“This is why I love poems: they require me to sit still, listen deeply, and imagine putting myself in someone else’s unfamiliar shoes. The world I return to when the poem is over seems fuller and more comprehensible as a result.” —Tracy K. Smith, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time
I did not dare to join a poetry writing workshop until after I became an ordained pastor. Poetry had long been an academic interest — something I studied in class, analyzing context, craft, history and form. However, apart from the usual achingly earnest middle school scribbles, I myself had not put any elbow grease into writing my own poems.
But then I was ordained as a pastor and was soon asked to pour out words daily, to lead worship, to create liturgy, to pray in gatherings, to dwell in deep questions and to write newsletter articles. Shaping and sharing faith-filled language is the pastor’s modus operandi. I loved it — and I also found myself growing tired of the words coming out of my mouth.
I remember feeling especially weary in my prayers, both communal and individual. I wanted to shake loose my language. I wanted to play with it. I wanted to learn to turn the prism of a word to see what unexpected colors and shapes might glint from it.
Poetry teaches us the art of proclamation. It teaches us how to pay attention to every word that we use — not as a means of coercion, but as an invitation to discovery.
Previously, I had recoiled from drafting in the company of others. I preferred to study others’ finely burnished finished pieces rather than make messy new ones myself. But after ordination, poetry became a thirst in my spirit, a greed in my gut. I read literary journals and library books. I gobbled up new discoveries (Claudia Emerson! Ross Gay! Naomi Shihab Nye!) and steeped myself in old favorites (Emily Dickinson! Lucille Clifton!). With the approval of my pastoral colleagues, I signed up for a Thursday morning poetry-writing class held in a second-floor art classroom. Each week, I slid into my seat around a table next to a stranger and a stack of art books. Together, we explored how to shape words and space within a poem. In that workshop, I learned a few things about prayer as well.
How to proclaim
Poetry teaches us the art of proclamation. It teaches us how to pay attention to every word that we use — not as a means of coercion, but as an invitation to discovery.
I think about this art in relation to prayers as well. Poetry, praying and preaching all have different purposes. They are not interchangeable mediums, but they do carry a common responsibility: to teach us to honor the power of words. Poems and prayers alike reveal that it matters what we say and how we say it. Poet Michael Longley, in a 2015 interview with Krista Tippett, called it being “custodians of language.” We pay close attention to the words on our lips and at our fingertips because we believe this material has the power to transform lives.
In summer 2020, I took an online workshop called “Poetry and Prayers for Pastors” with Irish poet and public theologian Pádraig ó Tuama. Through close readings, collective writings and creative prompts, ó Tuama offered far-ranging wisdom for the religious leaders gathered in our Zoom squares. I took many notes.
Poetry is not proclaimed in a vacuum. Neither is prayer. Both teach us to construct our words with care and intention.
ó Tuama cautioned us about turning poems into mini-sermons. Indeed, I had learned this danger years earlier in some of my first poetry classes, when I was often tempted to end my poems in a neat homiletical bow. My teacher repeatedly told me to cut the last stanza or the last couple of lines — parts I so often thought essential! “Stop trying to explain the poem to the listener!” my teacher said. I resisted for a while. Eventually, I learned that when I stopped trying to force the poem’s meaning on the listener, the words came alive.
In that 2020 workshop, ó Tuama explained what he saw as the difference between writing for a sermon and writing for a poem: “Preaching is often in danger of telling you something it thinks you don’t know, instead of trusting you. Poems say, ‘You are with me as I’m learning. You are with me in this.’”
He gave us a writing exercise that I use to write poems – and prayers – to this day: Return to something you have previously written. Remove all the adjectives, adverbs and abstractions. “Put these words to one side,” ó Tuama said. “Find the spine of the poem without them.”
He explained how adjectives, adverbs and abstractions can serve as a “language of control.” Writers use these words to remain in charge of how the reader or listener will interpret a word. Removing this language means letting go of some of that interpretive control. Particularly for religious leaders, this exercise can be unnerving at best, terrifying at worst.
ó Tuama clarified that not all adjectives, adverbs and abstractions must be banished from a piece forever. Instead, as writers, we must be intentional about which ones to bring back into our writing. How do these words build upon the spine of the piece? How do these words build trust with the reader? He concluded, “By removing this language of control, we make our language more sharp and hospitable” to those who are listening or reading along.
In this vein, perhaps we can turn to our prayers and ask: What remains when I remove all the adverbs, adjectives and abstractions from a prayer? Can I find a spine to it? (Does it even have a spine?) When am I trying to control listeners, rather than trusting them to walk with me to discover something sharp, precise and hospitable?
Poetry is not proclaimed in a vacuum. Neither is prayer. Both teach us to construct our words with care and intention. As Mary Oliver says in her classic Poetry Handbook, “Language is rich, and malleable. It is a living, vibrant material.” Later in the book, she explains, “Poetry is a life-cherishing force. And it requires a vision — a faith, to use an old-fashioned term. Yes, indeed. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. Yes, indeed.”
How to pause
Poems can teach us not only how to proclaim but also how to pause.
Cole Arthur Riley, in her 2024 book Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems and Meditations for Staying Human, says, “It can be difficult to find the words to pray when one wants to die.” She writes this in the context of wandering into an Episcopal service and experiencing liturgical prayer. “It is exhausting enough trying to keep oneself alive. … Liturgy, I found, was a kind of rest. For the first time, my presence in a spiritual space didn’t depend on my own articulation or imagination.”
Perhaps emptiness in our prayers is not something to avoid, but rather something to explore as meaningful, necessary and illuminating.
Our prayers, like our poetry, must take seriously the places where our words run out, where empty spaces emerge within our written forms — and within our life of faith. Riley is describing a moment when she needed to pause instead of produce. She needed to find space to rest within prayer in order to stay alive; in her case, liturgy gave her that.
Perhaps emptiness in our prayers is not something to avoid, but rather something to explore as meaningful, necessary and illuminating. Growing quiet can be a deeply faithful response. What happens when we encounter an awkward pause and see it instead as a moment for a sacred breath?
All poetry has rhythm, a cadence and beat, even if it’s written in blank or free verse. Poetry makes us pay attention to breathing — in our own poems and others. I’ve heard the poet Mark Doty theorize that poets tend to write lines the length of their breath; he referenced how Emily Dickinson wrote her stanzas in quick, rhythmic bursts, as if inhaling within the four walls of her home, whereas Walt Whitman wrote long, excursive lines, as if he were exhaling while striding around the city. Prayers, too, follow breath patterns. Through the arrangement of words and white space on a page, prayers can invite us to catch our breath at a line break, even if just for a moment.
To lightly touch on craft: Poets often play with space and breathing by employing such tools as line breaks, enjambment, assonance and internal rhyme. To learn more about these techniques, I recommend two helpful guides: Mary Oliver’s Poetry Handbook and Gregory Orr’s Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry.
Silence is something that AI cannot teach us, but poetry can and does.
Making space for silence alongside words is countercultural in a time when ChatGPT can aggregate a response to the prompt “write a three-minute intercessory corporate prayer in the Reformed tradition” with mind-blowing speed. However, in this season of our church and world, our prayers must make more room – not less – for the sacred pause, the holy breath, the quiet place where words fall silent. Silence is something that AI cannot teach us, but poetry can and does.
As an exercise: How can we make spaces in our worship liturgy for someone like Riley to breathe? When we print prayers, instead of reproducing blocks of text, how might we be intentional about leaving emptiness around our praying words? How might playing with line breaks, enjambment and assonance shape the congregational reading of a prayer?
Riley ends the introduction to her book of prayers by saying, “Any mystery within these pages certainly cannot be contained to them. These are only fragments of divine encounter, and I am proud of that. Turn them over in your hand. Take a deep breath.”
The pause is intertwined with the proclamation. We cannot have one without the other in poetry or in our prayers.
How to let go
Since taking that poetry writing class with strangers in an art classroom early in my ministry, I have joined a few other groups. At times, they have included strangers, and at other times they have been taken with friends. Sometimes they were in person, other times virtual. Regardless of their setup, the vulnerability of sharing messy drafts out loud, in public, remains a personal stretch. Still, I’ve learned better how to trust the vision and wisdom of others to receive what they hear in the poem — even something I did not originally intend.
Anyone who preaches and prays in public knows this reality. Those listening may hear words that you did not say, meanings that you did not intend to convey. It isn’t always fun, but it happens. Poetry can teach us how to release our grasp on every inch of interpretation. This education serves our spiritual life as well.
Poetry can teach us how to release our grasp on every inch of interpretation.
Indeed, poetry is biblical. It is always worth remembering this truth. Abram Van Engen, a professor and author of the terrific 2024 book Word Made Fresh: An Invitation of Poetry to the Church, opens his book with this reminder: “Poetry fills the Bible. It spills from column to column and page to page.” He adds, “If God delights in poetry, how might we also partake in that pleasure and pursue the distinctive uses and particular functions of a poem?”
How to participate
A deep love of language is threaded throughout the Reformed tradition. From our confessions to our emphasis on the interpretation of the Word – and a hundred thousand commentaries in between – Presbyterians continually highlight the work and witness of words within our theological tapestry.
We believe that the Word transforms. By grace, with fear and trembling, we are invited to participate in this revelation, to use our own words to approach the mystery of Incarnation.
Poetry and prayer both teach us how to draw close to the threshold of this mystery. Sometimes we speak, sometimes we fall silent, sometimes we proclaim and sometimes we rest in a holy pause. Always, there remains so much to learn. Thanks be to God.
