Words for Readers and Writers (eBook)

3

THE WORDED FLOOD, RURAL TO ACADEMY

Poetry was my pursuit in high school, and in 1960 I enrolled at the University of Illinois, Urbana, with 35,000 students in residence, plus a meager number who met on a pier in Lake Michigan—the Navy Pier Chicago branch. The Urbana population formed a community, mostly cohesive, and it was there that my faith faded and went underground for a decade.

Agnosticism and atheism and a welter of other isms—more than words to those who encounter them in their youth—including some I’d never heard of, were in the air along with whiffs of smoke with the scent of burning leaves. Professors and graduate assistants held forth at the front of classrooms from oak lecterns that had the appearance of sawed-off upper halves of pulpits. They set these on their desks at the front of the room, chopping the church in two and taking over, puffing on pipes or cigarettes as they spoke.

It was a new religion they preached.

A Big Man on Campus (“B-Moc,” in that era’s lingo), the sort who wore a suit and tie and topcoat and was campaigning for the office of president of the student senate, stopped me one day in the corridor of Lincoln Hall, used by many as a passageway between the journalism and English buildings, and said, “You must be Woiwode, right?”

“Yes.”

“It looks like you’re a real existentialist,” he said, naming one of the isms I hadn’t heard of.

“Oh?” I said, wary, and felt the red flag of an entity I couldn’t define start fluttering. Existentialism?

“You know, Camus and Sartre and those guys. I mean, those poems of yours!” They had appeared in a campus publication. “They’re existential, man, if anything is! Keep it up!” I was flattered, of course, even if I didn’t know what the word meant, and nobody I asked could give a satisfactory definition. But I wonder now, with sobering shots of cynicism added to my outlook, if he wasn’t fishing for a vote.

A professor of mine, an impeccable and widely published scholar with a sweet sense of humor, a true gentleman, referred to people of faith as “Christers,” as in “That Christer!”—dissing them, as we say now. It hurt at first to hear that word from a dear person otherwise so tolerant and kind, and then I fell into his fashion—or anyway imagined the label amused rather than included me.

Nobody told me you need faith to write poetry—some larger view to draw the arrangement of words free from mere verbal construction, no matter how technically sound or pyrotechnic, into the realm where they sail off in song. I enrolled in an advanced course in the metaphysical poets—John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell—because one of the draws was the instructor. He glowed with intelligence and was lively and witty, able to cause students hardened by groveling study to laugh. I preferred the precise and subtly dodging movements of his mind revealed in his lectures to my generally flat-footed method of getting at matters, but I grew disenchanted with the class. I couldn’t imagine why I was troubled about it. For a while I found it difficult to attend, and sometimes didn’t.

Was it because he never mentioned that the poets he assigned to study were applying their faith or singing in ecstasy out of its holy strictures? I was drawn to the poets, pulled into their worlds on my own, but I don’t recall any explanations about what it was that captivated their intellects or generated the force behind their poetry—other than, as the professor said, they followed the form of metaphysical conceit or extended metaphor to the breaking point, and so forth.

Let me confess that I did well in science but wasn’t the sophisticate fit for literary study. What I probably needed to hear was “They wail in faith, baby!” One of the lows in my academic life came when I submitted a paper to this instructor on Marvell. I worked it over in my dogged way and received a grade of C, with this explanation: “Good as far as it goes but needs detail.” I asked the professor what details he meant, since my paper was mostly details, and the fellow I found so witty frowned at me in a frosty way, and said, “You can’t possibly know. You didn’t attend all my lectures.”

I hope this doesn’t seem a disaffected student taking a poke at a professor who gave him a C. I’ve been a professor and know the theme. I admired him as much as the Christer professor but he helped define an angle of the atmosphere of the sixties—the “Me Generation” about to implode over the United States and then the globe, as if “I” and “me” were the only entities able to provide proper answers. That was the animating religion behind most of the poetry I read a decade later.

What I needed was a collection like A Sacrifice of Praise with a discerning and gentle guide like James Trott.1 In his anthology readers will find what I was able to only suspect in some small area sovereignly preserved in me: that the tradition in Western literature is Christian.

Arbiters of consensus and taste, let’s call them, who are drawn from the academic community, tend to overlook this historical statistic. They would like to expunge any suggestion that God appeared incarnate on the earth, in the person and realm that the poets in Trott’s collection celebrate. Academics have been scrupulous to alter even AD (the Latin anno Domini, meaning “in the year of our Lord”) to CE, Common Era.

No matter how you change the name of centuries of artistry, however, or sift the entries in the pantheon of poets of the past, you always arrive at an unassailable truth: the tradition in Western literature is Christian.

You see glimmers of it in Beowulf (Verses added by a monk? Who can say a monk didn’t write Beowulf?) and then the métier arrives full-blown in Chaucer, with subject matter unclouded by Victorianism—which has no part in Christianity and dampens the appreciation of poetry for present-day Christians. The subject and object of the body is holy to God, the sacrifice of praise Christians are expected to offer, as Christian painters down the centuries have done. I know of Christian writers criticized in their community for using words like “naked”—a word the Bible leans on. If that’s your view, watch out for Chaucer, lock up Donne, banish husband-clinging Anne Bradstreet, expunge portions of T. S. Eliot, and keep an eye out for those doubled metaphors in Emily Dickinson, and please, please, please, steer clear of that master of double entendre, William-the-bard-from-Avon Shakespeare.

But, dear reader, I expect better of you, and propose you take Trott as your guide and with him meet the magnificent residents of A Sacrifice of Praise—centuries of poets with Christ at their center. It’s a commendable work Trott has arranged, and you’ll find Sauls and Jepthahs present, engaged in a hope that the highest reach of their words will touch the hem of the Word.

Two decades ago I was working on a novel and hit a stretch when the words ran like cream—a dozen pages or so. I usually write in pencil, anyway for my first draft, but that afternoon I was at a computer, because of time constraints and who knows what, diving through a section of action that had me so engaged I couldn’t pause to hit the “save” button, a necessary adjunct to word processing then, when a lightning bolt hit.

Out went the computer and the twelve pages dissolved in a sinking dot on the screen. This had happened before and I knew that with all the well-intentioned effort I might summon, I could never recapture the onrush of words as they had arrived. It wouldn’t do any good to turn on God or shake my fist at the electric company. By a force majeure the pages were gone, and perhaps a swift distillation would be better—or so I was trying to persuade myself to think. No hope of the electricity appearing seemed in the offing, in the midst of the thunderous downpour the arid high plains often receive on a sweltering summer day.

We lived twelve miles from the nearest town, dependent on the fallible intricacies of rural electricity. So I followed the impulse of my children, donned rubber boots and a slicker, and went out to enjoy this visitation on our parched land. I’m not sure I’ve been in a rain that heavy. I felt I was under a cataract, the weight of the water over my rain gear adding greater gravity to any movement I made. Runnels and rivulets were appearing where I’d never seen water, forcing grass flat, sliding down our lane, turning it slick, while ditches everywhere I looked were running clay-yellow and red-brown. The pour of rain increased, and a narrow creek at the bottom of our pasture, usually dry at that time of year, was spreading so wide it started to climb the incline of the pasture that bordered it.

According to a later news report we had six inches of rain in an hour. A gravel road runs between our pasture and the pasture of a neighbor, down an incline from our lane, and a mile and a half into his fields a hogback butte rears up two hundred feet high for a good mile. I heard runoff from the butte hit the already pouring water in the pasture across the road and told our children to move to higher ground, and then it came, a rumbling sea wave that hit the road with a tsunami crash and started boiling in a rise to gain its top, the road banked high here for a bridge that spans our usually dry creek.

The pressure of the water sent a fifty-foot column shooting through the arch of the bridge, raising the...