September 8, 2025 • 20 mins
In this collection of conversations, Ben Palpant, author of Letters From The Mountain, has compiled his intimate, one-on-one interviews with seventeen powerful poets of the 21st century. These conversations cover an entire range of life experience, including grief, hope, culture, the writing craft, family life, and the imagination. Each poet speaks with remarkable candor and joy. Taken together, these interviews are a powerful reminder that poetry remains an essential expression of what it means to be human.
Franz Kafka famously said that "a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." And the words and thoughts contained here aim to wake up much that has become silent in each of us. They contain wisdom that may inspire, instruct, and strengthen, confronting us with the reality that words matter, that poetry matters, and that we matter.
You can purchase a copy of An Axe for the Frozen Sea in the Rabbit Room Store.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
S1 (00:00):
The following is brought to you in partnership with Oasis Audio.
Welcome to Rabbit Room Press Presents, a podcast series of
great audiobooks, one chapter at a time.
S2 (00:16):
An axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben Pallant. Read
for you by the author. Chapter 15 Jeremiah Webster. Rumor
has it that Sir Walter Scott coined the phrase book
Bosomed to describe someone who carries a book at all times.
(00:38):
I hope the rumor is true. It's an endearing term.
If Sir Walter Scott were still taking questions, I would
ask him how to describe someone who carries hundreds of
books in his heart. What's the name for someone who
has memorized so much and loves so deeply that lines
both ancient and modern, spill out of him unbidden? That's
Jeremiah Webster. He greets me with his characteristically wide grin,
(01:01):
and after a few minutes talking about his family, I
ask him to describe his relationship to poetry as a child.
I think I found my way to poetry through the scriptures.
I wouldn't say that mine was a house that was
particularly attentive to the poetic tradition. Apart from the fireside
poets like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier, or
(01:21):
the poets who graced time magazine like Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot.
My parents understood poetry to be an important inheritance, of course,
but not a part of everyday life. But the cadence
of language I got directly from my dad, a pastor
who worked all week on his sermons and would read
them aloud. I have vivid memories of him reading from Ezekiel, Isaiah,
(01:44):
and Joshua, accompanied by my mother's violin and her students
playing Bach's Minuet one. That exchange of sound and sense
of language intertwined with music was a constant in the household.
The love of language was with you early, I say.
I have always loved language for its own sake, the
beauty intrinsic in the thing itself. It's interesting to see
(02:06):
how many poets of the 20th century were pastor's kids,
even if they abandoned Orthodoxy. Later, they found their music
in the cradle of the church. I think it informed
much of their poetic sense. Liturgical rhythms certainly helped me
find my own voice as a poet. It's an inheritance
for which I feel immense gratitude. The gospel. The gospel
(02:27):
is something we should be singing all the time. That's
what I hope to capture in my poetry. How does
the word inform your poetry? What are the practices that
help you inform your poetry in that way? We love
what we pay attention to, he says. My kids know
that I love them when I look them in the eye.
When I put the phone down and give them my
full attention. I think that has deep application to our
(02:50):
work as poets. Taking the time to really pay attention.
I think of prayer in this way. Why do we
close our eyes to pray? It's a defiance of our
empirical senses. It's a very public acknowledgement that the material
world is not the sum total of reality. You have
to shut off the noise to attend to the heavenly realm.
(03:11):
At its best, the Christian life should be a way
of enchantment and wonder. Jesus is always interrogating what we
perceive to be true. You say, but I say to you.
The Christian life should lead us upward and onward to
the beatitude economy, where the worldly order of things is disrupted.
This is the source of abundant life. And I'm trying
(03:33):
to capture that in my poetry, to mimic it in
some small way. Would you say that writing poetry is
for you, an act of imagining that world in hope
all the time? I'm participating in a discipline that the
world says is worthless, lacking utility. It's taking time to
pay attention to what the world doesn't value. Too often,
(03:56):
the reflexive move with music, with poetry, with art is
to ask where we can buy it. Is it on Spotify?
Eugene Mccarraher critiques this reality with real precision in The
Enchantments of Mammon. It's the commodification of communal experience. I
think that's deeply problematic. It's an attempt to carry and
control something that's immaterial. Poets spend their time and energy
(04:20):
on something the world doesn't value, and they do so
in faith that the work will have enduring significance. It's
a way to preemptively enter the habits of heaven. I
write poetry because I can't help myself, and because through
it I experience the abundant life that Jesus promised to
those who follow him. So it sounds like you feel
a tension between the market economy and the gift economy.
(04:42):
And yet you've had books published. How do you see
the value of publication? I think that's an open question,
he says. I will always write poems, but I wonder
if they all need to get published. Maybe I'll just
write them for my friends in the past few years.
I feel less driven to publish. It's less and less
the reason to write. Beyond the good mentoring and editing
(05:03):
and the improvement of my craft that comes from getting
it out to a wider audience. I'm less inclined to
seek publication. Is there a way in which technology or
publication can help give the gift to a wider audience,
I ask? I wrestle with that, he says. I mean,
Jesus didn't publish. I'm haunted by this reality. The word
(05:26):
that never, to our knowledge, wrote down a word. Would
his ministry have been more effective if he had shown
up in an era of podcasts and Substack? Is that
the most effective way to proliferate the message? I see
it as a Faustian bargain. I've been told many times
that I need a website. I need to get on
(05:47):
social media. It too often feels like self-aggrandizement. I can't
take the marketing seriously myself. That's the Gen X punk
rocker in me. I would rather be with friends sharing
poetry than spending my time managing those things. When I
weigh the pros and cons and try to consider what
the abundant life looks like, it looks more like what
you and I are doing right now. Like friends talking
(06:09):
face to face. Gerard Manley Hopkins names the crisis when
he writes, each mortal thing does one thing and the
same deals out that being indoors each one dwells selves
goes itself. Myself, it speaks and spells crying. What I
do is me. For that I came. Is life about
(06:32):
being seen and heard, or is it surrendering oneself into
the life of God? I think it's the latter. My
dad used to say it's better to be known by
the nameless few than to be known by the nameless masses.
I suppose that's the Hobbit in me, in How to
Be a Poet. I say Wendell Berry wrote accept what
(06:52):
comes from silence. Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come out of the silence.
Like prayers prayed back to the one who prays. Make
a poem that does not disturb the silence from which
it came. Is that connected to what you're talking about? Yes,
he says. One of my professors at Whitworth University said
that poetry is a language approaching fruitful silence. A good
(07:16):
poem is trying to get to a place where words fail.
What does T.S. Eliot say in the Four Quartets? Trying
to use words. And every attempt is a wholly new
start and a different kind of failure, because one has
only learnt to get the better of words for the
thing one no longer has to say, or the way
in which one is no longer disposed to say it.
(07:38):
And so each venture is a new beginning, a raid
on the inarticulate, with shabby equipment, always deteriorating in the
general mess of imprecision, of feeling undisciplined squads, of emotion,
and what there is to conquer by strength and submission
has already been discovered once or twice or several times
(07:59):
by men whom one cannot hope to emulate. But there
is no competition. There is only the fight to recover
what has been lost and found and lost again and again.
And now, under conditions that seem unpropitious, but perhaps neither
gain nor loss. For us there is only the trying.
(08:21):
The rest is not our business. How scandalous to think
that I can write poetry post William Shakespeare post John
Donne post Emily Dickinson. Are you kidding me? It's a
fool's errand, he says. My fear is that all the
marketing and promotion of the sovereign self will make us
lose sight of what Eliot says. There is no competition.
(08:42):
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost.
Our work is to try and get back to the garden,
to the estate of our first parents. I love the
idea that God walked with them in the cool of
the day. I want that. My heart longs for that.
I'm old enough now to be able to list all
the big singers and celebrities from when I was younger,
and my students don't know those names. They don't care.
(09:05):
The only name that persists is the name of Jesus.
It's astonishing. In On the Incarnation of the word. Athanasius
of Alexandria remarked that if Jesus is dead, why do
people continue to encounter him on a daily basis? One
of the things that can arise in a community is rivalry.
(09:25):
I say envy occurs because we're trying to make a
name for ourselves. How do we fight against it? Is
it just a matter of being aware that it could
be a temptation? We're prone to make sidelong glances to
see where we rank. It sounds like you're talking about
a lifestyle that makes rivalry difficult. A few years ago,
I came into a deep realization of the futility of
(09:48):
that pursuit. In my office, I have hundreds of books.
I could pull out the best seller from any given year,
and I'm amazed at how many of those names have
been forgotten. We have to rethink where the meaningful resides.
Reappraise what endures in the Kingdom. What treasures are we
storing up in heaven? I haven't arrived anywhere near this
place of total surrender, obviously, but I want to get closer.
(10:11):
I want something more than the sum total of what
self-actualized Jeremiah Webster has achieved. Can you elaborate on where
you think the meaningful resides, I ask? One of the
things I like about Christ's parable, he says, is that
he takes things that are relatively marginalized and easily missed
and says, God's kingdom resides there in a lost coin
(10:33):
or lost sheep. It's in these very domestic provincial objects
that you're going to find the kingdom. I think we
did the New Atheists a favor for a time, by
propagating the notion that God was simply an Uber marvel
version of ourselves. Colossians says he is before all things
and he holds all things together. And the book of
(10:54):
acts says, In Him we live and move and have
our being. He is sustaining us by his life giving word.
This revelation should make us attentive to words and the
way our words align with the logos, or diverge from
the logos. The patristic suggest that God is active and
present in the world, in contrast to the deistic view
that God is absent and has left us to make
(11:15):
of things as we will. It's this view of God's
intrinsic presence, the notion that he presides over everything that
emancipates my heart and re-enchanting the world. It has deeply
shaped my poetry of late. Do you find that your
poems have become intensified by life experience? I think I'm
writing with a keener awareness of my mortality, he says.
(11:37):
What is it about the intimation of mortality that makes
me a better writer? I feel the gravity of middle age.
There's an urgency to my writing that wasn't there when
I was 22. You write in various forms, including free verse.
How would you respond to those who favor form poetry
over free verse? George Steiner, the literary critic he says,
(12:00):
has a wonderful phrase nostalgia for the absolute. What do
you think he means by nostalgia for the absolute? I
wonder if people have a nostalgia for a time when
poetic form was more reliable, when it was understood by
the broader culture? Free verse exploded that reliability. This is
nothing new. What is poesis but innovation? It was a
(12:23):
scandal when Dante wrote his comedy in Italian, when Mozart
wrote his opera in German, when Samuel Coleridge and William
Wordsworth wrote about the everyman, and when Virgil prioritized shepherds
over Caesar in the Eclogues. Those were all innovative decisions.
I think we're still in aesthetic recovery from the spiritual
wasteland of modernity. I think the world wars were so
(12:46):
disruptive to our experience of reality, to what was predictable
and reliable. I think they did something to our spirits
and to our imaginations. I think Free Verse is attempting
to make sense of that chaos. Elliott showed us how
poetry might inhabit a region seemingly inhospitable to lyricism. And
I think we're still questing for a music that can
(13:07):
meet the discord of our present tense. How do we
prevent the poems we write in free verse from capitulating
to the chaos, I ask? There are plenty of poems
out there that are arguably a chaos of words. During
my MFA studies, he says, I came to see that
the reason some of my peers were writing were fundamentally
(13:27):
different from my reasons for writing. I was writing devotionally. Some, however,
employed language to demonstrate, sometimes violently, the meaninglessness of the logos.
And that brought about the death of beauty. I think
poetry can be evangelistic in that it can reinvigorate people's
sense of the good, the right and the beautiful, rather
(13:49):
than merely adding sound and fury to the void. Preserving
a sense of beauty and free verse, I say, rests
heavily on how and when you end a line. So
how do you make those decisions as a thoughtful Christian?
I try to end my lines at a place where
the thought I'm trying to convey comes to a natural close.
The syllabics govern some of that as well. The line
(14:11):
break is reliably guided by the rhythm I've established. Finishing
a line on a strong verb, adjective, or noun is preferable.
I also like to use line breaks as a way
to set up an expectation and then subvert it, or
meet that expectation, but broaden the initial presupposition of a
given idea. Enjambment expands the range of the possible. And
(14:33):
then there's the way the whiteness of the page is
an equal conveyor of meaning, along with the words. I
like to think of poems topographically, to see the poem
as a kind of geography, and allow that geography to
communicate as much as the words, or at least provide
assistance to the message. One example of this is a
poem I wrote after my wife and I experienced a miscarriage.
(14:56):
I shaped the poem in the form of a box.
It was a kind of cenotaph for us, you know.
A cenotaph was for those who lost a loved one
out at sea. For those unable to recover the body.
I needed some kind of incarnation. And all I had
was this poem. It became a sort of memorial. Christian
(15:17):
Wiman wrote I say, my God, my grief. Forgive my
grief tamed in language to a fear that I can bear.
Make of my anguish more than I can make. Lord,
hear my prayer. Poetry is a way for you to
bear grief. You aren't writing it for others. You're writing
(15:37):
it for yourself. If it is a blessing to others, great.
But writing poetry would still be worthwhile. Yes, he says,
poetry is certainly how I negotiate and make sense of
the world. I would like to meet the chaos of
the world with a song. I think that's W.H. Auden, right?
He writes, if equal affection cannot be, let the more
(15:57):
loving one be me. That should be the heart's desire
for every Christian to be the more loving one. Poetry
helps me inhabit this high calling by the grace of God.
The world is full of people who are calloused, disillusioned,
and driven by mammon, I say. They've lost a sense
of childlike wonder. I hear you saying that writing poetry,
(16:19):
at least in part, is a way to combat that
tendency in yourself. Absolutely, he says. I take myself too
seriously with the best of them. Poetry is how I
apprehend the reality that Christ plays in 10,000 places. Hopkins again,
writing poetry can look irresponsible and uncouth in an age
(16:40):
of digital liturgies, but it's how I stave off despair
and stay curious and wide eyed. It's a space where
I'm so invested in what I'm doing, so awake to
what God is doing in creation that I forget myself entirely.
That's where I want to be. Do you see this
tendency in young writers today? Do you see it in
(17:00):
your students, I ask? I love to tell the story
of a student who entered class one day wearing a beret.
I asked her what was up with the beret and
she said, well, I'm a poet now. As if the
beret was a magical talisman, and by wearing it, she
could suddenly write beautiful poetry in iambic pentameter. He laughs.
I wish it were true, but that's just not how
(17:21):
poetry works. Your story reminds me of something Kate DiCamillo,
the author of because of Winn-Dixie and the Magician's Elephants,
once said she was told back in college that she
was good with words, so she decided that meant she
would be a famous author someday. She bought a bunch
of black turtlenecks and spent her 20s sitting around in
disdaining the world. We laugh. It wasn't until later that
(17:44):
she realized the only way to become a writer is
to sit down and write. Exactly. He says, do the thing.
There's always a temptation to romanticize it, but we have
to write, and we have to live in a posture
of receptivity. Every encounter is charged with grandeur, and we
need eyes that see it. The poems that I enjoy,
the poems that I want to memorize, have that quality
(18:06):
about them. They give a flash insight. Vladimir Nabokov's Picnic
lightning that makes it worth the journey. There's an instructive
quality to that. It makes the world strange again, in
a good way. Good poems expand my apprehension of the world.
Final question, I say. Tell me about your poem called
(18:27):
Life Work. That's a poem in which I explore the
idea that after death, doctors, lawyers and politicians will have
nothing to do. Poets will be the only ones in
the same line of work. It's an enchanting proposition that
makes my work now a kind of rehearsal for eternity.
(18:47):
Here's one of my favorite poems by Jeremiah Webster. De
Anima on the soul. With no liturgy and no word
from grieving parents, my son scans the obituary page of
the Seattle Times for news of Oliver's death. This is
how he mourns a friend with no pyre for the body,
(19:09):
no processional or last ditch libation to gods who scuttle
beneath the waves of the Acheron. With its cold and
constant dark, the traffic of commerce, the mounting up of
illiterate men and the Faustian distraction of our devices. Temps
nihil anima to take root in the soiled state of
(19:30):
our present tense. I go to adoration where silence accommodates
the wounded God. My son must wrestle past the aftermath
of Covid and a godless Christendom in order to see.
I stare at the tabernacle until the host becomes the
sealed cave of Lazarus. A preemptive Sunday praying beyond mortal hope,
(19:55):
beyond the absence of saints not found in the Seattle Times.
To see Oliver emerge among the dead now living.
S1 (20:09):
An axe for the Frozen Sea is published by Rabbit
Room Press. The audiobook is published by Oasis Audio. Copyright
by Ben Pulpit, 2024. By Chris Badeker.
The following is brought to you in partnership with Oasis Audio.
Welcome to Rabbit Room Press Presents, a podcast series of
great audiobooks, one chapter at a time.
S2 (00:16):
An axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben Pallant. Read
for you by the author. Chapter 15 Jeremiah Webster. Rumor
has it that Sir Walter Scott coined the phrase book
Bosomed to describe someone who carries a book at all times.
(00:38):
I hope the rumor is true. It's an endearing term.
If Sir Walter Scott were still taking questions, I would
ask him how to describe someone who carries hundreds of
books in his heart. What's the name for someone who
has memorized so much and loves so deeply that lines
both ancient and modern, spill out of him unbidden? That's
Jeremiah Webster. He greets me with his characteristically wide grin,
(01:01):
and after a few minutes talking about his family, I
ask him to describe his relationship to poetry as a child.
I think I found my way to poetry through the scriptures.
I wouldn't say that mine was a house that was
particularly attentive to the poetic tradition. Apart from the fireside
poets like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier, or
(01:21):
the poets who graced time magazine like Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot.
My parents understood poetry to be an important inheritance, of course,
but not a part of everyday life. But the cadence
of language I got directly from my dad, a pastor
who worked all week on his sermons and would read
them aloud. I have vivid memories of him reading from Ezekiel, Isaiah,
(01:44):
and Joshua, accompanied by my mother's violin and her students
playing Bach's Minuet one. That exchange of sound and sense
of language intertwined with music was a constant in the household.
The love of language was with you early, I say.
I have always loved language for its own sake, the
beauty intrinsic in the thing itself. It's interesting to see
(02:06):
how many poets of the 20th century were pastor's kids,
even if they abandoned Orthodoxy. Later, they found their music
in the cradle of the church. I think it informed
much of their poetic sense. Liturgical rhythms certainly helped me
find my own voice as a poet. It's an inheritance
for which I feel immense gratitude. The gospel. The gospel
(02:27):
is something we should be singing all the time. That's
what I hope to capture in my poetry. How does
the word inform your poetry? What are the practices that
help you inform your poetry in that way? We love
what we pay attention to, he says. My kids know
that I love them when I look them in the eye.
When I put the phone down and give them my
full attention. I think that has deep application to our
(02:50):
work as poets. Taking the time to really pay attention.
I think of prayer in this way. Why do we
close our eyes to pray? It's a defiance of our
empirical senses. It's a very public acknowledgement that the material
world is not the sum total of reality. You have
to shut off the noise to attend to the heavenly realm.
(03:11):
At its best, the Christian life should be a way
of enchantment and wonder. Jesus is always interrogating what we
perceive to be true. You say, but I say to you.
The Christian life should lead us upward and onward to
the beatitude economy, where the worldly order of things is disrupted.
This is the source of abundant life. And I'm trying
(03:33):
to capture that in my poetry, to mimic it in
some small way. Would you say that writing poetry is
for you, an act of imagining that world in hope
all the time? I'm participating in a discipline that the
world says is worthless, lacking utility. It's taking time to
pay attention to what the world doesn't value. Too often,
(03:56):
the reflexive move with music, with poetry, with art is
to ask where we can buy it. Is it on Spotify?
Eugene Mccarraher critiques this reality with real precision in The
Enchantments of Mammon. It's the commodification of communal experience. I
think that's deeply problematic. It's an attempt to carry and
control something that's immaterial. Poets spend their time and energy
(04:20):
on something the world doesn't value, and they do so
in faith that the work will have enduring significance. It's
a way to preemptively enter the habits of heaven. I
write poetry because I can't help myself, and because through
it I experience the abundant life that Jesus promised to
those who follow him. So it sounds like you feel
a tension between the market economy and the gift economy.
(04:42):
And yet you've had books published. How do you see
the value of publication? I think that's an open question,
he says. I will always write poems, but I wonder
if they all need to get published. Maybe I'll just
write them for my friends in the past few years.
I feel less driven to publish. It's less and less
the reason to write. Beyond the good mentoring and editing
(05:03):
and the improvement of my craft that comes from getting
it out to a wider audience. I'm less inclined to
seek publication. Is there a way in which technology or
publication can help give the gift to a wider audience,
I ask? I wrestle with that, he says. I mean,
Jesus didn't publish. I'm haunted by this reality. The word
(05:26):
that never, to our knowledge, wrote down a word. Would
his ministry have been more effective if he had shown
up in an era of podcasts and Substack? Is that
the most effective way to proliferate the message? I see
it as a Faustian bargain. I've been told many times
that I need a website. I need to get on
(05:47):
social media. It too often feels like self-aggrandizement. I can't
take the marketing seriously myself. That's the Gen X punk
rocker in me. I would rather be with friends sharing
poetry than spending my time managing those things. When I
weigh the pros and cons and try to consider what
the abundant life looks like, it looks more like what
you and I are doing right now. Like friends talking
(06:09):
face to face. Gerard Manley Hopkins names the crisis when
he writes, each mortal thing does one thing and the
same deals out that being indoors each one dwells selves
goes itself. Myself, it speaks and spells crying. What I
do is me. For that I came. Is life about
(06:32):
being seen and heard, or is it surrendering oneself into
the life of God? I think it's the latter. My
dad used to say it's better to be known by
the nameless few than to be known by the nameless masses.
I suppose that's the Hobbit in me, in How to
Be a Poet. I say Wendell Berry wrote accept what
(06:52):
comes from silence. Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come out of the silence.
Like prayers prayed back to the one who prays. Make
a poem that does not disturb the silence from which
it came. Is that connected to what you're talking about? Yes,
he says. One of my professors at Whitworth University said
that poetry is a language approaching fruitful silence. A good
(07:16):
poem is trying to get to a place where words fail.
What does T.S. Eliot say in the Four Quartets? Trying
to use words. And every attempt is a wholly new
start and a different kind of failure, because one has
only learnt to get the better of words for the
thing one no longer has to say, or the way
in which one is no longer disposed to say it.
(07:38):
And so each venture is a new beginning, a raid
on the inarticulate, with shabby equipment, always deteriorating in the
general mess of imprecision, of feeling undisciplined squads, of emotion,
and what there is to conquer by strength and submission
has already been discovered once or twice or several times
(07:59):
by men whom one cannot hope to emulate. But there
is no competition. There is only the fight to recover
what has been lost and found and lost again and again.
And now, under conditions that seem unpropitious, but perhaps neither
gain nor loss. For us there is only the trying.
(08:21):
The rest is not our business. How scandalous to think
that I can write poetry post William Shakespeare post John
Donne post Emily Dickinson. Are you kidding me? It's a
fool's errand, he says. My fear is that all the
marketing and promotion of the sovereign self will make us
lose sight of what Eliot says. There is no competition.
(08:42):
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost.
Our work is to try and get back to the garden,
to the estate of our first parents. I love the
idea that God walked with them in the cool of
the day. I want that. My heart longs for that.
I'm old enough now to be able to list all
the big singers and celebrities from when I was younger,
and my students don't know those names. They don't care.
(09:05):
The only name that persists is the name of Jesus.
It's astonishing. In On the Incarnation of the word. Athanasius
of Alexandria remarked that if Jesus is dead, why do
people continue to encounter him on a daily basis? One
of the things that can arise in a community is rivalry.
(09:25):
I say envy occurs because we're trying to make a
name for ourselves. How do we fight against it? Is
it just a matter of being aware that it could
be a temptation? We're prone to make sidelong glances to
see where we rank. It sounds like you're talking about
a lifestyle that makes rivalry difficult. A few years ago,
I came into a deep realization of the futility of
(09:48):
that pursuit. In my office, I have hundreds of books.
I could pull out the best seller from any given year,
and I'm amazed at how many of those names have
been forgotten. We have to rethink where the meaningful resides.
Reappraise what endures in the Kingdom. What treasures are we
storing up in heaven? I haven't arrived anywhere near this
place of total surrender, obviously, but I want to get closer.
(10:11):
I want something more than the sum total of what
self-actualized Jeremiah Webster has achieved. Can you elaborate on where
you think the meaningful resides, I ask? One of the
things I like about Christ's parable, he says, is that
he takes things that are relatively marginalized and easily missed
and says, God's kingdom resides there in a lost coin
(10:33):
or lost sheep. It's in these very domestic provincial objects
that you're going to find the kingdom. I think we
did the New Atheists a favor for a time, by
propagating the notion that God was simply an Uber marvel
version of ourselves. Colossians says he is before all things
and he holds all things together. And the book of
(10:54):
acts says, In Him we live and move and have
our being. He is sustaining us by his life giving word.
This revelation should make us attentive to words and the
way our words align with the logos, or diverge from
the logos. The patristic suggest that God is active and
present in the world, in contrast to the deistic view
that God is absent and has left us to make
(11:15):
of things as we will. It's this view of God's
intrinsic presence, the notion that he presides over everything that
emancipates my heart and re-enchanting the world. It has deeply
shaped my poetry of late. Do you find that your
poems have become intensified by life experience? I think I'm
writing with a keener awareness of my mortality, he says.
(11:37):
What is it about the intimation of mortality that makes
me a better writer? I feel the gravity of middle age.
There's an urgency to my writing that wasn't there when
I was 22. You write in various forms, including free verse.
How would you respond to those who favor form poetry
over free verse? George Steiner, the literary critic he says,
(12:00):
has a wonderful phrase nostalgia for the absolute. What do
you think he means by nostalgia for the absolute? I
wonder if people have a nostalgia for a time when
poetic form was more reliable, when it was understood by
the broader culture? Free verse exploded that reliability. This is
nothing new. What is poesis but innovation? It was a
(12:23):
scandal when Dante wrote his comedy in Italian, when Mozart
wrote his opera in German, when Samuel Coleridge and William
Wordsworth wrote about the everyman, and when Virgil prioritized shepherds
over Caesar in the Eclogues. Those were all innovative decisions.
I think we're still in aesthetic recovery from the spiritual
wasteland of modernity. I think the world wars were so
(12:46):
disruptive to our experience of reality, to what was predictable
and reliable. I think they did something to our spirits
and to our imaginations. I think Free Verse is attempting
to make sense of that chaos. Elliott showed us how
poetry might inhabit a region seemingly inhospitable to lyricism. And
I think we're still questing for a music that can
(13:07):
meet the discord of our present tense. How do we
prevent the poems we write in free verse from capitulating
to the chaos, I ask? There are plenty of poems
out there that are arguably a chaos of words. During
my MFA studies, he says, I came to see that
the reason some of my peers were writing were fundamentally
(13:27):
different from my reasons for writing. I was writing devotionally. Some, however,
employed language to demonstrate, sometimes violently, the meaninglessness of the logos.
And that brought about the death of beauty. I think
poetry can be evangelistic in that it can reinvigorate people's
sense of the good, the right and the beautiful, rather
(13:49):
than merely adding sound and fury to the void. Preserving
a sense of beauty and free verse, I say, rests
heavily on how and when you end a line. So
how do you make those decisions as a thoughtful Christian?
I try to end my lines at a place where
the thought I'm trying to convey comes to a natural close.
The syllabics govern some of that as well. The line
(14:11):
break is reliably guided by the rhythm I've established. Finishing
a line on a strong verb, adjective, or noun is preferable.
I also like to use line breaks as a way
to set up an expectation and then subvert it, or
meet that expectation, but broaden the initial presupposition of a
given idea. Enjambment expands the range of the possible. And
(14:33):
then there's the way the whiteness of the page is
an equal conveyor of meaning, along with the words. I
like to think of poems topographically, to see the poem
as a kind of geography, and allow that geography to
communicate as much as the words, or at least provide
assistance to the message. One example of this is a
poem I wrote after my wife and I experienced a miscarriage.
(14:56):
I shaped the poem in the form of a box.
It was a kind of cenotaph for us, you know.
A cenotaph was for those who lost a loved one
out at sea. For those unable to recover the body.
I needed some kind of incarnation. And all I had
was this poem. It became a sort of memorial. Christian
(15:17):
Wiman wrote I say, my God, my grief. Forgive my
grief tamed in language to a fear that I can bear.
Make of my anguish more than I can make. Lord,
hear my prayer. Poetry is a way for you to
bear grief. You aren't writing it for others. You're writing
(15:37):
it for yourself. If it is a blessing to others, great.
But writing poetry would still be worthwhile. Yes, he says,
poetry is certainly how I negotiate and make sense of
the world. I would like to meet the chaos of
the world with a song. I think that's W.H. Auden, right?
He writes, if equal affection cannot be, let the more
(15:57):
loving one be me. That should be the heart's desire
for every Christian to be the more loving one. Poetry
helps me inhabit this high calling by the grace of God.
The world is full of people who are calloused, disillusioned,
and driven by mammon, I say. They've lost a sense
of childlike wonder. I hear you saying that writing poetry,
(16:19):
at least in part, is a way to combat that
tendency in yourself. Absolutely, he says. I take myself too
seriously with the best of them. Poetry is how I
apprehend the reality that Christ plays in 10,000 places. Hopkins again,
writing poetry can look irresponsible and uncouth in an age
(16:40):
of digital liturgies, but it's how I stave off despair
and stay curious and wide eyed. It's a space where
I'm so invested in what I'm doing, so awake to
what God is doing in creation that I forget myself entirely.
That's where I want to be. Do you see this
tendency in young writers today? Do you see it in
(17:00):
your students, I ask? I love to tell the story
of a student who entered class one day wearing a beret.
I asked her what was up with the beret and
she said, well, I'm a poet now. As if the
beret was a magical talisman, and by wearing it, she
could suddenly write beautiful poetry in iambic pentameter. He laughs.
I wish it were true, but that's just not how
(17:21):
poetry works. Your story reminds me of something Kate DiCamillo,
the author of because of Winn-Dixie and the Magician's Elephants,
once said she was told back in college that she
was good with words, so she decided that meant she
would be a famous author someday. She bought a bunch
of black turtlenecks and spent her 20s sitting around in
disdaining the world. We laugh. It wasn't until later that
(17:44):
she realized the only way to become a writer is
to sit down and write. Exactly. He says, do the thing.
There's always a temptation to romanticize it, but we have
to write, and we have to live in a posture
of receptivity. Every encounter is charged with grandeur, and we
need eyes that see it. The poems that I enjoy,
the poems that I want to memorize, have that quality
(18:06):
about them. They give a flash insight. Vladimir Nabokov's Picnic
lightning that makes it worth the journey. There's an instructive
quality to that. It makes the world strange again, in
a good way. Good poems expand my apprehension of the world.
Final question, I say. Tell me about your poem called
(18:27):
Life Work. That's a poem in which I explore the
idea that after death, doctors, lawyers and politicians will have
nothing to do. Poets will be the only ones in
the same line of work. It's an enchanting proposition that
makes my work now a kind of rehearsal for eternity.
(18:47):
Here's one of my favorite poems by Jeremiah Webster. De
Anima on the soul. With no liturgy and no word
from grieving parents, my son scans the obituary page of
the Seattle Times for news of Oliver's death. This is
how he mourns a friend with no pyre for the body,
(19:09):
no processional or last ditch libation to gods who scuttle
beneath the waves of the Acheron. With its cold and
constant dark, the traffic of commerce, the mounting up of
illiterate men and the Faustian distraction of our devices. Temps
nihil anima to take root in the soiled state of
(19:30):
our present tense. I go to adoration where silence accommodates
the wounded God. My son must wrestle past the aftermath
of Covid and a godless Christendom in order to see.
I stare at the tabernacle until the host becomes the
sealed cave of Lazarus. A preemptive Sunday praying beyond mortal hope,
(19:55):
beyond the absence of saints not found in the Seattle Times.
To see Oliver emerge among the dead now living.
S1 (20:09):
An axe for the Frozen Sea is published by Rabbit
Room Press. The audiobook is published by Oasis Audio. Copyright
by Ben Pulpit, 2024. By Chris Badeker.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Are You A Charlotte?
In 1997, actress Kristin Davis’ life was forever changed when she took on the role of Charlotte York in Sex and the City. As we watched Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte navigate relationships in NYC, the show helped push once unacceptable conversation topics out of the shadows and altered the narrative around women and sex. We all saw ourselves in them as they searched for fulfillment in life, sex and friendships. Now, Kristin Davis wants to connect with you, the fans, and share untold stories and all the behind the scenes. Together, with Kristin and special guests, what will begin with Sex and the City will evolve into talks about themes that are still so relevant today. "Are you a Charlotte?" is much more than just rewatching this beloved show, it brings the past and the present together as we talk with heart, humor and of course some optimism.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.