Poetry as Scripture for the Areligious

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. For many of us, religious ritual provides language for the key moments in our lives, for welcoming babies into the world, for weddings and coming of age, for how to think about morality and mortality. But what if you don’t ascribe to any particular religion? What language do you use to find your way through such things? Historian and poet Jennifer Michael Hecht suggests that to fill that gap, we turn to poetry. Poetry, she says, can connect us to one another and to meaning in our lives. Her new book is called The Wonder Paradox, embracing the weirdness of existence and the poetry of our lives, and it’s an absolutely gorgeous meditation on language we can use to make sense of the world and to create meaning for ourselves. Reading this book feels like taking a stroll in a beautiful place with a smart, generous friend, one who invites you to marvel again and again at the wonder of existence itself. As a historian, Hecht is deeply familiar with many religious traditions. In each of 20 chapters, she considers a situation that’s traditionally framed by the language of religion, and she offers poems that can be helpful for finding language for each of these cases. She invites us to compile a clutch of favorite poems to create a familiar, dependable liturgy of our own that we revisit again and again for holidays, events, practices, and emergencies.

And she’s a poet and teacher herself, and one of the delights of this book is that she shares the poems she loves from lots of different cultures and traditions. And she teaches us about how and why they’re so powerful. So in this book, we learn about Chinese classical poetry, the gazel form that originated in Arabic poetry, Shakespearean sonnets. She shares poems from Pablo Neruda and Vislava Shimborska and Joy Harjo. And she shares a poem from the great Nigerian poet Chinua Achebe that absolutely stopped me in my tracks.

I literally gasped and had to put the book down before I could move on.

And what’s great also is that her own prose itself is very poetic.

Grant, I’ve never read anything quite like this book.

And honestly, I feel that both believers and non-believers are going to find it nourishing and uplifting.

I really recommend it.

I’m so happy that you recommended this book to me, Martha.

I’m looking forward to reading it.

I have browsed it.

Everything you say seems to be true.

As I get older, poetry speaks to me more and more.

And the interplay between poetry and liturgy, poetry and religion is clear because so much of the written word of religion is poetry and song and lyric.

And I think there’s a truth to that.

So the book, again, is The Wonder Paradox by Jennifer Michael Hecht.

We’ll link to that on our website and we’ll link to her website as well.

Martha and I are always fans of finding out what you’re reading and hearing about the wonderful passages or sentences that spoke to you.

And you can also send us your favorite poets and poems.

You can send those to words@waywordradio.org or tell us on the telephone at 1-877-929-9673.

That’s a toll-free number in the United States and Canada.

And if you’re somewhere else in the world, there are a lot of ways to reach us, including WhatsApp.

You can find all that information on our website at waywordradio.org/contact.