The Poetry of Glossolalia

To be present and yielded is what prayer is, is what a good poem should be: a presence that is actively conscious, but also unattached, allowing for—to rob Paul Celan of a word—an “encounter.”

Distinctly articulated in Christendom as a prayer that happens through the one who “is” praying—adapted as a poetic form, glossolalia could create a vibrant space for freshness in the poem, whether that be religious poetry or the poetry of anger, both of which we engaged in the class. 

We looked at glossolalia in three forms: (A) as Locked Tongues, language that is clearly written but utterly undecipherable; (B) as Enterable Tongues, language that is understandable when made plain or interpreted by another person who belongs to the community of the tongues-speaker; and (C), glossolalia as language that moves—through revision, editing—from Locked to Enterable Tongues. But not even Locked glossolalia, which seems to have no evident, coherent meaning, lacks what Paul the Apostle called “signification.” 

Bettina Judd, in her essay “Glossolalia: Lucille Clifton’s Creative Technologies of Becoming,” describes how this form allowed “Black women writers not only to know and describe the contours of her experience, but to speak to others [those within her community] as well.” To make something that cannot be understood is freedom and power—to be spoken through, as in Clifton’s case, is the “signification.”

Glossolalia, then, is Surrender. Religious poetry is today tired, perhaps because the poem is bound by a rigid idea before it even commences. The force that drives the poem must solely be the desire to be driven. Lorca puts it this way, “[T]he duende is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought.” The struggle is against Knowing. Once the poem begins to dawn on you, let it go. We must forget what we know. Or the poem will come out heavy on nothing.

To make something vital when we draft, we discussed dislocating/ disorientating/ deconstructing language. Consider this saying of Christ’s—“Break down this temple and I will raise it up in three days.” For a revivification to occur to the edifice of religious poetry, it must be brought to a kind of destruction as we write. As with the statement by Christ, the peculiar abundance of the image we arrive at—and its truth—is understood only in retrospect; its immensity grows. In Danez Smith’s “from summer, somewhere,” boys are not born, they fall out of the sky. Snow falls black.

Also, we discussed miniaturizing and exaggerating. Think of a star trapped in a birdcage in the eye of a child. The body as the temple of God. In Lamentations, Jeremiah says a people have swallowed Jerusalem. What happens when we take the grand and place it near or inside the little? And when we stretch the little beyond measure?

Christian Wiman talks about the need for the concretization of abstractions in religious poetry. Could we domesticize love, grace, faith, joy—that is, make them particular in terms of objects in the house? An example taken from Kaveh Akbar (5): “your [God’s] myriad signs, which seem/ obvious now as a hawk’s head on an empty plate.”

On the other hand, to write a poem about the inner space is to speak of an “undetermined [and undeterminable] space.” It is possible to make great poetry about faith and anger by shunning description. Language is allowed to flow without taking any root. “Elsewhere” is an example. 

Roots are not a problem, however. But a poem that is “all roots” will fail. We looked at how some of the Black African poets of the twentieth century remade what they took. To paraphrase Wiman, their work successfully mixes memory and imagination, becoming itself a distinct entity. To reclaim a tradition for themselves, what they did was to give their songs to Surrender, wrestle with Knowing, dissolve and dislocate what they borrowed, and—usually—they concretized abstractions via the Black body. The body as sacrament, and as testament. The poetry of glossolalia testifies to the presentness of the body, the urgency of the beating blood.

Below are some of the writing prompts we worked with during the two-hour session.

A. Write a poem in which God is doing something seemingly trivial. Cooking, say. Washing plates or clothes. Be particular—what kind of clothes? Linen, handkerchief, ankara dresses, blue scarfs, silk robes. Think of Christ washing the feet of His disciples. He could be playing a flute. He could be writing a poem. A near example is George Herbert’s “Prayer (I).”

B. Imitate Paul Celan’s Surrealist Questions. How did grace arrive? How many ribs has a hallelujah? Let your answers to these questions be framed in terms of the particular—love is an apple pierced through with a nail. 

C. If you speak in tongues, try writing while simultaneously speaking in tongues. 

D. Close your eyes for a brief moment. Think of a kitchen. Note five things in the kitchen. Write five statements: in each statement, give an abstraction a concrete, kitchen-y meaning. Describe, say, grace in terms of an object in the room or in the kitchen—grace is a paper bag filled with cereal, for example. 

E. Write a prayer—begin with Dear God or Holy Father—that has the feel of a conversation with a friend. Read Kaveh Akbar’s “Despite My Efforts Even My Prayers Have Turned into Threats” for a lead.

Poems

• Despite My Efforts Even My Prayers Have Turned into Threats, Kaveh Akbar
• Little Prayer, Danez Smith
• From summer, somewhere, Danez Smith
• Prayer (I), George Herbert
• Glossolalia, Eugenia Leigh
• Prayer, Carol Ann Duffy 
• The Peace of Wild Things, Wendell Berry
• The Passage, Christopher Okigbo
• Death in the Dawn, Wole Soyinka
• Viaticum, Birago Diop
• Elsewhere and Hard Night, Christian Wiman
• A Dog Was Crying To-Night in Wicklow Also, Seamus Heaney 
• Luke 22.39—45

Essays

• Attention and Will, Simone Weil
• A Conversation with Christian Wiman, Image Journal
• The Duende, Federico García Lorca
• Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space