Dear God: A discussion of Robert Kelly’s “Sermon” with poet Katie Condon

Welcome to the first of my 2021 talks with poet and friend Katie Condon. Our January launch begins with Robert Kelly’s poem “Sermon.” To learn more about our yearlong project as well as Katie’s poetry, see my previous post, “Talking to myself with other people’s words.”

Sermon

by Robert Kelly

and the birds fly all over the face of the earth and cry
dear God what are they doing down there
with their structuralism and their popcult muzak
and their hiways from Justthesame to HereIamagain

and God looks down in turn on the birds and says Guys
do not scoff at my handiwork or the work
of those who flow from my hands
It is licit to be fucked up and fucked over
it is licit to take almost forever to get there
even now they look up at you and say dear God
how does a bird fly how does anything do what it does
while we have to make everything up year after year
and nothing comes easy but the wicked wonderful things
when we roll over to each other in the dark and clutch
to the warmth we find there and murmur dear God dear God

A conversation about Kelly’s “Sermon”

Thomas Calder: First, thanks again for creating my yearlong poetry playlist. Until recently, poetry has always kind of intimidated me but as I mentioned to you awhile back, your collection, Praying Naked, really made things click for me in a way that I can’t entirely explain. But I’m grateful for it and excited to familiarize myself with some of the poets who’ve inspired you. 

With that in mind, let’s talk about Robert Kelly’s “Sermon.” When and how did you first discover his work and what makes this particular piece among your favorites?

Katie Condon: I’m so flattered that you liked Praying Naked and I’m thrilled that you asked me to curate your 2021 poetry playlist. Thank you so much for letting me participate in this awesome project.

“Sermon” is absolutely one of my favorite poems. The late Tony Hoagland, my friend and dearest teacher, used to send around postcards with poems taped over the front-facing images. “Sermon” was on a postcard that he sent me in 2016. I loved it immediately for probably many of the reasons that Tony loved it. For one thing, “Sermon” is written in third person omniscient, yet much of its vitality comes from its voice, a characteristic I typically associate with poems written in first person. I think that combining voice with the third person omniscient is such an exciting aesthetic choice because it injects intimacy, casual humor, and enthusiasm into a POV that risks rendering their narrator inaccessible and distant. What’s more interesting is that, actually, the narrator himself only speaks the first line of each stanza, and they are the most formal sentences in the poem. So how accessible is the narrator, really? But the speech the narrator chooses to import from his characters is so rich in delight and colloquialism that I’m sort of tricked into thinking that the narrator himself is as present and accessible as his birds and God. It’s an exciting and productive deception.

Another reason I love “Sermon,” I’ll be the first to admit it, is because I’m a total sucker for poems that write at religious themes, content, figures etc. with irreverence, humor, and playfulness. I remember reading the poem at my mailbox in Knoxville and letting out a gleeful giggle when I read “and God looks down in turn on the birds and says Guys.” Guys! It still brings me so much joy. In juxtaposition with the more formal diction and syntax (which is quintessentially religious), the utterly casual “Guys” comes as a complete surprise and immediately marks the God of this poem as an approachable figure, a being not so different than the humans that the birds cast judgement upon in the first stanza, which, as you know if you grew up in some kind of Christianity, is not how God is typically portrayed. 

I could go on and on about why I love this poem, but instead I’ll stop there. In short, I love “Sermon” for its voice and POV and for its playful treatment of more serious content and themes. (And also because it arrived in my life on a postcard from Tony.)

TC: I’m fascinated by the way you describe Kelly’s handling of voice and the third person omniscient and the “productive deception” it creates in the poem. I’m also interested in how this plays within the poem’s shifting perspectives. We start with an actual bird’s eye view of the world. Then we’re taken higher up to God’s perspective. And finally we move to the earth, looking up both at the birds and God. Meanwhile, we have this omniscient narrator delivering a sermon—so a faith leader perhaps—who presumably is located with the rest of us, down here on earth. Yet the narrator’s omniscience creates a godlike quality. And with the narrator’s own ability to manipulate all perspectives within the piece, it suggests he is somewhere higher on the heavenly ladder than God. Yet we know this can’t be.

In this way, the poem reads to me as a critique of religious arrogance, especially when you consider the Old Testament-like vibe the narrator speaks with at the start of each stanza. It’s as if Kelly is saying: This is how those in power believe God should sound, but if you actually let God speak and truly heard God’s delivery, you might just discover God is as “fucked up and fucked over” as the handiwork he’s created.

Does that make a lick of sense? Or do you go somewhere else entirely with the poem?

KC: It makes sense to me! I hadn’t considered how the many perspectives potentially orient the narrator as higher up and/or more powerful than God, but I do think it’s really interesting to consider. Thinking about your point, one could ask a lot of questions about authority and respect and knowledge. Who holds more power over the congregation, really? The person celebrating the mass? Or the guy we can’t see but have to trust is there? 

I wouldn’t say that I go somewhere else entirely with the poem, but I do spend a lot less time thinking about power dynamics and the narrator, who, I think you’re right, is possibly some kind of priest. What strikes me about the poem is an extension of something we’ve both mentioned already: how God’s approachability seems to go hand in hand with a startling empathy for the human race. In “Sermon” he’s not asking anyone to sacrifice their first born. He’s not banishing anyone from the garden. Instead, he’s soft toward our human condition, even though (or because?) he is the reason why we are so mortally “fucked up and fucked over.” (Some would argue Eve is the reason, but I say God didn’t have to make them leave Eden.) But I digress. I’m just so touched by the character of God in this poem. That he’s kind in his defense of his humans even as they admit that sinning is the easiest, most pleasurable part of life. That, instead of smiting them with his Godly power, he continues to articulate their circumstances with a seeming warmth. 

TC: Yeah, I absolutely love God’s warmth in this piece as well, which makes me wonder how to interpret the poem’s ending, when these sinful humans repeat, “dear God dear God.” I can’t help but hear echoes of Kurtz’s “The horror, the horror,” from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. And yet, there’s another part of me that reads it and wonders just how the God of “Sermon”—who is indeed warm and forgiving—might interpret the call. Does he hear it in a more gentle tone, muttered by someone who isn’t horrified by their actions but rather grateful—if not relieved—that there is somebody, anybody, next to them in the cold night. How do you interpret it?  

KC: I’ve thought a lot about this ending. In Christian religions (or at least in Catholicism, which is my background), so much energy is spent teaching the congregation that you shouldn’t take pleasure in wicked things because, if you do, God will reject you and you’ll be banished to hell. With this in mind, I thought for a long time that the end of “Sermon” was ironic: when we do inevitably sin we find that sinning so overwhelmingly pleasurable that we instinctively call out to God, the entity we’ve been taught will smite us, as if to invite him to join us in our ecstasy. 

Now, though, it doesn’t strike me as ironic. The emotional situation seems more nuanced and complicated. It does, as you mentioned, seem gentle—forgiving and empathetic, generous and open. I find it interesting, for example, that Kelly chose the phrase “dear God” over the more expected “oh God.” It’s a seemingly insignificant choice, but “oh God” seems to me inherently selfish and internal, whereas “dear God” invites dialogue and conversation—it is, after all, how we begin letters and emails. This ending seems extremely intimate on multiple levels. On the one hand, it’s a scene of physical intimacy. On the other hand, the people involved, by engaging God in dialogue, invite him to share in their intimate darkness. It seems to me that the lack of punctuation is especially communicative here. We don’t know if God responds, accepts, reprimands, judges them. The poem is left open, God’s gentleness possible.

TC: I love that take. And I really dug this poem and I think it makes a great January selection for this yearlong project we’re undertaking. Thanks again for the insights and thanks everyone for reading. If nothing else, please remember: it is licit to be fucked up—love thyself and thy neighbor all the same!