One last thought from the Fall 2022 (#114) edition of Image Journal...
Philip Metres connects poetry and religion in two different sections ("Poets and (versus?) the Sacred" and "God in All Things(?!)."
In the first he quotes Cunningham and Kelsey:
"When we look at religious language we find something very close to poetry: Believers (and poets) use ordinary words, yet they want to convey a sense of something that they consider larger, more profound."
Yes. I like that.
And Metres then carries on the above to say... "...the tension between the modern poet and the religious temperament comes from the orientation towards mystery: the modern poet often stays on the plane of questions, the plane of complex experience, while religions, by their very nature, offer a fully formed answer, a worldview, in the shape of faith."
Interesting. So, perhaps, religion isn't so much hard and fast "answers," as it is that our questions become the answer(??). Hmm. I think I like that (though I'm not sure that's what he's saying; but it is what I am currently pondering).
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Anyway, moving on to the second section, Metres points to Kaveh Akbar who, in his Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse proposes that sacred poetry, from his experience as a Muslim, is "earnest, musical language meant to thin the partition between a person and the divine..."
Oh. My. I REALLY like that!!!
Words. You know I have a thing for them. I like to read them, write them, hear, see, taste (if I could)... Why? To "thin the partition"... In other words, to get closer to God!!!
That's sorta what it's all about for me...
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