Creative Response to Faith

Robert Kendall’s dynamic poem Faith starts out grappling with the idea of logic, which I find very interesting. In Christianity believers are taught a lot about relying on faith in God instead of our own human logic. The poem shows the word “logic” descending down onto the word “faith,” bouncing off of it and then disappearing. It begins with one, then another, and all of a sudden it dumps a whole bunch of the words “logic” and they all bounce off and disappear. It seems to me that Kendall is trying to make a point that faith defies logic, no matter how much logic is involved. The word “faith” is decorated in a fancy Old English-style font that highlights its importance and emphasizes it more then the other text that is in a normal font style. The style of the letter “f” in “faith” also reminds me of how the monks that handwrote the first copies of the Bible italicized the first letters of the first words in a passage.

As the words from the previous slide fold into the next, the previous words are in a different color as the new words or phrases, which allow you to differentiate between them and see how they all came to fit together. On the next two slides each time a word or phrase appears there is a sound like a “ding” or “dong.” This makes it easier for you to avoid missing something or get lost when you are reading the poem; the sound sort of calls your attention to the new text arriving on the scene. The poem has a fun, playful-like feel through the disposition of the words. For example, the phrase “off the rocker (yippee!)” is slanted downward, one word grows so big that it fills up the entire screen, and at the end the majority of the text falls down into a large pile at the bottom of the screen.