Welcome listeners to the first things podcast, The Editor's Desk.

This is Rusty Reno, and I am at my desk, the editor's desk.

And I have with me today, Dana Joya, author of Christianity and poetry in the August

September issue.

And Dana is former poet laureate of California, an author of a great deal of poetry,

and the books Can Poetry Matter and the Catholic Writer Today, which was a famous article

at first things a number of years ago. Welcome, Dana, to the podcast. I'm glad to be here.

So Christianity and poetry, I mean, I was just so delighted when the piece came in.

So I guess the place to start here is why do we discount, because there's an element of urgency in the piece.

So why do we discount the role of poetry in our

religious lives? Well, I believe that, especially since Vatican II, in the Catholic Church,

but in a larger sense in the 20th century across all Christianity, we've had the prosaification of language.

People no longer understand the notion of sacred language and the levels of sacred language.

My essay, I think, is overwhelmingly just basic.

I make a few fundamental observations about how language works and how scripture works.

These are things that, you know, everybody should be obvious, you know, find obvious,

but they've been forgotten, really, certainly in the last, you know, 60, 70 years, and perhaps

since, you know, across the whole 20th century. I start off with a basic notion, and actually,

I'm going to back one step behind the essay. Human language is human speech. We talk to each

other, that's what language is. Over the course of civilization, we found two basic ways of

turning that speech into literature. One is called prose, one is called verse.

They have very different human, social, and cultural functions. Verse, which is to say poetry,

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