When I first began to think of myself as a writer, a few decades ago, I’d type onto file cards the wisdom of writers I wanted to emulate and thumbtack the cards to the bulletin board above my desk.

I had several lines about the writer’s vocation by Flannery O’Connor and G.K. Chesterton. But the one I’m recalling right now is by Simone Weil. I no longer have the file card, and I can’t put my hands on the passage in my volume of her writings. But the gist of it is:

“How many books leave us with the impression that the author, before ever beginning to write, asked himself with any real concern: ‘Am I in line with truth?’”

Typical Weil, with her astoundingly strict strictures.

I was reminded of Weil’s standard of “truth” for the writer while reading around in the new issue of Image #70. Mark Jarman’s poem, “The Teachable Moment,” explicitly takes “truth” as its subject. The poem starts from Pilate’s repartee with Jesus, leading to Pilate’s famous “What is truth?”—then moves into the being of Jesus, who is the Truth. A few sections later, a magnificent stanza rings changes on the “true,” imagining Jesus’ inner life at that moment.

Jesus is, we Christians believe, the Word who is the Truth. And so, as Christian writers, we are called into that Truth. Greg Wolfe’s editorial explores what this can mean: “The writer is one who uses words in such a way that they may become habitations of the logos, the Word.”

Weil would give her assent to this formulation, I think—and also to strictures that poet Robert Lax set himself, as laid out in Michael McGregor’s essay on Lax in this issue of Image. Lax came to focus on individual words as if they were his very life.

And as writers, aren’t words in a sense our very life? I remember trying to keep Weil’s question before me as I’d write each line of whatever essay or book I was working on. (I’ve never tried writing poetry.) In those days, way before computers, I wrote by hand on lined paper. I limited myself to one paragraph per page, so that I could lay out the pages on the floor and see how the words were developing, paragraph by paragraph.

I’d choose a metaphor, then write out where it might lead me as I followed the images implied within it. If the images seemed to be leading me off course (away from whatever felt like “truth”), I’d draw a big X over those paragraphed pages and try another metaphor.

I wasn’t sure what “truth” was (it would be presumptuous to be sure of this); but I could tell if I was moving away from it into self-indulgence or wordplay for its own sake.

Because this was my temptation. I loved the play of words. This isn’t a bad thing in itself. But the temptation I struggled to resist (and sometimes succumbed to) was to let my indulgence in wordplay become the whole point of the writing. To show off.

Lisa Russ Spaar, in this issue of Image, reviews new poetry collections by Stephen Cushman, Kate Daniels, Mark Jarman, and Christian Wiman. Here are four poets whose way with words is brilliant and yet who resist the temptation to simply show off.

Spaar’s own guiding metaphor for her review is the wonderful one that poet A.R. Ammons developed in his essay “A Poem is a Walk.” When I’ve given retreats on reading poetry for meditation, I’ve sometimes “walked” through a poem with retreatants: strolled through the poem, following its steps, its turns, its resting places.

One of the assignments in my current course for the Glen Online, “Poetry as a Spiritual Practice” does the same.

As I stroll now through Jarman’s “The Teachable Moment” I come to a section where he exhibits the height of his artistry: a tour de force of wordplay and intricate rhyming. Here’s just a taste:

But there is more.
There’s always more.
The score’s not settled.
There is more.

One shuts the door.
One strikes the door,
Worried, nettled,
Outside the door.

What is truth for?
What is it for
For those who worry
What it is for?

And on and on, continuing this pattern of end-line repetitions and end-rhymes. But what I’ve always treasured about Jarman’s poetry is that he disciplines his wordplay so that it points beyond itself. Points—as here quite explicitly—to the Word who is the Truth.