because this blog post is dedicated to my new favorite poet.
[It's such a beautiful night I feel like I can't sleep. The rain is falling on the skylights, soft and unpredictable, a funny sort of conversation. The quiet-seeming yellow lights strung across my window, Anais Mitchell's "Child Ballads" playing... ah, life just burns at me sometimes, how wonderful it is.]
okay, so, you know how i just wrote "meet Christian Wiman. This will never happen, but a girl can dream" as part of my '20 things to do' list?
Yeah, yesterday I listened to this On Being podcast, an hour-long interview with this lovely human being. I felt like I had met him. I was listening to it at work and I had to keep pausing because my eyes kept burning like I was going to cry. It was kind of weird, actually, but I'm chalking it down to one of those odd 'kindred spirits' moments and leaving it at that.
So now I'm just going to quote a bunch of stuff he said on the show/in essays archived on the poetry foundation website because I think he's awesome & I want all these thoughts in one place.
__
Krista Tippett to Christian Wiman: You know, you've written "Faith is not a state of mind, but an action in the world, a movement towards the world."
Me: Yesss.
__
Ms. Tippett: So one thing I really like in your poetry and I think it connects also to your faith is this real tie to reality, which also gets intellectualized, the notion of reality. Do you know what I mean [laugh]? I don't know. When I was reading through you, I also found a lot of reference to reality from Simone Weil, "It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy in order to find reality through suffering" or even in this essay you wrote, "Hive of Nerves." You talked about Christ using metaphors, speaking the language of reality in terms of the physical world. So tell me about how you think poetry works with reality uniquely.
Mr. Wiman: Well, you know, I've been sick lately and I actually had a bone marrow transplant and was in the hospital for quite a long time. And one of the things, poetry died for me for a while. I found that it just wasn't speaking to me. I think I had certain expectations that took me a while to realize were false expectations. I think we often talk about poetry getting us beyond the world and taking us to the very edge of experience and then getting us into the ineffable. I have to say, when I was, you know, faced with the actual ineffable, I didn't want poetry that gave me more of the ineffable. What I wanted was some way of apprehending the world that was right in front of me that was slipping away.
I wanted the world, you know, in front of my eyes, and the poems that I found useful were absolutely concrete, sometimes not at all about religious things and not at all about spiritual things, but simply reality, and reality rendered in such a way that you could see it again. There's a great quote from the mid-20th-century literary critic R.P. Blackmur. He's talking about John Berryman. He said that his work "adds to the stock of available reality." It added to the stock of available reality, and that's a good way to think about what a real poem can do. It suddenly makes the amount of reality that you have in your life greater. You're able to apprehend more of it.
...Mr. Wiman: Right. And that has helped me to at least understand those terms somewhat and to explain to myself why I do need some sort of structures in my life. I do need to go to church. I need specifically religious elements in my life. I find that if I just turn all of my spiritual impulses — if I let them be solitary, as I am comfortable in being, I'm comfortable sitting reading books and trying to pray and meditating. Inevitably, if that energy is not focused outward, it becomes despairing. It turns in on itself and I will look up in a couple of months and I find that I'm in despair. So I think that one of the ways that we know that our spiritual inclinations are valid is that they lead us out of ourselves.
__
From The Poetry Foundation...
All sorts of useful things may be written in perfectly adequate prose: editorials, history, philosophy, theology, even lasting novels. But there is no such thing as a perfectly adequate poem, because a poem into which some strange and surprising excellence has not entered, a poem that is not in some inexplicable way beyond the will of the poet, is not a poem.
Seamus Heaney has noted that if a person has a single poem in his head, one that he returns to and through which, even in small ways, he understands his life better, this constitutes a devotion to the art. It is enough. And in fact I find that this is almost always how non-specialists read poetry—rarely, sparingly, but intensely, with a handful of high moments that they cling to. The emphasis is on the memorable individual poem, and poetry in bulk is rarely memorable.
You don’t need to know a thing about quantum entanglement, wherein one atom can affect another even though they are separated by tremendous distance, to have some sense that our lives are always larger than the physical limitations within which they occur. We exist apart from our existences, you might say, are connected to the world and to other people in ways we will never be able to fully articulate or understand—and we assert our iron wills and ravenous hungers at our own peril. There is such a thing as a collective unconscious. There is such a thing as a spirit of place, and it reaches beyond geography. And poetry, which is a kind of quantum entanglement in language, is not simply a way of helping us to recognize the relations we have with people and places, but a means of preserving and protecting those relations.
Most poets I know read almost unconsciously at first, feeling the poem’s formal and linguistic dynamics as much as its “meaning” (in the end, there is no way to separate meaning from a poem’s form and sound). Meaning matters, of course, and most poems do have some bedrock denotative sense upon which the mind can rest. But still, some mystery usually remains. Poetry, like life, has its patches of pure black, its furthest interiors where meaning gleams darkly, and must remain in that darkness if it is to mean at all. You know a good poem by whether or not those irreducible dark spots are integral to your experience of the whole. “Our only obscurities...should be those we are driven into,” Ruth Pitter once wrote, “then a sort of blessing may descend, making such obscurity magical.”
One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise.
For all the canons and anthologies, for every rock-solid reputation and critical consensus, poetry is personal or it is nothing. That is, until a poem has been tested on your own pulse, to paraphrase John Keats, until you have made up your own mind and heart about where you stand in relation to it, and it to you—until this happens, all poetry is merely literature, all reading rote. It’s true that some people are better readers of poetry than others; that some people’s judgment matters (for the culture as a whole) more than others; that, just as with music or art, there are elements of craft and historical perspective essential to being able to formulate a meaningful response. But still: poetry is made up of poems, and poems repulse and entice in unpredictable ways, and anyone who reads independently and spiritedly is going to carry an eccentric canon around in his head. This is half the fun of it all.
[It's such a beautiful night I feel like I can't sleep. The rain is falling on the skylights, soft and unpredictable, a funny sort of conversation. The quiet-seeming yellow lights strung across my window, Anais Mitchell's "Child Ballads" playing... ah, life just burns at me sometimes, how wonderful it is.]
okay, so, you know how i just wrote "meet Christian Wiman. This will never happen, but a girl can dream" as part of my '20 things to do' list?
Yeah, yesterday I listened to this On Being podcast, an hour-long interview with this lovely human being. I felt like I had met him. I was listening to it at work and I had to keep pausing because my eyes kept burning like I was going to cry. It was kind of weird, actually, but I'm chalking it down to one of those odd 'kindred spirits' moments and leaving it at that.
So now I'm just going to quote a bunch of stuff he said on the show/in essays archived on the poetry foundation website because I think he's awesome & I want all these thoughts in one place.
__
Krista Tippett to Christian Wiman: You know, you've written "Faith is not a state of mind, but an action in the world, a movement towards the world."
Me: Yesss.
__
Ms. Tippett: So one thing I really like in your poetry and I think it connects also to your faith is this real tie to reality, which also gets intellectualized, the notion of reality. Do you know what I mean [laugh]? I don't know. When I was reading through you, I also found a lot of reference to reality from Simone Weil, "It is necessary to have had a revelation of reality through joy in order to find reality through suffering" or even in this essay you wrote, "Hive of Nerves." You talked about Christ using metaphors, speaking the language of reality in terms of the physical world. So tell me about how you think poetry works with reality uniquely.
Mr. Wiman: Well, you know, I've been sick lately and I actually had a bone marrow transplant and was in the hospital for quite a long time. And one of the things, poetry died for me for a while. I found that it just wasn't speaking to me. I think I had certain expectations that took me a while to realize were false expectations. I think we often talk about poetry getting us beyond the world and taking us to the very edge of experience and then getting us into the ineffable. I have to say, when I was, you know, faced with the actual ineffable, I didn't want poetry that gave me more of the ineffable. What I wanted was some way of apprehending the world that was right in front of me that was slipping away.
I wanted the world, you know, in front of my eyes, and the poems that I found useful were absolutely concrete, sometimes not at all about religious things and not at all about spiritual things, but simply reality, and reality rendered in such a way that you could see it again. There's a great quote from the mid-20th-century literary critic R.P. Blackmur. He's talking about John Berryman. He said that his work "adds to the stock of available reality." It added to the stock of available reality, and that's a good way to think about what a real poem can do. It suddenly makes the amount of reality that you have in your life greater. You're able to apprehend more of it.
...Mr. Wiman: Right. And that has helped me to at least understand those terms somewhat and to explain to myself why I do need some sort of structures in my life. I do need to go to church. I need specifically religious elements in my life. I find that if I just turn all of my spiritual impulses — if I let them be solitary, as I am comfortable in being, I'm comfortable sitting reading books and trying to pray and meditating. Inevitably, if that energy is not focused outward, it becomes despairing. It turns in on itself and I will look up in a couple of months and I find that I'm in despair. So I think that one of the ways that we know that our spiritual inclinations are valid is that they lead us out of ourselves.
__
From The Poetry Foundation...
All sorts of useful things may be written in perfectly adequate prose: editorials, history, philosophy, theology, even lasting novels. But there is no such thing as a perfectly adequate poem, because a poem into which some strange and surprising excellence has not entered, a poem that is not in some inexplicable way beyond the will of the poet, is not a poem.
***
Seamus Heaney has noted that if a person has a single poem in his head, one that he returns to and through which, even in small ways, he understands his life better, this constitutes a devotion to the art. It is enough. And in fact I find that this is almost always how non-specialists read poetry—rarely, sparingly, but intensely, with a handful of high moments that they cling to. The emphasis is on the memorable individual poem, and poetry in bulk is rarely memorable.
***
You don’t need to know a thing about quantum entanglement, wherein one atom can affect another even though they are separated by tremendous distance, to have some sense that our lives are always larger than the physical limitations within which they occur. We exist apart from our existences, you might say, are connected to the world and to other people in ways we will never be able to fully articulate or understand—and we assert our iron wills and ravenous hungers at our own peril. There is such a thing as a collective unconscious. There is such a thing as a spirit of place, and it reaches beyond geography. And poetry, which is a kind of quantum entanglement in language, is not simply a way of helping us to recognize the relations we have with people and places, but a means of preserving and protecting those relations.
***
Most poets I know read almost unconsciously at first, feeling the poem’s formal and linguistic dynamics as much as its “meaning” (in the end, there is no way to separate meaning from a poem’s form and sound). Meaning matters, of course, and most poems do have some bedrock denotative sense upon which the mind can rest. But still, some mystery usually remains. Poetry, like life, has its patches of pure black, its furthest interiors where meaning gleams darkly, and must remain in that darkness if it is to mean at all. You know a good poem by whether or not those irreducible dark spots are integral to your experience of the whole. “Our only obscurities...should be those we are driven into,” Ruth Pitter once wrote, “then a sort of blessing may descend, making such obscurity magical.”
***
One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise.
***
For all the canons and anthologies, for every rock-solid reputation and critical consensus, poetry is personal or it is nothing. That is, until a poem has been tested on your own pulse, to paraphrase John Keats, until you have made up your own mind and heart about where you stand in relation to it, and it to you—until this happens, all poetry is merely literature, all reading rote. It’s true that some people are better readers of poetry than others; that some people’s judgment matters (for the culture as a whole) more than others; that, just as with music or art, there are elements of craft and historical perspective essential to being able to formulate a meaningful response. But still: poetry is made up of poems, and poems repulse and entice in unpredictable ways, and anyone who reads independently and spiritedly is going to carry an eccentric canon around in his head. This is half the fun of it all.
Special bonus feature: this recitation of Robert Bringhurst's "These Poems, She Said."
So, believe me yet? He's the best. The best.
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