Poet-priest enlightens, entertains

Malcolm Guite is on a mission to bring music back to English poetry. So it’s fitting that the UK sonneteer and Anglican priest often finds himself on stage with Winnipeg musician Steve Bell, in their show “The Bell and the Bard.”

A rapt Toronto audience was treated to a unique performance of poetry, songs and storytelling on Oct. 27 at Yorkminster Park Baptist Church as part of the Lester Randall Preaching Fellowship. Mr. Guite, the chaplain of Girton College at Cambridge University, was also a workshop presenter.

The appearance was a bit of a homecoming. Born in 1957 in Nigeria, Mr. Guite moved to Hamilton at age 10 when his father got a post in the Classics department at McMaster University.

“I spent my early teenage years as a Canadian kid, going to grade school and then junior high in Hamilton and Dundas,” he said from his Cambridge study in an interview before his Toronto visit.

“But in ’71 my dad felt I was losing my British identity – which is quite funny because I’d hardly even been in Britain – so he sent me to boarding school in England. So from ’71 to ’77, I had a kind of strange double life as a British schoolboy in term times, and a Canadian teenager in vacations.” In 1977, he won a scholarship to Cambridge University and came back to Canada for vacations until 1980.

About 15 years ago, he met Mr. Bell, which rekindled his Canadian connections. “I ended up playing gigs with him in Hamilton and Dundas. I really like doing that. And I go to Canada every year or two, either to do courses and lectures at the summer institutes (Regent College in Vancouver) or to do stuff with Steve.”

It’s a true and unique collaboration, he says. “He’ll take a poem of mine, and he doesn’t just set it to a tune: he’ll remake it or reshape or take the final couplet from the sonnet and turn it into the bridge or the chorus of the song, that kind of thing. It’s a great partnership. What we love to do when we play gigs is we just set up two stools. We kind of know where we’re going to start, and we have a landing place. But otherwise, we don’t have a set list, we literally riff off each other. We’ve come to know each other’s back catalogue, as it were.”

On stage, both artists enthused about the other’s respective talents. Over an animated hour-long chat, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Father Christmas. Mr. Guite’s white beard and bangs frame his bespectacled face, while he takes occasional draws on his Calabash pipe. He frequently recites fragments of his favourite poems, from Tennyson to Herbert, in a rumbling and melodious voice.

Mr. Guite writes Poet’s Corner, a column in The Church Times, and has published seven poetry collections, many of which explore Christian themes or scripture. His most popular is Sounding the Seasons, comprising 110 sonnets – one for each day of the Christian calendar. Each one unfolds like intricate origami, turning in on itself to reveal something surprising, though at the same time, familiar all along.

Take the sonnet for the Feast of Christ the King:

Our King is calling from the hungry furrows
Whilst we are cruising through the aisles of plenty,
Our hoardings screen us from the man of sorrows,
Our soundtracks drown his murmur: ‘I am thirsty’.
He stands in line to sign in as a stranger
And seek a welcome from the world he made,
We see him only as a threat, a danger,
He asks for clothes, we strip-search him instead.
And if he should fall sick then we take care
That he does not infect our private health,
We lock him in the prisons of our fear
Lest he unlock the prison of our wealth.
But still on Sunday we shall stand and sing
The praises of our hidden Lord and King.

For Mr. Guite, the connection between poetry and faith has always been linked. It was the Psalms that drew him to Christianity, or rather, compelled him to return to it.

“I was a moody, sloppy and slightly precocious teenager,” he said. “Part of my modern scientific mind was that Christians were all a bit dim. But that began to break down in the face of beauty and music.”

While studying literature at Cambridge, all the writers he was reading were Christian. “When you read St. Augustine, you realize you’ve been ushered into a mind that is far more capacious than your own. [The idea that] Christianity is for dummies dies on the first couple of pages of St. Augustine’s Confessions, which really blew my mind.”

Then, while house-sitting in London, he began to read the Psalms aloud to learn how poets’ minds were formed by scripture. On reading Psalm 145, one line had a profound effect on him: “The Lord is nigh to all who fall, he is nigh to all who fall upon him.”

“As I read this line, suddenly everything changed,” he said. “One minute I was alone in the room, and the next minute I wasn’t.”

He recalled being uncomfortable, like he had shifted from being the centre of his universe to God being at the centre. “I was way, way, way out on some infinitely distant edge, hanging out by a thread, while the whole room was filled with this immense holy presence, which I couldn’t really look at because I was a man of unclean lips. And it was almost intolerable. But it was also inexorable. I couldn’t stop it.”

In a state, he went to see the college chaplain for guidance. “He told me, ‘The answer’s clearly in the Psalms.’”

The chaplain said Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer every day in the chapel and invited Mr. Guite to join him, and they would say the Psalms antiphonally. “He told me I could say anything in the Psalms directly to that presence, and don’t be afraid because you’re taking his words.”

That experience, followed by other moments, eventually led Mr. Guite to become a member of the Anglican Church. He was confirmed in 1980 in a university confirmation service. Ten years later, he was ordained.