Poetry, as a popular literary form, is quietly but confidently emerging from the shadows of the last half-century or so, and with that renewal has come greater opportunity but also new challenges for Christian poets. How does one write poetry that is both good in its literary art and also engages with questions of faith? Our wider culture today is increasingly secular, lacking even basic cultural familiarity with the Bible and the basic concepts of Christianity. There can be a temptation to think that the only alternative to compartmentalizing one’s faith and excluding it from one’s poetry is to write triumphalistic or overtly pious and uplifting poetry for fellow believers. As the sarcastic tone of my last phrase suggests, the latter alternative does not lead, on the whole, to good literature.
Happily, however, we now have a number of significant contemporary Christian poets who show how it’s to be done right: faith that is evident but not triumphalistic or forced (not every poem has a specifically Christian message!), clear and fresh language, engagement with traditional literary techniques and forms, and indeed a sense of tradition not as nostalgia but as a living continuity from past to present. Some of the leading figures include Dana Gioia, Malcolm Guite, Paul Murray, Sally Read, and James Matthew Wilson. One of the reasons that I think this poetic revitalization will be a lasting one is that it has range: There are more poets who are rising to the occasion than I could list.
And so I was very pleased to be able to interview Kelly Belmonte about her newest volume of poetry, The Mother of All Words.
Kelly Belmonte, a native of New York who now lives on the coast of Maine, names among her poetic influences Kobayashi Issa, R.M. Rilke, Mary Oliver, and Frank X. Gaspar. Her poems appear in two anthologies edited by Malcolm Guite, The Word in the Wilderness and Love, Remember, as well as in journals such as AltarWork, Atlas Poetica, Barren Magazine, Relief Journal, The Literary Nest, Open: Journal of Arts & Literature, and Ruminate. Her earlier poetic collections are Three Ways of Searching, Spare Buttons, and Transit, an artistic collaboration with photographer Tom Darin Liskey.
Holly Ordway: Kelly, thanks for doing this interview! One of the characteristics of your poetry that I feel really brings it to life is that you draw on the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and experiences of everyday life. (There’s a zucchini in one of your poems!) I know it’s rather a hackneyed question, but can you say a bit about where you get your ideas, or how you shape an image or experience into a poem?
Kelly Belmonte: Hmmm. Every time someone asks this, my answer changes! It’s always: Notice everything. That’s always where ideas come from, but not all things that you notice will end up as an idea that ends up in a poem. Right now, I think the answer is more like this: I get my ideas for writing from writing.
It’s like that old saying: “I don’t know what I’m thinking until I write about it.” I’m not sure who said that, but it’s true for me many times. For example, the other day I was frustrated as I felt like I was in a writing slump because I hadn’t written a poem for weeks. But I hadn’t really sat down to write creatively for myself for weeks either, so I was kind of just stewing in my juices. Then I had my monthly writing group with a couple of friends, and I gave a prompt, and we just sat there together and wrote for a few minutes then shared our raw writings. My scribbles were just that, but the next day I shaped those scribbles into a poem, which was not bad. I never would have had the idea for that poem without starting to just move the pen across the page with no real thought to what it might end up being about. That’s often where the ideas come from.
Can you say a bit about how your Christian faith shapes your writing?
My Christian faith shapes a good deal of my thinking about writing and, I hope, my writing itself (maybe not as much as it should, but certainly more than I intend). It all begins at the beginning, so to speak. First in Genesis: “In the beginning, God created.” Then echoed by John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” God said, and it was. He used words, the first tool in the great Artist’s first studio, to make stuff. And he was the Word. And it was all good. He made us image bearers to carry on this forever work of making good with words. That is the foundational building block for me.
My poems don’t always say something explicitly “faithy.” I am not trying to evangelize through my poems; if I’m trying to do anything in my poetry by way of invitation to readers, it’s simply to invite them into a moment and experience it with me from my perspective within that poem. It’s an invitation to connect. I’m not asking them to believe in what I believe or how I believe it but just to rest in that moment with me for a bit. If that can make a difference for them in bringing them closer to faith, glory to God. If they leave it there with a shrug, we had that moment, and that’s not a bad thing. The only way I know how to write poetry is to write my experience—my life—and that is deeply informed by my faith, my relationship with God, and my deep reverence for Scripture.
That said, I’m not shy about being explicit about my faith in my poetry if it’s what the poem is about. For example, the last third of The Mother of All Words is a section made up mostly of prayers as poetry or poems about prayer, such as “A Prayer for an Offended World”:
Where no one is left who
in truth can say, “How could you?”
with authority, without a trace of irony.
Return to us our shock and shame.
Relieve us of our need to blame.
Receive our sacrifice of self.
Let us begin again.
Amen.
And this closing micro-poem, “Benediction”:
We will never have
all that it takes,
hence the miracle
and the grace.
Some of my favorites in Mother of All Words are those micro-poems! What’s your perspective on them as a poet?
For me, micropoetry allows for a snapshot of a moment in time while also allowing for deeper reflection. I find the world around me inspiring when I take the time to notice. For example, here’s one for which the inspiration was literally looking up after a hurricane and thinking, “Wow, the sky looks like the color of a fading bruise”:
After the storm, sky
the color of a bruise
fading
Giving ourselves the time to notice things and to notice how and what we think about things—this is the great privilege of being alive and being a poet. It’s a way to practice gratitude.
One last question. The title of your new book is very intriguing. What is “the Mother of All Words”?
There’s a bit of an ironic inspiration for the title. Back when I was first putting this collection together, and I suppose even before that when I was writing the title poem (before I knew it would be the title poem of a poetry collection), I kept hearing in the news about “the Mother of All Bombs” (or the MOAB, for short). I thought, “Wow, that’s weird, combining a nurturing/parental image like ‘mother’ with the devastation of a bomb.” So I did some more thinking and looking and realized that “mother of all” was used in many places to describe something that is beyond all others, something epic and larger and all encompassing. It was a much fiercer way of looking at the word “mother.” And since in this collection, the “Mother of All Words” is (spoiler alert) love, I am at a basic level saying that love is the most powerful and fierce and epic thing of all.
While the overarching theme of this collection is love, there’s a subtext of grace as well. There’s so much that is amazing and beautiful in life that we did nothing to deserve, but it was God’s good pleasure to create and give it to us and say, “Enjoy.” Because he loves us. That’s grace.
The poem “It’s About Time” is one of the more autobiographical ones in this collection. I spend most of the poem beating myself up for not being prepared to send my only son off to college, to “launch an almost-adult human / into an over-ripe world.” By the end, I finally cut myself some slack:
It’s about time
I wrap this up and send it to my younger self
with a note that says something like:
You’ll never get used to it. You never had to.
That’s also grace, and I think we need more of it in our relationships and toward ourselves. We need to stop with the stone throwing and the self-flagellation. Look around. Enjoy God’s amazing grace.
The poems in this collection are my attempt to wrestle with—and rest with—the beautiful and the broken (and the overlap of both) in this world. I guess you could say they are my way to love a world that is sometimes hard to love but is also really quite spectacular at the same time.
Thank you, Kelly!
The Mother of All Words is available from the publisher Bandersnatch Books.