Luke Hankins is a poet, editor, and founder of Orison Books, a publishing company committed to supporting voices at the growing edges of spirituality and literature. In his first poetry collection Weak Devotions (Wipf and Stock, 2011), Luke explores the religious context of his childhood, one marked by violence, fundamentalism, mental anguish, and a pure desire to encounter God in the midst of it. With years of experience as an editor at Asheville Poetry Review Luke has written extensive poetry criticism, essays on aesthetics, and more—all in the service of his search for spiritual art and literature. As he writes in the mission statement of Orison, “the best spiritual art and literature call us to meditate and contemplate, rather than asking us to adopt any ideology or set of propositions,” and Luke’s edited anthology Poems of Devotion brings together emerging voices calling us toward that meditation he describes. He graciously allowed us to republish a few of his poems—and to present a new one for the first time (“The Right Way”)—and we discussed devotional poetry, faith and violence, and the struggle to find a language to express our spiritual longing.

from “Weak Devotions”

Why do You leave
some recess of my mind,
my heart, unlorded?
Leave nothing behind
that will linger in shit
and wallow and grind
itself in filthy defiance,
in masochistic, blind
groping after further
blasphemies. Furnace, kind
Lord, the furthest reaches
of me—make me refined.
Make me new. Take me to You.
Why have You assigned
this torture to me,
this desperate mind
that thinks inevitably
what it fears to think? Be kind
and do not let me be.
Need I remind
You, Lord, that You lay claim
to even the blindness of the purblind
worm—not only its righteous
wriggling? Be kind and be, kind
Lord, what You rightly are.
Rule what—whatsoever—you find.
Rein me in and reign in me.
There is freedom only when You bind.
Take me wholly, holy God.
Wholly, Holy. Mind my mind.

*Reprinted from Weak Devotions (Wipf & Stock, 2011).

…

Curator: More than a poet, you also edit work, curate anthologies, and run Orison Books, a press you founded. Online, we’re often trained to build our own platforms and focus on our own writing, so why work so intentionally with others? How did Orison come about?

Luke: I’ve been an editor almost as long as I’ve been a writer. In college, I worked at the campus literary magazine; in graduate school, I worked at Indiana Review; I’ve worked at Asheville Poetry Review, a national literary journal based in my current hometown, for ten years. I’ve always loved championing and publishing work that I’m enthusiastic about, and also working with authors to strengthen their work. Orison Books is a natural extension of those passions.

As valuable as periodical editing is, let’s be honest—the audience is miniscule. Books, however, are a little different. There’s at least a possibility that a book will gain a lot of attention and find a place on many bookshelves, to be treasured and returned to year after year. For whatever reason, we don’t treat literary magazines the same way. They feel more ephemeral and I think we treat them as such. Very seldom do people keep past issues of literary magazines on their shelves—unless their own work appears in them. Our cultural relationship to single-author books is different, more long-term.

Curator: You begin Poems of Devotion, an anthology of modern devotional poetry, making a careful distinction between devotional poetry directed toward God and poems about devotional experiences. Why is this distinction important for the reader to understand?

Luke: My aim in the introduction, and in the contents of the anthology, was to demonstrate not a genre so much as a mode of composition. The devotional mode, in my mind, is experiential on the writer’s part, a dynamic and uncertain process in relation to the divine—or at least the idea of the divine. This kind of poem enacts devotion through its very making, rather than simply recounting a past experience or pre-conceived notion.

And I want to be clear that when I speak of devotion, I decidedly do not mean simplistic expression of faith and certainty—that hogwash that passes for “inspirational” verse. To me, that’s not even devotion, because it doesn’t do justice to the human relationship to the divine. Real devotion is full of doubt, curiosity, wonder, confusion, anger, playfulness, fear, awe—all of those real human responses to the ineffable, transcendent, immanent sublimity of God.

Curator: I imagine the process of anthologizing devotional poetry exposed you to the best and worst of the genre. I wonder if you could reflect on the state of the devotional poem today? What’s happening in this genre that needs to change? What excites you about today’s devotional poetry?

Luke: I’ve just mentioned the hogwash that passes for inspirational verse. I think that’s all I need to say about that. There’s also the kind of poetry that seeks to convince the reader that the poet has all the answers or to proselytize—which I think is the opposite of devotional poetry because it doesn’t exist in relationship to mystery, but rather relies on false certainty.

But I think the state of real devotional poetry today is very exciting indeed. I’ve seen so much compelling recent work that embodies brave spiritual searching from poets and musicians like Christian Wiman, Jane Hirshfield, Leonard Cohen (ave atque vale), Yehoshua November, Kimberly Johnson, Vandana Khanna, Franz Wright (requiescat in pace), Bruce Beasley, Alicia Ostriker, Kaveh Akbar, Leila Chatti, and many, many others. I also want to single out the poems Brett Foster was writing at the end of his all-too-short life.

I hope that Poems of Devotion provides an important historical overview of recent decades, and that the annual Orison Anthology that Orison Books has initiated—we released the first volume last year—will help provide an ongoing record of today’s best spiritual writing.

Curator: Your recently published poem “Equal and Opposite” reflects on the weakness of language to express spiritual experience, and it reminded me of Rowan Williams, who said, “Language behaves as if it were always ‘in the wake’ of meaning rather than owning or controlling it.” In a way, you’re asking to be carried upstream to an experience of being that language cannot contain. How has poetry helped to carry you there?

Luke: I imagine that no one feels viscerally both the possibilities and limitations of a medium until they’ve worked with it for a long time. The longer I write poems, the more I feel the tension between the wild potential of words and their ultimate insufficiency. I think poets are fascinated with language for both reasons—its potential and its limitations—as I’m sure painters are with canvas and paint and musicians are with sounds.

One of the things that writing poetry does, over time, is cause you to attend more closely to the ways language informs, shapes, and even limits your experience. That’s what I’m wrestling with in the poem you mention. For better and for worse, humans are linguistic creatures, and we inhabit language constantly. Physical experience is always accompanied by and mediated through internal language.

I don’t have much more to say about this than what the poem itself says, nor do I think I’m able to say it any better than in that attempt.

Curator: It seems our public life has a fraught relationship with language right now. We’re reeling from political rhetoric and the constant bombardment of information online, and this atmosphere makes it difficult to speak and think clearly. The way we use words seems to be part of the problem, what can we do to restore our language and how can poetry and literature help?

Luke: I probably differ from most writers in this, but I don’t believe that language needs any restoration. Language itself is not ill—how could it be? Language, like any cultural product, is not inherently good or bad, right or wrong, healthy or sick. Language exists as a constantly evolving medium, a tool for us to use. What matters is the way we use it.

What you’ve called our “relationship with language,” however, may well be unhealthy. This is nowhere more evident than in our current politics, as you rightly point out. Donald Trump and his laughable excuse for a White House team continually use language to distort reality and to lie. Kellyanne Conway’s oxymoronic phrase “alternative facts” exemplifies this insane administration’s relationship to reality. The people in the most powerful positions in our country right now are deeply ill, spiritually, psychologically, ideologically. Their relationship to language is constant evidence of this.

While it’s vital that poetry continue to use language to illuminate reality and the human experience rather than distort it, its ability to effect political change in the moment is very limited. The audience for poetry in our country is a very small percentage of the population, and one that tends to already be politically progressive—poetry mostly operates in an echo chamber. We shouldn’t minimize the importance of shoring one another up through dark times, nor the potential for poetry to outlive us and benefit future generations, but we should also be honest with ourselves about the limitations of our literary work. We ought never give up our art, but we need to combine it with tangible political action as well.

Curator: The cycle of poems in the first section of your book Weak Devotions is an unflinching examination of violence. You write about writhing cottonmouths, barbed wire, a boy shooting another boy with a pellet gun, etc. The violence circles closer and implicates your own body where you’re in the earth digging a grave, your hands are soaked in blood. At one point you’re even covered in piss. These moments seem to operate in you as existential shock, a forceful clearing away of the mind’s debris in response to bodily suffering. How do you understand the violence that has happened in your life? How have you used it, and how has it shaped your understanding of religion?

Luke: Andrew Hudgins, in what I think is one of the finest religious poems of recent decades, writes about Christ in response to an artwork by Andres Serrano:

He peed, ejaculated, shat, wept, bled—
bled under Pontius Pilate, and I assume
the mutilated god, the criminal,
humiliated god, voided himself
on the cross, and blood and urine smeared his legs—
the Piss Christ thrown in glowing blood, the whole
and irreducible point of his descent:
God plunged in human waste, and radiant.

We have grown used to beauty without horror.

We have grown used to useless beauty.

(“Piss Christ,” from American Rendering: New & Selected Poems)

The idea that beauty without horror is of no use is a fascinating one. While I don’t believe that suffering in and of itself is a good, I do believe that we find God incarnate there every bit as much as we do in pleasureful experience. Beautiful art that doesn’t do justice to the suffering that is inherent in being human doesn’t serve art’s highest purpose.

I’m reminded also of a beautiful passage from one of Orison Books’ recent titles, Two Worlds Exist by Yehoshua November, in which the poet references mystical Chassidic teaching:

Two worlds exist:
The higher hidden one
and our earthly realm.
Everything that occurs in this life
flows down from the hidden world.
That which appears good
descends through an infinite series of contractions
until it fits within the finite vessels of this world.
That which appears tragic
slides down, unmitigated,
from the hidden realm—
a higher, unlimited good
this world cannot hold.
So the mystics explain suffering
if all comes from above,
from where no evil descends.

The poem concludes:

When I was younger,
I believed the mystical teachings
could erase sorrow. The mystical teachings
do not erase sorrow.
They say, here is your life.
What will you do with it?

So, while violence and suffering are not beautiful in and of themselves, I try in my work to find meaning in them, to see how they might teach me something about what beauty really means, by being informed by its opposite. In that way, maybe we can do something useful with our pain.

Curator: Violence can also be internal, and you’ve also explored the theme of mental anguish in your work. In section X of “Weak Devotions,” you say, “Do not leave me / feral and alone—yank / my heart that it may come heeling / and creaturely before You.” It’s a prayer asking for divine violence, and it echoes other devotional poems like Donne’s infamous “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” These poems fit squarely in the tradition of “dying to self,” but what’s the difference between the death of self and self-harm?

Luke: I can’t pretend to know where the line between self-abnegation and self-destruction lies. It’s likely different for each person. Some of the spiritual thinkers I most admire—Simone Weil, Franz Wright, David Bazan—often seem to me to cross this so-called line. I love their work despite its extremity—well, also because of its extremity, if I’m honest. It’s something like what I’m talking about in the poem “The Right Way” when I say “I think / you’re wrong, but wrong in the right way.” The farther away I move from my fundamentalist upbringing, the more I find myself interested in ideas I technically disagree with, such as Weil’s insistence on the “destruction of the ‘I’” rather than simply its abnegation, such as when she speaks of “decreation” and “self-effacement”: “The self,” she writes, “is only the shadow which sin and error cast by stopping the light of God,” and “Even if we could be like God, it would be better to be the mud which obeys God.” I pity Weil. She’s all Romans 9 and no Sermon on the Mount. But I also admire the dark beauty of what she’s written, even where I think she’s mistaken.

About the self-destructive strands in my own poetry, I’d like to say that they’re the record of particular times in my life, and are not indicative of my day-to-day outlook. I recall that T. S. Eliot once said something beautiful and insightful about his early work when asked, late in life, whether he would change anything about his early work. He said, essentially, that he didn’t feel that he was enough the same person as to have the right to change anything about his early work. My collection Weak Devotions was published in 2011, so even the most recent of those poems are seven or eight years old—and many are much older. So, while I wouldn’t change much about them and I remain proud of them, they’re not the poems I’m writing today.    

Curator: In an introduction to a poet published by Orison, you say, “this is the highest and most essential function of art and literature: not to provide the so-called answers that ideology attempts to, but to delve fully into the unknown, to accept it, to bravely meet it. And by doing so, to convince those who encounter one’s art that they are not alone, but that there is that type of invincible human solidarity that Joseph Conrad so eloquently describes.” That distinction between ideology and literature is fascinating to me. I’m often more moved by Denise Levertov’s poetry or Frederick Buechner’s Godric than creeds, and it’s been cause for confusion for me. How do religious communities begin to support this kind of brave meeting?

Luke: Art is experiential. Creeds are propositional. Experience carries authority because it isn’t conclusive, but rather full of mystery. And if we believe—or at least suspect—that God is immanent in the actual world we live in, then we encounter Her through experience.

Creeds lose their authority because they seek to claim too much of it, without doing justice to experience. Religious-minded folks often make idols of creeds, all the while looking askance at art out of fear of idolatry. Dear God, the irony.

Curator: The poet Franz Wright said, “You gave me / in secret one thing / to perceive, the / tall blue starry / strangeness of being / here at all.” Your own work as both poet and editor searches for this enlarging of perception. Any last advice for our readers hoping to do the same?

Luke: The strangeness of being—the mystery—is all.

…

A Shape with Forty Wings

Love is strange and calls me to stranger things.
When I was young I thought that I’d know why.
I’ve drawn my life—a shape with forty wings.

The woods at night are full of awesome beings.
Listen carefully and you can hear them cry:
Love is strange and calls us to stranger things.

I want to follow everything that sings,
but I cannot tell you how afraid I am to fly.
I’ve drawn my life—a shape with forty wings.

The unseen Being deep inside me brings
ideas to mind I hope I’ll never try—
Love is strange and calls me to stranger things.

Possibilities surround me in concentric rings.
A light shines down that I cannot see by,
yet I’ve drawn my life—a shape with forty wings.

I walk about as if I understood my wanderings.
If You are near, show me how to die.
Love is strange and calls me to stranger things.
I’ve drawn my life—a shape with forty wings.

*Reprinted from Weak Devotions (Wipf & Stock, 2011).

The Right Way

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in a letter from prison,
The transcendence of epistemological theory
has nothing to do with the transcendence of God.
Which, given, is an epistemological theory all its own . . .
But the sentiment is right. It feels right to say that sentence.
And so I say it over and over, and I write it again and again.
He also says that God’s “beyond” is not the beyond
of our cognitive faculties. Hmm. I can’t
technically agree with either statement,
as they seem to arise out of the very processes
they’re attempting to discount. It involves a logical fallacy
for which I’m sure logicians have a name.
But I do say yes to these statements.
I do memorize and repeat them.
Dear Bonhoeffer, I don’t agree, but I feel you, man.
It’s strange—I could almost be talking to myself.
Heaven nowhere more possible than in the depths of hell,
I write. God as reason beyond reason.
Dear Me, I feel you, man. I think
you’re wrong, but wrong in the right way.

Equal and Opposite

Looking at the sky, the word sky
comes to mind. The word has a referent—
the sky itself—but the sky itself
has no referent. To live in language
is to anticipate metaphor,
but in this moment I sense the void
upon which, all these years, I have built
my house of words.
Only come with me
to the precipice where I peer in terror,
I pray, grasping at words
that offer no resistance
like feathers snatched from the air,
like ropes not tied to anything.
I plunge through the world
that is no language
praying (in my language)
to the absent Referent,
the force equal and opposite
to the void, the grip that can
(I pray) suspend my fall
so that I might hang
in what the sky means.

*Originally published in St. Katherine Review and also appeared in The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing, UK, 2016).