Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

William P. Brown is William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, Decatur, GA. His teaching focuses on the use of scripture in the life of the church and the world, particularly in the context of ecology and justice. Recent books include The Seven Pillars of Creation: Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder, Wisdom's Wonder, and Sacred Sense.

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The Psalms (Interpreting Biblical Texts Series)

Abingdon Press

Chapter One

Poetry cannot be read, I would argue; it can only be reread. For me, it is a continuation of the holy scriptures. —Jay Parini

A painter once engaged the nineteenth-century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé with the following complaint: "I have tried to write poetry, but I cannot do it, even though I have ever so many ideas." Mallarmé responded, "Chéri, poems are not written with ideas, but with words." Mallarmé was right: words are the essence of poetry, words used in very special ways. Arguments and treatises, however rhetorically embellished, can be boiled down to their logical, or fallacious, ideas. Narratives can be summarized with synopses. Poetry, however, resists such reductions. The study of poetry is fundamental to the study of Psalms, and to introduce the poetic nature of ancient Hebrew psalmody, we begin with modern poetry.

Modern Poetry

Defining poetry, whether ancient or modern, is an elusive endeavor. "Poetry is the kind of thing poets write," said Robert Frost. Such an operational "definition" simply pushes the question back a step: so what defines a poet? Arriving at a conclusive, fits-all-sizes definition is impossible. Nevertheless, one can identify certain features that help distinguish a poem from a narrative or an argument: (1) artistic or aesthetic quality; (2) density or compactness of expression; (3) performative power.

Aesthetic Quality

"Poem" comes from the Greek verb poieo, "make" or "do." A poem is a literary, indeed artistic, creation. It is not mechanically or casually produced. Poetry is verbal art. A poem is crafted to be impressive to the ear; its diction is frequently conveyed through the use of assonance and alliteration as well as through its metrical structure or rhythm. Such poetic devices serve to "thicken the verbal texture" of a poem.

In addition, there is the visual side to the verbal aesthetic. The format of a poem, for example, distinguishes itself from prose narrative: much shorter lines and uneven right margins for English poems. Poetry is arranged in lines instead of paragraphs. As the most basic unit of poetry, the line is typically absent in straight prose. As we shall see in biblical poetry, a verse largely consists of parallel or corresponding lines. And there is another critical aspect to a poem's graphic texture. More often than not, poems revel in imagery and metaphor, in figurative language and allusion. A poem evokes images and feelings that stir the imagination. The attuned reader not only hears the poem in all its eloquence but also sees in and through the poem all that it conjures in the reader's mind. A poem is not only riveting to the ear; it is also arresting to the eye. What makes a poem a poem is its synergy between sense and sound.

Density of Expression

A poem typically has less space to wield its communicative craft than its prose counterpart. With the exception of epic poetry, a poem is generally short and compact. Its terseness is its literary hallmark. The German term for poetry is Dichtung, which coincidentally sounds as it if were derived from the German dicht, meaning "dense." According to J. P. Fokkelman, "poetry is the most compact and concentrated form of speech possible," with the exception, I would add, of electronic text messaging. The difference between a poem and an instruction manual is readily evident: a poem's terse style conveys an abundance of meaning. Laurence Perrine defines poetry as "a kind of language that says more and says it more intensely than does ordinary language." More "condensed and concentrated" than prose, poetry exhibits a "higher voltage" and applies "greater pressure per word." A poem, thus, marks the convergence of verbal compactness and semantic intensity. Semantically, poetry does a lot of heavy lifting, and with its semantic abundance comes ambiguity. More than any other form of discourse, poetry invites multiple readings. Much in contrast to a text message, a poem conveys a palpable richness that resists a narrowing of meaning. Poetic language is generously and generatively suggestive.

Performative Power

The words, images, and rhythms of a poem invite the reader to feel, sense, and imagine. In poetry, the reader is brought into intimate relationship with the poem's speaking voice. The reader performs the poem in the very act of reading, and the kind of performative reading that a poem requires is first and foremost a close and careful reading, an attentive recitation. A poem lends itself first to recitation and only thereafter to interpretation. A poem must be sounded, otherwise its palpably oral quality is lost; its rhythm and rhyme, its assonance and euphony, are grossly disregarded. Such qualities have compelled many to compare poetry to music. Both typically share a sense of rhythm. Many of Emily Dickinson's poems, for example, can be sung to the tune of "Amazing Grace," although they were not intended for such use. It is no coincidence that many of the biblical psalms are given instructions for what appears to be musical accompaniment. As S. E. Gillingham notes, "To understand Hebrew poetry at all, we have to participate imaginatively in its performative power.... The psalms have an evocative power; they communicate beyond the boundaries of ancient Israel, and continuously testify to a capacity to perform their one 'score.'" Activated by the reader's imagination, a poem's performative power is its power to evoke. As a result, a poem transcends the poet's own context, allowing it to join the ranks of all poetic works, ancient and modern, Eastern and Western.

Reading a poem is quite different from reading a narrative or an essay. Poetry "is not to be galloped over like the daily news: a poem differs from most prose in that it is to be read slowly, carefully, and attentively." A poem places a high demand on the reader's active participation. To read a poem as poetry is to linger over the words, to reflect on their sequence, to read aloud for their assonance and alliteration as they roll off, or get stuck on, the tongue. There is an element of simultaneity when it comes to reading poetry. As we read, the poem unfolds before our eyes and ears, and as the poem unfolds, so does our reading. The art of reading poetry is to find oneself "moving inside the growing poem." We do not read to impose our meaning on the poem or to extract something out of it. Rather, as Mary Kinzie points out, "We are actively remaking the work's own meaning, tracing the path of the poem from among the tangle of possible routes it might have taken but did not. In effect, we accompany the poet through the ambiguous emergence of the eventual artistic pattern." In short, reading poetry is much like writing poetry: it proceeds thoughtfully and creatively, word by word, image by image, beat by beat.

These three features of poetry, while briefly discussed above as discrete topics, are inseparably wedded in any good piece of poetry. Together, they ensure a poem's freshness and openness to interpretation that other discursive genres do not necessarily feature, at least not to the degree that poetry does. Kinzie talks of poetry as "a sequence of new turnings" that is "neither the clone of a convention nor a mere...