Our May Read: Gerard Manley Hopkins

Dr. Holly Ordway joins me to discuss two poems

I still have one exchange to come with Jeff Spross on care and infrastructure. But, in the meantime, I’m happy to announce our next guest for Tiny Book Club.

Since our April read and discussion were heavily policy-focused, I decided to shift gears for May. We’ll be reading and discussing two poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins, one picked by me, and one by my guest.

This month, I’m excited to be joined by Dr. Holly Ordway. I’ve been a fan of her work since I read her conversion-and-fencing memoir, Not God’s Type.

Holly Ordway is the Cardinal Francis George Fellow of Faith and Culture at the Word on Fire Institute, and Visiting Professor of Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and is the author of Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages. She is also a Subject Editor for the Journal of Inklings Studies and a published poet.  

I’ve only encountered Hopkins in the last few years, and I wanted him to be our poet for the month for two reasons. First, Holly has written annotations for his poems for the new Ignatian Collection from Word on Fire. Second, I find him to be the most English poet (of the poets I’ve encountered).

Growing up, I thought of poetry as primarily songlike—rhymes, meter, melodic phrasing, etc. Trying to write it myself, I have always been working against both my amateurism and (it feels like) my language. It’s easier to work in French, even though my vocabulary is limited, where the words all sit nicely alongside each other.

But Hopkins is a poet of consonants! He has chewy, dense verses that clatter and force you to wrestle with them. He’s expanded my sense of what poetry can be, and I’m looking forward to reading him with Holly and with you.