Faith plays a role for area poets who write from their hearts about topics ranging from day-to-day life to the eternal. Four poets speak about their writing and how faith informs their work to honor April’s National Poetry Month.
Jewish poet Janet Ruth Heller says it well: “Some see religion as something we don’t need. But it helps people get through life and better themselves. Improving community and helping people improve are very positive goals. Who doesn’t need community support and encouragement to better themselves and rethink their actions?”
Jane Zwart
Jane Zwart has a big notebook called Poem Crumbs. In it she records the crumbs that may become poems someday, those tiny bits of words or images that spark her curiosity and imagination. She may turn those crumbs into a full-fledged poem or simply flesh out her idea and dress it up later. Or maybe they will stay crumbs in her notebook.
“You never know when something will come,” said the professor English at Calvin University who is also codirector of the Festival of Faith & Writing, held biennially at the Christian Reformed university in Grand Rapids. She’s been writing poems since childhood, a natural extension of her English major parents and bookshelves full of poets such as e e cummings, Emily Dickenson and Langston Hughes.
Her first full-length manuscript, Oddest and Oldest and Saddest and Best, will release with Orison in October. Some of the poems have no Christian element while others speak into the lives of saints or about the grace Christ offers.
“There is hope underneath all of them,” Zwart said. “Any creativity people have is because they were created in the image of a creator. If we can make something a little bit true or peculiar or beautiful, it is a gift. It mirrors the bigger and truer truth, the originally perfect design of creation.”
She’s finding more time to write now that her sons are older, and finding that poetry can meet a spiritual need. “Poems don’t proselytize; they are more interested in what they don’t know than what they do and have sense of their own limits. Poems point to things that are mysterious or divine,” she said.
Janet Ruth Heller
“Fairness” has been a theme in Janet Ruth Heller’s life from the beginning. From defending the underdogs in grade school to encouraging shy students to find their voices to giving voice to Jewish women in her poetry book “Exodus,” Heller has been helping those who need it.
She’s a retired college professor (WMU), a tutor for high school students, a playwright, a former journalist, and an active participant in her synagogue.
“Faith is a bedrock of my life and poetry,” said Heller, who lives in Portage. “I’ve always been a person of faith. I try to develop certain themes and ideas that interest me, to write about characters that connect to something in me.”
One of those themes has been poems about women in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, including Rebekah, who “went off with an old guy she’s never met to marry a man she’s never met in a place she’s never been,” to Leah, the unloved first wife of Jacob, and Peninah, the first wife who was unkind to the barren Hannah. And don’t forget Ruth, Naomi, Miriam and even Jezebel.
“There is a long tradition in Judaism and Christianity of going back to the Bible and reworking and rewriting stories. In Judaism we call it midrash, in Christianity exegesis,” said Heller. “It’s not a tradition I invented, but one I’m proud to be part of. Each new generation needs to find meaning in the religious text and to connect with it.”
Heller is working on a fifth book, just now starting to put together a group of her new, miscellaneous poems.
Jeff Munroe
Jeff Munroe retired in 2020 from his role as executive vice president of Western Theological Seminary in Holland, and by November had taken over Reformed Journal, an online magazine that had been through several iterations over the years. In March 2021, Munroe relaunched it as the online home for reviews, poetry and feature articles. The site’s popularity has grown, with 1.4 million page views in 2024.
While Munroe publishes others’ poetry in Reformed Journal, his own work has found a home in the The Christian Century, U.S. Catholic and Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature. His most recent is “Murmuration” in December 2024’s The Christian Century, a poem about encountering a large group of starlings that “part before me like I’m Moses …”
“The beauty of poetry is taking a moment and putting a frame around it and hollering ‘pay attention’,” said Munroe, who lives in Holland. “In a limited attention-span world, we can say ‘look here at this moment.’”
He writes poetry for his own enjoyment, always working on bits of poems and recording ideas longhand in college-ruled notebooks bought at Meijer for a dime each. His faith is part of who he is.
“I don’t write poems because I’m a person of faith, but because I’m a person of faith it comes through in my poems,” Munroe said. “Faith is my worldview; it just come out in my poems.”
Munroe has also published several nonfiction books. “Telling Stories in the Dark: Finding Healing and Hope in Sharing Our Sadness, Grief, Trauma, and Pain” released in January 2024, and in 2019 InterVarsity Press published “Reading Buechner: Exploring the Work of a Master Memoirist, Novelist, Theologian, and Preacher.”
Katie Kalisz
Katie Kalisz believes a poet’s job is to witness, to tell the truth about what’s going on in the world, to make sense of things. She writes about her Catholic faith as “trying to understand; I can be honest, even angry sometimes.”
“Part of what I take away from faith is the cycle of searching and questions, and rejoicing. It’s the mystery of faith, and being okay with the mystery,” said Kalisz, who is a professor in the English department at Grand Rapids Community College.
She calls herself a poet and a professor and, in her world, one certainly informs the other. She began writing poetry in 2009 and now calls it something “I can’t not do.” She has a new collection coming out in April: “Flu Season” with Cornerstone Press, which is based at the University of Wisconsin—Stevens Point.
“I refer to it as the Dread Collection. We’re having to deal with dread a lot these days, which is a daily companion for me. Not just dread of the flu, but of weather-related things, warnings put out all year long, news stories,” she said. “But the opposite of dread is longing. Readers can understand what dread is, but also hope and longing.”
Kalisz, who lives in Belmont, describes her faith as always in the background, if not in the foreground. “It’s in how I see the world,” she said.
Poems to ponder
From “A Theodicy for Children” by Jane Zwart (first published in Saranac Review)
God is the precipice
and theodicy the gravity
From “Hush” by Katie Kalisz (first published in Willows Wept Review, included in her forthcoming “Flu Season”)
See how the leopard frogs glimmer
in the sun? Hush now – here is a lullaby:
forage in the woods, swing on the tire swing,
rocking to sleep, like we live between the pages
of a hymnal, and any moment now, someone
will open it to find us here, content.
From “Imagine the Dexterity of God” by Jeff Munroe (first published in The Christian Century)
And now imagine the dexterity of God, who stands both in and out of time. Consider that it cost God everything to have a foot in our world and a foot in eternity. It may cost God still. Imagine a God who keeps choosing to do so despite the cost, a God who keeps saying yes.
From “Sarah’s Prayer” by Janet Ruth Heller (published in “Exodus”)
My God, I beg you to send
a young child
who will grow strong within my body,
renewing my life.
Facebook Comments