Take Your Poet to Work Day!

Yes, today, July 17, is the official Take Your Poet to Work Day. The folks over at Tweetspeak Poetry  (which I suppose includes me) created this, and so far it’s caught on in Australia, Holland, the United States and a few places in between. The Atlantic Monthly promoted it. And the Paris Review. And the Rotterdam Poetry Festival.

The idea is to select one of the conveniently created cutouts – Eliot, Dickinson, Poe, Neruda, Teasdale, Rumi or Basho – print it, cut it our and color it, paste to a stick, and then insert your poet somewhere in your work space. And tell a story.

OK, so I don’t do cut-outs. But, as you can see from the photography above, I did bring some poets to work today: Wallace Stevens (a favorite), Billy Collins (close to a favorite), Wendell Berry (a favorite even if he would hate my politics), and Edgar Lee Masters (who has been THE favorite since high school and given the fact he’s lasted this long as my favorite, it’s unlikely he will be dethroned anytime soon).

Oh, yes, that’s the current (July/August) issue of Poetry Magazine. This issue includes three poems by Scott Cairns (I should have brought him to work today, too) and one by James Galvin, among others; an article by the late film critic Roger Ebert; and four remembrances, including one of Richard Wilbur by Donald Hall.

I inserted the four books directly into my work space – the computer screen (yes, that’s Tweetdeck showing on the screen). And in one way or another, all four or these poets, and a few others, have helped me understand the poetry in work – and the poetry at work. That’s the story here. Perhaps that’s always the story here.

So if you’re in the mood for poetic cut-outs, or even if you aren’t, head over to Tweetspeak Poetry and see what’s happening. And it’s not too late to Take Your Poet to Work.

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.