By Rowan Williams, Master of Magdalene College Cambridge, and Former Archbishop of Canterbury
Poetry is always an act of faith. People write poetry in the eccentric confidence that, by allowing ‘normal’ speech to be pressed and manipulated out of shape by some perception or obsession or unlikely recognition, they will discover something they didn’t know they knew. Poetry is among many other things a way of finding out what’s in your mind – which will include finding a great deal you didn’t consciously put there. When poetry is written out of a mind informed by specifically religious faith, you might well want to say that this includes a lot you didn’t even unconsciously put there – echoes of Simone Weil’s great aphorism that faith has to do with ‘the connections we cannot make’. The poetic discovery is a discovery of connectedness that has been stumbled across, not laboriously engineered – through assonance and puns and sometimes absurd associations (not unlike dreaming). The hard work of poetry is not putting together coherent schemes but feeling your way through words, weighing and trying them, as if they were material for a drystone wall (a metaphor that dawned on me in a poem I wrote over 30 years ago), finding the shape that is suggesting itself. And that happens when some sorts of guard are down, perhaps when ‘nothing is happening’.
The introduction underlines the double sense of ‘making nothing happen’. Poems don’t change the outside world (do they? depends what sort of change, I suppose), but they do change the landscape of language so that space appears. And the space that a poem creates for a reader or speaker is a sort of mirror of the space in the poet that allows all this work to be done, the ‘nothing’ that happens in the process of making a poem. The faith that out of this nothingness there is a shared discovery and a new space cleared is actually just as ambitious an act as any commitment to doctrine; indeed, we understand a lot better what a commitment to religious doctrine might be if we are able to sense that the words of our belief systems are supposed to ‘make nothing happen’ – to bring us to a space of discovery and recognition. All the authors in this collection would agree, I think, that being committed to a religious form of words and practices is not simply ‘the conscious occupation of the mind praying’ (Eliot’s phrase), but a set of habits that allows – and eventually demands – space in us. They write – poetry and prose alike – to demonstrate that these habits bring something to life, make space for others. So this is a book about a coming to life and a coming to stillness, together and inseparable; a serious and joyful gift, for which this reader is deeply grateful.