The Brooklyn Rail

Years ago, in response to a question I had posed to Scott Cairns about what constitutes a bad theology, the poet, who had written a poem called “Bad Theology,” replied: “Any theology that presumes to have God in its pocket … that replaces the enormous, immeasurable real with very measurable and very calculated replacements . . . [and] articulates as definitive and conclusive that which is unknowable and without end.” Among numerous implications for this are the all-too obvious ways bad theologies can impose restrictive measures upon people in the name of morality. One especially toxic practice that supports such measures weaponizes scripture by misappropriating portions of sacred texts to other and exclude—a practice that harms the wielder as well as those wielded upon.

What a relief and joy then it has been to encounter poet Katie Manning’s Hereverent, a collection of poems which, again in the words of Cairns, provides “an inclusive corrective to pharisaical anxieties that have, of late, threatened to erode the compassion and joy of the Gospel.” More specifically, Manning draws upon the language of the Bible to create art, a procedure she believes “promotes an open mind,” and allows those who encounter the results to “step toward acceptance and inclusiveness.” Each biblical book, beginning with Genesis and ending with Revelation, functions here as a word bank for individual poems that are, despite their ties to ancient literature, as fresh and formally innovative as anything being written today.

Time and again, the poems in Hereverent left me astonished: they re-envision scriptural passages through new contexts, exploit unexpected juxtapositions, and foreground the plasticity of words. Some poems seem like allegories relevant to current world issues. Others assume a timeless, koanic quality akin to riddle. “The Book of No” (sourced from Jonah) suggests both of these features: “anger / became angry” and “wanted to die.” The final lines, too good not to quote in full, leave one embracing uncertainty in the service of wonder:

God said
is it right for you to be angry

it is
he said
I wish I were dead

but the Lord said
you
died overnight

The conversation below occurred as a series of email exchanges across six days in late April. Manning, who was in the thick of grading papers and recovering from a temporary illness, handled the assignment with magnanimity and grace: her responses articulate her methods and are, in their broader implications, almost as notable as the poems themselves.

Tony Leuzzi (Rail): Hello, Katie. Congratulations on the release of Hereverent, published in spring 2023 by Agape Editions. I am captivated by your vigorous application of certain restrictive compositional methods as well as the spirit of openness and inclusiveness with which those restrictive methods were used. Through the course of our exchanges, I’ll give you plenty of room to discuss both. I’d like to start, however, by quoting in full your “Author’s Note” that precedes the poems:

I am tired of people taking language from the Bible out of context and using it as a weapon against other people, so I started taking the language from the Bible out of context and using it to create art. My process was to use the last chapter from one book of the Bible as a word bank for each poem. This is either the most heretical or the most reverent thing I’ve ever written.

If you’ve had verses from the Bible used in harmful ways toward you because of your disability, ethnicity, gender, infertility, mental illness, race, sex, sexuality, weight, or for any other reason: I’m sorry.

This book is for you, with love.

As a gay man, I appreciate the motivation of your project. More broadly, as a human, I also am intrigued by the implicit correlation you have made between the creation of art and the negation of hate. While there are those who use the language of the Bible as a weapon against others—frequently othering those others—you have chosen to counter such destructive efforts through the forging of your poems. I do believe art can heal. But, from your perspective, does art inherently promote acceptance and inclusiveness?

Katie Manning: Thanks for spending time with my work, Tony. I love that we’re jumping right into the purpose and possibility of art. I have a big umbrella for what I deem “art”—meaning I don’t think I’m too snooty about what counts or not—but I do think that in my definition, art requires something of those who experience it. At the very least, art invites or challenges us to think, feel, or question something without demanding an exact answer. In that way, I think art promotes an open mind, which I do think can be a step toward acceptance and inclusiveness, but it’s up to us to accept the invitations and take the steps. Art that shuts down conversation or simply pushes the dominant narrative becomes propaganda; to me, that ceases to be art.

Rail: Yours is one of those rare books where the contents pages read like an actual poem. In the left column appears the title of each poem; then the page number; then, in ghosted text to the right, appears the actual book where each respective poem has originated. Each individual title, then, is a sort of anagram of a corresponding book title. Hence, “The Book of Genes” emerged from Genesis; “The Book of Verbs” from Proverbs; “The Book of Eke” from Ezekiel; “The Book of “Mist” from First Timothy; etc…. I have gotten so much pleasure moving through the list of contents, observing what you have extracted from the original names. What were your reasons for presenting the contents this way? What, if anything, might your approach tell us about the nature of language and the cultures we create around names? Are you, in a sense, challenging certain constructions of historical knowledge?

Manning: I’m so glad you enjoy the titles! I presented the contents page this way because I wanted the poems to retain some connection to their source texts, but putting the name of the biblical book on each poem felt like too much. I wanted to allow them to exist as distinct poems on their own, so using grayscale on the contents page seemed like a good way to keep that connection while still maintaining some distance. I enjoyed the process of creating a list of anagrams and partial anagrams for the potential titles. Sometimes I selected a title first and let that guide my composition of the poem, and other times I created the poem first and then chose a title that seemed to generate the most interesting conversation with the poem. As for the nature of language, one of the things I realized along the way is that I’m always working with a limited word bank, even though I haven’t usually thought of my own vocabulary in that way. Names always do a lot of work and bring along their baggage, so it was especially interesting to see what fell away and what else emerged when I let go of the proper names.

I’m not sure I can answer your last question—am I challenging certain constructions of historical knowledge? I might be. I hope so.

Rail: I am intrigued by what you just said, that “one of the things [you] realized along the way is that [you’re] always working with a limited word bank.” I suppose this is true for all writers. I’m wondering if you could amplify this idea a bit. What are some of the words in your bank that you have carried over from your work prior to writing Hereverent? How might those words have been useful in your conception of this project? Or, from another angle, do you feel the words culled from individual books of the Bible have expanded your existing word bank and will continue to do so moving forward with other projects? 

Manning: My debut full-length book, Tasty Other, explores the transition to motherhood, and words related to mothers, women, and children certainly carry over from my previous work. I can see how my own preoccupations and interests, and my daily experiences of parenting and being in my body, shaped the words I pulled out and the ways I crafted several of these poems. One of the early poems in this collection is “The Song of Sons,” created from “The Song of Songs,” of course, and my poem takes the voice of a nursing child. This speaker has a sweetness, but also an intensity of love and need that’s almost too much.

I don’t think I know yet how the words I’ve culled for this project are going to haunt my future projects, but I do know that, as someone who was raised in the church and who memorized a lot of Bible verses throughout my youth, my mental lexicon was already packed with biblical language. Something this project did for me though was make me aware of the individual words again. Some of the verses had become so familiar that it was hard for me to see their strangeness or hear their music.

Rail: The title of the book is a pun on irreverent, though you have gendered it as Hereverent.  In what ways does your identity and perspective as a woman play a part in your creation of these poems? Is a woman's irreverence, for instance, fundamentally different than a man’s? Or am I looking at this the wrong way round? What if, for example, Hereverent is not as much a pun on irreverent as it is an amalgamation of Her-eve-rent. Are the poems in this book torn from the pages of a lost scripture, say, a woman who positions herself in the lineage of Eve?    

Manning: I’m so delighted by this question! You’re playing with the title in different ways than I was, and I love that. I put the word “hereverent” together as a portmanteau of “heretical” and “reverent” because, as I said in the author’s note, I wasn’t sure if this project was heretical or a deeply reverent response to weaponized uses of scripture. And then I loved that the portmanteau began with “her,” because many of the poems woven throughout do explore women, mothers, God as feminine, etc. I’m not opposed to any of your interpretations or any others that might come along though! I always tell my literature students that readers participate in making the meanings of poems, and I enjoy when I get to find out how other people are filling in the gaps of mine. This project more than any other I’ve done leaves so much space for readers to participate in interpretation of the titles and poems, which is another layer of playfulness and offers another layer to ponder (I hope) in thinking about Scripture, translation, and how we use (and misuse) holy texts.

Rail: Given the parameters of your project, there are a number of ways you could have engaged the source texts. I’m curious why you focused on the last chapter from each book of the Bible. Might you as easily have chosen the first chapter, or a random chapter each time out? Is there something significant about selecting words from the endings of each book?

Manning: If we could go back in time to 2012 and ask my past self as I was starting this project, I might give you a different answer. Here’s the answer I’ll give now: trying to interpret biblical verses out of context without considering what has come before is absurd, and just using the last chapters and ignoring the rest felt like the most absurd way to highlight this. I wasn’t thinking consciously of this when I began the project, but it reminds me of an experience I had in college when I showed up to the last day of a literature class. Before the professor arrived, my classmates and I were talking about how terrible our final papers were. We were generally high-achieving students in an upper-level literature class, so the papers probably weren’t that bad, but we each started reading aloud just the last sentence as proof of how awful our papers were, and we laughed to tears because, indeed, just hearing the concluding sentence out of context was hilarious. For this poetry project, using only the ending chapters is one way that I respond to the absurdity.

Rail: There’s a whole tradition of absurdity in literature, which often (though not exclusively) exploits randomness. Based on your explanation above, it sounds like you could have set different boundaries and restrictions for making the book. Although this may be the case, what struck me about the poems in Hereverent is how inevitable many of them seemed. Let me cite in full a comparatively short poem, “The Book of Ma,” composed from a word bank in the final chapter of “Mark”:

a
mother
might go to a
tomb
trembling and bewildered
and
ask
a young man
in a white robe
who
is not
there

are
you
afraid

Had I not known the source text for the words in this poem, and had I not known that your choice to use that specific word bank was selected at random, I would have never wondered if the poem could have been written in an entirely different way. It feels wholly-realized. So, I guess my question is this: did you write a number of possible poems from the same word bank and choose the one you thought worked best? And related to this, have you been tempted to go back and write more poems from the same word banks?

Manning: Thank you for affirming that these poems are working individually as poems! As I mentioned earlier, that was something I hoped for (and feared wouldn’t happen). I love found poems, but I wasn’t sure it would be possible to sustain them for a whole collection. I thought it was worth trying though. When I first began this as a self-assigned project in 2012, I wanted to work on something meaningful, and I wanted to keep myself writing at a transitional time when I could’ve very easily lost my writing practice (new baby, finishing grad school, starting a full-time job).

I worked on these poems over a decade. I was startled by how long each poem took to compose! I had expected these to be much quicker creations, but I would find myself working on a first draft for over an hour. Usually, I would keep drafting from what I began, but every now and then I started over completely to see what else would emerge. I could only do that if a lot of time had passed since my previous work with that book though. I needed to come to the words with a new perspective. I certainly could have set other boundaries and included other poems in this project. I tell my students that there’s never a “right” version of their poems; there are just different versions that will have different effects, and they get to choose which they want, at least for now. It’s okay to revise again later. I have to remind myself of these things too.

I haven’t been tempted to go back and write more poems from these word banks! I think I worked with them so closely for so long that once I gathered them together and edited them on the manuscript level, I felt like I was ready to let them be and move on to other things. I had been working on other projects and publishing other collections throughout that decade as well, but this one was my sturdy foundation. Even with the sleep deprivation of newborn parenting, the stress of first-year teaching, and several other intense things that our family went through in those years, this project had parameters that never left me staring at a blank page, and it kept me writing.

Rail: Formally, one of the most conspicuous features of your Hereverent poems are their clipped lines. I’ve read a lot of short-lined poems in the past. Many feel fragmented, or appear to promote a non-contiguous reading, where each line sort of floats in isolation; other times, such dramatically short lines may be a result of experimental typography. I don’t sense any of this from your poems. Your phrasing and syntax are quite fluid. If the lines were omitted and you placed the sentences into paragraphs, many of the passages would resemble lyric prose. So, your decision to consistently parse sentences into short lines feels deliberate, as if you are slowing one’s progression through sentences and even creating tension and dissonance by retarding the flow. Would you agree with these observations? What informed your decision(s) to lineate the poems as you have?

Manning: I worked with the lineation a lot, so I’m very glad to know it feels deliberate! On my first drafts, I pulled out words and phrases and kept them together or separated based on how I’d found them in the text. As I revised, I played more with arranging and pacing the language across line endings and stanzas. I always read what I’ve just written back to myself while I work, so I’m usually thinking both about how the words appear on the page and how they sound. In this collection, I wasn’t working with set meter and rhyme, but I was thinking about rhythm and sonic qualities like alliteration and assonance. While I did try a variety of line lengths during my revision process, I ultimately felt that making the lines very short led to a slower, more deliberate reading that kept attention on the words themselves, and this seemed to suit the individual poems and the overall project well.

Rail: When reading these poems aloud, do you take a noticeable pause at each line ending before moving to the next line? If so, what effect might your drawing out the syntax this way have upon a listening audience? And do you feel a psychological or emotional change when enunciating each word so carefully? 

Manning: I don’t take a noticeable pause at each line ending, but the short lines make me read more slowly than I otherwise would, and they usually make me emphasize the end words (and secondarily the starting words) of each line. I naturally tend toward reading quickly, so I appreciate that this collection made me zoom in and slow down. Sometimes when I’m reading these poems now, I’ll see possible meanings that I didn’t realize were there when I composed them. I don’t think listening audiences perceive me as reading slowly, but they probably perceive me as reading deliberately. Maybe they always do; I tend to enunciate very clearly when I read. I think it’s the lifelong choir girl in me.

I’ve been talking a lot about lines and line breaks this semester with my grad poetry workshop, and the most fun thing for me about working with different poetic lines across collections is that there are so many variables—short lines can slow readers down or speed them up depending on what else is going on with the punctuation, diction, sound play, content, etc. The same length of line or type of line break doesn’t always do the same thing.

Rail: The great poet Scott Cairns claims in his blurb of Hereverent that you have “brought [your] midrashic imagination into the service of an inclusive corrective to pharisaical anxieties that have, of late, threatened to erode the compassion and joy of the Gospel.” Although these words are not your own, I am wondering what you think of them, especially in relation to your work.

Manning: Well, I feel seen and affirmed by these words. I love the way midrash turns stories over to view them from new perspectives and fills in gaps in the texts, so any time someone mentions my writing in connection with that tradition, I feel deeply honored. I also appreciate the way he calls my project “an inclusive corrective” (may it be so) and uses the label “pharisaical anxieties.” I’m constantly amazed that some people who claim to follow Jesus look and sound like the Pharisees and other religious leaders in the Bible who were all about legality and judgement (and who don’t come off well) much more than they resemble Jesus, who taught and lived a life of love and inclusion (“gospel” means good news, after all).

Rail: Your book was recommended to me by poet and critic Jonathan Everitt, whose review of Hereverent appears in the May issue of MicroLit Almanac Book Review. There, Everett says: “Manning does more than consider centuries-old teaching in these poems. She alludes to modern sociopolitical forces, too.” He then cites “The Book of Endings,” where you write: “an official / came / and said / settle down / and it will go well with you / he set fire to the city.” Indeed, several of the poems in your book seem to be simultaneously referring to ancient and modern worlds. In the passage Everitt cites, I’m thinking of any number of contemporary demagogues, some more local than others. “The Book of Fists” has a similar feel, where one king asks another “shall we go to war / or not”—which could allude to some biblical struggle between two power-hungry rulers or suggest the state of affairs between nations fighting for world dominance in the present era. Would you concede that Hereverent does more than provide “an inclusive corrective” of centuries-old prejudices against individuals but also dramatizes abuses of power on today’s international stage? How, if at all, do you connect your effort to rectify through art various ways biblical language has been used against individuals with allegories that expose, say, nationalism and political maneuvering?

Manning: I hadn’t read Jonathan Everitt’s review yet, so thank you for sharing it with me! It’s always a gift to have someone engage so thoughtfully with my work.

I would certainly concede that Hereverent dramatizes abuses of power that recur throughout history and into the present day. Power-hungry rulers make decisions that destroy so much human life, including the lives of their own people, and especially the poorest and most marginalized among them. Such rulers precede biblical texts. Some of them are getting a lot of publicity for their devastating actions right now. More will be here when we’re gone, no doubt (but I wish I could doubt that).

I suppose for me, fervent nationalism or any kind of political maneuvering that causes harm and dehumanizes “others” feels the same as religious fervor that uses a holy text as a weapon to harm and dehumanize “others.” These impulses have more to do with power, control, and in-group purity than they have to do with love of God, people, country, or anything else.

Rail: Earlier you admitted: “I was startled by how long each poem took to compose! I had expected these to be much quicker creations, but I would find myself working on a first draft for over an hour.” I’m glad you said this because I tried your project—albeit on a small scale—with students in one of my undergraduate creative writing classes: after we read and discussed a couple of your poems, I brought in the final chapter of one of the prophetic books and asked them to use that chapter as a word bank for one of their poems. They were entranced, entirely focused on the mission. Fifty minutes later, they had drafts but none of them were in a hurry to call them “done.” They wanted more time. I’m not sure if it was the parameters of the project, or the text they were working on, or a combination of both, but they were committed to the process and eager to revise. Any thoughts about that? And what, for you, accounted for the length it took you to complete the book?

Manning: So many things you just said make me very happy. Thank you for sharing my work with your students! I love that you all tried out my project. The fact that your students also immersed themselves in the work but wanted more time to draft and revise makes me feel better about my process and pace as well. Not that it’s a bad thing to work slowly or to get lost in the work/play of poetry, but I like knowing that I’m in good company.

I think I expected these poems to be easier and quicker to create because the words were already there on the page. I didn’t have to conjure them from my mind. I could see them and select them. What turned out to be the case for me—and what I imagine was also true for your students—is that I was choosing words even more deliberately than usual. I had to think about each word I selected and pay closer attention even to the articles and prepositions that I wouldn’t usually spend so much time thinking about in an early draft. That got even wilder if I wanted to reach for one of those functional words and it wasn’t available in the chapter I was using as a word bank! Then I had to keep sifting around for more and different words.

Rail: Katie, thank you for being such a generous correspondent this week. As we conclude our discussion, I’ll ask a question many interviewers may have started with: What is your relationship to scripture/Biblical texts? Has working on Hereverent altered that relationship? Or is the book an extension of a relationship that already existed?

Manning: This question feels at once completely valid for you to ask and almost too personal. My relationship to the Bible is lifelong, ongoing, evolving. I want to make the social media status joke, “It’s complicated,” and then we can laugh and end here, but it’s only complicated sometimes. The more I learn, the more I know I don’t (and won’t) know, and I’ve become more okay with that. The Bible is fascinating, full of so many genres (including so much poetry!), and it’s a shame when people flatten this incredible multi-genre text and treat it like it’s just “history” or “instruction manual” or “bludgeon for people who don’t agree with me.” Jesus said in Matthew 22 that the greatest commandments are to love God and then to love neighbor and that all of the law and the prophets hang on those commandments. I think that’s where my relationship to scripture gets simple: if everything else in there depends on love, then love is where all interpretive moves should begin and end. When in doubt: love. If I err in any interpretation or action, I hope I err on the side of love.

I think Hereverent is both an extension of my relationship with the Bible and an alteration. I mentioned earlier that working on this project allowed me to re-see language that had become so familiar to me. This project also moved me from a very angry starting place into a process that became more playful. I’ve talked about this elsewhere, but I was shocked when I realized along the way that the kind of word-banking process I was doing resembled Lectio Divina, which is a devotional practice of close reading that involves reading a text multiple times and seeing what words and images stand out. This practice wasn’t common in my denomination and isn’t something I encountered, especially not by name, until grad school, but the realization of this connection and the fact that my writing group found the earliest drafts of my poems funny transformed the project for me. Not that I don’t still feel fury when people misuse scripture to exclude and wound, regardless of intent—because I really, really do—but I also feel like this project has been a salve for some of my own wounds that needed healing, which was an unexpected gift.