Poets and Poems: Christian Wiman and “Once in the West”

Christian Wiman is an essayist, translator, and poet. For ten years (2003-2013), he was the editor of Poetry Magazine. He’s published four collections of poetry; the celebrated My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer; the equally celebrated Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet; and a translation of Osip Mandelstom’s poetry, Stolen Air. And with Dona Share, he co-edited the Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine.

 

His most recent collection of poems, Once in the West, is one of the five finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, the winner of which will be announced March 12.

Wiman grew up in West Texas, and the poems of Once in the West find their source in the upbringing and that geography.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Christian Wiman’s “Once in the West”

I’ve read a lot of poetry over my lifetime, and likely more in the last 10 years than the rest combined. Rarely have I been as taken with a collection as I have with Christian Wiman’s Once in the West: Poems.

The poems originate in Wiman’s childhood and coming of age in Texas. They extend beyond that, into the reader’s mind and own experience, a collection of sharp, piercing stones with cutting edges that leave blood on the floor – the blood of life and of a life lived.

Some may mind the occasional profanity. I didn’t, and it surprised me that I didn’t.

I’ll have more to say later, but here is one example of a poem from the collection.

 

Calculus

A soul

extrapolated

from the body’s

need

needs a body

of loss

is that, then,

what we were

given

in that back-

seat, sweat-

soaked, skin-

habited heaven

of days

when rapture

was pure

beginning

and sinning

praise?

Related:

Christian Wiman’s Every Riven Thing

Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss

Tumbling at the Nightstand

Photograph by Silviu Firulete via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Christian Wiman’s “My Bright Abyss”

I spent three months reading a 177-page book, Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. I read a number of other books during the same time, but My Bright Abyss was never far from my mind.

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Some days, I could read only a paragraph. I spent two weeks in London, and did not bring the book with me to read on the plane. It was too much; it would have been too much to read and assimilate at one time.

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So what happens when you learn you have a terminal disease that may, or may not be controlled? How do you make sense of it? And what happens when you stop one day in the church on your block, and are pulled back to the faith you learned in childhood, that faith that was often cold and hard like a West Texas wind?

One thing you do is keep a journal.

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My difficulty with My Bright Abyss was not one of shared experience. I don’t have a serious illness like cancer. My difficulty lay more in how much of what Wiman writes about illness can be applied to growing older. Minutes pass faster, sometimes so fast that you realize, as Wiman does, that “strictly speaking…the past and future do not exist. They are both, to a greater or lesser degree, creations of the imagination.”

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Growing older, I suppose, is a kind of death. I’m learning that, as I age, some things are more sharply focused. Not more importantly, necessarily. More focused. Clearer. I understand as I never did before how much two or three teachers shaped my entire understanding of literature.  Never before did I understand how important the idea of death is to literature.

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Wiman talks much of death, and not only about the possibility of his own. The idea of death powerfully influences every younger poets and writers, because it represents an intensity of experience, one that slips or falls into a vanishing point.

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Wiman, for years the editor of Poetry Magazine, is now on the faculty of the Yale Divinity School. In January, I reviewed Every Riven Thing, a collection of his poetry. I noted My Bright Abyss was being published. I said it sounded like a Psalm 23 experience. I was only slightly right.

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What he wrote in his journal ultimately became this book. Like all journals, it has long and short entries, sometimes a single thought or a poem, followed by several paragraphs or a longer essay.  Sometimes years separate the entries.  This seems to me to be a lot like life.

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I read My Bright Abyss, and I come to understand that each life, including my own, is an unfinished poem. Each life always will be.

Top photograph by Alex Grichenko via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Tumbling at the Nightstand

So I read a story about West Texas

that I didn’t think I’d like at first,

dusty and dry and tumbleweed gray,

but I did, and behind stood, waiting,

a poet’s Abyss, tumbling into darkness,

followed by a Spanish poet,

the Spanish poet, finding New York

before he tumbled in civil war

back home, but he wrote his poem

in two languages side by side which

makes the book shorter if you skip

the Spanish side, but it didn’t

because I read a few of them aloud

anyway, tumbling into hard consonants

and flamenco music and the tragedy

of life cut short, and I read another one

in Spanish and realized without benefit

of translation that it was a romance.

In case you’re wondering, the three books cited here are Thunder and Rain by Charles Martin, My Bright Abyss by Christian Wiman, and Poet in New York by Federico Garcia Lorca.

Photograph via The Quantum Biologist. 

Christian Wiman’s “Every Riven Thing: Poems”

I have a habit of writing down titles of books I might be interested in reading on yellow Post-It notes, and letting them accumulate until either I toss them all or transfer them to a single page. If they make the single page, I’m likely to buy them at some point.

In 2011, I scribbled Every Riven Thing on a Post-It note. I didn’t write the author’s name, but it sounded like a book of poems, or possibly a book by Stephen King. I looked to up on Amazon, and sure enough, it was a poetry collection; the poet’s name was Christian Wiman. It was written on the same Post-It note as a poetry book by Luci Shaw, which suggested there might be some connection. Or not – it couldn’t have been I ran out of Post-It notes and was conserving space.

I recognized the name. Wiman is the editor of Poetry Magazine. That is, until June 30, 2013, when he steps down to join the faculty of the Yale Divinity School.

I did order it, and then read it during the Christmas holidays just past. I didn’t know anything about Wiman other than he was editor at Poetry Magazine (and how I was often surprised to see some various obvious Christian poems make it into the magazine). But I found the poems haunting, sometimes riveting. They clearly spoke to an experience of serious personal illness, and a difficult spiritual journey. And they spoke of grace, and faith, and even hope. I made a note (another yellow Post-It) that said “find out more about Wiman.”

Within just a few days, the January/February issue of Christianity Today arrived, and as I’m thumbing through it I find a major interview with Wiman. Many of my questions were answered. I was so moved by the interview that I went back and read Every Riven Thing again. And knowing didn’t change understanding, but it surely enhanced it.

The second reading evoked the sense of a deep, deep silence. Not an emptiness, but a silence, a silence enclosed within a sharp wind, sand and

The interview was less about Wiman’s poems and more about his new book of essay, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. The day he turned 39, married less than a year, he was diagnosed with a cancer of the blood. One that’s incurable. According to the article, the essays came after the diagnosis.

I haven’t read the essays, but I suspect that, much like the poem of Every Riven Thing and what he talks about in the interview, they will be the story of a man who lived Psalm 23, and walked in the valley of the shadow of death. “Illness,” he says in the interview, “has brought a great urgency to my work. One speaks differently when standing on a cliff.” Yes, I will read the essays.

In the meantime, I will read the poems. Again.

Here’s the title poem, “Every Riven Thing:”

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made

sing his being simply by being

the thing it is:

stone and tree and sky,

man who sees and sings and wonders why

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he’s made,

means a storm of peace.

Think of atoms inside the stone.

Think of the man who sits alone

trying to will himself into a stillness where

God goes belonging. To every riven thing he’s made

there is given one shade

shaped exactly to the thing itself:

under the tree a darker tree;

under the man the only man to see

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made

the things that bring him near,

made the mind that makes him go.

A part of what man knows

apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.