Contemplation and Contemporary Poetry: The Gift of Not Knowing

Abstract: This essay argues that the value of contemporary poetry for the Christian life is as much a matter of form as content. The formal difficulty of contemporary poetry creates an experience of attentional friction that demands a mode of contemplation conducive to spiritual exercises. Such capacity for contemplation is a mode of resistance to the Distraction Industrial Complex and opens readers to a mode of awareness beyond the discursive. Thus contemporary poetry can serve as a prelude or portal to mystical sensibilities.