Interesting Interview: Christian Wiman

William Haskins · Sep 6, 2007

Best known as the young and sometimes controversial editor of Poetry magazine, Christian Wiman created a different kind of stir earlier this year with the publication of an essay in the American Scholar that revealed, among other things, that he has a potentially fatal illness. Wiman, 41, suffers from Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia, a rare and incurable blood cancer.

In the essay—included in Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet, a collection of autobiographical prose and literary criticism to be published next month by Copper Canyon Press—Wiman describes his diagnosis as part of a seismic shift in his life and work. A devout Baptist during his youth in west Texas, Wiman had spent most of his adult life feeling estranged from religion, but now has returned to it. Around the same time, he began writing poetry again, an activity that had come to a three-year halt.

In an interview at the Poetry offices in Chicago, Wiman—looking robust after a workout—talked about the changes in his life and their effect on his work as a poet and editor. He also addressed controversies at Poetry, including a protracted and passionate debate over the merits of Garrison Keillor’s anthology Good Poems, as well as a recent New Yorker article critical of the Poetry Foundation’s efforts to broaden the audience for contemporary poetry.

interview here.

kdnxdr · Sep 7, 2007

thank you for posting this article, William. I appreciated reading the interview.

A. Hamilton · Sep 8, 2007

There's a lot of food for thought here (bolding mine):

Quote:
P&W: You’ve also written about prose being less precious than poetry.

CW: I find I can always get prose written, whereas in poetry, there is some element of givenness that you have to depend on. I’ve gone away for a month or two months or six months, and not been able to write. In confessional poetry and prose, what’s bad is when it seems like what you’re getting is just the person’s experience, and it’s important only because it happened to them. What I respond to, and what I aim for, is to try to get something that speaks to experience itself.

P&W: Another interesting part of the essay has to do with your having stopped writing poetry, and then starting again, and the connection of that to your rediscovery of religion.

CW: I stopped writing poetry for a full three years, starting about a year before I became editor of Poetry. I think I had pushed things in one direction as far as I could. For a long time I was writing poems that circumscribed an absence that I couldn’t define, and I think this was the absence I was feeling. I hope the poems I’m writing now, and am trying to write, are more filled with presence. I don’t just mean the presence of God; I mean just simply being present in the world. The earlier poems, particularly in my book Hard Night, are often about not quite experiencing the world, about that absence. And I consider not being able to write as a manifestation of grace; I think grace sometimes can be anguishing.
P&W: Not being able to write was a manifestation of grace?

CW: Yes, because I was having the thing that I thought was most important in my life taken away from me, and so I was forced to cast around. In some way I had to become destitute to realize what mattered.

Interesting Interview: Christian Wiman

William Haskins

poet

kdnxdr

One of the most important people in the world

A. Hamilton

here for a minute...catch me?