Tools of the Trade
A new essay collection considers what poetry has to gain from faith and how art is shaped by the Spirit.
By Maryann Corbett
What does poetry have to do with the Christian life, and vice versa? These questions have been hanging around Christian thought since the beginning. St. Paul apparently had no qualms; Acts 17:28 depicts him speaking to the crowd at the Areopagus, applying the words of an unnamed gentile poet to the God of Christians and Jews. Almost eight hundred years later, Alcuin of York was more troubled. Objecting that priests should not be entertained at meals by verse from the pagan heroic past, he asked, “What does Ingeld have to do with Christ?” In recent years, poets have reframed the question: What does poetry have to gain from faith? Victoria Moul proposed in a recent Substack essay that exposure to a religious tradition gives a poet practical advantages, while both Amit Majmudar and Dana Gioia separately declare that poetry is grounded in the religious impulse. Whether the link is practical or existential, serious arguments about what faith does to art seem to be bubbling up like hot springs.
This latest collection by George David Clark and L. S. Klatt, cheekily and allusively titled Playing with Fire, grew (as described on its acknowledgments page) “out of a symposium in which fourteen mid-career poets . . . were invited to describe how Christian faith informed their poetic practices and their thinking about poetry.” The collection is about as different from the usual slim volume of poems as a book can be. With almost three hundred pages of text, nineteen pages of notes, and four separate indexes—of personal names, subjects, biblical citations, and works—it is, to say the least, substantial. It is best read over time, consulted using its good tools, and marked up in your preferred way.
All the contributors are teachers in some capacity; most are academics with biographies that cite many honors. The hymnodist Adam M. L. Tice is the sole nonacademic odd man out. There are seven women and seven men, with histories in an assortment of Christian denominations—all Western, though some participants are knowledgeable about the Eastern tradition—and with theological educations that range from naive to deep and wide.
It takes only a little progress into the book to see the uniqueness—the strangeness, even—of each contributor’s journey to faith and to poetry. For example, the book’s first section is titled “Tongues of Flame: Poetry and Revelation,” and the types of revelation it describes are various. Bobby C. Rogers begins with his small-town Baptist upbringing, the sense of hauntedness by spirits holy and otherwise, and the force of revivals, Southern evangelists, and country music. Lisa Russ Spaar talks about soul-cake (as sung on a Peter, Paul and Mary album), adolescent anorexia, and hungers of the body and the soul. Aaron Belz spends ten pages recounting his personal history with poetry, then pivots to ask, rhetorically, whether a Christian poetics is really any different from a poetics per se. Peter O’Leary tells how he discovered the canticle Benedicite in a film about the monks of the Grande Chartreuse, how that led to his own list poem, and how the list poem is an ideal vehicle for expression of the divine energy.
The section’s final essay, by George David Clark, says nothing at all about the author’s religious or poetic upbringing. But that essay is the one that had me grabbing my pencil most often—not only to mark passages that made me bang the desk and shout yes, but to underline spots that made me gulp with an awareness that I might be falling short. The essays by Clark, coeditor L. S. Klatt, Benjamin Myers (on the vexed subject of sentimentality), and Geoffrey Nutter are standouts for their clarity and organization, and for being studded with useful and memorable nuggets—like this one, from Nutter: “I like to offer the formulation that the poet in the act of composition must be smart and stupid at the same time: smart about form and technique, stupid about subject matter and ideas.”
Some of those parts, though, stand out because they deliver a genuine poetic and spiritual kick in the backside—the sort of kick we usually need to feel regularly in a writing life.
The second section, called “Brilliant Absence: Poetry and Possibility,” probes at the importance for the poet of getting past certainty, of exploring. The counsel to abandon a set goal, an intended idea for a given poem, appears in more than one section of the book. (So do other major topics; the demarcations between sections are somewhat porous.) In this section we find Kiki Petrosino’s lament for lost faith and meditation on how Catholic liturgy might inflect poetry. Mysticism, darkness, searching and the absence of God come up in this grouping.
The third section, called “Burning Questions: Poetry and Doubt,” gives four writers room to meander and poke and feint at ways for a poet to wrestle with angels, and to argue that honesty insists on such wrestling. The fourth section, called “Holy Fire: Poetry and Vocation,” has the most to say about what poetry made by a Christian—or perhaps by anyone, but especially a Christian—should actually look like, what it should be and do, and what the process of making it should be. The pieces on hymn writing and the exploration of sentimentality are in this last section.
It’s probably inevitable that fourteen American poets, nearly all educated in creative writing and not far apart in age, point to some of the same writers, poems, and ideas as influences. The book’s indexes track this, with long strings of page numbers at the names of Eliot, Herbert, Hopkins, Weil, and Wilbur. A major virtue of those indexes is that they make it much easier to compare what different poets say about each particular. For example, I have always felt that liturgy, public prayer, and liturgical music influence my sense of prosody, so I wanted to see if others thought so, and was glad for the index entry on “rhythm,” but dismayed to find “meter” only as a subhead under it.
Full disclosure: I’ve been an indexer and have strong feelings about indexing. I want the moon, of course. I want the indexer to get inside my head and know exactly what terms I might use to look up an idea, not a word—and yes, it’s a challenge, but indexing done by a trained person who knows the subject can accomplish it. So I find that the very useful tools in this book have a few shortcomings. For example, the subject index includes Calvinism but has no entry for Catholicism, even though Lisa Ampleman, Katy Didden, and Kiki Petrosino all specify their Catholic backgrounds, and Carolina Ebeid says it without saying it (“I grew up around plaster and clay saints.”). Some entries focus on the passing mention of a word (for example, “Orthodox”) rather than the discussion of a concept, a worrisome sign of partly mechanized indexing.
But I mustn’t overstress that flaw, because each individual essay has beauties that will not be discovered by this sort of index hunt—here a poem in response to a theme; there a lesser-known but excellent poem by a poet you thought you knew well. The various parts of Playing with Fire have their different virtues, including close readings of poems you’ve met before, and the simple pleasure of getting to know some poets better as people. Some of those parts, though, stand out because they deliver a genuine poetic and spiritual kick in the backside—the sort of kick we usually need to feel regularly in a writing life. Which is why we read criticism. Which is why this is a book to read slowly and return to.
Maryann Corbett is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The O in the Air (Colosseum Books / Franciscan U. Press, 2023). Her work appears in anthologies including Best American Poetry, Christian Poets in America Since 1940, and Contemporary Catholic Poetry. A seventh book, Notifications from the Unseen, is forthcoming from Slant Books.
Playing with Fire: Christian Poets Reflect on Faith and Practice was published by Baylor University Press on March 15, 2026. You can purchase a copy here.
