Marilyn McEntyre is a writer, teacher, and speaker whose work reflects a lifelong attentiveness to language, faith, and the healing arts. A longtime professor of literature and medical humanities, she has taught widely—through New College Berkeley, Westmont College, and Western Seminary’s “Sacred Art of Writing” doctor of ministry program, as well as the “Forest Dwelling” program at the Oblate School of Theology. Her teaching spans American literature, medical humanities, and a range of writing courses shaped by care for words and the natural world. She offers retreats and writing workshops and works as a writing coach. Her recent books include When Poets Pray; Where the Eye Alights; and Start with a Word. More at www.marilynmcentyre.com.
In a cultural moment saturated with slogans, spin, and carefully managed (abused?) language, poetry may seem like a quiet—and perhaps unnecessary—art. But what if it is precisely here that poetry matters most? Hint: it does. In this conversation, Marilyn McEntyre gently instructs us in the moral weight of words—and in the ways language (whether we notice it or not) shapes how we see, speak, and live. From propaganda and metaphor to scripture and even the naming of God, she invites (and incites!) us to attend more closely: to notice how language can obscure truth or reveal it. Along the way, she explores writing as a form of prayerful receptivity, where words are not merely produced, but received and offered. What you’ll read or hear is a thoughtful and searching discussion on language, faith, and the discipline of paying attention.
Names mentioned:
Karl Barth, Josef Pieper, C. S. Lewis, Paul Fussell, Anthony Swofford, Eugene Peterson, Christian Wiman, William Paul Young, Dylan Thomas, Paul the Apostle, Evelyn Underhill, T. S. Eliot, Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, Ellen Bass, Marie Howe, Joy Harjo, Rudolfo Anaya, J. R. R. Tolkien
Books / Works mentioned:
Leisure: The Basis of Culture (by Josef Pieper)
The Great War and Modern Memory (by Paul Fussell)
Jarhead (by Anthony Swofford)
The Message (by Eugene Peterson)
The Shack (by William Paul Young)
Start with a Word (by Marilyn McEntyre)
The First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament (by Terry M. Wildman)
“Learning in Wartime” (by C. S. Lewis)
“Every Riven Thing” (by Christian Wiman)
“Fern Hill” (Dylan Thomas)}
Four Quartets (by T. S. Eliot)
“Little Gidding” (section of Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot)
“The Speed of Sight” (by Colin Goedecket)
Radix: Thank you for taking the time to speak with us. Your title, “Why Read a Poem at a Time Like This?”, immediately brought to mind a recurring question that I know is bubbling up in some minds: couldn’t poetry, during times of crisis, seem almost indulgent?
I was reading recently about how Karl Barth was once described as blissfully learning the intricacies of theology during the First World War. And I thought to myself, gee, I bet some people might have grumped: like, he ought instead to have been out fighting the enemy. Josef Pieper, in introducing his book Leisure: The Basis of Culture in 1952, raised the same issue: Now of all times, in the post-war years is not the time to talk about leisure. We are, after all, busy rebuilding! Like, really? Leisure and contemplation? C. S. Lewis, too, in an Oxford presentation during WWII, made a similar point to the students he was addressing: that it seems an odd time to be learning philosophy or history. It could almost even be like fiddling while Rome burns! So with poetry, some might ask: why concern ourselves with it now?
Well, as you will be telling us—because it’s actually really, really important.
Marilyn McEntyre: Thanks for having me. You know, I’ve been leading a six-week poetry workshop, and that question came up immediately. Then, too, just recently I was at an in-person writing retreat on the northern California coast. It was beautiful, quiet. And then, on Saturday, the U.S. bombed Iran.
When I walked into the morning session, I thought: “We don’t get to ignore what’s happening in the world.” So before anything else, I gave the group a prompt. I asked them to write for five minutes—poem or paragraph—just a few lines—and to begin with the sentence: “We bombed Iran today.” What followed was striking. One participant wrote a series of adverbs—something I don’t usually recommend—but it worked. “We bombed Iran today, thoughtlessly… horrifically… secretively…” Each word opened another layer of awareness, another dimension of decision-making and consequence. It was powerful.
That moment felt like an answer to the question, “Why write a poem in a time like this”? Because there is always a reason. If we care about language, poetry becomes one of the places where it is hardest to lie. You can lie in a poem—but it shows. It’s harder to get away with than in prose. And we are surrounded by lies. Poetry, at its best, cuts through that fog.
That may sound like a dark place to begin. But it’s where we are.
Radix: If we stay there for a moment—this idea of poetry as a counter to propaganda—you’ve spoken about that elsewhere. Could you say more?
MM: Anyone who takes poetry seriously cares about precision in language. That’s what a poem is trying to do: to distill something, to render it with clarity. Good prose shares that quality, of course, but prose has more room to blur the edges. Whereas poetry moves in the opposite direction.
Propaganda, on the other hand, thrives on abstraction—on words that can’t be pinned down or clearly defined. Take a word like war. What are we calling war now? It’s certainly not Saving Private Ryan. Much of our weaponry is designed not just to destroy things but to destroy people—often civilians. And yet the language we use can obscure that reality. Poetry resists that kind of deception. Almost by definition, it pushes back against abstraction and homogenization. The better the poem, the less susceptible it is to the flattening force of propaganda.
Radix: That connects, I think, to your many comments over the years on the importance of metaphor—that metaphors don’t just describe reality, but shape how we act within it. How does learning to read poetry carefully train us to resist the kinds of metaphors that distort our thinking?
MM: I love that question, because there are several layers to it.
At the most basic level, reading poetry closely teaches us to notice metaphor. We begin to see how a poet develops or stretches a metaphor, and that helps us recognize that metaphor is not neutral—it’s consequential.
In writing workshops, I often encourage people to pay attention to their own self-talk. For instance, I remember a participant who said, “I feel like I’ve cannibalized a piece I wrote earlier—pulled chunks out of it to build something new.” I didn’t have time in the moment to follow up, but I wanted to say: listen to those words—cannibalized, chunks. What if, instead, you described it as rearranging pieces of a mosaic? Or reweaving strands? The task itself hasn’t changed, but the metaphor has. And with it, the emotional experience of the work shifts. We can become trapped in the metaphors we use without even realizing it. They’re embedded in everyday language—so much so that we don’t notice them. I mean, even using that word “embedded” is a metaphor, right? So, learning to notice them, and then to choose them more deliberately, is a crucial skill.
I remember once a grandson—who is a very gentle person—was talking about warfare and said something like, “Well, I guess they just go in and take them out.” I stopped him and said (without blame, but hoping it would be a little teaching moment): if you get used to speaking about killing human beings in that way—“taking them out”—it becomes harder to register the horror of it. That kind of shocked him into a new level of awareness, which was the intention. The point is that our language can mask reality. Yet language that masks challenging truths is everywhere. It softens violence, sometimes by speaking of it with sports metaphors. And that deeply troubles me. We’ve normalized violence to the point that commonplace metaphors normalize and neutralize it.
We’re in a kind of language crisis. Those who care about language need to remain at the table, insisting that this crisis—along with others we might name—matters, because it does. It’s seriously consequential.
Radix: Are there simple ways to become more aware of the metaphors we use—and perhaps to change them?
MM: Without turning it into homework, I think even a small practice can help. Once a day, notice a metaphor—something you’ve said or heard—and pause for a moment. Then carefully consider: what does it imply? What would happen if I shifted it? Take something like “She really aced that.” That’s a sports metaphor: tennis, specifically. And it’s useful, even helpful. I actually have a list of lessons I’ve learned from tennis, because so many coaching instructions translate metaphorically into other areas of life. But the question is: does that metaphor fit this situation? If someone is dealing with pain, for instance, does a sports metaphor illuminate their experience—or distort it?
Part of the work is noticing which metaphors normalize violence or trivialize serious realities—like describing war in the language of sport. Paul Fussell writes about this in The Great War and Modern Memory, which is one of the best books I know about World War I. He describes how soldiers were, in a sense, trained for war on the playing fields of England. That indoctrination by analogy made them more susceptible to propaganda, because war had already been cast in familiar, even rewarding terms. We see similar dynamics elsewhere. In memoirs like Jarhead, which reflects on Marine training, there’s a clear sense of how language participates in a process of brutalization—training people to kill, in part by reshaping how they think and speak.
So the practice is actually simple: notice, pause, reflect. Like learning to recognize bird songs—once you begin to hear them, you can’t not hear them. Metaphors move into the foreground. And that awareness has practical implications.
When I taught medical humanities to medical students, I would often point out that this kind of attentiveness makes you a better clinician. You don’t just hear what a patient says—you hear how they say it. If someone says, “It feels like I’m walking with a knife in my leg,” that tells you something very specific—about the quality of the pain, and perhaps about what they hope for: removal, extraction. If they say, “My nerves feel like they’re on fire,” that suggests something else entirely—a desire for cooling, for relief of burning. The anatomical reality may be the same, but the lived experience—and the metaphor that expresses it—shapes how we understand and respond. And that kind of attentiveness is invaluable not just for doctors, but for anyone who works with people: therapists, pastors, caregivers.
Radix: This may be a bit of a side question, but I’m struck by how all of this connects to religion—especially Christianity—and the metaphors we use not only to understand the world, but to understand God. Even in something as simple as Bible translation, the shift in language can open things up differently. I grew up with the King James Version, and while I still have a fondness for it, reading something like, for me, the New Jerusalem Bible or The Message and others can feel like encountering the text anew.
You have written somewhere that lyric poems model and teach the value of associative leaps… springing us free of conceptual grooves. I wonder how that might apply to scripture and religious language more broadly.
MM: The Bible is extraordinarily rich in metaphors for the divine. “God is my rock” is one thing. “God is my light” is another. “God is a fountain of mercy” offers yet another dimension. Even a line like “the heavens declare the glory of God” animates the entire created world. I think one of the reasons we recognize these texts as sacred is that they keep us right at the boundary between the literal and the metaphorical. There’s real danger in rigid literalism, but there’s also a kind of invitation—to enter into imagination, into mythmaking, into a deeper way of perceiving.
The imagination is not dismissed in scripture; it’s honored. You see this not only in the Psalms, but in places like Isaiah, or in Hannah’s song, or the Magnificat. Even the parables function this way—they invite you to play, to enter in, to see what unfolds. If you look closely, the sheer range of metaphor in scripture is remarkable. Metaphors shift across contexts, they normalize certain ways of seeing, they open and close possibilities. All of that is essential to understanding the message itself. What emerges is not a single, fixed image of the divine, but a many-faceted one.
And that matters. For instance, the image of God as Father is deeply embedded in the tradition—it’s there, and persistently so—but it’s not the only image. There are others: the hen gathering her chicks, the Spirit as wind or fire, the Psalms’ insistence that all of creation is alive with response to God. I think of Christian Wiman’s poem “Every Riven Thing,” with its sense that everything is energized, everything spoken into being. That kind of poetic imagination resonates with what we see in scripture—it extends it, even. I think it’s healthy for contemporary metaphors to enter into conversation with those scriptural ones. The reality is that for some people, the image of God as Father is no longer life-giving. The fact that there are other images available—that scripture itself offers them—is really a kind of grace.
Every metaphor opens a path. It’s an invitation into a way of imagining.
Radix: I’m reminded of when William Paul Young published The Shack. Some people were quite offended by his portrayal of God—particularly the image of God as a woman. But for others, it was profoundly moving. I remember being struck by how that shift in imagery opened something up for me. And later, in theological studies, I found myself thinking about how limiting it can be to refuse those possibilities—to insist on only one way of imagining the divine.
Recently, through a chaplain friend, I encountered an Indigenous translation of scripture, where God is described not so much as “God,” or “Father,” but as “Chief,” or in relational and communal terms that include animals and the natural world. And again, it feels like the text becomes newly alive—seen through a different lens.
MM: I had an experience once that captures this from another angle. I was teaching at Westmont, and in a poetry class we were reading the Psalms—looking at the imagery, the poetic devices, the ways the Hebrew gets rendered into English. At one point, a student raised his hand, very hesitantly, and asked, “I’m not sure how to say this, but… can you do this to the Bible?”
Radix: [Laughter]
MM: It was such a sincere question. I remember thinking to myself in that tender moment, don’t laugh. And I said something like: you have to do this to the Bible. Different kinds of writing ask to be read in different ways. Poetry isn’t the same as history or biography, and if you read it as though it were, you miss something essential. In the Protestant tradition especially, so much depends on reading—on scripture itself. And “teach us to pray” is, in many ways, also “teach us to read”: to live within words, to let them shape us, to make a home in them.
I often think of a line from Dylan Thomas: “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” That word force points to something immense, something concentrated into the smallest things. And as we learn more—from physics, from cosmology—it begins to feel as though these fields converge with theology. That convergence presses us to expand our imaginative capacity, to recognize God through new metaphorical lenses.
For me, that’s exhilarating. I grew up with a very personal sense of God, and I don’t want to lose that. But there is also something restored—something of mystery—when we begin to think of God as a kind of pervasive, living energy. Not impersonal, exactly, but more expansive than anthropomorphic images allow. Concepts like entanglement, for example—the idea that particles respond to each other across vast distances—offer a kind of metaphor for connection. It suggests that distance doesn’t quite function the way we think it does. I’ve found myself reaching for that word to describe what it means to be part of the body of Christ: we are, in some sense, entangled.
The body itself is a powerful metaphor. It’s organic. It lives. We speak of the “body politic,” but we also speak of propaganda as a machine—and those metaphors matter. If the body is living, then to be absorbed into a machine is, in some sense, a violation. It’s crushing. This is why Paul the Apostle’s idea of the body—what many traditions call the mystical body of Christ—is so important. It’s a life-giving metaphor, one that the church would do well to recover more fully.
I’ve spent a lot of time around deeply thoughtful Catholics, and one thing I’ve noticed is their consistent use of that phrase: the mystical body of Christ. That word mystical makes a difference. It insists that mystery—what we might call mysticism—is not peripheral, but central. And yet I’ve encountered many Protestants who are uneasy with that language. It feels too close to something suspect, or “New Age,” or outside the bounds of orthodoxy. But I think that hesitation comes at a cost. There is a deep human longing for the numinous—for the sense that there is more than what is immediately visible or measurable. And that longing doesn’t go away just because we refuse to name it. Even movements that fall outside traditional Christianity often express that same hunger. They’re reaching for something—sometimes in ways that don’t align with Christian theology—but the longing itself is real, and worth taking seriously.
The numinous is part of human experience. The question is not whether it exists, but how we make room for it—how we speak about it, how we live within it. And churches that sideline that dimension do so at a real loss.
Radix: Are there particular writers or books you’d recommend for those who want to explore this further? I imagine someone like Evelyn Underhill might come to mind—but are there others you’d point people toward?
MM: That question always makes my mind go blank—like being asked to recommend a restaurant in San Francisco. There are just so many good ones! With that said, I do tend to start with T. S. Eliot. Four Quartets has been profoundly life-giving for me, and for many others. Those poems were written between 1939 and 1945, so very much in a world at war. Eliot himself served as a fire warden, standing on the roof of the publishing house Faber and Faber during bombing raids. In Little Gidding, there’s that extraordinary line: “The dove descending breaks the air / with flame of incandescent terror.” It evokes both the Holy Spirit and the bombers overhead. That fusion—of the sacred and the immediate, the timeless and the historical—is deeply unsettling, but also revelatory. It’s a powerful example of how poetry can speak directly into a moment of crisis while holding open a larger horizon. I return to those poems again and again.
In a very different way, Wendell Berry has also been immensely important to many readers, as has Mary Oliver. It’s worth paying attention to poets who reach a wide audience—not necessarily because they are the “best,” but because they are meeting a need. I remember hearing Mary Oliver read at UC Santa Barbara, in a hall that seated about fifteen hundred people. It was full. And I remember thinking: all these people are here to hear a poet. There was a kind of collective attentiveness, almost a reverence. Whatever one thinks of her work, that response tells you something—she is speaking to a deep cultural longing.
The same is true of Wendell Berry. In a time when many of us feel grief over what is happening to the natural world, and a corresponding desire for language that restores integrity and meaning, Berry becomes a place of refuge. So many feel a real gratitude toward poets who help us recover that sense of grounding.
More recently, I’ve seen strong responses to poets like Ellen Bass and Marie Howe, as well as to Indigenous poets. Joy Harjo, or Scott Momaday, for example, bring conventions of Indigenous poetic tradition into English-language verse—you can almost hear another rhythm beneath the surface, something like a drumbeat. That creates a kind of hospitable space. Even for those of us outside that culture, it invites a deeper attentiveness, a different kind of listening.
Similarly, there are bilingual poets, particularly along the U.S.–Mexico border, who write in both Spanish and English, without translating. They simply present the poem as it is. The reader is invited to enter in, to understand through context, or to seek out meaning. That kind of “edge”—linguistic, cultural—is often where something new happens.
You mentioned the Indigenous translation of the Bible—I believe it’s called the First Nations Version. I love that Canadian term, “First Nations.” Hang on to it. Because it’s already an acknowledgment: not just a single people, but many nations, many distinct cultures. “Lakota” is not the same as “Navajo.” Tribal identity matters. And language that honors that difference helps us perceive more truthfully.
Radix: It’s incredibly helpful to hear all these names mentioned. For me, and other readers too, it opens doors. One writer leading to another, and so on. That’s part of what education really is: a network of connections.
MM: Yes—and, you know, sometimes I discover those connections quite randomly. I’ll go to a site like the Poetry Foundation and search a keyword, just to see what comes up. I’m teaching a workshop right now, and I send participants a poem and a prompt each day. Often I’m discovering the poems at the same time they are. There’s so much “one-off” poetry—pieces written by people who may never become widely known, but who have written something exquisite. I love that. It makes me hesitant to produce a fixed list of “important” poets.
There’s one poem I think of, ‘The Speed of Sight’ by Colin Goedecke that imagines how trees or snails might perceive the world, at their own pace. It’s playful, but also deeply attentive. It reminds me a bit of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Ents—the sense that something is happening in the non-human orders, just more slowly than we can perceive. I don’t know anything else by that poet, but I love that poem.
So yes, it’s good to know the major voices—but it’s also important to leave space for discovery. Poetry isn’t just about a kind of celebrity culture. It’s about encounter. I’ve had students who primarily write prose, but who, at some point, write a single poem—and it’s wonderful. They may never identify as poets, but that doesn’t matter. The poem exists. That’s enough.
Radix: That actually connects to something I wanted to ask about your new book. If there were one thing you’d want readers to take from it—especially readers of Radix—what would it be?
MM: The title is Start with a Word, and that comes from something I’ve said many times to students. They’ll come in during office hours and say, “I can’t come up with an idea for my paper.” And I’ll say: don’t start with an idea. Start with a word. Begin a sentence with “although,” and see where it leads. Or start with a prepositional phrase—“along the path…”—and notice what begins to take shape. Language has a way of generating thought. If you begin, something will follow.
So for me, that phrase is quite literal. It’s a kind of instruction: one I give to others, and to myself. Just begin. Put something down and see what emerges. The book is, in that sense, an invitation—to a more intuitive, even prayerful approach to writing. In classrooms, there are necessary constraints: structure, argument, evidence. All of that matters. But there also needs to be space for something else; for those moments when writing becomes a kind of listening.
In the context of a Christian college, I was able to move more freely between those modes—to talk about craft and also about prayer, about the moments when something genuinely spiritual seems to happen in the act of writing. For those who both write and pray, the two can begin to merge. Writing becomes an extension of prayer. I often find myself saying “thank you” while I’m writing—not just when a sentence works, but simply for the time, for the process. Many people, regardless of their beliefs, describe writing in terms of something being given: “it just came.” That sense of receptivity is central to the work. And that’s what I hope runs through the book—that writing is not just an act of production, but of attention, of listening, of receiving.
It was a joy to write. When an editor suggested it, my first thought was, “The world doesn’t need another book about writing.” But I wrote one anyway—and I hope people read it.
Radix: That idea of receptivity seems so central—that we have to make space for it. When we do, it’s as though something becomes possible: gifts can arrive, or at least we’re in a position to receive them; and if we’re not in that space, we miss them. There’s something really beautiful in that: the writer sitting down, making space, inviting the muse, or whatever may come—and then waiting with a kind of anticipation.
MM: Yes—and, importantly, that’s not just an idea, it’s something you can experience. Part of the magic of simple prompts, like “start with a word,” is that they open that door of receptivity. I remember working with a group of doctors and medical students when I was teaching medical humanities. We had been discussing clinical work and reading poems together, and then I gave them a ten-minute writing exercise. The prompt was simply: “She looked up.”
That was it.
Ten minutes later, what they produced was remarkable. The prompt took each of them immediately into a scene—a room, a moment, a relationship. “She looked up” meant something different for each person, but it opened a door. That’s what prompts do. They help you trust that something will come—and something does, because that’s what the mind does, what the imagination does. Once you have a sentence, it begins to lead you.
Another thing I’d like to mention: I really do think it’s appropriate to say “thank you.” People sometimes talk about the muse, and I don’t mind that language. But I’m also quite comfortable thinking in terms of the Holy Spirit—that if you invite the Spirit to work with you, then whatever comes is something to receive with gratitude. I’m also comfortable with the image of a channel. There’s that familiar prayer: “Make me a channel of your peace.” It’s powerful because it expresses something deeply true: let something come through me. Let it be given, and then offered. That, to me, is a writer’s prayer—or an artist’s prayer. You don’t have to make it abstract or mystical in a way that feels foreign. It’s simply this: something comes, and my task is to receive it, shape it, and offer it.
That sense of offering matters. Writing isn’t just about expression—it’s about giving something to someone, even if you don’t know who that someone is. When writers go through the process of publication, they’re often asked, “Who is your audience?” And of course, there are practical answers to that. But there’s another answer too: I don’t know. It’s for whoever it’s for. You put the work into the world, and trust that it will find its way. Over the years, I’ve heard from people I’ve never met, in places I never expected, who encountered something I wrote and found it meaningful. And I think—how did that happen? But it did. And for that, I’m grateful.
Radix: Every time I listen to you, or read your work, I am reminded that this is something God desires for us: that the gift of language, of poetry, is something we are meant to receive and participate in. Thank you for making words not only enjoyable, but meaningful—showing both their beauty and their danger, and how they can be given as gifts, or offered as something more. You make language—and really, all of life—feel deeply alive. That’s a gift. Thank you.
MM: Thank you, Matthew. It’s been a real pleasure talking with you. And truly, one of your gifts is receptivity—you listen well, and that’s such an important dimension of word work.