Reading as Resurrection: A "New and Improved" Approach to Poetry

ABSTRACT: Dana Gioia speaks for many contemporary commentators when he writes: “Most Christians misunderstand the relationship of poetry to their faith,” regarding poetry as, at best, “an admirable but minor aspect of religious practice” (“Christianity and Poetry” [1]). This paper offers some reflections on the causes of poetry’s disconnection and devaluation, while providing some modest suggestions for redress of the current situation. Drawing on Don Bialostosky’s How to Play a Poem and its bold approach to poetic pedagogy, I will argue that any revival of the power of poetry in communities of faith needs to begin with revival of the teaching and critical reception of poetry itself in the broader culture. For Bialostosky, a disciple of Mikhail Bakhtin, good poems are less “verbal icon” than performative event: artfully orchestrated fictive speech that engages readers in participatory reanimation—or “resurrection”—of the poem’s music, in the broadest sense of that word.

Brennan O’Donnell is President Emeritus of Manhattan College in New York, where he served from 2009 – 2022. Previous appointments include five years as Professor and Dean of Fordham College, Fordham University, New York, and seventeen years as Professor of English at Loyola University, Maryland. Among his publications are two studies of William Wordsworth’s versification, Numerous Verse (Studies in Philology Texts and Studies, 1989), and The Passion of Meter (Kent State, 1995).