Five Ponds Poetry Festival
I’ll be presenting and reading at the Five Ponds Creative Writing Festival at Gordon College.
“What Can We Learn from the Prophetic Voice?”
It has been argued the prophets of the Hebrew Bible have more in common with spoken word and slam poets than Sunday morning preachers. Tasked with communicating the “word” and “vision” of the LORD, and recognizing the magnitude of the communal and cosmic stakes, their sensitivity to evil and hatred of public performative piety, infused their poetry with controversial imagery, often at great personal risk. What can modern writers with similar spiritual sensitivities learn from the rhetorical elements of the Prophetic critique—the images, metaphors, and sign-acts that they employed? What can we get away with? How far is too far?








