One art form that people often find intimidating, confusing, or perhaps simply don’t think to include in a worship service is poetry. In reality, poetry is already all around us: it’s in the songs we sing along to in the car or worship with together on Sunday mornings. Scripture is also full of poetry: poetry that praises, like The Song of the Sea in Exodus, poetry that mourns, like the book of Lamentations, and poetry that cries out for God’s help, like the Psalms or the book of Job. In fact, we can find poetry for almost every human emotion in the Book of Psalms. There are poems of praise, thanks, confession, petition, blessings, and curses.
The language of poetry is set apart from our everyday language. But this set-apartness is not meant to make it confusing or hard to understand. Instead, poetry’s strangeness helps us see things more clearly. Poetry often uses metaphors or sound patterns like rhythm and rhyme that sound different than the way we typically talk. Poetry brings attention to language like this in order to make us uncomfortable. Making us uncomfortable helps us see the world in a new way.
When you read a good poem, you don't leave the same person you were when you found it.
What poetry can do:
This process of making us uncomfortable is called defamiliarization, and it can work in two directions. Poetry can make the unfamiliar, familiar. OR it can make something familiar strange. Let's look at two examples of how this works:
- First, by making the unfamiliar familiar, poetry can help us understand things that are hard to explain. Say an astronaut returns from walking on the moon. How might the astronaut explain this experience to the people on earth? To help us understand his experience, the astronaut can connect the unfamiliar thing (walking on the moon) to something most people have experienced – perhaps feeling weightless in a pool.
This also applies to difficult concepts, complex emotions, or even traumatic experiences. You may not have been through the same hard thing as someone else, but a good metaphor can help you to resonate with their emotions. The Psalms do an incredible job of explaining complex emotions with similes that draw on everyday objects. For example, in Psalm 22, the Psalmist says:
"I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast;"
Even though we don't know the context for the Psalmist's pain, we can connect with the feelings expressed here because of the use of familiar similes: we have all spilled water or burned a candle down to a stub. More than that, we've also all felt like a candle burning down into a puddle, like everything solid in us has melted or crumbled. By using these metaphors, the Psalmist conveys that his body and spirit are fragile, easily spilled like water – he used to feel useful, but now he is wasted, evaporating into nothing. By using figurative language to connect something hard to explain with something familiar, poetry can help us to connect with one another and know we're not alone.
- The second kind of defamiliarization is the exact opposite of the first. It takes something familiar and makes it strange. If you drive past the same building every day, you might stop noticing it. By describing it in a strange way, poetry can wake you up to what is already right in front of you. Emily Dickinson does this when she says “Hope is a thing with feathers / that perches in the soul” or opens her poem about a steam train with the peculiar statement “I love to see it lap the Miles, / and lick the valleys up.” We can sense her suspicion of the train because she describes is as quite literally consuming the landscape!
The 20th-century American poet Elizabeth Bishop was also an expert at making everyday objects seem fresh and strange. She draws some odd comparisons to describe a fish she caught: “his brown skin hung in strips / like ancient wallpaper” with “shapes like full-blown roses / stained and lost through age.” Combining the unexpected image of your grandma's old floral wallpaper with the skin of an old fish helps us to appreciate the fish's age and points to a kind of eroded beauty that we might not have seen before.
As you write your own poems or songs, lean into the powers of defamiliarization by getting creative, concrete, and highly specific with your description, images, and metaphors. With thousands of years of Christian writing preceding us, it is sometimes easy to slip into cliché. While these common metaphors might be true, they are so familiar that your audience may simply gloss over them without registering their implications. One strategy to help find more dynamic metaphors is to make a list of all the parts or features of the topic you want to describe. Be as literal and as detailed as you can. If it’s an emotion, what does this emotion do in your body? Then next to each feature, list a couple of possible metaphors that could help explain that specific concept. If you are trying to make something familiar unfamiliar, choose strange and visceral points of comparison (like “The Fish”). If you are trying to make something abstract or unfamiliar more accessible, choose common, relatable comparisons (like Psalm 22).
Poetry and Worship
So, what does this all have to do with worship? Poetry can help us feel connected to others, and poetry can wake us up when we have become complacent. Poetry doesn’t just convey ideas; it helps us connect our heads to our bodies through its obsession with the materiality of language – its visual features, its sounds. Poetry’s rhythms, rhymes, repetitions, and appeals to the five senses help make an idea that might initially seem abstract felt in the body. Those are things we could use more of in our worship together.
Although we already encounter poetry through scripture and song in the context of our worship, there are plenty of other ways we could bring poetry into a service, liturgy, or devotional practice. Here are a few suggestions.
You could write poems for the worship service:
- call to worship
- confession of sin
- prayers of praise, thanks, or petition
- blessing to send a ministry partner or the entire congregation back out into the world
You could also write occasional poems that align with events in the church calendar or about what is happening in the world around us:
- Advent readings
- Lenten devotionals
- VBS – kids are great at memorizing things that rhyme
- Meditations on injustice
- Laments to express grief or loss (see my earlier blog post on “How Poetry Helps Us Dwell in Difficulty”)
As you consider what to write about, you can start by identifying some topics that would benefit from poetry’s power of defamiliarization: what concepts in Scripture seem abstract or hard to understand? What creative metaphors could you use to make them more accessible? On the flip side, what ideas have become too comfortable for the church? They might have heard the Gospel a thousand times – how can you write a poem that makes that familiar story feel fresh again?
For further reading, check out “How Poetry Helps us Dwell in Difficulty” by Olivia Milroy Evans.
Olivia Milroy Evans is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Samford. She teaches and writes about poetry, world literature, documentary, and television and serves as the faculty advisor for the Samford Writers Club. At Animate 2024, she taught a toolbox class on poetry. She holds an MA from the University of Virginia and a PhD from Cornell University. Originally from North Carolina, she completed a BA at Wake Forest University before teaching literature, rhetoric, and creative writing at a classical Christian high school in Virginia. When she’s not proselytizing for poetry, she enjoys analyzing tv shows with friends, learning to paint, and spending time with her husband, Daniel, and their dogs, Bingley and Darcy.
