Lyricism and Knowledge in the Study of Religion

Abstract

American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 158–162 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.13 Lyricism and Knowledge in the Study of Religion Maia Kotrosits Denison University, Granville, USA “In a tantalizing way many individuals have experienced just enough creative living to recognize that for most of their time they are living uncreatively , as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine.” (D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality) How to give an account of the life of poetry—lyrical language—in the field of religion? Its official place is mostly as an accessory, an accoutrement. Poetry as epigraph. As preface. As ornamental illustration. In this way, poetry has offered not just borrowed beauty, but evidence of literariness, of a certain form of wellbred education. A stylized gesture of selection. The unofficial place of poetry in the field of religion, however, is less sterile. It is what many of us text friends (or, if you like, the more respectable “colleagues”) early in the morning, what we read softly to ourselves when we can’t stand any more technical analyses or flat renditions of information. It is what many of us return to at heightened or elemental moments—love, wonder, sickness, death. (It was, for instance, the only thing I could read for 5 weeks during quarantine.) So what induces such a self-conscious—wrong word—controlled deployment on official registers? Here’s one thought: lyrical language is the claimed expressiveness the field wants, but has mostly given up in its (also highly stylized ) emergence as a field of study. It is, in other words, what you sell to afford Maia Kotrosits 159 your expertise. Lyricism becomes threat, its pleasures and thickness of meaning shaved down to a canon of acceptable uses, parlayed into the exoticism and mystical air of “other languages,” and sometimes even becoming, in this whittled form, its own delicate dispatch.1 I tripped into this field. I entered a biblical studies classroom at the age of 26—an actress, sort of, and a well-intentioned but disillusioned Brooklyn public school teacher. I was still an adolescent, so numbed and melancholy from a long series of acute disasters, personal and collective, that I could barely even register that they were there. I was just simply curious, not seeking a career, not even wanting a degree. I felt intuitively obligated to old Christian things, without knowing why, in which ways, or to what ends. I was also a self-fashioned poet: a creative writing major in college, who had been enabled, fortunately, by a professor who saw writing—and specifically my writing—not as an exercise in perfection of technique as much as a venue for an almost perverse attachment to life, even and especially at life’s strangest, most inscrutable turns. She’d register me in her MFA sections, and scribble encouragements that now seem outlandish (like “Send this to Alice Quinn at the New Yorker”) in the white space next to my Anne Sexton knock-offs, poems caked in my rage and depression. At the same time, she regularly dropped some of the most efficiently terrifying writing advice I’ve received to date. Once: “Write from what you love, not from what you hate.” In this, she taught me the art of grieving. So it was a sharp turn into the literary world after graduation as I sent my poems out for review, with the attendant waiting and rejections. I got a job for a non-profit poetry organization in Manhattan, working alongside students in Columbia University’s MFA program, and met Alice Quinn who, I learned, did not want my poems for the New Yorker. I mispronounced names, earnestly quoted lines back to their writers, and asked, with real confusion, “What do you mean by ‘language poets,’ aren’t all poets language poets?” to George Plimpton himself, longtime editor of the vaunted Paris Review, at a cocktail party in his apartment. (Hint: no, they are not.) I was “unsophisticated.” I had not been initiated into the elite forms of knowledge and careful postures that the literary world assumed.2 Writing, for me, had...