternative’ forms of liturgical expression. Much of my poetry addresses consciously ‘religious’ subjects, stories and texts, has often been written for liturgical use, and even when neither of these is true, draws deeply on scriptural forms – particularly the language and rhythms of the psalms (repetition, parallelism, chorus and so on) and makes use of liturgical forms such as the confession, canticle and litany. I include in the poems that follow examples that draw explicitly on liturgical forms and settings (‘A litany for illiterate girls’, ‘At the table of Christa’, ‘How to pray’) and others that, while not making the connection explicit, have the sounds and the intentionality of prayer and liturgy behind or within them (‘Sea song’, ‘Anna’, ‘The river’).

Much of my poetry, perhaps all of it, is written, whether consciously or not, against the backdrop of divine presence or absence and is addressed, whether consciously or not, to a divine ‘Thou’. My poems, as well as more overtly liturgical texts, are constantly in search of more authentic ways of addressing, naming or evoking the Thou who becomes, not less mysterious and elusive with time, but more. I find myself returning to certain elemental images – water, the sea, the abyss, darkness, the erotic, the wilderness, death – in poems that gesture towards the divine (and this is obvious in the poems tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 (W)riting like a Woman: In Search of a Feminist Theological Poetics
• 2 Steady until Sundown: Searching for the Holy
• 3 Taking Form: On Becoming a Christian Poet
• 4 Where Poems Come From: Spirituality, Emotion and Poiesis
• 5 The Miracle of Poetry: Divine and Human Creativity
• Index