I. Reading poetry like the KGB; Or, Justin Bieber demands ‘metaphysic’

Back in 2014, Slavoj Žižek wrote a piece for Poetry Magazine in which he describes the craft of poetry as the human response to dwelling in the “torture-house of language.”^[1] His thesis, in my opinion, perfectly exemplifies the contemporary malaise over the “what” and “why” of poetry.

While we may use other modes of description, calling poetry things like “creative expression” or “artistic impulse” reveals that the disposition of us moderns towards language, and therefore poetic craft, is that it is somehow unreal. “But that’s just poetic language,” we say. “We must move beyond the text to get to the meaning,” we say. “It’s not the literal words of the Bible, it’s the message behind them,” we say. “That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet,” we, along with Juliet, say.^[2]

Language, in other words, for modernity, is a mere husk that can be discarded once we have the meaning—must be discarded, in fact. One does not eat husks.

We have all bought into the lie that Language is a kind of problem to be solved, an unhelpful if albeit necessary mediation between us and a kind of Schopenhauerian Reality Itself. Poets and novelists and others who play with words are those, therefore, who obey Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek’s conviction that “language should be tortured to tell the truth.”^[3]

Why? Because Language (with a capital “L”) in contemporary society, typified by Žižek et al., is an instrument of objectification and trauma.^[4] Language is itself a Pharaonic “House of Bondage” oppressing us with systems, and grammars, and categories.

Language, “the word,” can be of assistance to us in accomplishing things (like saying “this is a cat” and “aspirin is a bond between nine carbon molecules, eight hydrogen molecules, and four oxygen molecules”) but it also traps us in a linguistic tyranny. It doesn’t invite us into an encounter with the Real. Rather, it reduces humans (in Žižek’s schemata) to a sheer bio-phenomenal subjectivity, forever troubling and foreclosing our revolutionary horizons:

Language as the “big Other” is not an agent of wisdom to whose message we should attune ourselves, but a place of cruel indifference and stupidity. The most elementary form of torturing one’s language is called poetry.^[5]

But that’s just Žižek, one may argue, and he’s crazy. As crazy as Žižek et al. (or, let me say “Žižek and Friends”)^[6] may be, their treatment of language is the majority opinion. They are not outliers; they are elites.

And this is not just some “abstract leftist theory”; it has very real-world consequences. Billy Collins gives an example of the day-to-day impact of modernity’s disposition to language / poetry:

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.^[7]

This “torturing of a confession” from poetry is not isolated to Mr. Collins’ poetry course. It is widespread. This ”beating it with a hose to find out what it really means” happens across the modern world: in Bible studies, and sermons, and community theaters, and concert halls, and YouTube videos, and gender reassignment surgeries. Contemporary society gazes on the world with the simultaneous need and loathing of Raskolnikov and quotes Justin Bieber: “What do you mean?”

II. Dear Father Mark, what a wild way to begin your contribution; Or, why does Mark have to be this way and what the heck is wrong with him?

I begin my contribution here in this manner to expose a danger to which I address the positive content of my essay under heading “III.” While Mr. Higgins’ initial piece was great overall, there can be a temptation to lose oneself (and the world) in a Žižekian demand for “meaning.” We must be careful not to come to poetry, whether the portions of the Bible that are versified, or the speech of the angels, or the prose writing of Saint Paul, with a torturous disposition.

Sure, the vapid materialism of our current secular order makes us die for a lack of sacramental meaning, but surfeit is not the antidote to starvation. If modernity suffers from a metaphysical anorexia nervosa, a kind of metaphysical bulimia is not progress in the direction of health.

And to be clear I am not accusing Mr. Higgins or any of the other contributors of committing any error—I, in fact, agree with them on all the important points—but I want to warn against what I see evidenced across contemporary literature and criticism as a kind of conservative fetish for **M-E-E-E-A-A-N-N-I-I-N-NG**  or **METAPHYSICS** which treats key aspects of poetry as discardable or dislocatable^[8] from the things and structures and times which mean the meaning, as if one could distill 100 proof “meaning” from the fermented corn-mash of “things.” Doing so still leaves us, even if not materialistic, as inquisitors and torturers of Language.

Or to put it another way, if there’s a certain kind torturous impulse evident in “Žižek and Friends” which looks at a picture of a tobacco pipe and says, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,”^[9] there’s an eerie similarity to the person who thinks that a pipe can have a metaphysical meaning that has nothing to do with putting black cavendish in the bowl and smoking it.

Poetry, like the things of which it speaks, can only point beyond itself by being itself. There is no plenary sense without plain sense.

If, therefore, I hold that all of the other interlocutors did wonderful work in their essays, but I hold that there is a danger crouching at our door of “beating poetry with a hose” in order to extract meaning from it, what I offer is a series of theses (or rules or prolegomena) for a robust approach to poetry, theses of the sort that will enable us to be partakers of poetry in the manner gloriously demonstrated by Remy in his essay, which was a kind of poetry.

If we have been guilty of being torturers of poetry, if we moderns need to repent and be cleansed of our poetic-KGB-ism, then the theses that follow are both a kind of tonic and a kind of exorcism, a beneficence and a casting-out. Vade retro Satana.

III. On poetry, in no particular arrangement

1. Poesis is the act of making or creating. Poesis flows, therefore, from the nature of God himself. Human Poetry is about poesis, about what Tolkien calls the act of sub-creation: of taking what God has made and making new things.^[10]
2. To quote Rainer Maria Rilke, “singing is being.”^[11]
3. What is often called “poetry” formally is a strict species of Poesis generally wherein human speech is laid hold of and transfigured by verse in sub-creation.
4. Verse names the formal structure of language whose aim is to induce an enchantment which aims to produce a consubstantiality with the musical rhythmic structure of the poem. This is why Ezra Pound can claim that poetic verse “withers and dies out when it leaves music, or at least imagined music.”^[12]
5. Human persons, in all of their multiform and tripartite being, are poems.^[13] We are words spoken by the Word through whom all things were made (Jn 1:3).
6. Poetry, writes Dana Gioia, “is a universal human art…every society has developed a special class of speech, shaped by apprehensible patterns of sound, namely, poetry.”^[14] Humans, poems ourselves, cannot not versify.
7. Throughout Scripture, God calls his people to remember and not to forget. Key to these calls to remember the Lord are songs and verses (e.g., Deut 32[1] [2] ). This is because poetry, according to Robert Frost, is “a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.”^[15]
8. As historical creatures, as mnemonic creatures whose very being has an origin, our present self is the place where future kisses memory. The recitation of a poem is a great example: I’m thinking into the future (what I’m going to say or sing next) while drawing from the reservoir of what I have memorized in my past. In doing so, a Present is created. Memorized verse helps us live in our tripartite times.
9. Poetic verse is precisely that kind of language in which there is no separation between the speaker and the speech. The sad state of contemporary poetry, and the source of its general powerlessness, is its aim to make a distinction between speaker and speech. Poems today aim largely to be silently read and analyzed.
10. Poetry, as Dana Gioia has argued, aims chiefly at enchantment—the induction of a kind of ecstasy.
11. Poetic verse, then, in its fullest, ought to be chiefly concerned with performance. The poem is the performance.
12. As an example of #9, consider someone who only ever read the lyrics of your favorite song but never heard it played, let alone was a part of singing it. You would be hysterical: “What!? You say you like it but you’ve never heard it?” Poetic verse is the same. To silently read a poem is to almost entirely miss it.^[16]
13. Poetic performance is also, therefore, that kind of language whose goal is to incorporate the poet and the audience. Moses doesn’t just sing in Deuteronomy 32; he commands Israel to memorize the song. They become the poem. It tabernacles in them. Anyone who has been to a concert knows what it means to be caught-up into the song.
14. We tend to think that the best path to understanding versified poetry is private analysis. Though this mode of reflection is not entirely wrong, it is not the fullness, nor the ideal way to understanding poetry. Memorization and recitation are the Jachin and Boaz at the entrance to poetic knowing.
15. A major part of poetry’s decline in modern life, argues Dana Gioia, lies precisely in the disappearance of this performative, embodied aspect. The poetic geniuses of antique periods from Confucius and Boethius to Dorothy Sayers and Ralph Vaughn Williams were formed in the crucible of verse memorization and recitation.
16. Poetic verse lays a soundtrack for life. It orders the chaos of our variegated experiences precisely by ploughing them, turning the strange words I encounter into furrows tilled by rhythm. Dana Gioia reminds us that “verse” in fact comes from the Latin “to turn,” as in to reach the end of the field a person ploughs then turns the oxen. It says, “it’s this time in the music; do this now.”
17. Human poetry is necessarily embodied. One has never read a poem outside of the body, nor is that the goal. It is, as Roland Barthes describes it, “language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony.”^[17] “Oh I just love it when so-and-so is the lector at church,” we say, by which we mean that the conjugation of the poem on the body God gave them is deeply impactful to the receptive parts of the body God gave me.
18. We cannot escape things like rhythm, linguistic challenges to translation, oral performance, memorization, vocalization, vocal quality, images, sounds, lengths of syllables, into a gnostic space of sheer unmediated meaning. The poem is participation in the meaning.
19. Poetic verse is, therefore, costly. It takes time and effort. Cheap and uncostly poetry is its own judgment.
20. Far from torturing language, what poetic form (and poetic verse in particular) ought to achieve is the death-and-resurrection of language. It takes language in a grateful and sacrificial capacity and blesses, breaks, and transforms it. And, after the transfiguration, distributes it for the life of the world.
21. Poetry is a kind of magic. It is enchantment in the truest sense. Malicious poetry casts spells in order to bring the audience under its Dionysian thrall. Good poetry breaks spells, awakens, and grants vision, allowing us to “see things as we are (or were) meant to see them.”^[18]
22. Poetry, in this performative and embodied sense, invites us into what David Field calls “The DeepReal” with the God who is the Great I Am, which is to say the Here-And-Now himself. It grounds us: here I am right now, in this place, in this body, and among all my auditors (many or few) is the living God in the passing of my minutes which rush past me as the verses which pour from my lips. I think there’s a likely obvious connection between the sad state of poetic verse performance (where its only real civic function is for the concertgoer) and our spiking anxiety and restlessness. That we do not know how to be “here-and-now” is symptomatic of an underlying poetic sickness.
23. Poetry greets the world of the real with hospitable speech. It exchanges the torturer’s gaze for the mother’s gaze: “Hello! Here you are!” It offers to our experience of things an ennobling hospitality.^[19]
24. Finally, and in conclusion, poetry is delightful. Even tragic or sorrowful poetry has an element of delight, even if only in the catharsis of its performance. It is not a client in a cell to be tortured but a meal waiting to be consumed. Children’s poems, like nursery rhymes, tend to remember this after adult poetry has grown old. Good, delightful songs and poems, even songs which are delightful sorrowful, sung or read aloud, in the company of others[3] [4] [5]  is an ineradicable part of the “what” and “why” of poetry. God as Poet never sings alone but in the counsel of the Trinity. And he never sings a song in which he does not delight. Let us imitate Him.

Mark Brians is rector of All Saints Anglican Honolulu.

NOTES

^[1] Slavoj Žižek, “The Poetic Torture-House of Language,” Poetry Magazine 203:6 (2014): pp. 563–566.

^[2] William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.

^[3] Elfriede Jelinek, “Elfriede Jelinek im Gespräch mit Adolf-Ernst Meyer,” in Sturm und Zwang: Schreiben als Geschlechterkampf, eds. Elfriede Jelinek, Jutta Heinrich, and Adolf Ernst Mayer (Hamburg: AME Hören 1995), 7–74, as cited in both Žižek, “Poetic Torture-House,” 566 and Gil, Fragile Matters,” 2.

^[4] Isabel Gil, “Fragile Matters: Literature and the Scene of Torture,” New German Critique 127 (2016): 119–140.

^[5] Žižek, “Poetic Torture-House,” 566.

^[6] As in: “Okay boys and girls don’t forget to tune-in to ‘Žižek and Friends’ every weekday afternoon at 3 p.m. on PBS for songs and sovietism!” Or “This week on ‘Žižek and Friends Clubhouse’ Slavoj is joined by his buddy Hannah Arendt for deconstruct-the-Iliad story-time! Don’t miss it!” @remywilkins maybe you can draft the pilot episode?

^[7] Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry,” in The Apple that Astonished Paris (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995), available at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46712/introduction-to-poetry

^[8] My Word Processor says this is not a word. I’d like it to be, and it is perfectly what I mean. I throw myself upon my readers’ kindness and beg you to forgive my illiteracy.

^[9] “This is not a pipe” à la René Margritte’s famous 1929 painting The Treachery of Images.

^[10] See J. R. R. Tolkien, Tolkien On Fairy-stories, eds. Verlyn Flieger and Douglas A. Anderson (London: HarperCollins, 2008).

^[11] As quoted in Dana Gioia, “Poetry as Enchantment,” Dark Horse Magazine, 34 (Summer 2015).

^[12] Gioia, “Poetry as Enchantment.”

^[13] N.B. ποίημα in Eph 2:10.

^[14] Gioia, “Poetry as Enchantment”

^[15] As quoted in Gioia, “Poetry as Enchantment”

^[16] I address the problem of the contemporary church treating the psalms as private meditations instead of as songs to be sung in “Finding Rest by Singing the Psalter,” Anglican Compass, February 25, 2025.

^[17] Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991), 66, as quoted in Gil, “Fragile Matters,” 121.

^[18] Tolkien, “On Fairie Stories,” 67.

^[19] On the concept of “mother’s gaze” see Esther Lightcap Meek, The Mother’s Smile, (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2025). As regards the concept of welcome, it is important to note that poetic verse, even in its imprecatory or lamenting form, offer a “welcome” to circumstances: “Here is this thing of which I speak,” says the poem, “for better or for worse it is in my song and I will turn it into music.”