Making the Stone Stoney

I'm reading psalm 88 -- one of the "lie down in darkness" psalms -- thinking about the jazz psalm thing. I've been wanting to read it and write out of it for a while, as it's the psalm music I've already heard. Today it occured to me that I'm in the mood for it. Anyway, it's my practice to read as many versions as I can get my hands on, as well as commentary, transliterations, and the like. And I found something ... well:

I know many of my Christian friends are fans of "The Message" interpretation of the Bible. But I'd like to take this chance to trash it. Here is part of the opening of The Message, Psalm 88:

GOD, you're my last chance of the day.
......
Put me on your salvation agenda;
take notes on the trouble I'm in.
......
I'm written off as a lost cause,
one more statistic, a hopeless case.

When I say I want to recover the strangeness of the Bible in Seal up the Thunder, this is exactly what I don't mean.

Things get dulled with repetion, the way a river dulls a stone. Sometimes this is beautiful, a patina of voices, a patina of years. But often it's just -- dull. The way to make it hard, to make it stony, is not to cast it into modern cliche, but to go back in time, to try to experience it as if it had never been heard before, never spoken aloud.

"When I feel as if the top of my head has been taken off," says Ms. Dickenson, "then I know it is poetry." And when I feel that opening, I know it's grace.

("Making the Stone Stoney" one of the best essays on poetry out there.)