Keeping it real, one poem and police investigation at a time

“Reality is not just what we see,” Sarah Cortez told me in a recent interview for the Ignatius Press podcast. “For me, as a poet,” she elaborated, “my vocation or calling is to try to bring the heart of God, or how I understand God’s eternal sweep of creation to what I see day to day.”

And she has seen a lot.

Cortez belongs to the cadre of great modern writers whose careers outside the literary world have inspired them in their poetry or prose. It may seem obvious, but it is worth remembering that a writer needs something to write about, and great insights about human nature may come from looking closely at one’s own day-to-day life. William Carlos Williams worked as a full-time physician for forty years, and Wallace Stevens worked for just as long as an insurance lawyer. For her part, Cortez has served for twenty-six years as an officer in police departments in the Houston-Harris County area, and she has also worked as an Educational Specialist for the Harris County Department of Education. As a writer, she has published fourteen books, and she has received acclaim in the religious and secular press alike, winning the PEN Texas Literary Award.

Cortez has also been at the vanguard of a growing number of influential Catholic writers and artists who are committed to an aesthetic program described by Joshua Hren as “contemplative realism.” As the ground beneath our feet feels less stable all the time, our art must avoid falling into different but equally dangerous traps of diversion and indulgence. Likewise, abstract art has veered too far away from even attempting to represent forms that resonate with the human experience. Today, as Hren argues in his manifesto, “to see clearly under such circumstances requires continual attentiveness, continual self-correction, continual communal reference to the visions of others similarly engaged. Ours must be an exacting examen that ever concludes with great gratitude to God.”

But what should a modern Catholic poet choose to look at, describe, and ultimately give thanks for?

How about a gun?

As a poet and a cop, Cortez has long been in a unique position not only to describe danger and violence accurately but also to see the big picture of hope that lies beyond the broken pieces that she often encounters in places few people dare to go. She told me,

For me as a police officer, being on the street, working cases, collecting evidence, having people shot, homicide cases–I, in particular, when I was on the streets, was an investigator as well as a trainer of investigators of sexual assault, so very, very, very tough kinds of realities…but I try to bring whatever I can understand about my perception of God’s eternal reality in creation to all of those situations…. God is with us all the time. In times of great joy, and times of great suffering. Most of what you see on the streets is great suffering, and I believe God is there and I believe the eternal timeline that is supposed to lead us back to God is there.

And this brings us to the gun. Among Cortez’ many poems about policing, she authored a particularly haunting one in 2012 called “The Secret.” In the third stanza, she writes,

love your gun. Practice drawing until
your arm is extruded machinery.
The big grip in your big hand
will cleave to palm, replacing all
other knowledge. Clean its high
performance parts as if you were
swabbing the chambered mysteries
of your own auricles and ventricles.

The subject of Cortez’ poem may be unpalatable to those who resist the idea that a lethal weapon could be regarded as a gift from God. But Cortez challenges us to remember that in a fallen world, there are bad guys who have to be stopped. Some of them are really bad guys who are hell-bent on destruction. There are, therefore, things we must use to stop these bad guys, even if we may have no interest in picking them up ourselves, and even if we acknowledge they will not exist when the prince of peace reigns from a new Heaven over a new earth.

After all, when the Lord returns and the nations are judged, the prophet Isaiah tells us “they shall beat their swords into ploughshares” (Is. 2:4). But not yet. For now, guns exist, and we need people who know how to use them, even if as an absolute last resort. Accordingly, a cop treats her gun with a kind of reverence whose nuance only a poem can capture. “Love whatever can save your life,” Cortez writes. Likewise, the hunter may say, “Love whatever can feed your family” or the soldier may say, “Love whatever saves my homeland.”

Nonetheless, some Catholic readers may balk. Shouldn’t poetry reflect spiritual ideals rather than wallow in the mire of this mortal world? But we should ask in return: What would Dante or Shakespeare say? What would Dostoevsky or Flannery O’Connor say? Should we look only at the empty tomb and never at the cross? Should we always expect miracles and never consider the sacredness of difficult activity that brings forth blessings?

Cortez’ verse can be dark, like the claustrophobic, crime-ridden urban landscapes of classic Hollywood film noir. But her work does not invite despair. Rather, as Jon Bishop wrote here at Catholic World Report in 2023, “that which forces us to gaze at the most evil of acts also has us turn upward, toward the hereafter.” Likewise, Cortez’ cop poems do not present a romanticized view of pure lionhearts hunting down one-dimensional goons in back alleys. Rather, Cortez demonstrates that someone who knows violence all-too-well is uniquely able to turn our attention above the things we wish were not true.

At times, Cortez also reminds us that a life of sacrifice, duty, and danger can be just as mundane as anyone else’s. Police work, like any other occupation, provides an entrée for seeing the presence of God in the petty annoyances with which we can all identify. In a poem from her 2013 book, Cold Blue Steel called “After the Swearing-In,” Cortez writes,

If
you keep your nose clean and do
a decent job, you’ll probably get
passed over for promotion ‘cause
suck-ups back at the station
will get promoted first.

A police officer regularly faces peril, and in these instances, she gives thanks for her gun; but sometimes her challenges are as banal as anyone else’s. On a spiritual level, police work may feel more often like The Office than Miami Vice. Real poetry–Catholic poetry–reflects these nuances.

Emerging from the heights and depths of her real-world experience, Cortez has not confined herself to solitary writing. She founded and now presides over Catholic Literary Arts, an organization which describes itself as “a home for writers of faith,” where both aspiring and established authors can build community with each other, and where people of all ages may “enjoy spiritual and intellectual formation in the great literary traditions of Western civilization.”

Cortez’ work with Catholic Literary Arts has given her even more rich life experiences, now away from the mean streets. She has taught poetry in places as diverse as senior facilities and juvenile detention centers, and she has overseen the work of many other Catholic creatives whose hearts are moved with zeal for transforming the culture. Selflessness is the focus of the Catholic Literary Arts mission statement, which notes how the “rich treasures of the Catholic Church may be more perfectly explored and used to draw all peoples to God.”

In our conversation, Cortez elaborated further on the purpose of Catholic Literary Arts, emphasizing how the group seeks to mentor “Catholic writers of all ages,” but also “all people of good will.” There is no quibbling over whether a person must become a Catholic first, then a poet. It could just as easily work the other way. But for faithful Catholics who already have the writing bug, Catholic Literary Arts is designed to help them develop and publish poems, short stories, or novels they may have always wanted to get out to the world but lacked the know-how to realize.

Perhaps most important of all, Cortez told me about the commitment shared by everyone at Catholic Literary Arts to teach traditional poetic forms to young people, who are invited to participate in an annual sacred poetry contest. She told me that they get around 1,000 entries from middle schoolers attending schools in the Archdiocese of Houston-Galveston, where Catholic Literary Arts is based.

But contest requires a special kind of poem.

From my own experience scribbling verse as a teenager and working on the literary magazine at my high school in the 1990s, I know youth poetry can often be embarrassingly bleak. Cringe, as the kids say. For this reason, Catholic Literary Arts asks students to write an ekphrastic poem–that is, a poem which responds to a painting or another work of art. The stipulation does not deny that one day these kids will grow up to be police officers or boat captains or priests, thereby giving them their own rich source of writing material. But, until then, why not experiment with language while also learning to look at something appreciatively and critically? Immersing oneself in something beautiful with the goal of crafting a stylish verbal response is a sure bet against nihilism.

When Cortez described her work with young people and the poetry contest to me, she radiated joy. In fact, for someone who has ventured so often into the shadows, and whose poetic output is often not cheery, Cortez’ personal demeanor consistently reveals a person of deep hope.

Such is the Catholic thing, and such is the gift of great writing, because reality is devastating and wonderful, and God is in it all. Pay special attention to Sarah Cortez and Catholic Literary Arts as Catholic writers seek to lead the world back to the real.