Gifts of Grace
Christian Wiman in Conversation with Travis Helms
Anyone who falls in love with writing often tumbles into the abyss of language’s loveliness through the gifts of a specific writer — and then another. In time, the writers who move us most coalesce, and become a kind of home to which we return.
Christian Wiman has been such a writer for me, honing and homing me to new intensities of meaning. Since I first discovered his poetry — and then his essays, with their beautiful fusion of memoiristic witness and theological reflection, rendered in a clean and cutting prose that sometimes seems its own species of genre — I felt that simultaneous experience of inevitability and surprise that marks true moments of revelation. Yet, more than that, Wiman’s writing, and the way in which he asks life’s most difficult questions — about god and suffering, meaning and contingency — and refuses to accept easy answers, reached me at a time when I most needed it, just after my mother’s diagnosis with pancreatic cancer. His words made me feel a little less alone.
After serving for nine years as Editor of Poetry Magazine, Christian Wiman joined the faculty of Yale Divinity School; and I had the good fortune of meeting him just as I was graduating — not long before my mother’s death. Every book he publishes is an occasion of exhilaration for me, a moment of celebration, as the “word-horde” he keeps and cultivates (the collation of lines and passages I carry with me, and have read so many times they are a part of me) becomes a little larger. This autumn, I had the gift of interviewing Wiman over email, just months before his newest book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (Farrar, Strauss, and Giraux), was published.
Travis Helms: To begin, I want to thank you for saying yes to this. Your poems and essays, and the ways they “incarnate insight” (in a phrase from poet-priest Malcom Guite), have meant so much to me; and I’m grateful that this new book is in the world.
I’m curious about the genesis of this collection, and how it found its form. In prior books you’ve published, we find poems interwoven with lyrical prose; but this book feels different. In the essays of My Bright Abyss, for instance, it feels like poems (your own or those of others) are often introduced organically, to crystallize or distill a question you’re exploring, or to illuminate an insight you’re thinking your way into. Or, inversely, prose reflections serve to exegete and open up the meanings of a given poem. But in this new project, both the prose entries and the poems offer unique and viable lenses through which to consider aspects of despair and its antidotes. The entries feel like faces of a prism, reflecting and refracting themes of pain and courage, vitalism, skepticism, and faith as a means of eking meaning out of suffering. Can you describe how these entries came into being, and how you arrived at the book’s final form?
Christian Wiman: I never know I’m writing a book until I’m halfway through with it. The oldest piece in Zero at the Bone is fifteen years old (though I didn’t actually finish it until a couple of years ago). At some point a few years ago I realized that everything I was writing was focused on some aspect of despair and I wrote the little Preface that now begins the book. At the same instant I had the title and the form. From then on, it was a matter of shaping the book toward that form that I could feel in my mind. It was very satisfying to have that marriage of singular and collective coherence, though in truth it was a very difficult book to write.
TH: I’m interested in how poems and essays begin for you. For a long time, at least in composing poems, the governing metaphor I held in mind was sculptural: come up with an ‘idea’ for a poem, get a draft down, then hone it into something interesting and resplendent. But lately, I’ve been captivated by the way a poet like Jericho Brown talks about composing as a practice in following the logic of the lyric. In interviews, he talks about sonically riffing on a phrase or line, and ultimately producing a mess of words, which he then starts putting questions to: “Who is your speaker? What is your location? What is your occasion? Why are you so mad here? What’s this tone about?” So, he starts with something almost analogous to a mumble track, and then revises toward sense-making. And in the process, he makes discoveries about what he truly thinks, feels, or believes about a given topic. This is all to say, he doesn’t set out to write a poem 'about' something, but lets the music of the language lead him, and in doing so ends up often saying something resonant, born out of the values he holds most deeply, and which arises from within sub- or semi-conscious aspects of his psyche.
Does this account resonate with you? In composing poems, do you typically start with any sort of concept, or is the poem’s origin in language? Is the process different when working in prose?
CW: I don’t believe I’ve ever begun a poem with an idea. It’s almost always some sonic unit that begins to nag at me, and I build from that, bar by bar (it really does feel like composing music). I’ve written poems I didn’t understand until I wrote the last word. I’ve written poems I didn’t fully understand until years later. I like Ruth Pitter’s description of graced obscurities in poetry. She says a poet ought to work to rid her poems of all unnecessary difficulty, but sometimes a particular passage can’t be simplified without deforming the poem. In those instances a kind of grace can descend, making the obscurity provocatively volatile rather than inert and opaque. It’s the difference between a mystery that clarifies and a puzzle that simply befuddles.
I’m talking about lyric poems here, though. I’ve also written several long poems, and in those instances abstract reason and practical intelligence play a much greater part. And even regarding lyric poems, my way is hardly the only, or even the best, way. Just think of old rock-breaking Yeats, who not only started some poems with an idea but even plotted out the rhymes.
TH: I love this response for many reasons; and I feel like those reasons constellate in that gorgeously evocative phrase: “a mystery that clarifies.” It often seems like so much art misses, and so many expressions of religion and science offend, due to a failure in an author's (or artist's or preacher's) capacity to abide in states of ambiguity.
In the entry “This I Believe” you reference “the idolatry of science” and conclude the section with the rousing assertion: “This I believe: that we—priests and penitents, geneticists and journalists, physicists and philosophers—all need to outgrow our need to say, This I believe.” It feels to me that the problem with our varieties of fundamentalism — both theistic and atheistic — derive from their insistence of arriving at a definitive, conclusive interpretation: on their need to shut down the conversation. And, it feels like your compositional practice of building bar by bar from a sonic unit, as well as your inquisitive posture as a theologian is grounded in the best kind of agnosticism: an intellectual humility that proceeds by curiosity.
Does this feel true to you? How important do you think elements of not-knowing, and of curiosity, are in the making of poems, in the exploration of theological mystery, and in the necessity of reckoning with — and addressing — despair?
CW: I can’t really say it better than Dickinson: “It is true that the unknown is the largest need of the intellect, but for it, no one thinks to thank God.” But don’t all poets “know” this—that they write into a region they can never map, and that the taste of that boundlessness, the fact of it felt on the pulse, is the whole reward? What I don’t understand is why that realization so often falters at the edge of art, why it has no implications for life and faith.
That said, there’s a certain sort of contemporary “unknowingness” that can become an easy idolatry. “Live the questions,” said Rilke, which sounds like twaddle to me. (I prefer Hamm in “Endgame”: “Ah, the old questions, the old answers, there’s nothing like them!”) Dickinson is convincing because there’s no whiff of defeat or capitulation in her work. She never ceases trying to know, even as she admits the illusion of horizon.
TH: This answer makes me think of one my favorite Emerson essays, “Circles,” and its opening line, “The eye is the first circle, the horizon it forms is the second,” as well as the way the opening paragraph concludes: “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn ...” It doesn’t seem likely that Dickinson ever met Emerson; but we know that she read him; and it feels like both writers were possessed by a refusal to accept easy answers and to pursue that perennially receding horizon of ultimate knowing in their own fiercely resolute ways.
One of my favorite poems in this collection is “No Omen But Awe,” which concludes with the line, “Loss is my gift, bewilderment my bow.” As a culture, it feels like we’ve tried — and perhaps had enough of — cynicism and sarcasm, and that maybe discovering, or falling into, some new terrain of awareness, health, or wholeness might include a recovery of earnestness.
Awe and bewilderment feel like species of earnestness — and perhaps a fruitful way of addressing ourselves to despair, to the condition that your poem names as the reality “that a whirlwind could in not cohering cohere.” What do you think is the value of awe, bewilderment, and wonder — and perhaps earnestness, more broadly — in the writing of poems, the pursuit of faith, and living life in general?
CW: “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness, Lord, / And you gave them to me.” That’s Abraham Joshua Heschel, who built a whole theology around wonder. His books have been touchstones for me.
This morning I read Norman MacCaig’s poem “Kingfisher,” which begins: “The kingfisher jewelling upstream / seems to leave a streak of itself / in the bright air. The trees / are all the better for its passing.” That right there is enough for me to get through a day—the wonder at the writing, and the wonder that goes through the writing and back to a reawakened world.
But bewilderment is not quite the same as awe or wonder. There’s a shadow in the word. I’m all for a strong dose of awe as a tonic for our toxic times, but I’m probably not the one to lead the movement.
TH: When I first read that penultimate sentence, my eye mistook “word” for “world” … And thinking of how the word “bewilderment,” and also existence itself, seems in some way shadowed carried me to what felt like one of the most illuminating and necessary themes of the book: the way in which suffering feels seamed into every experience of meaning (or love or beauty).
You’ve written about this paradox elsewhere (often troubling easy epistemologies and pretty palliatives like Stevens’ “death is the mother of beauty”); but several of these entries seem to articulate, and domesticate, this thought in a way that feels both comforting and heartbreaking: for example, entry #17 (“Flashback”): “I suppose every real intimacy includes its end … and the final silence that so pains love is the same silence that sustains love. In other words, the knowledge of love and the knowledge of death are the same, and neither is knowledge.” Or #49, (“The Cancer Chair”): “I think all creation is unified; the expression of this feeling is called faith. And I think a crack runs through all creation; that crack is called consciousness… I believe the right response to reality is to bow down, and I believe the right response to reality is to scream.”
Your answer is already embedded in these entries, but how do you describe — or wrap your mind and heart around — the dynamic that inheres between suffering and meaning (or love or beauty; for some reason, I keep not being able to separate these three …)?
CW: It has taken me some time to get to this question—partly because, as you say, I’ve written about these things so much and have little to add at this point; but also because I have written about these things so much and have advanced so little. I still have everything to add, which sometimes just makes me want to turn on the television.
I’m not sure we’ve ever gotten beyond the Book of Job. Amid his affliction, the question that Job is really asking is not about justice, as most interpreters think, but about presence. Look how I’m suffering, Job says: Where are you, Lord?
There are a couple of ways to read the blast of beauty that is God’s response. One is: who are you to question me? Accept your limitations and your existence in a world that is steeped in both beauty and blood, beauty because blood. Basically: suck it up.
Beyond this, though, is another reading in which God answers Job’s question by saying: I was right here all the time. I was with you in every cell of your suffering. Job is granted a mystical vision that enables him to see God’s omnipresence.
It is a horrible thing to state outright, and maybe it is even wrong to state it outright as it makes the dynamic seem altogether comprehensible, makes it seem like an equation, but: suffering can break us open to God. Job’s suffering and his rapture at God’s transcendence are intimately bound up with each other. Simone Weil has a beautiful line in an essay that says something like: That we respond so deeply, so spiritually, to the natural world, which is really only the workings of brute necessity, is one of God’s greatest gifts of grace. How profoundly strange it is that the truth of mathematical theories and proofs are so often correlated with their beauty—which is just what Weil is saying.
On the simplest level, suffering cracks us open to perceive the world and our lives more clearly, more truthfully, and for many people that new reality is larger than the one they had inhabited. On a deeper level, though, suffering and beauty and love are bound up in our hearts and minds because that’s the way reality is configured. “The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be comforted,” says Ruth in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. Lachrimae rerum. “Never, never, never, never, never.” However you want to say it. Suffering does not bring us out of alignment with existence. Quite the contrary.
TH: This answer finds me and feeds me, in a necessary way. As it happens, I included some thoughts of yours in my sermon yesterday (All Saints’ Day), and concluded by reciting “From a Window” — which begins “Incurable and unbelieving / In any truth but the truth of grieving … ” and concludes “And that is where the joy came in.”
Maybe I’ve been reading too much Tao Te Ching; but it feels like one of the lessons suffering teaches is to learn to hold it all a little more lightly. You mention Job and the “blast of beauty” that is its culmination, which makes me think of the beginning / ending of another poem, Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Second Sermon on the Warpland”: “This is the urgency: Live!” … “Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”
It feels like there is an endless proliferation of noise and whirlwind careening all about us. When you consider the daily devastations, micro and macro, we all suffer — zooming out from personal frustration and cataclysm to the local news cycle to national and global crises, to climate catastrophe — what helps you you remain able to bloom, or work to bring things — art, relationships, anything — into blossom?
CW: My answer is both banal and absolute: attention. I find if I am able to find a space of clear, self-erasing attention, no matter how small, that act spreads out through my life and days and makes them, when I am suffering either physically or mentally, more bearable; when I am not suffering, simply more real. For me, this almost always involves writing. For whatever reason, I am not able to grasp my life without writing, even though what I am writing (a poem about a tree, a book review) may have nothing whatsoever with what I am trying to grasp (a moment with my child, the violence of the world). I don’t understand why this is, but somehow the movement of my mind in language enables a stillness elsewhere. One small act of attention ripples over the water of all experience, and when it settles there is a genuine calm.
I doubt I’m different from people as a whole, except insofar as artists are always a bit different, needing their particular medium for release and clarity. But I’d wager everyone needs this mental space I’m describing, though they may obtain it in very different ways. By no means does it always work. I live with a great deal of anxiety (drugs—legal!—are also helpful) and often am unable to write. But at this point in my life, it’s clear to me that surviving the onslaught requires this time of disciplined attention.
TH: ‘Attention’ feels like a lovely note to end on, resonating as it does with EcoTheo’s aims of “celebrating wonder” at the intersection of ecology, spirituality, art, and justice.
Given the organizational hope we hold towards catalyzing curiosity around our connections with the more-than-human world, I’d love to ask a final question about your thoughts on the role of the wider world in the poet’s work of making.
Lately, I’ve been captivated by insights from contemporary poetic thinkers (Natalie Diaz discussing indigenous wisdom as uniquely rooted in relationship with the land; Roger Reeves emphasizing the necessity of instinct, and a recovery of the feral, as modes of knowing) that invite an awareness of how our bodies are themselves a part of nature, even when we sit at the writing desk — and perhaps even of approaching the page as a kind of wilderness.
How do you think about the roles of the physical body, and the body of the land, as they relate to the ways in which we shape the bodies, and the landscapes, of our poems? And does a notion of what might be called ‘rewilding’ within the poetic process speak to you?
CW: I’m afraid it doesn’t—speak to me, I mean. I find the poetic process wild enough—too much for me, often. And I’m not sure anyone has bettered William Wordsworth’s consciousness of nature—and the way his mind and body were part of that. But maybe these poets are talking about recovering some of that urgency and necessity? It’s not really that long ago, in the scheme of things, though Lord knows a lot has changed in our relation to the physical world. A. R. Ammons seems someone whose work is marvelously attuned, both physically and intellectually, to the natural world. The forms of his poems really do seem inflected by the forms of what he’s seeing. Or Lorine Niedecker. Alice Oswald is a strong contemporary example, though I don’t really see any “rewilding” going on in her poems. (I don’t mean to diminish the term. I just mean that her work seems squarely in a tradition of nature poetry.)
Most contemporary nature poetry is inevitably sorrowful. There’s a vein of grief even in the poems that don’t admit it, simply because of the context in which they are occurring. Can poetry deliberately rewild itself, without seeming, paradoxically, artificial? Can it go so against the grain of its times? I hope so. It would be a wonderful thing, and would perhaps augur a kind of consciousness that could emerge collectively. I just wonder if such a thing doesn’t have to happen unconsciously in order to have some genuine reality and generative capacity. Poets don’t create paradigm shifts in consciousness. They sense something that is already happening (the antennae of the race, Pound called artists, not its body or brain) and with their articulations enable such shifts to acquire form and force, to become real.
I should say, I feel like there are poets much more qualified to speak on all this—you have named two—than I am. It’s all I can do to keep my eyes open, and my “word-hoard” clear.
