Elizabeth Oldfield: Have you ever done that slightly scary thing of asking yourself the question, if I had a year left to live, what would I do with it? I think a lot of us have the deep instinct that a question like that, facing our own mortality, can be incredibly clarifying for how we want to live, who we want to be, what matters and what doesn’t. But what do you do if you have to ask that question again and again and again?
In June this year, I went to Washington, DC to be part of the wonderful Understory festival in the National Cathedral, convened by Comment magazine, and had the absolute privilege of squirrelling away for a conversation with the poet Christian Wiman. Christian is a poet. He’s been featured in The New Yorker and The New York Times and Harper’s and The Atlantic for a long time. He was the editor of Poetry magazine. It’s a real fixture in the literary scene. And he has also had 20 years of living with that question.
Christian Wiman: The positive is I have no fear of death. I have a zero fear of death. I have a great fear of the grief that my death would leave behind. Coming back into the world after feeling like you’re going to lose—you’re leaving it—is not easy. It’s not pure joy. It’s like the world is abradingly difficult. Here’s suddenly this simple existence you’re supposed to step back into and pay your bills and teach your classes and do these things, and you’ve been in this crucible.
Elizabeth Oldfield: We had such a beautiful conversation about suffering. But how do we make meaning? How do we learn to live in the furnace and on the edge of the cliff, and what poetry and faith might have to do with all that? There was a profound honesty and humanity and tenderness to this conversation. I really hope you enjoy it as much as I did. There’s some reflections from me at the end.
Elizabeth Oldfield: It’s always a little bit nerve-racking asking word people, poets in particular, to riff on the word that’s been at the heart of this podcast and has changed and deepened, and I’ve been tired of it and I’ve fallen back in love with it over time. But I’m going to just punt it to you and say, what is sacred to you? What bubbled up?
Christian Wiman: Yeah, I have a kind of complicated answer. I immediately think—this wasn’t part of the answer, but I think of a Polish poet, Anna Kamieńska, who said that she converted to Catholicism after the death of her husband when she was around 40, I think. And she said that as a poet, she felt that the impulse to remake the language, that all of these words like sacred and redemption and faith had to be remade in the way that a poet needs to remake the language to make it fresh. And as she went further into the faith, she realised that these words were so saturated with tradition and meaning that for her to do that on her own would be the act of a heedless parvenu.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Coming in to rebrand.
Christian Wiman: Yeah, yeah. I have a couple—I have kind of a complicated answer. I had a colleague give a talk recently about—she’s a liturgical studies scholar, and she asked a group of students to write down the things that they considered rituals in their lives. And so we all participated and wrote down things that were rituals. And then we were asked to say some of them. I’ve long had a ritual of reading poems first thing in the morning, and I don’t really pay attention to the meaning. I just sort of pay attention to the sound. And I’ve done it since I was 20 years old.
And other people had gatherings with people that they considered sacred every week, or that they had—I mean, ritualistic—they had a ritual of a certain tea ceremony that they did, you know, whatever.
And then she gave a definition of ritual, and she said that it must be communal, and it must have a meaning that you can point to, and it must have some sort of historical basis. It must be a tradition.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Interesting.
Christian Wiman: It’s not an ironclad definition, obviously, but that’s the case in liturgical studies. And what you have all just described are habits, not rituals. And they were all alone—even some were with family members or something, but she still considered them habits because they weren’t a communal thing.
And so in thinking about the word sacred, I thought that’s a pretty good guideline for thinking of what’s sacred as well, that it has to have a meaning. It has to be communal. It has to have some sort of historical definition.
So I consider the church sacred. I consider the Bible sacred. Or I should say, I think those things can be sacred. It depends entirely on the energy that’s brought to them, on the kind of spirit with which they’re engaged.
I would be very nervous burning a cross. I’d be very nervous burning a Bible. I’d be very nervous burning a Quran, because I recognise the sacredness of that.
In my own life—I mean, I have a very contested relationship with religion. In my own life, the love I have with my wife seems sacred. It changed my life. It changed everything for me. And I’m aware of all kinds of ways that I could violate it. I don’t just mean the obvious one. I mean, there are all kinds of ways that I could violate that sacred trust.
I am a Christian, try to be, and I believe that every life is sacred. I think that the Jains may actually be right, that all of life, not just human life, is sacred. And that’s probably the aspiration we should have. So that’s a stab at an answer.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Thank you. Another thread I like to pull on sometimes is the way the sacred shows up in kind of principles that we try and live by. So I originally came across this concept via an anthropologist called Scott Atran. He talked about sacred values basically being the non-instrumental things in our lives. And you can test it, because if someone offered you money to compromise or to give up something, you would feel—you would feel insulted. You would feel compromised. And they’re often the kind of below-the-surface things that we’re semi-consciously trying to navigate by, you know, trying to make decisions around. Does anything bubble up for you around what might be some sacred principles or values that you have at least tried to let define your life?
Christian Wiman: Gosh, there’s very little I would give up for money. That is not a temptation that has ever been very strong for me. I wouldn’t give up my 10-year-old dog for money.
Elizabeth Oldfield: What about glory or acclaim?
Christian Wiman: No. No. No, if I was given the choice of winning the Nobel Prize and being able to spend the rest of my life as a simple Christian, with a simple faith, I would take that. And it would be that quick. But it’s because that seems to me so elusive, so difficult. But I would like to—that would be my highest aspiration, actually.
Elizabeth Oldfield: What is it about the word simple? What’s the work that is doing there?
Christian Wiman: I think I thrash about too much, thinking about the—my life has just been turmoil. It’s been that way since I was a kid. And I think in the end, faith in God is quite a simple thing. And the instances in which I have seen that lived out have been so clear and just so obviously right. But it seems remote to me. It’s remote to me.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. Let’s hear a little bit more about that childhood. Could you paint me maybe a word picture of you, say—we’d call it primary school age. What’s that? Elementary school age. Where are you and kind of what is the water that you’re swimming in, what’s around you in your life?
Christian Wiman: Well, elementary school, we were very poor. My father was himself a troubled person, and he sold vacuum cleaners and sold Bibles door to door and drove a bus and did these different things. And my parents were periodically splitting up. So we were just really poor.
But then he got his act together and he went to medical school. And so in my junior high, in later years, and there was a period there of about four or five years when we had money rolling in, and he became a doctor. And then we lost all that because he went bankrupt.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Gosh.
Christian Wiman: So there was a lot of—I grew up in far west Texas in a small town, and everybody I knew was religious. I never encountered an atheist until I went to college. And it was just the water that you swam in. And it was in some ways—I mean, I meet people who are shocked that a poet could come out of that environment. Not so much now; it used to really shock people. But it always seemed to me sort of the most—a quite natural thing, because I grew up in a charismatic atmosphere. And the Bible was very important. That was the only sort of poetry I knew. There were no books in our house.
But I also grew up with a sense of the—I mean, it’s very much in the natural world all the time. And Seamus Heaney has a great line, gleaning the unsaid off the palpable. “Over again, I tell and finger it like braille, gleaning the unsaid off the palpable.” He’s talking about this little harvest bow that his father made and he’s retained, “a throwaway love-knot of straw,” as he calls it then. And I grew up with that sense, gleaning the unsaid off the palpable, of a world that was just electric with radiance. And violence, too. There was a lot of violence where I grew up, in which I participated. So that was—it was quite a tempestuous upbringing.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Do you want to say a little bit about your mother? Because I feel like that violence she experienced, you could not have helped with your formative influence on you.
Christian Wiman: Yeah. Her father killed her mother when she was 14, and he did it in front of her and her brothers. They were all sitting at the table, and they ran away, the kids ran away, and then he laid down on the floor next to his wife and shot himself. And so she was without parents at the age of 14. And she had a younger brother and an older brother, and the siblings were split up and went to different places, and my mother moved from place to place and eventually ended up in the house of my father. They took her in, and then she and my father fell in love. But way too young, you know, 16, 17.
And so I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know that story. It wasn’t like they kept it from us. But I also don’t remember a time when we talked about it. It was just in the air—this just happened. And honestly, I don’t remember thinking much of it until I got older. And then I started to think, good God, how does a person come out of that? Boy, that explains quite a lot of what was going on back then.
So yeah, that was always in the background. But it was in—it was in my own life too. And I mean, I got in a lot of fights when I was young. I had a lot of anger.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And guns were around?
Christian Wiman: Oh, we always had guns. Yeah, I got my first gun when I was 12, I think. I got a shotgun when I was 12 or so. And my best friend killed somebody. It was serious.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah.
Christian Wiman: Yeah, it was serious.
Elizabeth Oldfield: It’s okay. I’m going to get you to read—partly because it’s just one of my favourite poems of yours—but it’s “Five Houses Down,” which is a little picture in a neighbourhood.
Christian Wiman: Yeah, this is a guy who lived down the street. The poem is real in that sense, and I would work for him with my friend from a very young age. The speaker in this poem is probably 12 or something. “Five Houses Down.” Oh, you need to know that a sapper—I mean, if you’re in England, they know this—yeah, sappers defuse bombs. I don’t think there’s anything else. Exxon, of course, you know, the big oil company.
I loved his ten demented chickens and the hell-eyed dog. The mailbox shaped like a huge green gun. I loved the eyesore opulence of his five partial cars, the wonder-cluttered porch with its oil-spill plumage, tools caked in oil, the dark clockwork of disassembled engines christened Sweet Baby and benedicted Old Bitch. And down the steps into the yard the explosion of mismatched parts and black scraps amid which, like a bad sapper cloaked in luck, he would look up stunned, patting the gut that slopped out of his undershirt and saying, Son, you’re looking to make some scratch.
All afternoon we’d pile the flatbed high with stacks of Exxon floor mats mysteriously stencilled with his name. Rain-rotted sheetrock or miles of misfitted pipes, coil after coil of rusted fence wire that stained for days every crease of me. Rollicking it all to the dump where, while he called every ragman and ravened junk dog by name, he cat-picked the avalanche of trash and fished some always fixable thing up from the depths.
His endless work was not work, my father said. His bark-like earthquake curses were not curses, for he could goddamn a slipped wrench and shit-fuck a stuck latch, but one bad word from me made his whole being twang like a nail mistruck. Ain’t no call for that, bad son, no call at all.
Slipknot, whatknot, knot from which no man escapes, presto’d back to plain old rope. Whipsnake, black snake, deep in the wormdirt, worms like the clutch of mud.
I wanted to live forever five houses down in the womanless rooms a woman sometimes seemed to move through, leaving him twisting a hand-stitched dish towel or idly wiping the volcanic dust. It was heaven to me. Beans and weenies from paper plates, black-fingered tinkerings on the back stoop as the sun set, on an upturned fruit crate a little jam jar of rye like ancient light, from which, once, I took a single secret sip. My eyes tearing and my throat on fire.
That’s very much about what I was saying, gleaning the unsaid off the palpable. That’s a sort of ars poetica about becoming a poet, really.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Your throat on fire at the end from all those objects.
Christian Wiman: Yeah.
Elizabeth Oldfield: When was the very first poem you wrote?
Christian Wiman: You know, it was when I was seven or eight. I mean, I had probably written poems before that, but didn’t know they were poems, and they were just little rhymey things that I got from hymns. But this one I know about, and it can actually be verified, because at the time we were living outside of Dallas, and we would drive into the First Baptist Church in Dallas, which was the largest Baptist church in the world, probably still is. I don’t know. Took up four city blocks. I don’t know why we went there.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Wow.
Christian Wiman: And so, you know, the services were enormous. And in that tradition, you have an altar call. So at the end of the service, the preacher—Brother W. A. Criswell was his name, famous guy in that world—called for people to come get saved. And I slipped out of the pew with no warning to my parents and went down front, and they thought I was going to get saved, which was early for a Baptist. And I handed him a piece of paper and then I ran back up the aisle. And the paper said, I love the Lord and he loves me. I will not forget and neither will he. And I signed it. And he put it in the Southern Baptist newsletter. And so it’s there. My mother still has a copy. It’s there in that thing, which is an enormous publication, much bigger than a New Yorker.
Elizabeth Oldfield: They discovered you.
Christian Wiman: That’s right.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Wow. And what—you talked a little bit about your faith in that time as being kind of shallow rooted, but what—and this is where we both, all the words fall apart—how much was God, a sense of the beyond, a prayer life, kind of an internal experience for you? And how much was it just, this is something that we as a family do, there’s cultural ritual forms that I’m participating in?
Christian Wiman: Oh, no, it was very much part of my internal life from a very young age. I mean, I often wonder, is that why I’m obsessed with it? Although I know plenty of people who’ve had the same experience who left it behind. But no, there was something in me from a very young age that was hungering for God and, I would say, pursued by God. And it hasn’t abated. It’s still very much the same.
I guess—I mean, both my parents were religious. My mother much more so, much more intimate relationship with God. And I was also very close to my grandmother. And she is one of those people that I would say had a kind of simple faith that I really admire.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Then you go away to college. And are you kind of—did you go to study literature, or are you already kind of immersed in the world of poetry at this point?
Christian Wiman: Not at all, no. I hadn’t read a word.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Wow.
Christian Wiman: In fact, the dean at the school—I went to a school in Virginia, which was all male at the time, and I tell people I didn’t even know it. They were the one school who sent me something. I wasn’t a good student, but they were the one school who sent me something in the mail. And so I just applied. I didn’t even tell my parents I was going to apply, but they weren’t going to pay for it anyway. And got in and just drove up there and went.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Wow. Without visiting it or anything, just went and paid for it.
Christian Wiman: I mean, I had to figure out a way to pay for that first year. I had a car that I could sell, and I had jobs that I made a lot of money working in the oil fields.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And at this point, you’ve never picked up a poetry collection?
Christian Wiman: Oh, no, never.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Wow.
Christian Wiman: And the dean—it was a small school, so the dean would meet with each of the students separately. And I would read books, but I would read spy novels. I was reading Robert Ludlum. And he asked me what I was reading, and I very excitedly said, you know, oh, my God, this incredible book—I forget the title, but it was a spy novel. And he leaned over the desk, and I could still see his, like, Ichabod Crane face saying, you do realise that’s not literature.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Wow.
Christian Wiman: And it just shocked me. I mean, I had no idea what to say. I went home, looked at the book. It’s a book.
But no, I was an economics major. I was determined not to be poor. I’d had a taste of that, and that was enough. And so I was an economics major, and I did switch to English at the end of my junior year. So that’s when I discovered reading.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And you met atheists for the first time?
Christian Wiman: Yeah, that was right off the bat. And I did read Nietzsche right off the bat. I don’t know how Nietzsche came into my hands, but I did read Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, my freshman year. And that was a shock. You know, I read it on my own, and it was a real body blow to me.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Right. Yeah. And was it instant, you know, this whole framework that I’ve grown up with is just beyond me now? I’ve grown out a bit with a slow ebbing.
Christian Wiman: It was pretty quick. It was pretty quick. It just fell away. Yeah. I think it was not—it’s not that it was deeply rooted. It just had no—it wasn’t—the soil wasn’t good.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. You know? Yeah. And you spoke a little bit about how poetry almost came in to take its place. When do you remember beginning to see this form part of your identity, and also something you wanted to dedicate your life to?
Christian Wiman: It was when I started reading poetry.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Who did you fall in love with first?
Christian Wiman: Well, I—you’re not asking a person, you’re asking a poet. You’re asking which poet, if I was not right. But strangely, they’re similar, because I did meet this woman. I was in the first all-male class, so the next class had 100 women in it. And I did fall in love with this woman who was one of the first intrepid people. And she read poetry. She was the editor of the literary magazine, and so she had quite an influence on me.
The first poets that I read that really lit me up were Yeats and Eliot. And it was actually in England. I went to Oxford—I got this fellowship to go to Oxford for a semester.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Wow.
Christian Wiman: And I just loved it. I just absolutely loved it. And we were studying Renaissance history and literature—that’s what the fellowship was for. But I came across this book in one of the bookstores. It had Yeats and Eliot together. And I just remember reading that and just not understanding much of it, to tell you the truth, but just thinking, man, I just loved saying it to myself. I just loved—it gave me an enormous amount of pleasure just to say the poems.
And then I would start making these little things that made no sense. For a long time, they made no sense. I couldn’t make them make sense.
But then after college, that was really it. I mean, during my senior year, I was like, well, I’m going to be a poet. And so I didn’t take the opportunities that were there. I was offered this job in Switzerland. I was a tennis player, and so you make a lot of connections in tennis. And I was offered a job at Citibank in Switzerland. And I didn’t think about it for very long at all. And I would just knock about from—I don’t know, it’s bizarre to me now to think about how sort of at once absolutely directed and utterly aimless it was. Like I had the instinct to stay away from schools, so I didn’t go to graduate school or anything like that. And I would just live on what little money I could piece together. And I would go to countries where I could live on a little bit of money.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And just rent.
Christian Wiman: Yeah. It was lonely, but—but yeah, that’s what I did.
Elizabeth Oldfield: When did the switch happen from someone who did not want to be poor and was studying economics to you said to me, I’m so not motivated by money? Did that happen in that discovering poetry?
Christian Wiman: It did. It did. It was that poetry was just so much stronger for me.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Wow.
Christian Wiman: It was just so much—the pull was just so much stronger. And I could, you know, I had an impulse towards violence. I was a wrathful kid, and I would tear up things, and I would get so enraged that I would just tear up my room. I got in trouble for tearing up public things.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Wow.
Christian Wiman: I would get enraged, and if a fight happened, I would get like—I’m a calm person, and I was not. I was relatively calm then, but if a fight started, it was all bets off and I was in it, and like a cloud came over me. And poetry took that, and it took all that energy and boom, it put it into a form, you know. And it just became such a release for me—a long time before I realised it was a release. But yeah, it became quite an alternative and much more beneficial outlet, you know.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I was talking to a poet friend yesterday and I said, is this a mad question? And she said, maybe, but it would be interesting. The thing that I’ve been sitting with, for a long time actually, but particularly in preparing for this interview, is what is a poem? What is this form? What does it do?
Christian Wiman: That’s easier to answer than what is poetry. I often think I don’t believe in poetry and the word—like when I hear people say poetry is this or poetry does this, I feel like I can always think of a million alternatives, like, well, what about this?
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah.
Christian Wiman: And that was when I was learning about poetry. I would always have these definitions. And I’ve written a lot of prose throughout my life. And it’s always come out of the poetry. The poetry would show me something. And then I would write the prose after to try to figure out what the poem had shown me.
And I was always making these definitions. Poetry does this. My first book is full of this. And then I would read something. And I would think, well, that doesn’t fit. How is that a poem?
And so I believe much more in poems. I believe absolutely in poems, but I don’t really believe in poetry. And I think one of the problems with contemporary poetry is that people write poetry and not poems. You have all these book-length project books.
But it’s about as easy to define what is a poem as it is to define what is faith. You sort of—I mean, you can define it technically. It’s in lines, but then what about a prose poem? You know, people do have these technical definitions. But the thing is, what is a poem for me might not be a poem for you. So you can resort to these technical definitions, but ultimately they’re just like the dogmas of faith.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. So what is it about the poem that keeps drawing you back? What is happening in a really good poem?
Christian Wiman: Again, that can be quite a wide range of things. You can have a philosophical statement that’s articulated perfectly, like William Wordsworth does, or Yeats, or Eliot, or Shakespeare. But you can also just have a piece of music that releases you, where you don’t really understand the poem, but you understand that it is really done something for you.
People are often very uncomfortable with that. It’s hard to—people who don’t read much poetry, they just are baffled by that. But I tend to think of poetry and music as being much closer arts than, say, poetry and fiction, which I think have very little to do with each other.
Elizabeth Oldfield: But I like Emily Dickinson’s definition. You know, if it was taking the top of my head off, I know it’s a poem. A. E. Housman used to say if he felt a shiver along his spine, then he would know. But both give a visceral sense of you’re coming across something that is uncanny.
Christian Wiman: I mean, faith would not have survived in me for 20 years if it were not for these experiences I had, both in my own work—especially in my own work of writing poems—but also in reading poems, of being shown something other, that there was some other dimension that was entering the language, and I knew it hadn’t come from me. And I’d cast my mind into—like Keats says it, it teases us almost out of thought, as doth eternity, about the Grecian urn.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah, it’s a sense of contact, right? This or a thinning, yeah, of some veil to something that you can’t even—yeah. I want to get you to read—forgive me. Carry on while I find it.
Christian Wiman: Well, I’m more surprised when—see, I don’t think it’s possible for a poet not to have faith. I don’t actually believe in an atheist poet, even though lots of my friends declare themselves as such.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Wow.
Christian Wiman: There’s a poet named Gottfried Benn, a German poet, who had the aspiration to write a poem that was utterly without faith, that would have not one scintilla of movement towards faith in it. He didn’t mean religious faith. And he meant that, but he meant more than that. He meant faith of any sort.
I read that, I just thought, good luck with that, you know. And it’s a weird aspiration. First of all, it’s like, you know, like training yourself to lick a public urinal or something—like do the worst thing that you can, you know, some nihilistic thing that you wanted, that you could think of. But I think the act of writing is an act of faith.
Wallace Stevens once said—he declared himself a non-believer until the very end of his life, but early on he said, if you do not have faith in poetry, you can’t write it. And that seems to me almost a nonsensical statement because, as I said, I don’t know what poetry means there. You know, what are you having faith in if you’re having faith in poetry? And my argument would be you’re having faith in some life beyond the life that we have here. You’re having faith that there is some radiance in things that is integral to them, integral to the reality. We don’t see the reality of them if we don’t see that radiance.
What confuses me often is that poets often, they have these experiences, they admit that the poems come from somewhere else, they all say that, and there’s some element of transcendence, but then it means nothing in the life. And for me, I would have this experience, and then afterwards I would just be so confused because I was like, well, what am I supposed to do with that? How does that fit in my life? And that’s what led to the faith.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I’d like you to read the last poem in your upcoming collection, The Dance. It’s called “Balm.” This has an epigraph from the poet Kevin Young. The heart, it hoards.
Christian Wiman: I should say, Kevin and I have known each other since we were in our early 20s. He’s a wonderful poet. And until recently, he was the head of the Smithsonian African American museum. And we were corresponding once, and I said something about how crazy his life must be. And he just said, you know, oh, the poems are a balm for me. And I hadn’t written a poem in quite some time, like a year. And that night I went to bed just thinking about that. Or actually, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about the poems are a balm, and then I wrote this the next morning.
The poems are a balm, the poet said, whose ear endured, besides the natural atrophy of any unearned gift, history, mastery, and all the mosquito demons of email and oil changes, underlings and overlords, afternoons of disappointment and self-taste too heavy and humid to move. Amid it all, the poet wrote, meaning loves, meaning deaths, meaning the lack of meaning infiltrating even heart and hoard, love and death. The poems are a balm, meaning, in ancient days, a substance fragrant, resinous, effective for a time against decay.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Thank you. You said that poetry eventually brought you back to faith, and I know there’s another piece of the story there about falling in love. Could you say a little bit more about those threads?
Christian Wiman: Yeah, I moved to Chicago when I was 35, I think, 36, something like that, to take a job at Northwestern University there. And within six months—
Elizabeth Oldfield: Were you teaching poetry?
Christian Wiman: Yeah. Within six months, this huge bequest landed on Poetry magazine—the pharmaceutical heiress, philanthropist Ruth Lilly gave 200 million dollars to Poetry magazine.
Elizabeth Oldfield: What?
Christian Wiman: Yeah. And just more money than poetry has ever made in all of history. Yeah. And I was associated with Poetry magazine because I had written a lot of prose for them. And there was a big tumult, and they suddenly needed to have this foundation, and the then editor, Joseph Parisi, wanted to become the head of that foundation, so they needed someone to edit the magazine. They were trying to figure out their relationship between the magazine and the foundation, and I was in the right place at the right time. You know, there I just moved to Chicago. I got together with Joe, and he started thinking of me, and then they just offered me the job. I mean, something that would—I don’t know, maybe it still happens, I don’t know, but it’s an unlikely situation, you know. No search, nothing. They just offer you this job.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Huge job. And had you had any, like, institutional leadership experience?
Christian Wiman: Oh, I’d never edited anything.
Elizabeth Oldfield: And picturing you sort of bumming around Europe writing poems and then suddenly being handed this huge thing.
Christian Wiman: Yeah. But I had written a lot of criticism, and that’s the main reason that they, you know—I’d exercised a lot of public judgment. And, you know, it was a long process with the board and all that, but I left Northwestern after that first year and then took the job at Poetry.
And at the exact same time, my wife, Danielle, was hired by the foundation. And so we met within days of me arriving there. And that was quite a—you know, quite a collision. And I mean, I resisted it the best I could for a while, but because I had so much going on and I was so nervous about everything. I was mostly nervous about, how am I going to continue as a poet doing this big institutional job? And in fact, we planned on leaving after two years.
But yeah, that changed my life. I had obviously had a lot of experience before then and loved people, but I hadn’t—not like that, where I wanted what was best for her, and also the sense that loving each other just wasn’t enough, that it wanted to be something else.
And it’s interesting, someone else wrote me a letter, a well-known person, but I never met him, but the way he put it was that he had a similar experience—but the way he put it was that if we didn’t love God, our love was going to destroy us.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Whoa.
Christian Wiman: It was going to incinerate us. And I hadn’t thought of it like that. I only thought of it as that the love just wanted to be more. It just wanted to be more than. So we started saying these little prayers before dinner each night, and first they were jokes and then they weren’t jokes.
And yeah, so that was the first movement, was this extreme joy. And Simone Weil says you can’t understand an experience of supernatural suffering unless you’ve had an experience of supernatural joy. And that was my experience, because the suffering came after I got diagnosed with cancer. Hadn’t even been married a year.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah.
Christian Wiman: And the diagnosis was bad.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I’m going to get you to read “2047 Grace Street,” if you don’t mind.
Christian Wiman: You should. Okay, so this is part two of a poem, and the last one ends with this image of the slick rock whirls of the real canyon, the yucca’s stricken clinch, and the dozen buzzards swirling like ash, and that kind of meaning in the heart of matter that that suggests. 2047 Grace Street is where we first lived.
But the world is more often refuge than evidence, comfort and covert for the flinching will, rather than the sharp, particulate instant through which God’s being burns into ours. I say God and mean more than the bright abyss that opens in that word. I say world and mean less than the abstract oblivion of atoms out of which every intact thing emerges, into which every intact thing finally goes. I do not know how to come closer to God except by standing where a world is ending for one man.
It is still dark, and for an hour I have listened to the breathing of the woman I love beyond my ability to love. Praise to the pain scalding us toward each other, the grief beyond which, please God, she will live and thrive. And praise to the light that is not yet, the dawn in which one bird believes, crying not as if there had been no night, but as if there were no night in which it had not been.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Do you remember, did you write that before or after your diagnosis?
Christian Wiman: Oh, after. Oh, yeah.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. Do you mind saying a little bit about what you were diagnosed with?
Christian Wiman: It’s a very rare disease. It’s called Waldenström’s macroglobulinaemia, but it came with an accompanying diagnosis after a couple of years, caused amyloidosis, which is a death sentence.
So Waldenström’s is usually diagnosed in older people. That’s really changing. Many more younger people are getting it now. It’s one in a million or so. It’s a rare disease. Maybe that’s wrong. Maybe it’s one in 500,000 or so. I was told one in a million when I first got it.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Do they mean that to be comforting?
Christian Wiman: Well, no, they meant that it’s called an orphan disease. So there’s very little research. At the time, there was no research being done on it. And so you’re treated with things that have worked for other kinds of cancers.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Right.
Christian Wiman: That’s changed. There’s a whole institute now at Dana-Farber in Boston that is devoted exclusively to Waldenström’s. And everybody goes there. Every single person who gets Waldenström’s goes there.
Yeah, they told me five years—what the first doctor told me, five years. And I got rid of that doctor because he was not helpful. And then I got a great doctor. But then I got diagnosed with this amyloidosis. And that is not treatable. And the only thing you can do is a bone marrow transplant. The only thing they could do in my case was hope to break the link between the cancer and the amyloid. And they didn’t know if it worked. And so both were raging out of control.
And so I had the bone marrow transplant. I was in very bad shape. And in fact, I put together My Bright Abyss, that book, prose book, when I was in that hospital room. I was there for weeks. And I scattered it all over the floor to figure out what the book would look like, pieced it together.
The transplant did not work on the cancer, but it worked to break the link. So the amyloidosis never came back, which was the first freak miracle. I mean, it was bad news with cancer. I had to get other treatments after that. But it broke that link, and had that not happened, I definitely would have died in five years, you know, because that was just three years after.
Yeah. So, yeah, but that’s what I’ve had for all this time. And it is a bizarre—it manifests in different ways in every person. And I’ve been told by all the doctors, I have a version of it that they have never seen anything like it, that the things that happened to me don’t happen to other people. I have a lot more pain than most people have. Not now. But I have had.
But on the good side, I respond to every single drug. And some people—I’ve had friends who—I have a friend who died from the very first treatment. But I respond to every single drug. And they don’t last, but it always responds. Yeah. So I feel very lucky.
Elizabeth Oldfield: At what point did you and Danielle have children?
Christian Wiman: We didn’t for five years, so we were really trying to decide whether or not we should have children. And it was actually after the bone marrow transplant, five years or so—and I can’t remember the dates. It was after the bone marrow transplant when everything looked like it was going to be really good.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Right.
Christian Wiman: It was about a—it was a window. Yeah. And we decided to do it. And so we had—no, I’m getting it wrong. It was after, because I had the bone marrow transplant when the girls were—they were one. They were not even one. That’s right. So I’m thinking I had a different treatment, some chemo treatment. I can’t remember. Yeah, I can’t remember what that treatment was. I forget. But something had worked, and we had a window. So we had the kids, and then nine months in, then I had the bone marrow transplant. That’s what it was. Yeah, because she had those kids, twins, by herself. I mean, I could help. I did help. I still stayed up at night as I could and stuff, but then I couldn’t really. There was a period of months there where I was lost. Yeah. She’s tough, my wife.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yes. It’s my favourite bit in the book Glimmerings, she wrote with Miroslav Volf, is the letter from her.
Christian Wiman: Yeah. Yeah. And she just dashed that off. She didn’t—I mean, that was just one morning’s email.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. You know? Yeah. It feels like an insane question to say—you know, I first came across your books from My Bright Abyss and this meditation on despair and faith, and you’d not long come back to prayer and church and met the love of your life, and then to be hit with this death sentence and then have had, what, 20 years?
Christian Wiman: 20 years.
Elizabeth Oldfield: 20 years. Living on the edge of a cliff, treatment after treatment. You said in Glimmerings, your most recent book, you know, again, having so assiduously prepared to die, I find I now need to prepare to live again. It’s too big a question, but how has it formed you, this very distinct, unusual experience since your diagnosis?
Christian Wiman: You know, it’s hard for me to say. I’m not very good at diagnosing my own mind, which is why I’m a writer. I figured it out in writing.
I mean, I’ve certainly—my writing would not have the urgency that it has if I hadn’t been on this edge for so long, you know. And I have been completely freed from the kind of ambition I had when I was young. And I suppose that had something to do with it. I just don’t care about the rewards of the poetry or being in it or, you know, I just don’t care.
So, yeah, it’s definitely honed me in that way, freed me up in that way. I wish it had given me a calm, wise mind like Wordsworth, other than Wordsworth being such a bad writer.
It’s hard for me to say. I mean, I want to make it a positive thing, but the truth is, some of it’s negative. The positive is I have no fear of death. I have a zero fear of death. I have a great fear of the grief that my death would leave behind.
But when I went through this a couple years ago, this latest transplant, when again it just seemed—this was a clinical trial, experimental, and I’m supposedly the first person with my disease to even get it in this country, get this treatment—I was reconciled to dying, and I was okay, other than my wife and kids.
But coming back from it is hard, and that’s what’s hard for people to understand, is that coming back into the world after feeling like you’re going to lose—you’re leaving it—is not easy. It’s not pure joy. It’s like the world is abradingly difficult. Here’s suddenly this simple existence you’re supposed to step back into and pay your bills and teach your classes and do these things, and you’ve been in this crucible. And I’ve found the shift to be pretty difficult to make. It’s like you’re not of the world.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yes. It feels so—I think all good poets are obviously kind of practitioners of attention. That’s what a—maybe all good art, but good poetry in particular is. But you had a line in the essay at the start of the Joy poetry collection, which is, God is a given to those who fully inhabit their own lives. And I wondered how much you thought your ability to pay attention and inhabit your own life has been helped or hindered by the fact that you’ve always been at risk of losing it. Also, do you still agree with that line?
Christian Wiman: Well, I was pretty good at paying attention before, but it definitely sharpens certain kinds of attention, I hope, for other people. I’ve paid a lot of attention to other people in my first book.
I often think that—I often think I’m actually not very good at attention. What I’m good at is productive inattention. That is, I’m good at—Wordsworth has this great passage. It’s actually told by Thomas De Quincey. He’s listening for the railroad, his ear on the line, on the railway line. He’s listening for it in the distance, concentrating really hard. And then he looks up, and he says, you know, I’ve noticed that any time I’m concentrating on something really hard, it’s when I look up, and there’s some area of inattention becomes fantastically clear. And he suddenly sees that what he has, his experience of looking up in the world, is just like, bam, so clear. And he sees everything so clearly, when what he was paying attention to was the train.
And I think that’s the case with most poets, that it’s not the case where you look really hard at reality and then write a poem about it. I think that in my own experience, there’s a piece of sound that will start and I’ll start following it. And it will show me that I was paying really close attention to something inattentively in the past. You know, like I certainly never paid any attention to that guy that five houses down. Never gave him a thought.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah.
Christian Wiman: All that stuff was just in my daily life, and it was in the sounds that all that stuff re-emerged. Clearly, I was paying attention. So there’s some kind of productive inattention, I think, rather than just focused attention.
Elizabeth Oldfield: One of the things you’re known for is translating Osip Mandelstam—is that how I say that name? And you’ve written a lot about Etty Hillesum. To my shame, I didn’t really know Etty Hillesum before I started reading your work. And they’re sort of luminous lives, Jewish, both of them, one under Hitler, one under Stalin, trying to write from—well, essentially trying to write from the furnace.
And one of the reasons lots of people are drawn to your work, I think, is how little Christian writing generally does that—how easy it is for those interested in faith to write in ways that don’t feel honest and that just slide into kitsch so fast, you know. But it feels to me unusual to have been—what’s the phrase? Keep your mind in hell and despair not.
Christian Wiman: Yeah. Silouan the Athonite.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Yeah. What is it that—but so many people I know who have the honesty to kind of stare into the abyss are swallowed by it, right? What do you think has allowed you to balance—and this is the phrase that came to me again and again in your work—the and, the both-and, the, you know, the faith and, as poetry, the holding together of things that we want to collapse into binaries? It’s not a very coherent question, but you can riff on it.
Christian Wiman: Yeah, I’m not sure in myself. I mean, the example of others has helped a lot. I mean, you mentioned those two. Etty Hillesum is amazing because she wanted to be the burning heart of the barracks. She went to this transport, Westerbork transit camp, voluntarily, outside of Amsterdam, because all of her family was there, and it was nothing but a way station for Auschwitz, and everybody knew it. And she went there, as she said—her goal was to be the burning heart of the barracks, that there has to be someone to remember God even in the midst of all this horror. And she just tried to do good. And she wasn’t even raised a religious person. She just suddenly found herself kneeling one day, and she said, I’m not a religious person, but I’m a person who prays, apparently.
Elizabeth Oldfield: I love that.
Christian Wiman: Yeah. I find those lives, those exemplary lives, very helpful. And in contemporary times, Fanny Howe is someone who is a deeply Catholic writer. She died recently. But she knew despair. She used to tell me she could go to bed an atheist, wake up a Christian, pretty much every day, you know. That’s what her days were like.
Marilynne Robinson, whom I read—I read Housekeeping at the same time I first read Simone Weil. Simone Weil is probably the most important writer in my life. I was 21. And both Gravity and Grace and Housekeeping—that remains for me a marvel. It’s a truly great book. Both those books seem to me to give me my soul. Like I thought, this is it. This is what I feel. This kind of loneliness, but also this kind of rapture that can come out of it. The supernatural joy that helps you to survive supernatural suffering.
We don’t know how we’ll do if we’re faced with situations like that. I mean, it’s a different thing being in a cancer ward than being in a death camp. You don’t know.
Elizabeth Oldfield: No. The phrase I come back to again and again in my work is, how do we become the kind of people that are needed at the end of the world? I think Etty Hillesum is exactly the kind of—
Christian Wiman: Sorry to interrupt. Yeah, she really is.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Knowing my own lack of moral courage and seeing—Dacher Keltner says that’s the number one thing that provokes awe in us. And he’s written a lot about awe. It’s moments of moral beauty.
Christian Wiman: Yeah. And the poetry often helps us. And it’s also—I mean, there’s an utter absence of piety in her. I mean, there’s no piety. She’s a deeply carnal creature. Talks about all of her love affairs. I mean, that’s very much a part, for her, of her coming to faith. She’s trying to understand what she’s experiencing in these love affairs. And some of them are weird. And one in particular. And I like that about her. I like it that she’s just this earthy, honest character. I like the fact that her moral goodness is embedded within this impious, fallen, miserable sort of wreck of a person, in a way.
Elizabeth Oldfield: To finish, I’m going to ask you to read one final poem from The Dance, which is called “In the Time of Fire.” It’s over three pages, so hopefully it won’t be too tricky.
Christian Wiman: All right, so maybe I’ll just set this up just a little bit. I have no idea where this poem came from. I just had a vision of someone addressing a crowd of people. I think it started as a dream. It was a man addressing the people; as I wrote the poem that shifted to a woman. I think that’s enough.
In the time of fire, she had a vision of the vowels of doves floating like snow in a common dawn. Not so much freed from gravity, she said, as in league with it. A slow, deliberate dance of chance and law.
She spoke of loneliness as a kind of sleep, nocturnal sorrows that marked the mind as lightly and palpably as prints in damp sand.
We cannot eat an image, we cried. Say it. What must we do to be saved?
There was a man, she said, who all one night beside a lake that glimmered darkly kneeled because within him there worked some stricken and almost animal thing whose need he knew he was. He stilled his heart. He willed away the small rustlings and retreats behind him with the thought, he thought, of God. But when the dawn resolved, and the lake enlightened, uneasily he rose, pierced by the thirsts that he had hindered.
A rumble went among us, glancingly, like a flame flickering limb to limb in a stand too wet to catch.
Remember the arctic eyes and pain-seamed face of the old woman selling flowers on the subway? The girl so glowing she seemed a nimbus of herself. Remember the rain that random afternoon pluck, plucking on the roof above you where you lay, matching the lassitude that it released? Look hard enough, look lightly enough, and the unlooked-at world looks back at you. That reciprocal seeing is the sight of soul.
And the man, we clamoured, who set himself ablaze outside the embassy? That animate lick and jag that danced him back to ash. And the shining child crushed in the push for flower. Are these lights to light the caves of our unconsciousness?
Darkness, then. She led us to a steep bluff that overlooked the blister city with its maddening sanity of high rises and highways, black lattices of train tracks like legible scars, row after row of lights implying lives, each seeking to be itself in a mud of dread and wasted days, and said: Within affliction there remains a space, within that space a means of reaching free, a solidarity of solitudes forged and refined by the fires that are ours. A soul can die. But it requires consent.
Beneath us glittered the endless city. Above us struggled the unpolluted stars. It’s time, she said. You are ready. And vanished back into the multitude before we could think to ask who we were. Or for what.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Christian Wiman, thank you so much for speaking with me on The Sacred.
Christian Wiman: Thanks for having me, Elizabeth. It’s been great.
Elizabeth Oldfield: Oh my goodness, what a treat to have someone read beautiful poetry to me, particularly in that voice. I could listen to that voice all day long. And really getting to sit with someone who is choosing their words so carefully, you know. He said he moved in a world that was electric with radiance and violence too. It painted such a vivid sense of the intensity and the struggle, you know. The American word I’m reaching for is hardscrabble. I don’t think we say that in the UK, but it feels like the kind of childhood you would call a really hardscrabble childhood.
And this picture of a young man—and he’s very honest—he was really violent, right? He got into fights. He was full of rage. He had a gun. His friend who had a gun shot someone. The different ways his life could have gone, the unexpected trajectory from being that violent, angry kid, and then I think that violent, angry young man working on the oil fields, to being a professor at Yale, Yale University, like this elite art form at an elite institution. Just the strangeness of the way life unfolds and all the other roads that he didn’t take. And that realising the strange contingency of life and how our expectations about people break down when we really listen to their story is something that I’m left with.
Also, he had this throwaway phrase about his mum and the violence in his mum’s childhood. And he said, I don’t ever remember a time when I didn’t know that story, that murder, but I also don’t remember a time when we ever talked about it. And I wonder if there’s something like that in your childhood, in your background, right? A story that’s passed down in your family history, in your ancestral history, that’s just kind of there, that’s part of the furniture, but actually you’ve never had a real conversation about it. You’ve never taken the lid off it and the effects of it on you or your family, how it’s still alive in the story of you all now.
It was a real challenge to me, what he said about the experience of living for 20 years with incurable cancer, of suffering so relentlessly. He spent large amounts of that time in hospital wards, in experimental trials, under anaesthesia, with his body pumped full of cocktails of drugs. And one of the things that struck me most was the radical honesty of saying, coming back to your life is abradingly difficult.
I guess the stories that we tell about people who’ve come close to death, who’ve had stage four cancer and been brought back from the brink, is that they must be suffused with gratitude. And I think—I don’t want to impose that actually on Christian. I’m not sure that comes through in like a very powerful way in his poetry. But the story that’s always told is like, it makes you really grateful for everything. It means that small things don’t bother you. You know, it changes you in a deep way. And I found it so refreshing to have someone say, no, sometimes it really sucks, right? When you’ve prepared yourself for death, when you’ve been outside these normal irritations of bureaucratic systems, to then have to go back into them, and you realise that abrading difficulty of life.
He also talks about supernatural joy making supernatural suffering possible. I was listening again, and there’s like a deep sadness in Christian. He said, my life has all been turmoil. He longs to be able to live a simple faith. He doesn’t want money, doesn’t want glory, doesn’t want success. He wants peace, I guess, is what I was hearing from him. He wants to be able to live a simple faith simply, rather than the overthinking and the analysis that he deals with every day.
But he talked about supernatural joy, and the sense of like electric contact with beauty and meaning that comes off his poetry is really profound. So I’m just left with this sense of a man whose waveform of experience is wider than most of us, right? That has really been to the depths, has really understood the abyss, has stood inside it, and has known wonder and awe and love at a depth that most of us long for. And the power of that—I think obviously part of that is the disease, and I would guess a lot of that is the form itself. That there is something about the form of poetry that grows in people who practise it a certain form of attention, a certain form of being in the world.
And he writes a lot elsewhere—we didn’t really get into it—about, he had this throwaway line that he doesn’t really believe in atheist poets. He uses this phrase, poetry and/as faith, that the two things are so close together for him, that paying attention and wrestling with words and seeking to speak and write in poetic ways is a profoundly spiritual practice, a profound act of presence, and very close to a form of prayer.
And so I guess I’ll just leave with the line of one of his poems that has most stayed with me, that I think sums up some of that. Look hard enough, look lightly enough, and the unlooked-at world looks back at you. That reciprocal seeing is the sight of soul.
