The power of poetry in broken times: An interview with Lee C. Camp
Photograph by Trust “Tru” Katsande via Unsplash
Rev. Dr. Anna Piela
Can poetry help us protest, pray, lament, and even hope at the time of crisis? This fall on “No Small Endeavor,” ethics professor Lee C. Camp explores this question with three poets. His first guest is Joy Harjo, former U.S. poet laureate, who draws from Indigenous traditions. The second is Haleh Liza Gafori, a poet and acclaimed translator of Rumi. The third is Pádraig Ó Tuama, poet, theologian, and host of “Poetry Unbound.” Camp reflected on the role of poetry in today’s world in an interview with “The Christian Citizen.”
Hi Lee. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. My first question is: Who is the audience of these three podcast episodes?
Our show, “No Small Endeavor,” is syndicated on public radio, so we’re on 100+ stations around the country. My academic discipline is Christian theology and ethics, so we straddle this interesting space in which we are regularly in conversation with theology and religion, allowing people to bring their full selves, bring their experience of faith formation, rejection of faith or never having believed, whatever the case may be, letting people bring their full selves to any kind of given conversation, including about faith. Questions around human flourishing are foregrounded in our show. And that language of human flourishing is something that both people of faith and people not of faith can relate to. It allows us to talk to, say, social scientists or neuroscientists, artists, theologians, philosophers, across the full range of disciplines, because all of those have something to say about what human flourishing might mean and entail. So the show is in conversation with faith and religious traditions, but trying to address questions that appeal to a very broad spectrum of people. This particular series is located within that general project, and so we anticipate a similar kind of audience for it.
Tell me, how did the idea for this series come about?
Given the pervasive sense of weight with all that’s happening socially and politically, we wondered, how could we make some sort of contribution? At some point I remembered Christian Wiman, the former editor of Poetry Magazine, the longest-running poetry magazine in the country for a long while. He was an atheist and then came back to his Christian faith, and now he’s at Yale Divinity School. He’s written some beautiful memoirs and a lot of wonderful poetry. I’ve gotten to know Chris through the years, and in his memoir, “My Bright Abyss,” he asked the question, what is poetry’s role when the world is burning? I happened to remember that, and I said, “Well, what we could do is we could ask a number of poets: how are you thinking about the weight of the world at this moment? What is the kind of work that you do as a poet?” We just used that as the frame, and it has been very fruitful for this series, because it allowed us to foreground the sense of weight, the weightiness of the moment.
What do you think approaching this question through poetry gives us that perhaps other artistic narratives, like music or visual arts, could not? How is poetry different from those other modes of expression?
One obvious difference between some of those other artistic forms and poetry is that poetry insists on language, and yet, it’s language that can often be elusive or is less easily manipulated. Perhaps that’s because it can be slippery or not always clear about what it’s getting at. I think in that very reality, sometimes it can disarm us and allow us to consider things that maybe we haven’t considered. One of the things that I have wondered about a lot as a Christian theologian — so much of Christian public witness in the last decade has been so contentious and so alienating — is how can I do public theology in such a way that can disarm some of this? How can we identify shared human concerns and bring the full weight of who we are, our full set of convictions, and then see what good comes from that act of hospitality, one with the other?
Poetry can allow us to see things that we haven’t imagined otherwise, or possibilities that we haven’t considered, or give us a new frame for thinking about our experience.
One of the things I’ve experienced poetry to do is that it can be very disarming and kind of sneak up on us and, all of a sudden, allow us to see things that we haven’t imagined otherwise, or possibilities that we haven’t considered, or give us a new frame for thinking about our experience. So I think that’s one way I think of it as a distinctive discipline that brings its own set of specific goods — obviously, other art forms have their own specific goods — that I find quite fascinating and quite compelling.
How did you come to select these three poets to appear on the show? They represent different backgrounds and traditions.
Padraig was on the show a few years ago. I always look for any kind of excuse to talk to Padraig again, because I find him so compelling and so thoughtful! And then we began just kind of casting our net to see what kind of connections we might have. The first criterion for our invitations was engagement with the fraught nature of human history, right? Joy Harjo, a Muscogee (Creek) Indigenous woman, has clearly grappled with the broken nature of American history. Same thing for Padraig in his Irish context. He has done a lot of peacemaking work, so he’s very acutely aware of the “fire” of hostile social settings. And Haleh Liza Gafori is an acclaimed translator of Rumi, a 13th-century Sufi mystic, bringing his vision in a meaningful way for our broken times. All of them, in various ways, have come to — or through — these experiences of the brokenness of the world to do their work in poetry. That was the main thing that we were looking for. Poets who have lived experience with using their art within these contexts of the brokenness of the world.
Were there any connections between these poets that you had not anticipated while envisaging the series?
This is not a surprise across the three conversations, but one of the surprises that I experienced very poignantly was with Joy Harjo.
This summer, I happened to go back home to Talladega, Alabama. I hadn’t been back home in a while, so I took time to kind of revisit old haunts and see old friends. I stopped at the historical marker in downtown Talladega which has an inscription about the Creek Indian War when Jackson killed many Creek Indian warriors which then led to another Creek War battle, and eventually to the Trail of Tears. And then a few weeks later I’m studying and preparing for my interview with Joy Harjo, and she says that she’s six generations removed from the Red Stick faction of Muscogee (Creek) Indians who fought Jackson. And I’m realizing this means that my people lived on land that was theirs, that had been just taken from Joy Harjo’s people, and I found this very troubling. I also thought, what does one do with that? Then I thought, I want to talk about it with Joy Harjo and acknowledge that this is a very painful reality of our world and of my own reality. And so we talked about it, and she said, “As a matter of fact, I have a document in my possession that mentions the name of someone who was forced to leave on the Trail of Tears from Talladega, Alabama” — which is my hometown.
Truth-telling about the fires of the world is not dichotomous with charity and kindness and mercy and justice but can coexist with them.
Joy said that you don't “solve” these things, right, but you can acknowledge them, and you can acknowledge that here we are, two people with our own experiences and our own backgrounds in the midst of these broken realities, and we can treat each other as people, and we can listen to one another and share with one another. And so that was a very poignant moment. I’ve been thinking about that conversation over and over again. I do think that’s the thing that you see across all of these episodes, the poignancy of brokenness and the way in which people found ways, not in a Pollyannaish sort of way, but in a very realistic, sober-minded way, to acknowledge how difficult things are and can be, and, yet, still trying to find a way to bear witness to something that’s beautiful or true or good, and to treat the other people around them with respect and dignity. And that truth-telling about the fires of the world is not dichotomous with charity and kindness and mercy and justice but can coexist with them. That’s one of the things that’s so compelling about all of my guests, that what they’re trying to do is tell the truth and then still find a way for us to facilitate a very real, deep human community.
And what would you say to people who think that poetry is not for them? That it’s too difficult, too hoity-toity.
Well, I mean, I would certainly say that some poetry is inaccessible to me as well. And I’m very much a layman with regard to poetry, but I’ve just found, through the years, certain poets that I find very compelling. A poet we’ve had on the show twice is Naomi Shihab Nye, a Palestinian American poet who’s just wonderful. Her poetry is very accessible, moving, and beautiful. It makes me a better human being. I would just encourage people to experiment. Don’t spend a lot of time trying to make sense of poetry that doesn’t mean anything to you but, instead, define the stuff that works. Billy Collins has a great anthology of poetry [“Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry”]. Find poets that you like and start buying their books. Marie Howe is another great poet, she served as the New York poet laureate. I love Wendell Berry’s poetry. Keep digging around. Find something that catches your attention. I think that’s one of the things that are so beautiful: If I’ll sit just long enough with a poem, it will catch me up. It will allow me to see something in a new sort of way.
This makes me think about my most recent encounter with poetry. A colleague of mine published a book of poems which had a launch at our American Baptist Home Mission Societies office. She wrote a lot about the challenges that she had lived through as a Chinese American woman. Reading her poems really made me feel like I just knew her, or began to know her, at a very different level. It was a learning experience for me, because she had written about discrimination and microaggressions that she had experienced. It had a very different weight — hearing it from a real person, someone you know — as opposed to reading reports or statistics. I couldn’t stop reading her poems until I finished the book!
Yeah, that’s lovely.
Thank you for your time. I will be tuning into the podcast!
The No Small Endeavor episode featuring Joy Harjo was released on October 20, 2025. Lee C. Camp is the creator and host of “No Small Endeavor,” an acclaimed podcast series exploring what it means to live a good life. He is an award-winning teacher and Professor of Theology & Ethics at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee. Following seminary (M.Div., Abilene Christian University), Lee completed a graduate degree in Moral Theology (Ph.D., University of Notre Dame).
Rev. Dr. Anna Piela is senior writer at American Baptist Home Mission Societies and assistant editor of The Christian Citizen.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
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