A Writer Cannot Not Write
Emerging from my four-month Substack hibernation to reclaim my seat at the writing desk
In March, I announced my decision to enter a season of Substack silence. I did not say why, and I didn’t feel a need to justify my decision. At this juncture in my writing life, I am not dependent upon Substack subscriptions and revenue, so it was a simple step to take.
So, why the break? I sensed a bitter twinge to my words, a waning in my creative spirit, a veering from generative speech toward unreflective chatter, and a grating weariness over the state of words in the public square.
When the idea first broke through the soil of my mind, though, I rebuffed. No, this is not a time to be silent! But, if we don’t tend to the wick when the fire’s dwindling, we won’t have any light or warmth to share. And besides, who am I kidding? Lay down your pride, Jonathan.
Immediately, upon making my hibernation announcement, I sensed it was the right decision, feeling a weight lifted—a burden only I had placed upon myself in collaboration with the social imaginary and immanent frame of the age that beckons each of us to grab attention here and now and make a name for ourselves.
Well, the days turned into weeks and weeks turned into four months. During my time away, I faced some health setbacks, making rest fairly necessary. And sadly, the world is no less on fire than it was in March. Add to that the various personal challenges and questions I’m carrying (aren’t we all?), and I was starting to feel a resignation about returning to writing at all. Perhaps I’m not a writer. Perhaps I don’t want to be a writer. Though I started the year with a renewed intention to choose joy, I must confess: I was keeping company more often with despair.
But then a friend suggested I pick up the pencil once again and write some poems.
This friend (some might call him a “spiritual director”) knew poetry held a special appeal for me and had witnessed some meager poetic offerings on my part. He believed poetry might be a healing companion in this season. And he was right.
Poetry has helped tend the garden of my soul the past four months.
As a child—like most children—I loved poetry, with a particularly affection for the whimsical poetry of Shel Silverstein. I remember making a poetry notebook in sixth grade—one of my most treasured classroom projects.
But then something happened. Poetry vanished (or so it seemed). Junior high, high school, college, graduate school. Where was the poetry? Apart from Homer and Virgil in high school Latin class, I can’t recall any attention to poetry. It seems hard to imagine now. An education without a solid go at poetry? But it happened. And it happens.
But I wasn’t entirely uniniatiated, as it turns out. I’ve come to see that I had a fairly good course in poetry in the church. In the scriptures and in hymns, I was reading, hearing, and memorizing poetry. If you’ve read the Psalms or Isaiah, sung “Blessed Assurance” or “Be Thou My Vision,” or prayed the collects, you have some poetry in your bones.
Poetry, as it turns out, is essential and fundamental to religious expression. Because communication is fundamental to building human culture and poetry is one of our most primal—and beautiful, potent, and memorable—ways of communicating, it makes sense that we’d see that from ancient times, poetry has been the durable vehicle of meaning, wisdom, myth. Which means poetry will continue to be pivotal in our seeking and habitation of the life of God, of Mystery, of the Real. Perhaps especially in the attention economy and age of AI, we need poetic words that surprise, agitate, and animate our being toward the true, good, and beautiful.
When I named this Substack “Words in the Wild” I didn’t have poetry in mind. But I did open my introductory March 22, 2024 post (I wrote 46 posts in year one) with these words that seem freshly appropriate: “Words fill the wild space between you and me, between heaven and earth, between divinity and dust, between spirituality and materiality, between the lines of our one ‘wild and precious life’ (Mary Oliver).”
Perhaps we could say the poet’s vocation in the world is akin to something like finding and cultivating “words in the wild” of our shared humanity. Poets are makers. Poets are namers. Even the apostle Paul in a letter to early Christians in Ephesus says we humans are God’s poema. God is the original Poet who created poems who become poem-makers (that’s you and me).
A “words in the wild” poet names something in the raw, wild, untamed, and unnamed interstices, shadows, in-betweens, and liminal spaces of our lives. Sometimes you don’t know what you really feel or believe or desire until you read or hear a poem to which you respond, “Ah! There it is. That’s it.” Poems become companions—friends.
Sitting alone on a park bench in a crowded park, you might feel like a lonely balloon on a dangly string, drifting in shifting air with no doting child holding the other end of the string in their loving grip. But then a poem comes along that names your experience. Nature around you—the birds, the trees—might indifferent, going on as usual (and creation is it’s own, but different kind of teacher!), but a poem comes along and sees you and names what’s bouncing around on the inside of your soul.
Good poems do that, becoming healing companions. Good poems tell it slant to surprise us, to sift and stir us toward the true, good, and beautiful. Good poems agitate and awaken crusty, dusty, slumbering, and despairing spirits. A Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Cezane, or Caravaggio will do that for me to, but not in the same way as a poem. I don’t want to just be moved by a poem, I want to be moved: toward God, love, mercy, justice, truth—toward the life that is truly life.
In my years after the classroom, the first person who (re)introduced me to poetry was Eugene Peterson. Peterson’s books encouraged my affection for the Hebrew poetry of the Psalms and the Prophets. He also introduced me to Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Hopkins’ sonnets are breathtaking and his “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” has become a cherished poem, a real friend to me (the octet is below). “Kingfishers” does what all good poems do: says so much brilliantly with so few words. Hopkins says more in 14 lines than many authors do in volumes.
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
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 Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
The fire of kingishers, the flame of dragonflies, the ring of stones, the vibration of strings, the gong of bells—are all images of Hopkins vision for his own life, for humanity: that our doing is meant to be the display of our being. In the full sonnet, Hopkins addresses the Incarnation, the imago Dei, human identity and vocation (recall now the title of this post).
So, I’ve written and read quite a few poems over the past four months. Maybe even memorized a few. Just a podcast here, a book there, and a fairly consistent rhythm of giving undivided attention and sitting down to practice poetry. Yes, I’ve been scribbling poems for years in journals, but without consistency or generative attention to the writing craft. I lack the foundation of formal education and broad exposure to the poetic tradition, but I have a poetic voice. You have a poetic voice, too.
Poetry can understandably overwhelm or intimdate us. The world of poetry is vast. And in many spaces the way it is presented or taught can be off-putting. Very few of us want to hear a literature expert drone on about Shakespeare, Chaucer, Donne, Yeats, Eliot, Dickinson, Hughes, or Thoreau (some of us do, though, and that’s okay too).
I am going to begin sharing more on poetry here at Words in the Wild, both my own stumbles and fumbles at poetry and the poets and poems that have become friends to me. I hope to encourage your writing and affection for poetry. I hope to form new bonds of friendships with aspiring writers of poetry and admiring readers of poetry. Is that you? Undoubtedly, your tastes and styles will veer from my own. That’s good.
So, before you click “unsubscribe,” I want to encourage you to look at your own life. Where has poetry been? Where is it now? Are there any poems that have been friends for your journey? Do you ever feel the urge to jot a few lines of verse? Are you curious about how poems work on us and function in the world? Do you desire to find ways of communicating that “tell it slant,” as Emily Dickinson famously wrote?
With that, I want to re-invite you to join me at the writing desk in the “Words in the Wild” workshop—a place for anyone looking for the Real as we all navigate the wild in-between.
Gratefully yours,
Jonathan
I’m so glad you’re writing again,
Look forward to hearing your poems bro!