Theopoetics, defended language, and why I started reading poetry again

I wrote my first poem as a kid in the backseat of my family’s car, looking back at the Sear’s Tower as we drove away from the city towards Indiana. I made wallpaper from poems I pinned to my wall in high school. I workshopped poems in college, where I was an editor of the school’s literary magazine. I spent an earnest summer in San Francisco cafes writing about God and other big feelings in an oversized moleskin.

After college, I received a grant to start a literary magazine featuring Indiana writers and began reading hundreds of poetry and creative non-fiction submissions. I loved making the journals: layout, printing, planning a launch party, and marketing each issue. But choosing poems for the magazine completely drained me. Instead of exploring ideas of faith, my own creative writing flattened. Without a very good reason, I stopped reading and writing poems altogether. That was more than 15 years ago.

I recently read an article about theopoetics in Sojourners. The author, the Latinex poet Carolina Hinojosa-Cisneros, used to mentally sort her poems into a few buckets and not overlap “Christian” poetry with her other topical interests. Then she learned about theopoetics, which she defines as, “a decolonial reimagining of the Creator, God, through creative expression when the language of the church and theology have failed us.” She continues, “When the church cannot supply the language for what our experience is and what our liberation looks like, we engage in theopoetics as resistance.” While there is a well developed body of scholarly work on theopoetics that I’ve have yet to explore, the concept of using imaginative language to bring new life to old and complex arguments is ripe with possibilities.

Here, poetry brings words and feelings together around the struggle and oppression of our marginalized brothers and sisters.

Isaiah and the prophets were not doing dissimilar work: calling to account the religious authorities and their lackluster, bland, and elitist form of faith and creating new language for a remnant. They were critiquing the power structure of the day and building a vibrant, living connection to God. In 2019, poetry again offers us a fresh invitation to reimagine a way to talk and think about God.

On Being’s Poetry Radio Project reminds us how, in an era when “defended language is practically all we know” we are “re-learning our basic human need of poetry to flourish.”

Poetry can resist, it can introduce new language in divisive spaces, and at its best I believe it can spark healing.

I started writing poems again several months ago as a form of prayer and a way of questioning Christianity and culture. I’ve found a settling in my mind and heart as I write. And even better, an invitation to re-enter reading poets giving us bright, defiant, and important expressions of faith in a desperate time.