Recovering the How of Literature with Dr. Doug Sikkema and Dr. Matthew Mullins

Transcript

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What, Why, How

Dr. Doug Sikkema: Good to see everyone again this evening, those of you who are remote as well. But we're going to be talking about, Dr. Mullins and I, Matt and I - I am going to call you Matt while we're up here - is the what, the why, and how of living books. And obviously we do not have time to make this exhaustive. So we're gonna be moving through sort of “the what” question first. I'm gonna talk a little bit about what it is that makes literary writing distinct and then Matt's going to talk [more] about that. Then we're going to do a little exercise to sort of unpack that. Second, we’re going to be looking at “the why”. Why is literary writing different than other forms of writing? I'm going to talk a little bit, Matt is going to talk a little bit, and then we'll get into a little exercise in a reading where we're going to invite you sort of into a class, if you will, of Matt and I basically just talking about two of our favorite poems. And we'll have a reading of them and then unpack the questions we would ask to make sense of these poems. 

What Is Literary Writing?

So to start us off, “What is Literary writing?” One of the things I love doing with my classes when I teach literature - and I did teach high school English, actually I've done this with grades seven and eight, I've done this with Grade 9 through 12, and I've even done this with University students and it's always interesting to see how they unpack it. And the idea I use comes from this short book, An Experiment in Criticism, by C.S. Lewis. If you've not read this book before I'd really encourage you to read it because it's wonderfully written and the very last chapter is where Lewis gets into unpacking the distinctives of what makes literature, literature. So there's two words he uses that I think are really important: logos and poiema, logos and poiema. And if you're in the Christian tradition, you might understand that we use that word logos in John 1:1, "In the beginning was the Word the Word was with God." That Greek word is logos. We also see it in kind of words like biology, logic. And poiema obviously reminds us of poetry and poems. Now what Lewis is talking about is that literary writing is distinct by fusing these two things together. So he says,

“When we take literature in the narrowest sense, the question is more complicated. A work of literary art can be considered in two lights. It both means and is. It is both Logos (something said) and Poiema (something made). As logos, it tells a story, or expresses an emotion, or exhorts or pleads or describes or rebukes or excites laughter. As Poiema, by its aural beauties and also by the balance and contrast and the unified multiplicity of its successive parts, it is an objet d’ art, a thing shaped so as to give great satisfaction. From this point of view, and perhaps from this only, the old parallel between painting and poetry is helpful.” 

All right. So, what does that actually mean? What he's talking about. There's this Canadian media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, who was famous for saying the medium is the message, right? The medium is the message, right. Television, radio. They don't contain messages; they are the message. The thing that we wrap the idea in, right, it does something to that that message right.

So what we just listened to - the beautiful music - that's almost like pure poiema. Now, the prepratory remarks are really interesting to me because I was thinking oh, there's actually a way to read the logos out of this. There's ideas in that music, but music is almost pure form, right. And we have to pull the meaning from it. When we're talking about a literary text because it's words and they're meaningful, there is an idea and if you're paying attention to Matt's talk this morning, he was talking about how that works out in our reading of the Bible.

So one of the things I do with my class is we just talk about the way that form shapes the idea. And if you take something as simple as the song Three Blind Mice and you ask them to put that song as a country western song or a rap or a classical piece of music. Those same words the same logos actually means something different. Sometimes I use the famous contemporary poet who's recent poem says "the haters are going to hate hate hate hate hate hate and and you have to shake it off.." So Taylor Swift, right? She has this song and it's really up beat and peppy, and Ryan Adams took the exact same lyrics and he actually redid the whole album and he put it to this really sort of minor key rendition and also all the same lyrics start to mean something different.  So, it's actually a lot of fun for students to see that there's not just an idea and a form. These things are working together, and the form controls the idea. So, hold that thought and Matt’s gonna talk a little bit about line, and we're going to see how this works out in a poem. 

A Concrete Example

Dr. Matthew Mullins: Yeah. These are such important ideas, but sometimes we can get lost in the idea, get lost in the abstract. One concrete example: What do we mean by this? Just think about the line in a poem. Usually, in prose writing, the end of a line is determined by, well, in our day and age, you know, the margin and your computer and your writing software where it sends you on to the next line. Back in the day of typewriters, you run out in the end and you ding back over.

But in a poem, the end of the line is not usually determined by the space of the page but rather is determined by the poet making a very conscious, intentional decision to turn the line, and this is a great quote from Mary Oliver's Poetry Handbook. She tells us in fact that, “The word verse [think about a single line of verse] derives from the Latin and carries the meaning ‘to turn’.” It's actually an agrarian turn or word. The verse is meaning kind of when you get to the end of the row and you have to turn and start a new row and whatever you're planting beans, potatoes, corn, whatever. And so at some point, right, you have to make this conscious decision to turn, and that's just one concrete example of how we might begin to attend, to pay attention to not just the logos of a work, of written art, of a work of literature, but also to the poiema, the form.

Look at a line of poetry, which we're going to do here in just a second and you can ask a question. The easiest thing to ask would be like “why does it turn here”? Why here and not somewhere else? Is it in the middle of a thought or the middle of a sentence? Does it seem like we always get to complete the thought before we go on to the next one or is the thought broken up? Just really basic questions that you can ask about a line in a poem that can help you start paying attention to and just noticing poiema.

Questions to Ask

• Why does it turn here?
• Why here and not somewhere else?
• Is it in the middle of a thought or the middle of a sentence?
• Does it seem like we always get to complete the thought before we go on to the next one or is the thought broken up?

Dr. Doug Sikkema: Yeah. all right, so I believe you're going to read this correct Matt? (Yes) But let me just set it up a little bit. So this poem is by William Blake. Many of you are probably very familiar with it. You probably read it. You probably taught it at some point. I usually use this poem, and I pair it with the pair that it comes with, which is "The Tyger," and we'll be getting to that at the end of this, but these are from a collection called Songs of Innocence and Experience so they kind of come in pairs and as you know, perhaps, William Blake was an engraver, so he Illustrated these poems and they were actually on plates where you have the one poem on the one side and the other poem on the other side. So "The Lamb" and "The Tyger" actually are two plates on the same side. Okay, so keep that in mind and if you're not familiar with that poem don't worry about it. We'll get to The Tyger later. But Matt's going to read for us "The Lamb." Then we're going to think about logos, poiema and verse.

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‍Dr. Matthew Mullins: So, as I'm reading, think specifically about that question. Where does the line turn? Where does Blake break the line and be thinking about some of those options. Middle of a thought? End of a sentence? Middle of a sentence?  Okay. So here's the poem "The Lamb." 

Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o'er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice:
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee

Little Lamb I'll tell thee,
Little Lamb I'll tell thee:
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb:
He is meek & he is mild,
He became a little child:
I a child & thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.
Little Lamb God bless thee.
Little Lamb God bless thee.

Dr. Doug Sikkema: All right. Now in kind of Mason fashion, the first thing I want you to do, so you've been thinking about the turn and the line and the verse, but first kind of narrate back to us. What's the idea here? And I know I'm going to commit the cardinal sin that Matt doesn't like is like - stripping the idea right out of the poem. But what is Blake getting at? What's the kind of central driving idea? And there could be a few here, but what's the idea that's being conveyed in this poem. So I'm going to give you like 30 seconds. Just talk to your neighbor, talk to somebody right beside you and see if you could just sum it up, paraphrase it. Could you narrate back to us what this poem is about? Okay, so I'll give you 30 seconds to a minute.

All right. I know. I know, we got to move this thing a little bit too quick, but could somebody share with us, the group? How would you paraphrase this? What would be that driving idea? Oh now it got real quiet. [Audience idea: The form is question and answer.] That's good. What is the question/answer about? If we had to sum it up, right, the question is like who created us? Well, God created us. God made the lamb and God calls himself a lamb. Okay. So the driving conceit, the questionwith this idea of creation.

Now the question is well, how does Blake communicate this? So verse is one of the things we can look at, and I want you to look at that but consider other things too. Like what's the rhyme scheme? What's the rhythm? How is this broken down into parts? And then it's really interesting to start making the connections with the how and the what. Does that "how" help direct us to the "what"? Okay, so just the people beside you. I'll give you a little bit more time here, like a minute, minute and a half, maybe two minutes to talk about the the how, the form, the poiema. What are some of the things you notice in terms of how this poem works? All right. So talk with the people beside you and I'm really curious to see all the things you guys come up with because a lot of things going on here.

"At this point, again, when you're teaching you're just getting students to notice the "how." The "why" question, which is to me the really interesting question, where we really get into the work of poetry, can come later."

All right, so lots of good ideas out there and usually when I do this and I teach this I have my blackboard and chalk my favorite technologies and I just get the students to come up and write down all the hows and the things that they remember about how poetry works, right. Some of them still remember those fancy words like iambic trimeter, right? And they really impress me, but rhyme scheme, things like that. So what are some of the the hows that you noticed? Yes. (audience member speaking) Okay, so you're frustrated by the lack of punctuation? (audience member speaking) That's good. Right, and I, these are like my people right? We love grammar and punctuation. Yes, and that should frustrate us. So there's no punctuation. So that's interesting, and we're asking a lot of questions. As was noted earlier, this is question/answer but we don't have the punctuation. Okay, and already at this point, again, when you're teaching you're just getting students to notice the "how." The "why" question, which is to me the really interesting question, we really get into the work of poetry, can come later. So let's just get the hows out there. So what else?

(audience member speaking) Okay, right. So we have some sort of slant rhyme. Yeah, but we have "thee, thee, feed, mead." So,  AABBC, right, pretty simple rhyme scheme. Right, "lamb" and "name" though kind of throw us off a little bit. Okay good. What else? Is that a hand? (Yep, this side). (audience member speaking) Oh in each of the rhyming couplets. Okay, right, "little lamb who made thee, little lamb who made thee," it's kind of a repetition, right, almost like a Psalm. It's using a similar kind of pattern to the Psalms where you say a line and you kind of repeat it in a slightly different way, right? Which again can add to the how, right. What is the kind of allusion, the allusivity, that Blake is bringing to his readers, good. 

Dr. Matthew Mullins: Bonus points, if you know the poetic term for that intensification in the second line. The main form of biblical poetry Is parallelism, that's it right there. Oh double bonus points throughout the room.

Dr. Doug Sikkema: Okay, awesome. And I'm glad you noticed, too. I think somebody mentioned this is one of the clear formal structures of this, to how, is that break in the middle. Okay, there's actually a physical space, a physical gap. This is a two-part poem. There's two stanzas and there's a turn. That's happening. Right? Did anybody talk about that? What's going on in those two parts? Why is he breaking in those two parts?

"One easy question: How else could it have been done? Not to just imagine alternative endings, but to better understand what's actually there in front of you."

Dr. Matthew Mullins: One really easy question you can always ask for yourself, for your students, your kids, whatever, is for instance, there’s two stanzas to Doug's point. So why is it two instead of just one altogether all the way through? How else could it have been done? Not to just imagine alternative endings, but to better understand what's actually there in front of you.  There's two. Ostensibly, there could have been just one or could have been five. So why is it why, why break it in half like this? 

Dr. Doug Sikkema: Question/answer, right, and we're moving into even the second part which is the answer, you're absolutely right, is a beginning to sort of some symbolism and allegory, right. It's not just the answer to the question. But it's like I'm also going to give you a way to, like, interpret who I am, right? I'm your Creator, and I'm also called a lamb.  

When you ask the question, why is Blake making these choices? The form that he's giving us is communicating that central idea this is one of the songs of innocence. It's a song of a child. It kind of feels and it alludes to not just the songs, but sort of a child's Sunday school rhyme, and it's asking one of the most complicated questions we can ask right? Where did we come from? Who made everything? Why is there something rather than nothing, and I know if you have kids that are like three to five they ask them the deepest philosophical existential questions, right? I know we're, like, driving to school and I'm in a race and they're like "why is there evil in the world?" and I'm like, "well, we don't have time to discuss this right now." Now this poem is giving us an easy form. It's "Little lamb, who made thee, Dost thou know who made thee?" Right, simple, expected form a a b b c c. The form itself is communicating the ease of the answer.

Right. So the whole thing is moving to give us some kind of satisfaction when you get to the end of a rhyme that has a perfect rhyme to it, there's a satisfaction to that. We like that. When there's an answer to the question that we ask, we like that it resolves itself. And I wanted to think about that, especially when we get to the end and we look at "The Tyger" because that song of experience is going to do some very different things with the form. Even asking the same question, it's going to come up with different answers. 

Dr. Matthew Mullins: It's such a good point to go all the way back to the question about, well, why break the line here? Why turn the verse here? Think, in part, to create that feeling, sense, that musicality of satisfaction with those rhymes as we go if it's exactly what Doug was just saying. All right.

Why We Read Literature

Dr. Doug Sikkema: So, why do we read literature? That was very, very briefly sort of the what makes literature distinct when we talk about why educators should devote time to literature. There are sort of three things. I'm going to try to kind of fit them into the Mason model of an atmosphere, a discipline, and a life. And I know the maybe fourth part of that, the fourth pillar, is the science of relations, which is what I will be really focusing on in my talk tomorrow morning. So I'm going to leave that aside.

Atmosphere

One of the things that I love about literary writing, in particular living books, is the atmosphere it gives us of many friends, many voices, right? It helps us sort of populate our atmosphere with these relationships with other voices and other people. Specifically though, those other people are giving us language for experience. And last night in our fireside chat, we talked a little bit about this. But one of the things that I love about literature, poetry, but specifically novels and short stories, is that an author can put into words an experience or encounter that you've had. And you've never really thought about it until you've read it, and it kind of shines a light on your reality in a beautiful way, and I see some people nodding their heads because if you've read books, you love books, you know this experience I'm talking about. 

"So our literary artists are helping us expand our ability to think well, because they're giving us the language for experience."

The Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye said, “There is no thinking without language.” There are no thoughts without words. So our literary artists are helping us expand our ability to think well, because they're giving us the language for experience. So it's part of the atmosphere. Our atmosphere is made up of the words we have for our experience. 

Discipline

The second piece is the discipline. All art forms, whether you're talking about music, painting, architecture, they're really helping us focus our attention and our perception. Literary art is no different. And when you really take the time to go line by line over a poem or read and reread a short story or a novel, what you're really doing is training yourself in the discipline, the habit, of paying attention and perceiving. Perceiving the world. And our literary artists really help us focus. Right? What we should be paying attention to in the world. 

Life

And finally a life. One of the reasons I love literary writing is because I think part of a full life, and I know last night I quoted Mark Edmondson, and he said that the English major gets a thousand lives and, if you were here last night, the economics major only gets about one life.

"Part of a really healthy, rich life is one of imagination; one where we enter into the shoes of other people and other times in other places."

The literary life and, this again is an idea from an Experiment in Criticism that Lewis talks about, he says that when I read, I get to be 10,000 men yet I remain myself. He says in Modern Life, there's always this kind of pull to two poles. One is to make the self absolute; that we’re these autonomous individuals and you have within you all the resources you need. He says that actually leaves us alienated from other people and alone. And so many of the forces of the modern world move us into this kind of idea of autonomous individualism. The other fear, though, is that we lose ourself in the mass; that we actually dissolve ourselves and join the collective. And Lewis says literature, good reading, actually lets you have both of those, right. The dignity of being a person, what Mason would say is a very good thing, but also the ability to lose yourself in 10,000 other perspectives and voices. So, I think part of a really healthy, rich life is one of imagination; one where we enter into the shoes of other people and other times in other places.

Living Books

Dr. Matthew Mullins: So to build on what Doug's just said, I had three ideas as well about why this is so important, and by looking at logos and poiema, by even just talking about what it would mean to pay attention to line breaks, and I don't care if you're reading William Blake or we talked in my workshop this morning about Shel Silverstein, we talked about kids poetry. It doesn't really matter as long as what I like about Mason's idea about of living books.

"The living book doesn't have to fit into some pre-categorized canon or list. It's something that comes to life for you and brings you to life."

A living book is a different thing than the category of a great book, right? The living book doesn't have to fit into some pre-categorized canon or list. It's something that comes to life for you and brings you to life. And even just learning how to pay attention to the turn in a line is a way to begin to read literature well.

Reading for Pleasure

Maybe even one of my three reasons is [to read] for pleasure rather than to think about it as eating your vegetables, though vegetables are very good. In fact, we mostly only eat vegetables at my house. So, but you get the metaphor I'm striving for here. But to read for pleasure, maybe, rather than plugging into the box, you know, for two more hours tonight.

Reading to Resist

And then to build on what Doug said about a discipline, I think about that discipline specifically also as a form of resistance to this economy, and I don't just mean dollars and cents but this economy that is competing for my attention all the time mostly, like, right, all the time. And which is cultivating kind of an anti-discipline in our minds and inability to give our attention to the things that are good and worth it in our lives, and so cultivating these habits of literary reading can strengthen in you an ability to kind of resist that economy that is competing for your attention.

Expanded Horizons

And then my last one I think is about the science of relations, that part of the Mason program expanding horizons, that literature can give us access to the experience of others. It can't give us their experiences, right? It doesn't take us through that, but it gives us maybe a window into someone else's world, perhaps making the ability to relate and understand and even maybe empathize with others more possible than it was before. 

A Reading: Gilead

Dr. Doug Sikkema: All right. So I want to think about this idea of the why of reading, and I'm going to read a short piece from Marilyn Robinson's Gilead, a novel that might be familiar to you. If it's not, I'd really suggest you read it. Now, this is from the the narrator, John Ames, who is a pastor. He's recollecting a time when he's a child and he and his father go off to find the grave site of his grandfather, his dad's father. Okay, so they're out in the middle of nowhere and then this moment occurs. 

"Every prayer seemed long to me at that age, and I was truly bone tired. I tried to keep my eyes closed, but after a while I had to look around a little. And his is something I remember very well. At first, I thought I saw the sun setting in the east; I knew where east was, because the sun was just over the horizon when we got there that morning. Then I realized that what I saw was the full moon rising just as the sun was going down. Each of them was standing on its edge, with the most wonderful light between them. It seemed as if you could touch it, as if there were palpable currents of light passing back and forth, or as if there were great taut skeins of light suspended between them. I wanted my father to see it, but I knew I’d have to startle him out of his prayer, and I wanted to do it the best way, so I took his and and kissed it. And then I said, “Look at the moon.” And he did. We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up. They seemed to float on the horizon for quite a long time, I suppose because they were both so bright you couldn’t get a clear look at them. And that grave, and my father and I, were exactly between them, which seemed amazing to me at the time, since I hadn’t given much thought to the nature of the horizon.

My father said, “ I would never have thought this place could be beautiful. I’m glad to know that. (14 – 15)

Dr. Matthew Mullins: Let's reverse the order this time, maybe two minutes amongst yourselves. What are the how things, the structure of the passage, the poiema if you will, that stand out to you immediately. Again just observations. Does that makes sense? Yeah, so maybe just two minutes amongst yourselves. Let's do the how first and then we'll talk about the content.

All right, you ready? You don't have to change the world. Just let's make some observations about what's there on the page. What are some elements of that? No, I think keep the pressure high. We want the world changed profoundly only. Just kidding. Yes, please.

[Audience member speaking] Oh, there are two really smart, awesome things that you said in there that I liked. One was there's kind of like a whole mini plot in just this one paragraph. There is kind of a conflict. There's a rising action. There is a climactic moment and a little bit of a denouement right at the very end when his father kind of reflects. But then you said another thing which is really important about just the how, which is that it's narrated in the first person. It is always really important, right, the voice through which a writer chooses to tell a story. And in this case, it's so important because, as Doug says, this entire novel is a series of letters that this Pastor John Ames and in his slightly advanced age, he's had a young son and he is writing this series of letters to his son knowing that it's not very likely he's going to see his son become a man.

And so he's telling like the story of his family in the first person in his own voice. And the reason that's so important to his young son, the reason that's so important to me in this passage, is because in this moment, he's writing to a boy who's roughly the age that he was in this memory. And so because we're hearing it in his voice, we are kind of suspended between Ames's current self, his, his recollection and the version of himself that is here in this actual scene. I don't know if that makes sense to you. It seems really important to me, like Robinson has chosen to tell us this story, you know, many years after it has happened and through the perspective of one character so we don't have his father's perspective. 

Dr. Doug Sikkema: To kind of add to that. Yeah that detail that I did miss in the beginning is that he's writing this as like a kind of a death letter, a final thing of his life. And the fact that we're reading it means time has moved on and the person is actually probably dead, right? So he's actually now in the grave, just like the grave he's visiting as a child. He's remembering, so there's this really weird playing with time where the man in the present looking back at the past speaking to the future.

If you think about that pattern right, reflection to the people perceiving it, t's kind of mimicked by what's going on with them in the moon and the sun. Yes, they're standing in the middle of it. Right, and then you have him, his father, the man in the grave. And there's a pattern of three that are all happening in this paragraph. 

Dr. Matthew Mullins: And it's a little hard to pick up I think from this passage, but the setting is important, too, because you're on the prairies, it's Kansas, right, when they travel back. So they're in Kansas and this big open flat land. And so with the the sun and the moon on either side of them, they are, they can see the whole landscape east to west and there they are. Yeah, just exactly in the middle.

Other insights than any other how or structure, content, pieces form pieces? Yes, please. 

Yeah, even that authorial choice to separate the fancy word, right, direct discourse anything in those quotation marks, right since we're getting this from John Ames's point of view when we run into those quotation marks, we're told hey, here's another point of view. Here's another perspective, and she also does that by, you're right exactly, breaking it apart from that memory that he's just narrated for us. It's great. 

Dr. Doug Sikkema: And there's one last thing. I just have to, I know I'm breaking the Mason role of like being an overexplainer, but I just love this passage so much. I love this novel so much. But when Marilyn Robinson sort of came to faith, what kind of broke her out of, she was sort of an agnostic, is that she was at Pembroke College and she was so tired of all, she said, the boring determinisms on offer, behaviorism etc. Everything was about the sort of mechanistic reality which we had no free will, and then she started immersing herself in Jonathan Edwards of all people and she came across a footnote in one of his sermons about a passage where he talks about observing the light of the sun reflecting off the moon and hitting his eye and one of the things that Jonathan Edward said is it's amazing to me that every single second is new, right. Every single minute is new light hitting my eyes, and I'm not even aware of it.

And for Robinson, she said that just completely blew her mind, that this world is not determined. It's like every minute sustained and upheld by the attention of the Creator. So, she lovingly, I think, sort of transposes this epiphany she has in the archives of a library into this novel something like 50 years later and it's just beautifully, I think, sort of a woven in to the scenario. 

Two Poems

Dr. Matthew Mullins: So what we want to do in this next little bit of time, I'm not checking my phone and making sure we're being reasonable, is what we were preparing for - this discussion. So Doug and I kind of thought maybe one of the best ways that we could illustrate the distinctiveness, the importance, the educational value of literature. Maybe just to be simply, to kind of talk about, how we address these things with our students and just kind of do class together with and in front of you up here. So what we did was we thought we'd kind of walk through this scheme in the beginning and then we exchanged poems. Each of us chose a poem that was really important to us and wrote each other a bunch of questions kind of geared towards these issues of logos or content, ideas, theology or whatever and poiema, form, structure, and what we want to do now. Really thankful to have a couple of volunteers - Leanne and Sarah. 

Every Riven Thing

We're going to start with Doug's poem, which is "Every Riven Thing" from Christian Wiman's fantastic collection of that name. And we're going to chat through that, and then we're going to switch gears to Mary Oliver and do the same thing. Yeah, we're just gonna sit over here. 

Every Riven Thing

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made
sing his being simply by being
the thing it is:
stone and tree and sky,
man who sees and sings and wonders why

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he’s made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into a stillness where

God goes belonging. To every riven thing he’s made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to see

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.

Thank you so much. Fantastic. Reading a fantastic, tough poem to read, we're talking about this at dinner. So we just want to do a little logos, some poiema and also chill. We're getting older, like there's nice padded seats here. The thing that probably stands out to you all first of all, and that I had to ask Doug immediately, was about the repetition of the first line. That's one of the first things that you notice or that most people will notice when they read this poem. I mean, it's the same first line every time and yet the sense of it is different and it's really not complete until we get to the very end where it's repeated again. So, I mean, maybe this is, that's an obvious thing to notice but it could be otherwise. Wiman didn't have to do that. He made a choice to do this. So maybe, Doug, you could talk just a little bit about how the same words can kind of produce such a different effects, how the poiema here can produce different logos throughout the poem. 

"Poetry helps us put pressure on language."

Dr. Doug Sikkema: Yeah, that's great. Yeah, so obviously, yeah, that is one of those obvious things about this poem is this beautiful line. God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made, and we're gonna get into that word riven in a second. Some of you might be familiar with the kind of poetic form of a villanelle where you take a line and you kind of repeat it. Dylan, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Do not go gently into that good night," right. That's an example of it. Now. This is not a villanelle, but it is doing something similar where it's taking the same line and, in a different context with different syntax, it means something different. Rowan Williams, who's a former Archbishop of Canterbury and he's written a lot of stuff on literature, he has this wonderful book called The Edge of Words: The Habits of Language, and one of the things I love is that he says poetry helps us put pressure on language. And when you really pay attention to a poem and you read it, and you reread it, it starts to make these really familiar words strange. Makes them strange because it's again putting this kind of pressurized attention onto the word. 

Now, one thing that's interesting is when you start looking at the different contexts, like exactly what is going on: "God goes belonging. To every riven thing He's made seeing his being simply by being the thing it is." Okay. So let's just focus on that first  phrase "God goes," and one of the things that Wiman, I think, is doing, and I kind of cautiously say, I don't want to say I can say everything for this poem with absolute certainty, but there's an idea of God's presence, right? That God is on the move. He is, he's going, he's an action. He is a verb. God is like this movement and he, again, he goes and he's belonging to all the things that he's made. But then notice what happens in the second stanza, right? The man who sees and sings and wonders why God goes, it's the exact same word and it means almost the exact opposite thing.

"And when you really pay attention to a poem and you read it, and you reread it, it starts to make these really familiar words strange. Makes them strange because it's again putting this kind of pressurized attention onto the word."

It's God's absence. Right, so we're sitting here and wonder and if anybody's sort of felt this. It's like I can say that God created the world and even if I look at that passage from Robinson where I see God's ongoing attention. it's like constant movement of energy that we're aware of. But, God can also feel very silent. Very distant. Very absent. So God goes and God goes. And it's the same word and it means different things, and this is one of the beautiful things about poetry is that we live in a culture, I think, that still really wants to champion this kind of language of a unificent sort, of a unifocal meaning that there's sort of one idea for one word, and poetry kind of blows all that up and says words are actually polyvalent. They mean many things, not infinite things, but the same words could mean multiple things. How do we kind of hold that together? All right, I could go on but the idea of presence and absence, right, you just in the same words. 

Dr. Matthew Mullins: You know if you think back to "The Lamb" and how every line turns, you know, at the end of a pretty complete phrase, in order to give us that rhyming effect, that simplicity, in this answer to this big question, here, it's very different. Yeah, right, and the repetition is kind of emphasized by the differences in the lines that follow each opening line. So the part that Doug just read, the idea at the end of stanza one, "man who sees and sings and wonders why." What is he wondering? Why God goes. You have to go down to the next line. You have to follow the turn in order to complete the sense.

So well, I wonder why, because to me it's awkward to read. It's much easier to read when you get to the end of the line, and then that's the end of the idea. Why push us down, you know, onto the next line in order to get us to think about it?

Dr. Doug Sikkema: Well, and so this is one of the things that again poetry and all language works like this, right, is that meaning happens in context. It's actually, so part of that talk last night is that when we read, it happens within a form of life, a community of meaning. There's a kind of ecological principle to it. Right? So even a word means. Not in isolation. It's not this sort of abstract concept - this free-floating idea, but it's embedded in a whole system of signifiers, right?

So you can only understand "God goes" in the context in which it's written and that's a really important idea. So that's kind of a how. It's a literary truth. It's a linguistic truth, but it's actually going to tie to a theological and ecological truth that he's getting at in the poem. 

"So even a word means. Not in isolation. It's not this sort of abstract concept - this free-floating idea, but it's embedded in a whole system of signifiers, right?"

Dr. Matthew Mullins: And I want to talk about riven, too, because we're thinking about poiema. One of the kind of most beautiful and fun but easiest things to notice in a poem is whenever a word is used that seems kind of weird, that's not common, it's not colloquial, and riven, I don't know, right, is some kind of like weird, old sounding, antiquated. 

Dr. Doug Sikkema: I mean I use riven all the time. All the time. Yeah. I don't know about you. So riven, again, and to think back to the idea of pressure on language, right? So we'd call this in literature an archaism. This is a word that is old, and it's unsettling to us. So all of a sudden, our attention, snags on it, right? God goes belong to every riven thing. Like, what does that mean? And it’s supposed to do that. Right? It's supposed to kind of be this sort of ripple in the stream of our movement and then we go back to it. Well, what does that mean? So to rive, something that's riven is something that is cracked or broken. Okay. So this is really important, right? So he's talking about God belonging and it's actually, I didn't even think about this, but the poems we chose from Blake which are all about creation. This poem fits right into the same discourse, the same set of ideas, and he says God belongs to all the things he's made and all the things he's made are broken. They’re broken, they’re cracked, right, and that helps us understand that polyvalence of God's sustained presence. God's mysterious silence and absence. God's here. God seems not to be here. And how does that make sense? Right. Well, he belongs to the broken things he's made. And one of the things that's going to kind of keep recurring in this poem is this idea that these broken things are actually whole; they're kind of held up by the God who is sustaining them. Right? So they're made whole within that full context of the God he's talking about.

Dr. Matthew Mullins: I'm gonna step on your poiema here, but it's not until we get to the very last line that everything is made whole right? That's the really satisfying thing about the end of the poem is that in the early stanzas, you know, the first, second, third, and fourth stanzas when we get that line, "God goes belonging to every riven thing He's made," the first line is interrupted by a comma, the second by a period and a comma, the third by a period, the fourth by a period, and it's not until you get to the last time in the repetition that you get no Interruption; you get a complete thought at the end. 

But I want to ask one more question maybe before we hear the Oliver poem. Yeah, because one of the things that I know can oftentimes be frustrating both for me, but also with students, with my children, when I'm talking about a poem is that the easiest thing for most of us is to kind of look at everything as a symbol. This is, this word is really just a symbol of some secret deep meaning in the poem, and I've got to kind of get past or beyond or transcend what's actually there on the page and get to the real meaning, which is that poiema problem with music.

"One of the things that I know can oftentimes be frustrating...when I'm talking about a poem is that the easiest thing for most of us is to kind of look at everything as a symbol...of some secret deep meaning in the poem, and I've got to kind of get past or beyond or transcend what's actually there on the page and get to the real meaning."

We were listening to the beautiful songs earlier and there's this great story about the composer, Schumann, that he's at a party. I don't know if this is true, it may be apocryphal, but he's at a party and he's playing this really beautiful piece and he finishes and someone asks him, "Oh that was so beautiful. What does it mean, you know?" And so he sits down and he plays it again and that's what it means in fact.

And that's an example of, like trying to find, you know, the secret, the real meaning, and somehow get past what's actually there, which is so beautiful. Look for instance at that third stanza, you know, "To every riven thing he's made there is given one shade shaped exactly to the thing itself under the tree a darker tree under the man the only man to see God goes belonging to every riven thing." So like here's an easy example, we might read this in class or on our own or with our children. And there's this instinct just to say, "Oh, darker tree. Oh this is maybe a symbol for the, like, the cross on which Jesus died or something. That's what it maybe really means." Something like that.

How do you navigate talking about poiema, talking about form and content, without simply just kind of trying to create another poem, a second or an alternative poem. 

Dr. Doug Sikkema: Yeah, that's a great question. And I would say, yeah, that tends to be a problem with people, again, formed in a certain kind of atmosphere of reading where it's like everything is a type. Everything is an allegory of the Cross. Now, I think this is an allegory. No, I'm just joking. So, like, okay, one of the things that that's helpful, and this is when you do like the really, the harder work of reading a little bit outside of just the poem because we're kind of doing like a formal exercise here, but Christian Wiman, if you're not familiar, is a poet who, while he was working on this poem and this collection Every Riven Thing, was diagnosed with a very, very rare form of cancer. He was going through extremely painful medications and bone marrow transplants, and almost every week he was told you have about 24 hours left to live, and he had a wife and he had two daughters and he had left his childhood faith. And while he got this diagnosis, he ended up going into a church and sort of his faith came alive again, but he had a very conflicted relationship with faith because he said everything was childhood faith and the worst forms of faith always directed him away from this world. 

"You know the hymn, right, "When I see Jesus’ glorious face, the things of Earth will grow strangely dim." I tend not to like that idea. I actually think the things of this Earth will grow strangely clear."

So doing exactly what you said with the reading is that a tree is not just a tree but it's the cross and it's this, you kind of know the hymn, right, "When I see Jesus’ glorious face, the things of Earth will grow strangely dim." I tend not to like that idea. I actually think the things of this Earth will grow strangely clear. We'll see them, we'll really see them, and there's an essay that Wiman wrote called "Love Bade Me Welcome," it's a remarkable essay, but one of the things he said is that when he committed himself back to his faith, that he wanted it to be something that spoke to this life in all of its pain, all of its brokenness. So, that's one of the things he's doing in this poem is he's making us just attend to the rock, the tree, the sky, the physical reality, and I know we're kind of running out of time. I want to get to the next poem, but even just those symbols of rock beyond eons of age, right, a living tree that comes and goes, and then the sky that's kind of the invisible source in which everything is moving and having its being gets us that line where he's talking about, the thing that's underneath us, that's the dark form, right?

Well, what's the word that's not being used that makes that sort of darker shape of us, our shadow? Well, it's the light, right. So the light is this thing that's present because that's the only way we get a shadow, but it's absent because he never names it, right, and so he's making us just pay attention to that thing that's sort of underneath. It's that darker side. 

I Wake Close to Morning

All right. So, there's obviously way more we can say about this poem, and you might be like, "There's obviously more?," but we're going to move to the next poem. And could I ask our second reader, Sarah? Thank you. 

I Wake Close To Morning by Mary Oliver

Why do people keep asking to see
      God’s identity papers
when the darkness opening into morning
       is more than enough?
Certainly any god might turn away in disgust.
Think of Sheba approaching
       the kingdom of Solomon.
Do you think she had to ask,
       “Is this the place?”

Well, thanks Matt for choosing this, and I had not read this poem before so I really, really enjoyed it. You've been talking about line. Obviously, you mentioned a little bit about verse and it's been said that a poem’s sort of main difference from prose is that control of line or we would call enjambment. So, can you maybe explain what we think Oliver's doing in the kind of formal arrangement of these lines. Let's just start with lines and verse.

Dr. Matthew Mullins: And thanks to Sarah To who read them so well, especially that question at the end because it's one of the few kind of complete thoughts or complete sentence thoughts in the entire poem. But look how at the end of each line, "why do people keep asking to see?" That is kind of a thought on its own but it leaves you wondering, "see what?," and so you have to go to the next line and then you see the object - God's identity papers. "When the darkness opening into morning." That is, too, also a complete thought, isn't it? The darkness opening into morning, but we have to go to this, so she keeps getting to the end as if everything is clear here, but clear about what? You have to go down to the next line in order to see what's going to happen.

And the one exception is this middle line. So we have kind of these these four lines at the beginning, these four lines at the end, and then the poem is cut in half with, "Certainly any God might turn away in disgust." The one exception to that, or once we get into, once we've gotten to that point in the poem, we've not seen that yet, right? Every line has been enjambed, is the technical term that Doug was using, that it means the line was broken in a way that forces you to go to the next line in order to complete the idea. Until we get to that middle line and then we see it once more at the end of the poem. And I think that's what she's doing. She's trying to kind of push us on to get us to ask the next question rather than to be satisfied. 

And then I also think it's kind of the opposite of "The Lamb." We're not satisfied, I think, at the end of each line we have to go to the next line, and then I also think there is something to the broken lines, the enjambed lines, that is reflected in the poem's title. You wake very early, right, then your thinking is not usually super coherent and linear but rather kind of broken up or fragmented into pieces, and the structure of the verses, the turns in the lines on the page, kind of create that effect of like a foggy morning brain, as well. 

Dr. Doug Sikkema: That's great. Yeah, and we kind of use this word verse, where the line turns, but there's also this movement in the middle, something called the volta, where the whole kind of context turns, right? In "The Lamb," we saw that in the two sections. That middle line though, "Certainly any God might turn away in disgust," and there's this, I don't know, when I read that it seems like one thing she's doing is kind of flipping the the question around almost like we get at the end of Job. We're like God says, like, you don't question me, I question you, right. And she's kind of putting herself almost in the mind of God. Like, God is looking at this question with a kind of disgust ,but this does seem to be this, like, middle point between these two sections of four that is a turn in the form. So what, like, what do you think is going on here in this language?

Dr. Matthew Mullins:  So spoiler alert: we talked about this at lunch today. He gave me this question, you know, weeks and weeks ago, and the more and more I thought about it, I just told him, I was like, "I don't know man." Like, I don't know exactly what's going on, which I felt like was a good thing to say in front of everyone, you know.

Because I'll be honest, the way that you read  it and the way we've talked about on email is much more obvious to me now than the way I was originally reading it. Why do people keep asking to see God's identity papers when the darkness opening into morning is more than enough, right? Like certainly any God, maybe even a capital G God, would be disgusted if you saw what he had done and we were like, so are you God or no?

Right, but the way I was originally reading it was like any other God besides the God that made that thing would also see the darkness opening tomorrow and be like, "Dang, I can't do that." That was how I had read it and, like, for the longest time. 

Dr. Doug Sikkema: That's really good actually and, I don't, we did not plan this, but all the poems actually deal with the same idea. Yeah of creation. And yeah, so let's just move to that idea of Sheba, right? Because Sheba is going to Solomon. I mean again, one of the things we can ask as students is well, this could have been could have been anybody. It could have been Cleopatra, right, going to Mark Anthony or Julius Caesar. There could have been another allusion. So why Sheba? Why Solomon?

Dr. Matthew Mullins:  Yeah again, I don't know the answer to that question. But it's, what it makes me think of is, you know, if you've ever been to a friend's house or if you've, like, for our kids, there's this one house about five miles from from us that does this fantastically amazing Christmas lights display every year at their house and you can go and they let you drive around their property all around their farm and you can see all of the lights, and this line in the poem makes me think about that.

If someone were to tell you you can go out to this farm and see whatever, like, when you pull up, you wouldn't have to be, like, is this the place? You know, it's a similar idea here, but Sheba, of course coming from this amazing kingdom herself, hearing the stories and the rumors about the kingdom of Solomon and all it's greatness and its riches, you know, she, if she pulled up I imagine she would not have to say, “Hey guys, think this is the one, this is the Solomon, right?” And so when you then think about how that line in the middle, "Certainly any God might turn away in disgust," is interrupting these two sets of questions, and we get to this last question. 

And I was sharing this with Doug today. One of the things that I think is so brilliant and beautiful and crazy and weird about this last line is that it's both a question that Oliver, or the speaker of the poem, whatever, she's asking us. Right, because look what she says. Do you think, so who's the you there in the context of the poem? Think of Sheba. That's an imperative sentence, right, with an implied you subject there. Think of Sheba approaching the kingdom of Solomon. I mean, who's the you? Who's supposed to be thinking? It's us, right? The readers of the poem. So she is commanding us. "You, think of Sheba approaching the kingdom of Solomon. So you stop. Okay. I'm thinking about it. Is it a boat? I don't know. She's pulling up to Solomon's kingdom. And then the speaker of the poem is asking us as the readers, "Do you think that she had to ask?" So, she's asking us some question, but then also in the voice of the Queen of Sheba, Sheba is asking, "Is this the place?" You know, and so the question mark is doing this really fascinating double duty because it fits the quotation, the syntax of Sheba’s sentence, but it also fits the syntax of Oliver's sentence that she's speaking to us as well. I don't know what that means. It seems important to me, but it certainly speaks to how the the poem is communicating on multiple levels and it's folding story within story within story in order to kind of bring to life this early morning foggy brained question about why people keep asking God to prove himself over and over and over again when we have all of the answers right in front of us, when it's so self-evident. 

Dr. Doug Sikkema: So this kind of leads to my last question and it's a bigger question. It's not just about the poem, but it's about ideas we've been talking about, and you don't get to say I don't know to this one although you maybe will. What you're saying -- I could get that idea from reading the epistle to the Romans. (Matt: Sure.) I could get this idea from reading my catechism. Right? Well God's second book of Revelation is nature, right? It's obvious, people suppress it because they can see it all around them if they have the eyes to see. So why do we need Mary Oliver? Why do we need Christian Wiman? Why do we need poems to give us knowledge? Can they give us knowledge about God? Is there a different way of knowing that this is giving us and our students that we need that's essential as opposed to more direct forms of communication. 

Dr. Matthew Mullins: Yeah, in this specific case, I think what the poem does so uniquely and so well, especially in the way that Sarah read the last question, you know, "Is this the place?," is it evokes and communicates the ridiculousness of that question. And so I might get a sense of like the self-evident nature of God from Romans 1 or something like that, right, the self-evident existence or power or awesomeness of God from Romans 1. And Oliver is not, I think, teaching us in terms of logos anything necessarily different from that, but she is evoking a different, in this case, kind of emotional element of that same idea, of that same logos, which is really, like, man, when you stop to think about it, it's pretty silly - people keep asking God to prove his existence to us, which I think comes across in the funny image, right, like God having identity papers. What do you need those for, right, to prove that you are who you say you are? Right, or in the question. Is this the place? 

The How: Group Activity

Dr. Doug Sikkema: Okay, so we can do this one pretty quick, I think. Yeah, we got until 8. Okay. Oh, all right, we're gonna try ourselves, and we'll take a little bit of time. You're gonna get into a small group of four or five. Do it with people that you can just turn around and talk with. We're gonna read "The Tyger" and if you remember what I said in the beginning, "The Tyger's" the other side of that plate to "The Lamb" and you're gonna ask what questions do you have for this poem? What are some of the things you want to figure out about it? And what ways are logos and poiema, form and content working and then we're just gonna sort of discuss some of these ideas together. So, I will read it once and we'll take three to four minutes to do it and then we'll share some ideas. 

‍

All right. What questions do you have for this poem? What's going on in this poem? What are some of the ways the how is working to communicate the what? Okay, take a few minutes. I know we're nearing the end. It's getting late. So do your best and then we'll take up take it up together. 

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp,
Dare its deadly terrors clasp!

When the stars threw down their spears
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

I love the enthusiasm and the energy even late on a Friday night. So, well done. It's so good to be around people who are excited about poetry and I just saw people, like, doing this a few times like in their discussion. Amazing, okay. So, also I hope you realize this is one of the things I love telling my students, especially when they're new to the poem that they're already doing more advanced kind of hermeneutics and interpretation because they're not just reading this poem in isolation. They're now reading it in the context of "The Lamb" and that's actually added a layer right? So what they know about "The Lamb" and how it's working is actually forming and shaping how they read this poem. And if you had just come across this poem without reading "The Lamb" you might not actually have the same kind of discussion you would if you didn't know what's going on. So you guys are already doing like probably more advanced reading just because of a few minutes we spent on "The Lamb." So it's enough of me. I want to hear some of your observations. And by all means you can jump to the how and the why at the same time, right? So what you notice and why you think Blake is doing that.

Yeah in the back. (audience member speaking) That's great. Yeah, and that's why it's a song of experience. He had grammar class. Yeah, so you're good. So the song of experience - we had the song of innocence, we had the song of experience and I'm glad you know that one of the things about experience and I think is a very sort of again Charlotte Mason principle is experience doesn't mean you have all the answers. The older you get, the more life you live, the more you experience actually, the more question marks you have, the less periods you have if you're using punctuation, right. So, good, you notice that there's all these question marks and there's no easy resolution, all right.

You also made a point ...it's more complex. Absolutely and the the rhythm right? "Tyger Tyger Burning Bright in the forest of the," there's this like energy. This kind of frenetic pace to it. It doesn't have the same "Little lamb who made the dost thou know who made thee?" Like this kind of nice sing-song Sunday school kind of rhythm. It actually moves us because it's a different poiema, and just like I said, if you ask your students to take three blind mice and put it into a kind of rap rhythm or a country western rhythm the same words will mean something different. So the poiema is actually affecting us even if we don't articulate it, right? There's a kind of visceral gut response we have to reading it. (audience member speaking)

Dr. Matthew Mullins:  No, yeah, I was just gonna say that those are my favorite explanations, like some people like colors. Like the first one is very, you know, like sky blue and white and billowy or whatever, and this one is red and orange and choppy and the effect of this is, like, agitation. And the other one is like placidity almost or something like that. 

Dr. Doug Sikkema: Just to add to that point, too, like the person's interesting because it's very abstract. Right, and it's interesting that being a child, an innocent song, is to have these ideas of God that are very abstract, and this one is filled the very concrete, real things and it's again, the experience is like hammer, chain, anvil, right? Tyger, anybody can even get into that - like why a Tyger. Right, why Tyger and why Lamb? Like those are two dominant images and symbols. They're two very different animals, right? Why did he do that?

Any ideas to that maybe you guys talked about your group? Why Tyger and why does he misspelled Tyger with a y? Okay, come on. That's not how it was spelled in Blake's Day, by the way. (audience member speaking) Absolutely. 

Familiar and strange, right, because the lion of England and Richard the Lionheart so it actually has all these kind of poetic connotations that wouldn't do what Blake wanted to do. Right? So if this is a poem that was written, like, in an Indian context, it'd be very different thing. So, Blake, again, writing from where he's writing, you're absolutely right that this kind of has a kind of mystique of another world and that's sort of what that image allows him to do to his audience.

Yeah. (audience member speaking) Good. Yeah, and he's not, again, he's not saying no, there is no, God couldn't have done this. It leaves us in the question. Right? And there's that idea of being unsettled is, like, all through this poem. Right? So you made a lot of really good points there, right? That idea, "In the force of the night what immortal hand or eye", and I think even using that word, like, "What immortal." It's not the easy answer of, like, well, I'm a lamb and yeah, right, and here's the allegory. It's this force, this power, and how dare he makes this thing with a fearful symmetry. What's interesting is that symmetry gives us this idea of balance, and what we don't have is balance with that slant rhyme, right? "What immortal hand or eye dare frame thy fearful symmetry" that actually sits with us really uncomfortably. Like, it's like when you put your hands on the wrong strings on your guitar and strum it, right? It's just, like, it's jarring and that's kind of the effect Blake is giving us here. 

Dr. Matthew Mullins:  Yeah, and he opens with the question at the end of the first stanza, and at the end of the poem, it's repeated. It's still unanswered. We don't have the answer that we get in "The Lamb." 

Dr. Doug Sikkema: (audience member speaking) It is on purpose. Yeah, so Malcolm Guite, a really awesome poet, he's got a whole lecture series on Songs of Innocence and Experience, I'd really recommend you read it, but one of the things he says in there is this is a slant rhyme that actually is meant to be unsettling and jarring.

Okay last point and then we're going to wrap it up.

One thing that me and Doug both wanted for y'all, for your students, your children, to come out of this session with in recovering the how was to realize that you don't have to be scared to teach or to talk about or to read or to share texts that you don't go into the the session knowing, "Oh, this is the main thing that I need them to get out of this," right? You don't have to know all the answers beforehand and that's okay.

Dr. Matthew Mullins:  But it's so good though, because I think one thing that me and Doug both wanted for us, but for y'all, for your students, your children, to come out of this session with in recovering the how was to realize that, you know, you don't have to be scared to teach or to talk about or to read or to share texts that you don't go into the the session knowing, "Oh, this is the main thing that I need them to get out of this," right? You don't have to know all the answers beforehand and that's okay. We thought, "We'll just talk about logos and poiema and sometimes I'll say, 'I don't know'" and yeah, you have to figure it out and I was like, "I can't." And that's what we hope for you all, as well, that you'll have the sense of freedom just to be able to sit down and talk about hey, well, what's there on the page with your students, with your kids.

Dr. Doug Sikkema: Yeah. No, it's great and to your point, like, again as they develop the muscles of reading, all of a sudden it's like you don't just have to look at this poem but it's the other poems, the other things you've read, right? And you're absolutely right the images we're getting from Job, from the Bible, about the fall of the Angels is really all about this. It's like where does evil come from? How is there these dark forces of tygers who are, I think, the point that was made - they're ferocious. Like, they kill people right? And then we have the hammer, the chain. We're getting images of classical gods of the underworld who have faced this Vulcan, right? They're also the craftsmen of the ancient Pagan world. They also have theories about where things came from. So is it these darker forces that made these darker forces we see all around us? And like Matt said, like, let our students wrestle with these questions. Again, find that age that's appropriate, but again, I find it really fascinating that coming of age, being experienced, means you just ask more and more questions. Okay, I think we got to wrap it up. So thank you so much for this and hopefully it's helpful for you.

"What we hope for you all is that you'll have the sense of freedom just to be able to sit down and talk about "hey, what's there on the page?" with your students."