I have written poems that advance ideas I’ve never held and that give into feelings I’ve never had or at least have never admitted to having had.  Is that bad?  I’m not sure why I do it.

Though maybe it’s the poem’s fault.  The poem takes over, and it wants to go places.  It binds and gags me and stuffs me in the trunk.

A better explanation may be Richard Hugo’s, found in his book The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing.  A poem has two subjects, Hugo asserts.  Your triggering subjects “ignite your need for words.”  I feel a poem somewhere in a triggering subject, but as I write I begin to discover the poem’s real subject, often quite different from the triggering subject, the one I set out to write about.

Often I have lived only a little of the ideas and feelings my poems advance.  Hugo has lived much of his, if the poems he inserts into a couple of autobiographical essays are any indication.  I think I’m using poetry to create imaginative rehearsals.  “Imaginative rehearsals” is a term I learned from a book by a high school teacher, Terry Gallagher, to describe a benefit from books to young readers.  If you live imaginatively through books, the idea goes, you’ll be better prepared to make decisions when you get older.  If you try things out vicariously through novels and narrative poetry, you don’t have to make the same mistakes the characters make.

When Bethany was three and four years old, we would play school with her small characters and blocks.  Bethany, whom no teacher has ever suspected of misbehavior, always had one misbehaving character who disrupted every class with a simplicity and joy that neither Bethany nor I often demonstrate outside of home.  Maybe these playtimes were imaginative rehearsals.  More likely they were our shared opportunities to express a side of us that we suppressed outside of play.

Poetry is play, and a poem becomes a playmate that surprises us.  Sticking with our play’s original rules causes a poem to sulk and maybe go home.  What pair of kids plays imaginatively and yet ends up doing what they had planned to do at the outset?  To channel the imagination is to send it home early.

Hugo grew up a staunch formalist and shared New Criticism’s disdain for judging a poem by how well it conveyed a moral or got across its ostensible subject matter.  His book amounts to a spirited defense of creative writing workshops in English departments as well as a summary of advice he gives his college students during his own workshops.

Part of that advice to young poets was to drop qualms over a poem’s morality:

It is easier to write and far more rewarding when you can ignore relative values and go with the flow and thrust of the language . . . . Doesn’t this lead finally to amoral and shallow writing?  Yes, it does, if you are amoral and shallow.  I hope it will lead you to yourself and the way you feel.  All poets I know, and I know plenty of them, have an unusually strong moral sense, and that is why they can go into the cynical world of the imagination and not feel so threatened that they become impotent.  There’s fear sometimes involved but also joy, and exhilaration that can’t be explained to anyone who has not experienced it.  Don’t worry about morality.  Most people who worry about morality ought to.

Hugo writes that the imagination is cynical in the sense that “it can accommodate the most disparate elements with no regard for relative values.  And it does this by assuming all things have equal value, which is a way of saying nothing has any value, which is cynicism.”  Like a classic cynic, the imagination is value-neutral.

A lot of the stuff I write on Twitter is about death.  Unless I am mistaken and am already dead, these posts are imaginative rehearsals, among other things. 

Hugo’s vision of poetry – poetry with a life of its own that the poet uncovers by pursuing or playing with the poem – a poetry of self-discovery, a psychological poetry hidden in mundane topics, a world in a grain of sand – is the essence of twentieth century lyric poetry, I think.  I generally prefer it to the more clever Metaphysical poets and the more ardent Romantic poets of previous centuries, but I am a child of the twentieth century.  However, I don’t think that many of my fellow American Evangelicals have ever reconciled themselves to some common practices in twentieth century art and literature, particularly the practices of using two subjects as Hugo describes it and of using death frequently as an underylying subject.

Why focus on death? they may ask.  Instead of being preoccupied by death, why not write something uplifting?

I wonder if my imagination is taking me down roads I closed off to myself early in my religious years.  I remember our Charismatic church’s memorial service for its founding pastor who accidentally drowned on vacation in Mexico in 1979, the same year Hugo's book was published.  When the congregation permitted itself to show grief and even anguish in the middle of the service, the service leaders admonished the crowd and led it in some rousing songs of hope.  It felt like an emotional cover-up.

We American Christians sometimes cover up death today in more subtle ways, using phrases like “passed on” and “passed away” in place of “died,” as if death were something to fear or were some kind of sin or weakness that had overcome the Dear Departed.  We are complicit with our funeral industry in sanitizing death and in keeping it off our streets.  (I read Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One this past summer, a novella dripping with sarcasm of America’s notions of death and its funeral industry.  It’s fun reading if you get a chance.) Didn't the Preacher exhort us not to avoid the house of mourning but to hang out there?

But see how imaginatively New Testament characters and writers spoke and wrote about death in just these representative passages (all from the King James Version):

Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this? (John’s gospel)

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. (Colossians)

I protest by your rejoicing which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily. (1 Corinthians)

For we which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh.  So then death worketh in us, but life in you. (2 Corinthians)

I'll never die?  I'm already dead?  I die daily?  Death works in me?  How can these verses’ conceptions of death be reconciled without some admission that their authors used death imaginatively, that death stirred their imagination?

There’s even a sense in which death belongs to us in the way that we belong to Christ:

For all things are yours; Whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours; And ye are Christ’s; and Christ is God’s.  (1 Corinthians)

How can we fully possess death and whatever benefits accrue from death if we refuse to embrace it in any sense or even to speak of it without euphemisms?

Here’s my favorite verse about death (the first sentence from the New American Standard Version and the second from the Revised English Bible):

For we are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; to the one an aroma from death to death, to the other an aroma from life to life. Who is equal to such a calling? (2 Corinthians)

Events and feelings trigger poems, but certain smells – different smells for everyone – trigger strong feelings and memories.  Paul claims here that he and his crew act like incense offered to God that triggers different feelings in different people.  An application of parallel construction leads to a surprising message: for those that “are being saved,” Paul & company are a scent of death that leads them to death. For “those who are perishing,” on the other hand, Paul’s crew offers a scent that leads to life.

Once a Christian was on his way to salvation – having his mind renewed and his perspective altered – Paul would become a walking challenge to him.  He would smell death around Paul and would be drawn to follow him into a life of self-denial.  Am I still too young a Christian to smell this about Paul?  Do I still reject the idea of death as something that was only at work in me when I was perishing outside of Christ?  Is my Christianity so stunted that I remain obsessed only with the life it offers me?

I love the obsession with death evident in many of the works of Flannery O’Connor, a religious and Catholic writer.  I love the full-bodied spirituality of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.  I’m on my third reading of this uplifting, Christian novel.  (I find that most novels that call themselves Christian aren’t; in fact, many novels by people of other faiths or of no faith at all contain more truth than most novels in Christian bookstores.)  The Brothers Karamazov is tragic, but as Oswald Chambers points out, life is “wild and tragic.”  Dostoevsky doesn’t do dishonest spiritual highs.  His characters walk through, and not around, the valley of the shadow of death.

There is an objectionable nihilism I find in some writings by Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire.  I do not say that poetry is good simply because it is about death.

What is religious imagination? If our religious mind must travel down only prescribed avenues, the phrase amounts to an oxymoron.  I suppose that, until a Christian finds himself well on the way to salvation, the imagination is largely an unredeemed instrument, at best a two-edged sword, scary as death.  But as we grow in grace and in death and life, we become more human – more like God designed us to be.  We find God all over the place, even in death.  I think the Desert Fathers and many other saints and poets discovered God at times at play in their imagination and poetry.  Not always, but at times.

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Posted December 26, 2009.