“Poetry and Incarnation”: A Study of Poetry by Craig van Rooyen

Photo: Craig van Rooyen (center back) with students and faculty.

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“A good poem tries to turn words into flesh to make a connection with another person in another body.”
~ Craig van Rooyen

A momma pig, a sow, is on her side, one leg lifted, a pile of piglets huddled around her, trying to drink her milk. “There is something embarrassing about the picture,” Craig van Rooyen says while looking towards the audience, amusement dancing on his features. This image, taken from Galway Kinnell’s “Saint Francis and the Sow,” starts off Andrews’ annual Waller lecture, this year hosting Craig van Rooyen, poet and judge, as he tries to get to the essence of poetry itself in his lecture “Poetry and Incarnation.”

Starting with the image of the exposed sow, Van Rooyen uses Kinnell’s poem to emphasize how poetry seeks “to reteach a thing its loveliness” and “and retell it in words and in touch/it is lovely/until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.” “It seems so strange to focus on poetry when so much else is happening,” he says, referencing dishes awaiting washing, children needing help with homework, and the world burning right outside our doors. “Poets,” he informed us, “write in an industry that is so insular that the outside world doesn’t care.” Besides the mounds of problems we already face, poets encounter yet another one: AI. In a world of AI, writers need to ask themselves what they bring. “They bring touch,” Van Rooyen says slowly, emphasizing each word, “they bring back loveliness.”

But how exactly does poetry do that?

Turning to a different poem, “homage to my hips” by Lucille Clifton, Van Rooyen reads the poem to us, these oh-so feminine words spoken by a man, but so humane nonetheless, seeming almost natural to him. “There is a deep humanity under poetry that flowers from within,” he says. Under all those layers of fiction, all those layers of emotion, and all those layers of experience, we inevitably come down to the human experience. Describing this, Van Rooyen informs us how “it happens within us in this room as it happens with a poem on a page.” The incarnation of those hips on a page bestows the blessing of sharing human experience on everyone who makes contact with it. “She’s transcending those differences between us and reaching us concerning our own bodies and our broken hearts,” Van Rooyen emphasizes.

“A good poem tries to turn words into flesh to make a connection with another person in another body,” Van Rooyen says as he turns the page, diving into how the Bible itself stresses the same point. After the original sin, the first two humans become painfully aware of their own nakedness, the first example of body shame. This nakedness, or rather, awareness of nakedness, created a separation between humanity and the divine. Thousands of years later, in the New Testament, Jesus bridged that gap by taking form in a body to heal the world. Interestingly enough, Jesus was using touch to heal, placing His hands on the sick. “God incarnate, the Word become flesh, was using His body to touch the bodies of those who had become ashamed of their bodies,” Van Rooyen so poetically phrased, “[reminding] them of their loveliness.”

“There is a song inside the soul, the body’s bright wailing,” Van Rooyen says. “We cannot escape our skin, and we cannot escape time. The body’s spatial limits render me essentially alone,” he painfully but wonderfully expresses. In “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman tries to defy those limits, trying so hard to leave pieces of himself in the poem to meet the reader so many years after he is gone. “He goes for broke trying to bridge that gap and bare himself,” Van Rooyen remarks, “but yet he fails.” In a grave voice, he looks at his audience and drops a painful truth, “Maybe in the end, poetry is really the opposite of incarnation.”

Is all poetry then a failure of the very thing it sets out to do?

In a way, just as we human beings are so flawed, so is what we generate. “Poetry is an ordinary process of flesh trying to escape itself by becoming words, and failing. Maybe it’s a poem’s failure itself that is so moving.” In the end, we are flesh and will remain so as long as we are on this earth. But this flawed existence and the flawed beauty we create still so beautifully conveys so much of who we are. So yes, poetry does fail, but it does so wonderfully. Returning to our sow, we now understand that “she has flowered from within because a hand was laid on her creased forehead and because a poet told her, and us, ‘blessings of earth on you.’”

Van Rooyen finished his lecture with a reading of his own wonderful poems, which so rawly capture the human experience through touch and connection, namely, “Costco Ode,” “Take the Neck Step Against Aging,” and “Meeting the Buddha.”