The Art of New Creation by unknow

The Art of New Creation by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Creation;new creation;the arts;theology and the arts;theology;faith and the arts;eschatology;kingdom of god;new heavens and new earth;new heavens;new earth;DITA10;Duke divinity school;theology;Christian art;Christian artist;church and the arts;theological aesthetics;Christianity and the arts;end times;create;cocreating;co-creating;faith;future;artistic expression;poetry;transcendence;visual art;music;musical worship;worship and reconciliation
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2022-01-06T08:32:49+00:00


Micheal O’Siadhail: Thank you!

RH: And it seems to me that The Five Quintets engages both creation and the gift of new creation at three different levels.

First, at level one, you have offered us a dazzlingly erudite survey of intellectual and cultural history from the dawn of modernity to the present time. You have engaged not only literature and the arts but also economics, politics, science, and philosophy/theology. To take a few words from the sonnet you scripted for John Donne, “I bless your Dantean sweep of human kind.”2

I was particularly surprised by the science section, which improbably makes brilliant poetry out of quantum theory and subatomic particle physics. I know nothing about any of that, and I’m amazed that you were able to master this and make it accessible. Shaping hadrons and quarks into thought-teasing poetry is an act of artistic “new creation” indeed! Your verse hints at a universe that mysteriously embodies “a seething dance beyond our mind’s embrace.”3

At the second level, readers should savor your technically elegant poetic performance. It’s a sometimes breathtaking high-wire act of literary art. For example, in part one you have invented a new poetic form: the “saiku,” an interweaving of sonnets and haikus. You employ this novel form to create a spirited dialogue with the figures you have chosen: you critique them, and they answer you back.

But perhaps even more remarkable is your decision to employ Dante’s device of terza rima in part five. This is almost impossible in English, and your execution of this feat is extraordinary. This, too, is an example of artistic new creation, for it takes a classic form and remakes it into something new in another language, to fresh poetic purpose.

At the third level, your massive poem is a powerful work of Christian testimony. It bears witness to a vision of the joyful, unpredictable, all-encompassing, eschatologically healing overflow of God’s grace and God’s love. Of course, in this respect you have numerous august predecessors: other poets have sought to bear witness to the good news of the Christian story in soaringly ambitious verse. You forthrightly invoke precursors such as Dante and Eliot. One also thinks of Milton’s “adventr’rous Song” that pursues “things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme.”4 But your work is nonetheless truly for our time a performance of new creation in its innovative form and vast integrative scope.

I started to say that we arrive at the final pages of this poem with the impulse to get on our knees and give thanks, but I think that’s wrong. The only proper response to the testimony of The Five Quintets is to get up on our feet lost in wonder, love, and praise, and to bust a move—to dance across creation’s dancing hall.

When I finished reading the poem, I couldn’t help thinking of an evening five or six years ago when my wife, Judy, and I hosted a group of friends gathered at our home for a DITA event. After dinner, Ray Barfield and I were playing rock-and-roll guitar.



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