J.C. Scharl is a poet and playwright. Her work has appeared on the BBC and in many poetry journals on both sides of the Atlantic. Her verse play, Sonnez Les Matines, opened in New York City in February 2023 and is available through Wiseblood Books.
Your play Sonnez Les Matines puts John Calvin, Protestant Reformer; Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits; and François Rabelais, author of Gargantua and Pantagruel together in Paris as college students in the early 16th century. Deep theological and philosophical discussions ensue. What was the origin of this drama (in verse)? Were you reading deeply in these authors and began to speculate as to whether they could have come to common ground given the chance? Did you learn anything about their thought as you researched and wrote the play?
My husband and I visited Paris in 2017, and I learned that St. Ignatius and John Calvin both studied at the Collège de Montaigu and likely overlapped briefly around 1528. That sparked the idea to write something in which the two went head-to-head. Rabelais (as he likes to do) fell into the story from above—his life is less well documented, so it was just a small leap to place him in Paris with them.
For a while I envisioned the story as a novel that would include Erasmus (a professor at the college), but once I started framing it out, it became clear that it needed to have the kind of claustrophobic tightness that comes with a one-act play. During graduate school (an MFA in poetry), I’d worked a lot in the dramatic monologue form, so writing a verse play was a natural next step.
Writing the play was a wonderful experience of learning about these three thinkers. I researched each of them a lot, even though the figures in my play are not intended to be historically exact. Rather, they are pastiches or types, modeled off their historical counterparts. I was pretty familiar with Calvin’s thought but loved getting to dig into his personality and his life more. I came to have a lot of affection for him. When I have a chance to weigh in on casting, I am extra particular about Calvin, because I want him to be played with affection and charity, not with the specter of Calvinism with all its baggage looming behind him. I read many letters of St. Ignatius and loved the warmth and passion on display there. He was indeed exacting and brilliant, but remarkably kind and gentle to those seeking honestly to know Christ more.
And Rabelais! I’d heard of Gargantua and Pantagruel,of course, but for a long time avoided it because of its reputation as weird and gross. I became enamored of Rabelais after reading Robertson Davies’ The Rebel Angels in college. He’s a fantastic figure, and there’s always something more to learn about him. There is a rousing disagreement in literary criticism about his motivations and beliefs—was he a secret atheist working to undermine orthodox Christian belief? A closet Protestant attacking the Roman Catholic Church through satire? A faithful Catholic scandalized by the excesses and abuses of churchmen? A literary genius trapped in puberty, unable to rise beyond youthful impulses? There’s really no one like him, and I consider him a lifelong friend. He’s the main character of my second play, The Death of Rabelais, which will be out later this year, and I have one more Rabelais play in mind for down the road.
One of my deepest convictions is that nothing is unprecedented except the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ.
In addition to verse plays, you also write poetry proper. In your collection Ponds, you touch on subjects ranging from mourning to homespun incidents to archangels to The Odyssey’s Penelope to Theodoric the Ostrogoth (!). The interplay of the classical/biblical/historical and contemporary/quotidian appears to be an important theme for you. How important is a familiarity with the Classics and ancient history (not to mention theology) to coping with the chaos and borderline insanity of the 21st century?
One of my deepest convictions is that nothing is unprecedented except the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ. The more I study history, the less impressed I am by our current situation. True, things are rough right now in many ways, but things are always rough in some way or another. This doesn’t mean we should be ambivalent to our situation. Rather, the realization that we’re not in a uniquely terrible moment in history should free us from the anxiety that grips a lot of people today.
I think a lot about the mystery of the Sea Peoples, the strange and secret dark armies that came from nowhere and plunged Greece into her Dark Age. There’s a reasonable theory that the Sea Peoples were, quite simply, the Greeks themselves, and later Greek civilization reconstrued this story of self-destruction as an invasion of unknown forces. Morgan Meis writes about this beautifully in his book The Drunken Silenus, which everyone should read. I think civilizations tend toward this reimagining; we like to think of ourselves as the last bastion of goodness surrounded by a sea of darkness, but in reality the darkness is within us. Our collapse comes less like a tsunami wave from beyond and more like a sinkhole, consuming us from within.
Studying the collapse of other civilizations brings me some comfort as I witness the collapse of our own. It’s obvious that the collapse at this point mostly affects the vulnerable among us, those already struggling emotionally, economically, and spiritually to cope. Our time seems to be one of great opportunity for Christians, who are called to hope and joy, to reach out and offer a vision of order, beauty, and abundance, a vision in which human suffering has meaning and significance when united with Christ’s suffering. That’s what I want to do through my poetry: ground our contemporary experience in a historical sensibility, offer hope to those who feel lost in time, and propose ways in which our everyday lives are connected to greater, unseen realities.
Which writers and books have inspired you and informed your work? How do you keep from unconsciously imitating your mentors?
The poets I keep going back to are T.S. Eliot, Geoffrey Hill, David Jones, Archibald MacLeish, Shakespeare, B.H. Fairchild, Les Murray, Seamus Heaney, W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath. I love Dorothy Sayers’ (incomplete) translation of Dante, as well as her translation of The Song of Roland. Recently I’ve been studying the verse of Robinson Jeffers. I also reread Chaucer frequently.
Honestly, I don’t worry too much about unconscious imitation because I spend so much time on conscious imitation. It’s a big part of my writing practice to consciously and deliberately study what makes a certain poem work and then attempt to imitate those techniques. The resulting poems don’t usually end up being good enough to publish, but the lessons learned through that kind of careful imitation help immensely when writing a non-imitative poem. When you consciously imitate dozens of poets’ voices, it doesn’t obscure your own voice; it clarifies it.
It’s important to study the techniques of the greats, but the question that really drives me—and one in which I don’t think there’s any danger of over-imitation—isn’t simply technical; it’s moral. It’s vital to be able to shape the language, yes, but there’s a moral presence behind every great poem that is greater than the language itself. The real issue is how do I become the kind of person who can write the poems I want to write? There’s a technical element to that, of course, and an element of discipline, but there’s a much greater element of spiritual discernment and moral clarity that, to me, is the real work of artistic growth.
David Jones has a short poem called “A, a, a, Domine Deus” that illustrates what I mean about morality and technique aligning. The poem’s many technical elements—the meter, the assonance and resonance, the allusions and imagery—are necessary, but the poem also depends on the poet’s moral clarity. For example, the line “I have wondered for the automatic devices,” encapsulates the speaker’s struggle to reconcile the ever-increasing dominance of technology with his belief in the uniqueness of humanity. There’s a word choice in there that blows my mind: How did Jones know to say “for”? My instinct—I think nearly anyone’s—would be to use “at.” For an adventurous poet, “with” might suggest itself. But “for” is obviously the correct word; it shows the speaker straining not merely to understand technology, but to love it sacrificially, to offer up his uniquely human capacity to wonder as a gift to that which cannot.
The sublime charity on display in Jones’ poem is not something one learns simply by mastering poetic techniques. It is a hard-won wisdom that can come only through deep contemplation and, dare I say it, conscious moral formation. I know what kind of poems I want to write, and they require this kind of soul. So, to me, the great work is the work of shaping my soul—or rather, allowing it to be shaped—so that I am able to make the kind of startling and deeply charitable choice that Jones makes.
It's vital to be able to shape the language, yes, but there's a moral presence behind every great poem that is greater than the poem itself.
Strange question: Do you have a strategy for when you employ your fully spelled out name, Jane Clark, and when you use initials in your byline?
I intended to use J.C. Scharl for all my creative work but didn’t always explain that clearly to publishers, so it’s gotten kind of muddled. I am trying to consolidate everything under J.C. Scharl. But the short answer is no, no strategy at all, just a classic example of a poet who doesn’t manage administrative details perfectly!
What advice would you offer young Christians entering the arts? Should they make a distinction between being a Christian artist and an artist who happens to be a Christian? How important is providing a “witness” to their vocation? Have you encountered a low-grade suspicion, even contempt, as you’ve made your way in the theater world?
The advice I’d offer young Christians is, actually, the same advice I’d offer young non-Christians: take the time to discern what it is you are trying to say, and be prepared to suffer what it takes to say it well. One of my grad school mentors, Robert Cording, used to ask, “What is your obsession?” What he meant was: What is the question or conflict that drives you to create? It’s a harder question to answer than it may seem, because it requires an artist to push through many layers of accumulated secondary questions or concerns down to the very core of his being, down to the place where the breath of God moves in him and stirs him to life.
For a Christian, that obsession will very likely be something connected to God, faith, doubt, etc. For poets like Carolyn Forché, the obsession brings her face-to-face with the problem of evil: How can a good God allow such suffering? For T.S. Eliot, the obsession has to do with the seeming futility of man’s labors alongside the Christian belief that our actions matter. For Constantine Cavafy, it has to do with humanity’s irreconcilable impulses toward God, power, and sensual pleasure: How can we ever hope to be content? In each of these poets, however, you see their own understanding of their obsession growing clearer and clearer over time; that’s not just the result of greater technical skill, but of a clearer understanding of God and their own souls.
So the short answer to the question is: An artist who is a Christian will not be able to avoid being a witness to his faith because, if he truly believes—or wrestles with the belief—that Christ was made a man and died for our sins and rose again from the dead and promises that he will save us from death, that belief (or struggle with belief) will shape whatever his artistic obsession is.
Take the time to discern what it is you are trying to say, and be prepared to suffer what it takes to say it well.
Fun question: If you could blow up one public building, a la Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, without endangering life or risking imprisonment, which one would it be?
The Hubert H. Humphrey Federal Building, which houses the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is truly atrocious. It’s speculation, of course, but sitting in that building all day must be devastating to a person’s imagination and ability to think about human beings as complex, irreducible individuals. The building itself insists that all problems are solvable through the exertion of brute force and through eliminating complexities, flourishes, the little chiaroscuros that are both human personality and human history. It’s a totalitarian nightmare come to life. If the diabolic hierarchy is truly a bureaucracy, its office buildings look like this one. The medieval mind, for all its delight in horrors, could not have conceived of something as appalling as this; in fact, the Humphrey Building makes the burning wastes of Bosch’s various Hells seem whimsical as a carnival. Blowing this building up would be too easy; it demands the reparation of being pulled to bits by human hands. If it could be destroyed without harming anyone or resulting in imprisonment, I’d gladly take up a sledgehammer and get cracking!
