This Blog in 2025

Happy new year, friends! With the start of a new year, I have the same hopes and dreams for this blog as before, but a renewed determination to see them through. I therefore have some steps laid out.

This year, I plan to have more guest posts and interviews. I have hopes of welcoming my favorite contemporary Christian poets to this blog, but we'll see how that goes! I also plan to have more playful poetry posts to set off the more philosphical and technical ones. The details of my plan will unfold as the year wears on.

I look forward to it.

And today, I want to take the chance to step back and remind you--and myself--why I'm doing this.

I believe in the power of words and the beauty of poetry. And I believe that something has been lost today, with a surge of unstructured poetry and a fading of traditional rhymes and rhythms. This poem of mine, written a couple years ago, encapsulates my thoughts and feelings:

Forgive me if I do you injustice.

I cannot admire the poems of today,

Rhythm annihilated, rhyme ripped apart,

Sense and logic cast away.

Forgive me if my tastes are wrong.

Perhaps I simply do not understand.

I cannot find the beauty in the chaos

Of mangled lines and shifting sands.

Forgive me if I read you incorrectly.

I see in those poems bleakness of despair.

With no God or rhyme or reason

What peace, what hope, what joy is there?

Please do not take this poem to mean that I hate all contemporary poetry or that I see no worth in unstructured poems. Neither of those things are true. However, I have seen a trend of hopelesness, an idea of meaninglessness, in contemporary poetry, and I think that the structure of a poem can reflect that.

I believe that we as humans have an inherent desire for beauty and for order and that--at risk of oversimplification--is what art is. I believe this is because we are created in the image of Almighty God, and I believe we have a calling to pursue our desire for art to reflect His glory and worship Him, and that poetry is a facet of this art and this desire.

Hallelujah.

(Photo credit to Moritz Knoringer on Unsplash)