The Fare Forward Interview with Travis Helms
Travis Helms is an Episcopal priest, poet, and the author of Blowing Clover, Falling Rain: A Theological Commentary on the Poetic Canon of the ‘American Religion.’ He is the founder and curator of the LOGOS Collective, which organizes “liturgically inflected” poetry readings at a brewery in Austin, Texas, and around the country; and he serves as executive director alongside fellow poet Jason Myers of EcoTheo Collective, an organization that “celebrates wonder, enlivens conversations, and inspires commitments to ecology, spirituality, and art” through publishing the EchoTheo Review, sponsoring fellowships for emerging Black and Latinx poets, and organizing the annual Wonder poetry Festival. He lives in Jackson, Wyoming, where he serves a local parish, with his wife and daughter.
Interview Conducted by Sarah Clark
Fare Forward: You’ve mentioned in interviews before that your first love of poetry sprang from reading “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when you were supposed to be paying attention in another class. Can you tell me a little bit more about what captured your interest or imagination when you read that poem for the first time?
Travis Helms: Absolutely. It was the musicality of language, in one way. I love Walter Pater’s definition of Romanticism as “adding strangeness to beauty.” And I think that that was the sensation I had reading the Eliot poem: it was an experience of the uncanny. I wouldn’t have known how to phrase description or to evoke persona in the way that Eliot was, but it had this quality of strangeness and surprise, but also an element of inevitability to it. In reading those lines—I thought, “Of course this meditation, this lament, this sort of wistful reverie, would have had to have been expressed this way.” But I think it was really the musicality of the language that captivated me, from those opening lines,
Let us go then, you and I,
when the evening is spread out against the sky,
like a patient etherized upon a table…
It was as if there was an element of enchantment in the poem, as well. But I think what I most deeply felt upon finishing the poem was a sort of experience of communion. This poet who had been dead for a number of decades had somehow communicated something that had a resonance of reality and truth to it.
But also, he’d been dead for these four decades. So how was I able to experience this with such immediacy and vividness? It felt as if Eliot were in the room there and that there was a certain intimacy between the speaker and myself as a reader. And so that was, I think, my first experience of what poetry is able to perform in such a unique and viable way. And by that I mean that as language aspiring to the condition of music, it can connect with the immediacy of music. And so I did feel like the communication that was happening was simultaneously intellectual and emotional. I was having a felt experience of some of the kind of cognitive content that the poem was expressing, but I was also feeling it in this meaningful, palpable way deep down in my cells.
But it was something about the voice too. The voice felt alive and felt living and almost vatic in a way. Even though the speaker of that poem is situated in this despairing urban context, and there’s all these concerns of High Modernism at play in the ways in which different cultural institutions that have traditionally served as repositories for meaning and meaning-making are breaking down. It still felt like it was a kind of high proclamation; there’s this quality—and it’s even more there in “The Wasteland” and certainly in the Quartets as I discovered reading Eliot more deeply later on—even that sort of wonderful kind of rhapsodic reflection on the siren song at the end and, and even the easy, almost hackneyed rhyming, the, “In the room, the women come and go / talking of Michelangelo”—even those sort of easy couplets had a kind of charmed quality to them. And I just thought, “I didn’t know you could cast a spell with language in this way, but also evoke something deeper.”
One of my very favorite passages in all of literature is from Emerson’s essay, “The Poet,” when he talks about poetry as primal warblings, and how the poet pierces to this eternal original realm of pure expression where the divine dwells. Emerson says there’s this kind of primordial poem—but the poet misremembers the poem. Emerson says, “loses ever and anon a note and thus miswrites the poem.” And so I think of that, that it’s like a platonic ideal, this idea that there are ultimate poems out there. And Eliot does seem to tap into them, and reading “Prufrock” for the first time, I felt like I was piercing into something a little bit deeper, beyond some veil.
FF: What did you do from there? So you were sitting in history class or science class or whatever class you were in reading “Prufrock.” Did you go read more poetry? Did you think of this as an isolated incident and go about your day?
TH: Well, I became very obsessed with that poem in particular. I think certain poems seem, in Seamus Heaney’s phrase, like stepping stones at different moments in my life. And that poem and other poems by the High Modernists were the first to really captivate me. So I really just spent time with that anthology of American literature, that Norton anthology. So it was reading Eliot, reading Pound, reading Hart Crane, reading Wallace Stevens. And then from there I think just reading everyone in that anthology that I could get my hands on.
And I remember finding a very cool volume—I don’t know if the Library of America had something to do with this or the Library of Congress—it’s a bunch of Library of Congress recordings. But it’s a three volume or a three-disk set called Poetry Speaks. It begins with, those early wax cylinder recordings of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Walt Whitman. And then it goes from late 19th century up through, through the Confessionalists and the Black Mountain School and some of the Deep Image and Harlem Renaissance Poets. And I remember just driving around in my little unreliable red Jeep Cherokee around Atlanta, Georgia, listening to those recordings of poets over and over again.
And then I tried to emulate those poems. I feel like every aspiring writer goes through this process of self-apprenticeship, where you simp try on a variety of voices. I was attempting to do everything I could to discover the poets whose voices found me and then to take the poems apart a bit to see if I could understand a bit more how the poets were creating the effect that they were. But I remember writing very bad imitative poems, including a nine-page imitation of “The Wasteland” called “In Youth” that had a Latin epigraph, even though I hadn’t taken any Latin at the time! I was just working with all the superficial trappings of kind of a High Modernist mode without understanding all of the reasons behind why Eliot and Pound, especially, were making the stylistic choices they were.
But that was the first step. And then I had a surrogate grandfather, this grand paternal figure in my life, who went to University of Iowa in the summer for the Summer Writing Festival. And I ended up going to Iowa for a couple summers after my junior and senior year in high school and taking poetry workshops for the first time and learning a bit more about craft and how poems get put together.
poems, because they’re aspiring to the condition of music, can connect with the immediacy of music and give us a felt experience of some reality, like grace, or wonder, or even incarnation, through the ways in which they’re using particularity of diction or figurative language that then ramifies and gives us an experience of the universal or the transcendent.
FF: After college, you went to Yale Divinity School and then you got a PhD, and now you’re a priest. Is there a difference in the ways that you view poetry as an academic versus as a poet or as a priest, or are all those all the same?
TH: Finishing my undergrad, all I really wanted to do was write poems that might connect with other people. And I had this romanticized idea of I don’t know, finding passage across the Atlantic Ocean and then just working my way east, finding odd jobs to make ends meet and just working on poems until I published some volume to much popular acclaim and was able to make my way in the world professionally as a poet.
And then I quickly realized after finishing undergrad that I needed health insurance. And so I applied to the Peace Corps and served for two years, teaching English in Madagascar. And even going to Divinity School after the Peace Corps, I kind of thought, “Well, this is three more years to study something that I find interesting, and over the course of three years, I’ll finish that first book. And then I’ll realize this dream of becoming a professional poet.” None of that has come to pass thus far.
And then I always thought, well, maybe I’ll be an English professor. And I think that I’ve always undertaken the academic discipline of reading poems closely and analyzing poems as a way of understanding how they have the effect on me as a reader that they do. And even in my PhD, I felt as if I was just trying to read the work of the four poets who meant the most to me at the time, and clichéd as it sounds, on whose shoulders I wanted to one day stand. These were all poets writing in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s mode of American Transcendentalism to some degree. And I thought “Okay, this is the conceptual world, or theological world, that I want to be trafficking in as a writer. And so I just want to learn as much as I can about how these poets think and articulate themselves in verse, so that I can then go ahead and extend and carry forth and continue this project.”
But in seminary I took an amazing course with a scholar named David Mahan, who teaches at Yale Divinity School. And David has this wonderful academic monograph called An Unexpected Light. And in it, he sets forth this thesis that poems are able to perform or embody theological truth in this unique and viable way. It’s the difference, I guess, between positive and negative theology and cataphasis and apophasis, that we can’t ever positively articulate or through systematic analysis describe what undergirds this divine mystery that we’re trying to explore as part of the theological enterprise. But poems, because they’re aspiring to the condition of music, can connect with the immediacy of music and give us a felt experience of some reality, like grace, or wonder, or even incarnation, through the ways in which they’re using particularity of diction or figurative language that then ramifies and gives us an experience of the universal or the transcendent. So reading David, I thought, “Wow, there’s actually more at stake here than just analyzing the mechanics or the matrix of tropes that a poet may be trafficking in the writing of their poem.”
Also in seminary, I had the chance to work with Harold Bloom and realized that poetry is more than the anxiety of influence and just being overly determined as a writer by the tradition that’s come before me and by this canon in which I’m trying to clear some space for myself. Poetry can actually be about revelation and have this apocalyptic dimension. We perhaps reveal something of divine reality through the ways in which we’re using language, inscribed by contingency as it is.
I preached a little bit on this, this past Sunday and ended up concluding with one of my own poems that I thought was just a way to like distill or like encapsulate my point, or the aim of the sermon. And so I do think poems, they can open up new ways of seeing and loving and living. They can help distill theological truth into something tangible. And poems have this sonic texture to them, and we create vibrations with our vocal chords that then resonate within the aural hearing apparatus in another hearer. It can get inside our very selves in a way. We can carry these poems around us and help us in our efforts to live better lives.
I think that becoming a priest, I’m always thinking of the practical application—anytime I’m theologizing, I’m thinking, “Okay, well, what’s the practical application?” I’m thinking a little more pragmatically about “How is this going to help the people I’m serving or myself, as someone who has these faith commitments, live a better life?” And I think poems can be helpful technologies in that way.
FF: You now lead poetry readings that are liturgically inflected. Given that a poem is already in some sense liturgical, how do you make that clear in your events that you host?
TH: One of the things that I love about LOGOS and its liturgically inflected format, that is sort of like a poem in a way, is that it functions on multiple levels, like a good poem. And I do think the church’s liturgy is embodied poetry it’s a way, if we get back to that root meaning of poesis as “doing or making,” or theopoetics, a way of “making God (present)” through our use of words and embodiment and action and movement and breath and song and all those things.
I think that there are some people who don’t have much of a background in the church world or haven’t experienced, let alone studied, the way in which services of worship are put together, so they don’t have an appreciation for what the word “liturgy” might even mean. But they enter this space, and they have an experience of community and of connection with one another, and with some sort of deeper reality, some sense of a depth or meaning that transcends what’s happening just in the conversation with other attendees and with the poets themselves, that I would name God, they might call Beauty or Connectedness or whatever kind of language you want to put to it. But people understand, wow, this feels way different than any reading experience I’ve ever had or any talk that I’ve ever attended.
It isn’t just a passive, transactional thing where I’m absorbing poems as an audience member. Or, likewise for the poets—poets will reflect on how it’s such a unique and rare and wonderful thing to not just be offloading poems on a quiet or, you know, some audiences are very responsive, but still there’s kind of this transactional element to it. You’re just delivering poetry rather than helping some sort of act of communal savoring happen. And so with LOGOS gatherings, I always sort of orient the congregants to the order of service. I’ll say, “After this word of welcome, we’re going to have a moment of centering quiet in which to ground and center ourselves in the space. We’ll ring a meditation bell. And then we have this responsive reading of an opening poem, and then the poets have their readings. There’s some conversation that happens at table with those gathered, some sort of small group conversation. And then that opens up in this larger conversation with the poets. And then we typically conclude with an invitation to commune and share communion of conversation and usually some sort of food and libations together as a way of completing the evening.” And so I think that if you were a student of liturgics, you could see how there are elements of a Eucharistic liturgy that are mapped onto that format of a traditional poetry reading. But a lot of people just think this feels fun and disarming in a delightful way.
I think that one of the great disservices we do, especially in our places of primary and secondary education in this country has to do with the way that poetry gets taught (at least this was true with the way it was taught to me in middle school and high school). We get taught that poetry is this rarefied, privileged thing. And that reading poetry involves trying to discern what the author’s meaning was in composing the poem. And it applies all this pressure to me as a reader that I need to get initiated into this specialized mode of knowing, when at its essence and most fundamental level, I think poetry is meant to be savored. It’s meant to be enjoyed. It’s meant to be delighted in.
And so I think that’s one of the things that we try to foster an appreciation of in LOGOS gatherings, that ultimately this is about embodying these poems together. It’s about experiencing joy and disabusing ourselves of the notion that we need to analyze away the meaning or arrive at some sort of correct interpretation of what the author’s intention may have been. Because half the time the poets don’t even know what they’re trying to say. They’re letting the logic of the language lead them.
I think my greatest anxiety was around whether or not poets and potential participants, congregants, might think that because I was an ordained priest, there would be some sort of ulterior proselytizing motive at play.
FF: What inspired your imagination to envision that an event like the LOGOS Collective could happen?
TH: I think it came from a couple different places. In telling LOGOS’s story of origin—usually we give a sense of what the genesis of the project was at the beginning of every gathering—I can trace it back to a single conversation I had with a friend and poet named Grace Ortman who lives in Austin. And Grace has a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School and also an MFA from the University of Montana in poetry, but tends to approach questions of meaning from Buddhist or even kind of Shamanic frameworks. She’s also a yoga practitioner and just very syncretic in her theological approach to things, as well as a very brilliant poet and thinker. We were having a conversation about how transactional poetry readings sometimes feel. I was in the process of becoming ordained as an Episcopal priest, and we just started wondering what it might look like to lovingly, non-dogmatically fold aspects of sacred ritual in the format of a poetry reading.
I think my greatest anxiety was around whether or not poets and potential participants, congregants, might think that because I was an ordained priest, there would be some sort of ulterior proselytizing motive at play. And I had experienced so many church spaces that felt circumscribed in some way by either a poverty of theological imagination or frankly, a sort of egoic fear and closed-off-ness. I don’t know. I want to talk about the church spaces that I experienced growing up in the Deep South as—I think of Keats’s notion of negative capability: theability to be in uncertainty without an irritable reaching after fact or reason. And these were the opposite of that. And we see fundamentalisms in all sorts of modes. There can be atheistic fundamentalisms as much as religious ones. But for me, it seems to come back to Carl Jung’s idea of the ego, which craves stability and certainty and survival above and beyond everything else, recoils from ambiguity and uncertainty. And so fundamentalism always wants to claim a definitive conclusive interpretation of absolute truth to the exclusion and denigration of all other options, and has this need to shut down the theological conversation.
That’s not what I’ve experienced in most Episcopal churches, but I for sure experienced it in a lot of more fundamentalist leaning, non-denominational churches growing up. And so I just wanted to create a space that felt like an antidote to that in a way. And I’ve also been fascinated through my work with David Mahan and then Malcolm Guite, in my doctoral program, of exploring the ways in which purportedly secular poems, or poems that don’t have any explicit theological content (at least on a superficial level), can still perform theological truth or embody theological insights or insights or ways of approaching questions of meaning that are of genuine interest to theologians and people who do hold orthodox faith commitments like myself. And so there was something about hosting, trying to, as we say in LOGOS language, evoke the sacred in a purportedly secular space, like a brewery that felt life-giving and necessary. That this isn’t just a place where people are indulging in all sorts of excess and libertine behavior, but we can be engaging in this mode of connecting that has real intentionality to it, real integrity to it, and also helps us leave looking at the world in a little bit different way and maybe finding our hearts slightly more opened and ourselves more disposed toward embodying love and performing acts of charity and things like that.
So on the theoretical conceptual level we try and ask, “How do we broaden the way that we have theological conversations?” And it felt like evoking the sacred in a secular space was the best way to do that.
FF: Can we perhaps find ourselves more conscious of things we need to reflect on when we go through this unfamiliar language of poetry rather than the familiar language of the liturgy that we repeat every Sunday?
TH: I do believe that poetry can serve as a container to hold paradox and irony and seeming contradiction. And it seems like even doctrinally, this is one of the things that our churches and theological tradition has always wrestled with and created space for—even in the classic creedal formulations of Trinitarian theology or incarnation theology, two natures, one person or three persons, one nature—we need to find ways to hold that because we are human beings with these complex, self-contradictory systems. And I think William Butler Yeats talked about aspects of his personhood and ontology that were “deeper than the bundle of incoherences that sits down for breakfast.” And so often I wake up in the morning just feeling like that bundle of incoherence, and I need to remind myself that there’s something deeper in me that is capable of communion or even union with this deeper, sturdier thing that I would name God, the ground of all being. As Emerson said it beautifully, “I’m part or particle of God,” in his wonderful essay, “Nature.”
And I want to say that, “Christ plays in ten thousand places,” as Hopkins said. Of course God is going to find ways to become manifest to us with eyes to see and ears to hear, whether we’re in a traditional church context or attending a poetry reading, or just having a beer discussing poems with friends or sitting at our desks, writing or reading.
There might be some sort of unique possibility opened up for a gathering like LOGOS, just because it’s such a new experience for people. I think there’s an element of trying to reimagine what the liturgy looks like. And I do think that that has to continually be taking place in every new historical time and context and place. And so just like our theology, is continually being rewritten and translated. And so I think it does good.
I think that’s one of the things that poetry can affect—it can shock us back into recognition of the absolute audacity of saying that the triune God is three in one and one in three.
FF: Having this conversation, I’m reminded of how poetic the Nicene Creed is—it’s an expression of orthodox faith, and it expresses so many mysteries and contradictions, and it does it in such a beautiful way. But if I say it every Sunday, maybe I will forget both the truth of it and the beauty of it, because of the familiarity. Sometimes people take church for granted, so for them to be reminded that liturgy is this beautiful, living, mysterious, engaging communal practice by doing something else liturgically like poetry—maybe that can point people back if liturgy is something that they’re already familiar with, and if they’re not familiar with liturgy, it’s something that can introduce them to the ways that liturgy functions.
TH: That reminds me of one of Geoffrey Hill’s essays, I think it’s “Poetry as Menace and Atonement”—or one of the essays in The Lords of Limit—but he talks about the fallenness of language, and Coleridge talked about this a little bit too. I think Coleridge meant it as a sort of an etymological imprecision, and maybe Hill did as well. That there’s a corruption in the language because of a sort of aggregating and gradually accumulating sort of stupidity that just seems to instantiate itself as society becomes more and more corrupted and falls apart and so forth. But I do think, like Eliot talking about “the raid on the inarticulate with this shabby material, always deteriorating,” that we do become desensitized. And Hill in that essay, he also talks about “shocks of recognition,” which I think was a phrase from Hawthorne—Hawthorne writing to Melville.
But I think that’s one of the things that poetry can affect—it can shock us back into recognition of the absolute audacity of saying that the triune God is three in one and one in three. Or the amazing poetry of kenosis and of God self-emptying to take on our humanity. So if we are looking at a kind of Eastern soteriology, a salvation theory grabbing ideas of theosis or divinization to say, as Athanasius said in his treatise On the Incarnation, that “God became human, so humans could become God.” The audacity of that is baked into the creed and embedded in the language of the creed. But yeah, if we recite it every single Sunday, we do become desensitized to the absolute beauty and poetry. I mean, it should bring us to our knees in its beauty and poignancy. And if we understand the true significance of what those doctrines should convey to us as human creatures about God’s love and about the possibilities for the new creation that we’re invited to live into.
So I do think that reading poems can give an oblique way into experiencing those kind of “shocks of recognition” that are latent within us.
FF: One of my favorite bits of Eliot is from “The Dry Salvages”: “These are only hints and guesses, / Hints followed by guesses; and the rest / Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action. / The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.” He’s giving us this framework that we are not fully understanding this, we are going through these processes that have been given to us in order to understand it, but the gift will only be half understood. And he talks a lot in Four Quartets about the failure of language, that he’s writing these at the end of his life and saying, I have been trying for decades to say this thing and all of the words just fall apart. And of course, he’s got this treasury of beautiful words and has said so many things that continue to amaze and shock, but even he is saying, but I haven’t got it. I haven’t reached it. I haven’t said it. And I have to keep trying.
TH: Yeah, there are so many lovely moments of genius like that, you could almost like put together a beautiful cento of sentiments from the Quartets. I think of Wittgenstein at the end of the Tractatus (that I have not read and cannot read because I have had no training in formal logic), that “whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.” Or kicking down the ladder that we’ve used to climb up, and we just can’t progress any further. Or Aquinas saying that the Summa reminded him of straw.
But I remember Harold Bloom used to always quote this wonderful adage from the Rabbi Tarfon, I think second century, third century. He said, “You’re not required to complete the work. Neither are you free to desist from it.” I love that kind of humility in that enterprise. But also, you know that for Eliot, his anthropology is high enough that our creaturely response to God’s goodness, and even being endowed with these faculties of intellect and these gifts of language and articulation is, we’ve got to at least try. And that’s enabling and emboldening for me.
FF: I would say you were definitely someone who seems to be trying—so can you talk a little bit more about what you’re doing now?
TH: Yeah, I am trying. I wouldn’t say that I feel a profound sense of discouragement, but I’ve heard Jericho Brown say in interviews that if you publish your first book of poems when you’re 28 years old, then you’ve been writing your first book for 28 years. So I’ve been working on a first book of poems for 39 years and it’s sort of driving me mad. I’ve got a manuscript of poems—I probably have hundreds of pages of poems at various degrees of completion. I’ve done a number of manuscript critiques with some wonderful poets, including Jericho, including Joanna Klink, Allison Seay, one of our EcoTheo board members. And right now I’m working with Spencer Reece.
My mother died in 2013. And so in a lot of ways, the poems in the manuscript constellate around this experience of losing my mother to pancreatic cancer. And then simultaneously I met my now-wife and partner Gracie, and we fell in love. Just as my mom was leaving this world, Gracie was coming into mine. And we now have a one-year-old daughter. And so the manuscript of poems is something that I would love to see find the light of publication in the next year or so.
I feel really fortunate to have been asked to go to Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, twice this year as a creative and poet in residence. Part of the hope is that I’ll give a couple of readings, create a couple of LOGOS gatherings, and lead some workshops and co-teach some classes, but then I’ll also produce and share some original poetry. So I’m working on the poems.
And then I’ve got this larger project that has a conceptual sort of resonance with, and complementary to the poetry manuscript. There are memoiristic elements to it; part of it is reflecting on my experience losing my mother, sitting at her bedside when she took her final breaths and then had this smile blossom on her face that it seemed like she had no agency in or control over. And it was just a moment of absolute transcendence. It felt like the veil between this world and whatever waits beyond it was torn away. So it’s reflecting on that moment and then building out a theology of imagination and thinking about what it means to explore this kind of fortunate connection between perhaps our being made in God’s image and being endowed with imagination and reflecting a little bit on practices that helped me not just survive that experience of grief, but thrive within and through and beyond it.
So that project’s in flux as well. But yeah, finishing those two books is what I’m most wanting to spend my time on. I hope they find their way into the world at some point in the not-too-distant future.
FF: That’s very exciting. And given that you’ve been wanting to publish a book of poetry since you graduated from college, I think probably this will be the book it always should have been.
TH: I think so. And I do think there’s something fortunate, if not providential, in the timing of all of it.
