Random Acts of Poetry: We Are Called to Work with Words

Last week, we began thinking about words. Specifically we asked, What's in a Word? What do words have to do with our work and our "high calling," you might wonder?

Our words are more than just filters for our thoughts. Many language studies are showing that words actually control our thoughts. A child with no words for expressing spatial relationships (like prepositions, for example) actually doesn’t seem to understand spatial relationships. Radiolab explains the phenomenon well in their episode on words.

The words we use to describe the world actually help us to experience and understand the world. This means the words we use to talk about work, to talk about calling and purpose, even to talk with the people we encounter in our work, these words are more than mere descriptions of thoughts. They are the thoughts themselves. Our thoughts and beliefs take shape when we express them in words—whether we speak those words aloud or not.

For this reason, it makes sense that Jesus himself was the Word. God took shape in the world through the Word, the way he continues to take shape in the world through our own words.

And people are worried about how technology is changing our words. This morning I am finishing up this post at a Laity Lodge conference on technology with Albert Borgmann, Andy Crouch, Arthur Paul Boers, David Wood, Eugene Peterson, Andy Gullahorn, Jill Phillips, and Pierce Pettis. It is not an anti-technology conference by any means, but we do take seriously the idea that technology can dehumanize us in subtle ways.

This is what Jaron Lanier is getting at in his book You Are Not a Gadget. I've still got twenty pages left before I finish the book, but he makes his argument very clear. From the beginning he worries about the current direction of web technologies, saying, “As a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned interpersonal interaction.” He even goes so far as to say “Fragments Are Not People.” Of course, Lanier is right in an obvious sense. But in his criticisms of Twitter and Facebook, he also reveals his fear of fragments themselves. He almost argues that communicating in short bursts is itself dehumanizing.

It isn't dehumanizing. It is poetry. In fact, communicating through brevity is exactly the form and purpose of poetry. Expressing the deepest possible ideas in the fewest possible words. If there was ever a time that needed poetry, it is our time of tweets and status updates and short form communication.

I’ve waxed a bit philosophical here, inspired by Borgmann and Peterson, no doubt. But these ideas have practical application for us in our daily lives.

Just this morning I “exchanged words” with a close friend and mentor. I can be a bit of a hot-head sometimes. (Perhaps that is a surprise to you?) I know how to make words into sweets that can woo someone to my viewpoint. But I can also use them to cut people and to destroy things. Our words contain power. Our tongues are rudders that control entire ships—and we should not forget that our pens and our keyboards are tongues. Our brains contain tongues, too, that tell us stories about the world. If we do not control these internal tongues, our view of the world will be skewed by the words we tell ourselves.

A poetic approach

In learning poetry, we are learning the art of words. No matter what your work, no matter what your calling, you are going to love God with your words... or not. You are going to love your neighbor with your words... or not.

Glynn Young understands this in his poem Was with, is. In the last stanza, he writes:

This is a great mystery,
this hovering over the deep,
the formless, this shaping
of creation, a speaking or
the speaking of the hidden
into the light, the non-existent
into the real. A word
once thought, once uttered,
once written and thus codified
becomes eternal.

In Aprovechar, Abby put herself on my radar as one to watch. Her tight and thought-provoking poem describes the

colors of
wisdom’s charging
flourish as she
reverses hindsight’s
regret

Kelly Sauer, a talented photographer, shares a series of images to define what is In a Word. In my favorite image, she thinks about the word “wind”

that fills the sails on ships,
sweeps invisible through worlds,
riding snow and rain and cloud and light,
dancing in the treetops?

Karenee also thinks about words in relation to the wind. In her poem Word, she gives a wonderfully poetic definition of communication. For her, a word is a word is “Emptiness to emptiness, a scented wisp of subtle wind.” 

In Violet Nesdoly’s poem Wordsmith, communication is a kind of thought-forge. Her ideas about language remind me of Wordsworth who defined poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility. Violet gives a startling vision of recollection when she writes about “experience grown pliable in fire of memory.”

There are many other good poems here, but the last poem I will reference directly is Emily Murphy’s Words for What’s in a Word. She turns communication into an epic quest. And it does feel epic, sometimes, doesn’t it? She writes,

the quest to know how to be able to be known
must hold hands with words written, spoken,

The poems this week were really wonderful. Please take a few minutes to visit each of the poets and leave a simple note of encouragement to them in their comments.

• Gender-Neutral
• Parting
• His-story
• Aprovechar
• In a Word
• What's in a Word?
• relation making
• wordsmith
• Was with, is
• Words for What's in a Word
• What's in a word: churn?
• Word
• Recipe
• Words
• Ode to Perseverance
• Word Play

Image by em_ali. Used with permission via Flickr. Post by Marcus Goodyear.

• Tags:  
• culture
• language
• poetry
• random acts of poetry

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