A Conversation with Jeremiah Webster

An Interview by Ben Palpant | Words Under the Words No. 4

This post belongs to a series of interviews between Ben Palpant and important contemporary poets.

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And I wonder, save for books,
who can warn us of the innate catastrophe? 
Who can rise from the ether and say,
I understand.
I read you.

from "Literacy" by Jeremiah Webster

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Rumor has it that Sir Walter Scott coined the phrase book-bosomed to describe someone who carries a book at all times. I hope the rumor is true. It's an endearing name. If Sir Walter Scott were still taking questions, I would ask him for a term to describe someone who carries hundreds of books in his heart. What's the name for someone who has memorized so much and loves so deeply that lines—both ancient and modern—spill out of him unbidden? That's Jeremiah Webster.

He greets me with his characteristically wide grin and after a few minutes talking about his family, I ask him to describe his relationship to poetry as a child.

"I think I found my way to poetry through the scriptures, through the psalms. I wouldn't say that it was a house that was particularly attentive to the poetic tradition apart from the fireside poets like Longfellow and Whittier, or the poets who graced Time magazine, like Frost and Eliot. They understood poetry to be an important inheritance, of course, but not a part of everyday life. But the cadence of language I got directly from my dad who worked all week on his sermons and would read them out loud. I have vivid memories of him reading from Ezekiel, Isaiah, Joshua, accompanied by my mother's violin and her students playing Minuet 1. That exchange of sound and sense, of language intertwined with music, was a constant in the household."

"The love of language was with you early."

"I have always loved language for its own sake, the beauty intrinsic in the thing itself. It's interesting to see how many poets of the twentieth century were pastor's kids. Even if they abandoned orthodoxy later, they found their music in the cradle of the church. I think it informed much of their poetic sense. Liturgical rhythms certainly helped me find my own voice as a poet. It's an inheritance for which I feel immense gratitude. The Good Spell, the God spell is something we should be singing all the time. That's what I hope to capture in my poetry."

"How does the Word inform your poetry? What are the practices that help you inform your poetry in that way?"

"We love what we pay attention to. My kids know that I love them when I look them in the eye, when I put my phone down and give them my attention. I think that has deep application to our work as poets. Taking the time to really pay attention. I think of prayer in this way. Why do we close our eyes to pray? It's a defiance of our empirical senses. It's a very public acknowledgment that the material world is not the sum total of reality. You have to shut off the noise to attend to the heavenly realm. At its best, the Christian life should be a way of enchantment and wonder. Jesus is always interrogating what we perceive to be true. 'You say...but I say to you.' The Christian life should lead us upward and onward to the beatitude economy where the worldly order of things is disrupted. This is the source of abundant life and I'm trying to capture that in my poetry, to mimic it in some small way."

"Would you say that writing poetry is for you an act of imagining that world in hope?"

"All the time. I’m participating in a discipline that the world says is totally worthless. It's taking time to pay attention to what the world doesn't value. Our reflexive move with music, with poetry, with art, is to ask where we can buy it.  Is it on Spotify? Eugene McCarraher critiques this reality with real precision in The Enchantments of Mammon. It's the commodification of communal experience. I think that's deeply problematic. It's an attempt to carry and control something that's immaterial. Poets spend their time and energy on something the world doesn't value and they do so in faith that the work will have enduring significance. It's a way to preemptively enter the habits of heaven. I write poetry because I can't help myself and because through it I experience the abundant life that Jesus promised we would know and experience."

"So it sounds like you feel a tension between the market economy and the gift economy. And yet you've had books published. How do you see the value of publication?"

"I think that's an open question. I will always write poems, but I wonder if they all need to get published. Maybe I'll just write them for my friends. In the past few years, I feel less compelled by the drive to publish. It's just not the reason why I write. Beyond the good mentoring and editing, the improvement of my craft, that comes from getting it out to a wider audience, I can't see many reasons to publish."

"Is there a way in which technology or publication can help give the gift to a wider audience?"

"I wrestle with that. I mean, Jesus didn't publish. Would his ministry have been more effective if he had shown up in a time of podcasts and blogs? Is that the most effective way to proliferate the message? I see it as a Faustian bargain. I've been told many times that I need a website, I need to get on social media. It just feels like self-aggrandizement, and I can’t take the marketing seriously. That’s the Gen-X punk rocker in me.  I would rather be with friends, sharing poetry, than spending my time managing those things. When I weigh the pros and cons, and I try to consider what the abundant life looks like, it looks more like this, like friends talking face to face. I'd rather continue ministering at my local parish than going out to make a name for myself. Hopkins names the crisis when he writes, “Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: / Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; / Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, / Crying What I do is me: for that I came.” Is life about being seen and heard or is it surrendering one's self into the life of God? I think it's the latter. My dad used to say it's better to be known by the nameless few than to be known by the nameless masses. I suppose that's the hobbit in me."

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How to Be a Poet—Wendell Berry

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"In 'How To Be a Poet,' Wendell Berry wrote, 'Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.' Is that connected to what you're talking about?"

"Yes, one of my professors at Whitworth said that poetry is a language approaching fruitful silence. A good poem is trying to get to a place where words fail. What does Eliot say? 

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

How foolhardy to think that I can write poetry post-Shakespeare, post-Donne, post-Dickinson. Are you kidding me? It's a fool's errand. My fear is that all the marketing and promotion of the sovereign self will make us lose sight of what Eliot says, 'there is no competition, there's only the fight to recover what was lost.' Our work is to try and get back to the garden, to the state of our first parents. I love the idea that God walked with them in the cool of the day. I want that. My heart longs for that. I'm old enough now to be able to list all the big singers and stars from when I was younger and my students don't know those names. They don't care. The only name that persists is the name of Jesus. It's astonishing. Athanasius commented that if Jesus is dead, why do people continue to encounter him on a daily basis?"

"One of the things that can arise in a community is rivalry. Envy occurs because we're trying to make a name for ourselves. How do we fight against it? Is it just a matter of being aware that it could be a temptation? We're prone to make sidelong glances, to see where we rank. It sounds like you're talking about a lifestyle that makes rivalry difficult."

"A few years ago, I came into a deep realization of the futility of that pursuit. In my office, I have hundreds of books. I could pull out the bestseller from any given year and I'm amazed at how many of those names have been forgotten. We have to rethink where the meaningful resides, reappraise what will really last in the kingdom. What treasures are we storing up in heaven? I haven't arrived anywhere near this place of total surrender, obviously, but I want to get closer. I want something more than the sum total of what self-actualized Jeremiah Webster has achieved."

"Can you elaborate on where you think the meaningful resides?"

"One of the things I like about Christ's parables is that he takes things that are relatively marginalized and easily missed and says the kingdom resides here—in a lost coin, lost sheep. It's in these very domestic, provincial objects that you're going to find the kingdom. I think we did the new atheists a favor for a time by propagating the notion that God was simply an Uber-Marvel version of ourselves. Colossians says he is before all things and he holds all things together. And the book of Acts says in him we live and move and have our being. He is sustaining us by his life-giving word. This revelation should make us very attentive to words and the way our words align with the Logos or diverge from the Logos. The Patristics suggest that God is active and present in the world in contrast to the deistic view that God is absent, that God has left us to make of things as we will. It's this view of God's intrinsic presence, the notion that he presides over everything, that emancipates my heart and re-enchants the world. It has really shaped my poetry of late."

"Do you find that your poems have become intensified by life experience?"

"I think I'm writing with a keener awareness of my mortality. What is it about the intimation of mortality that makes me a better writer? I feel the gravity of middle age. There's an urgency to my writing that wasn't there when I was twenty-two."

"You write in various forms, including free verse. How would you respond to those who favor form poetry over free verse?"

"George Steiner, the literary critic, has a wonderful phrase—nostalgia for the absolute."

"What's that from?"

"It's from a series of lectures that he gave. I wonder if people have a nostalgia for a time when poetic form was more reliable, when it was understood by the broader culture. Free verse exploded that reliability. This is nothing new. What is poiesis, but innovation? It was a scandal when Dante wrote his comedy in Italian, when Mozart wrote his opera in German, when Coleridge and Wordsworth wrote  about the Everyman … even Virgil prioritized shepherds over Caesar in Eclogues.. These are all innovative decisions. I think we're still in aesthetic recovery from the spiritual wasteland of modernity. I think the wars were so disruptive to our experience of reality, to what was predictable, reliable. I think they did something to our spirits and to our imaginations. I think free verse is attempting to make sense of that chaos. T.S. Eliot showed us how poetry might inhabit a region seemingly inhospitable to lyricism. And I think we're still questing for a music that can meet the discord of our present tense."

"How do we prevent the poems we write in free verse from capitulating to the chaos? There are plenty of poems out there that are, arguably, a chaos of words."

"During my MFA studies, I came to see that the reasons some of my peers were writing were fundamentally different from my reasons for writing. I was writing devotionally. Some (not all), however, employed language to demonstrate, sometimes violently, the meaningless of the Logos—to write that conviction on the page—and that brought about the death of beauty. I think poetry can be evangelistic in that it can reinvigorate people's sense of the good, the right, and the beautiful, rather than merely adding sound and fury to the void."

"Preserving a sense of beauty in free verse rests heavily on how you and when you end a line. So how do you make those decisions as a thoughtful Christian?"

"I try to end my lines at a place where the thought I'm trying to convey comes to a natural close. The syllabics will govern some of that. The line break is reliably governed by the rhythm I've established. Finishing a line on a strong verb, adjective, or noun is preferable. I also like to use line breaks as a way to set up an expectation and then subvert it, or meet that expectation, but broaden the initial presupposition of a given idea. Enjambment expands the range of the possible. And then there's the way the whiteness of the page is an equal conveyer of meaning, along with the words. I like to think of poems topographically, to see the poem as a kind of geography and allowing geography to communicate as much as the words, or at least provide assistance to the message. One example of this is a poem I wrote after my wife and I experienced a miscarriage. I shaped the poem in the form of a box. It was a kind of cenotaph for us. You know, a cenotaph was for those who lost a loved one out at sea, for those unable to recover the body. I needed some kind of incarnation and all I had was this poem. It became a sort of memorial."

"Christian Wiman once wrote, 'My God my grief forgive my grief tamed in language / to a fear that I can bear. / Make of my anguish / more than I can make. Lord, hear my prayer.' Poetry is a way for you to bear grief. You aren't writing it for others, you're writing it for yourself. If it is a blessing to others, then great, but writing poetry would still be worthwhile."

"Yes. Poetry is certainly how I negotiate and make sense of the world. I would like to meet the chaos of the world with a song, I think. That's Auden, right? He writes, 'if equal affection cannot be, let the more loving one be me.' That should be the heart's desire of every Christian, to be the more loving one. Poetry helps me inhabit this high calling, by the grace of God."

"The world is full of people who are calloused, disillusioned, and driven by mammon. They've lost a sense of child-like wonder. I hear you saying that writing poetry, at least in part, is a way to combat that tendency in yourself."

"Absolutely. I take myself too seriously with the best of them. Poetry is how I apprehend the reality that ‘Christ plays in ten thousand places.’ Hopkins again. Writing poetry can look irresponsible, uncouth in an age of digital liturgies, but it's how I stave off despair, stay curious,  wide-eyed. It's a space where I'm so invested in what I'm doing, so awake to what God is doing in creation, that I forget myself entirely. That's where I want to be."

"Do you see this tendency in young writers today? Do you see it in your students?"

"I love to tell the story of a student who entered class one day wearing a beret. I asked her what was up with the beret and she said, 'Well, I'm a poet now.' As if the beret was a magical talisman and by wearing it, she could suddenly write beautiful poetry in Iambic Pentameter." He laughs. "I wish it were true, but that’s  just not how poetry works."

"Your story reminds me of something Kate DiCamillo, the author of Winn Dixie and The Magician's Elephant, once said. She was told back in college that she was good with words, so she decided that meant she would be a famous author someday and she bought a bunch of black turtlenecks and spent her twenties sitting around and disdaining the world." We laugh. "It wasn't until later that she realized the only way to become a writer is to sit down and write."

"Exactly. Do the thing! There's always a temptation to romanticize it, but we have to write and we have to live in a posture of receptivity. Every encounter is charged with grandeur and we need eyes that see it."

"The poems that I enjoy, the poems that I want to memorize have that quality about them. They give a flash insight that makes it worth the journey. There's an instructive quality to that. It makes the world strange again, in a good way. Good poems widen my view."

Jeremiah Webster wrote a poem called "Life Work." In it, he says that after death, doctors, lawyers, and politicians will have nothing to do. Poets will be the only ones in the same line of work. I, for one, am thankful he has started on that eternal work and I look forward to reading his work here and in the hereafter. 

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Jeremiah Webster's poetry has appeared in numerous journals including North American Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Creek Review, Dappled Things, Relief, Anglican Theological Review, and Mockingbird. His books include After So Many Fires, Notes For A Postlude, and one fiction, Follow The Devil, Follow The Light.