Christian Wiman
Christian Wiman
Christian Wiman is an American poet and editor born in 1966 and raised in West Texas. He graduated from Washington and Lee University and has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College in Virginia, and the Prague School of Economics. In 2003, he became editor of the oldest American magazine of verse, Poetry, a role he stepped down from in June 2013. Wiman now teaches literature and religion at Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music...
achievement elizabeth frost great memorable poems poets rivals robert written
He has written some of the most memorable poems of our time, and his achievement rivals that of great American poets like Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop.
color joy soul
Sorrow is so woven through us, so much a part of our souls, or at least any understanding of our souls that we are able to attain, that every experience is dyed with its color. This is why, even in moment of joy, part of that joy is the seams of ore that are our sorrow. They burn darkly and beautifully in the midst of joy, and they make joy the complete experience that it is. But they still burn.
ambition home anxiety
There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.
alive existence feels
To be truly alive is to feel one's ultimate existence within one's daily existence.
perception different demand
It's just that different emotions and perceptions demand different frequencies and intensities.
spiritual mean imagination
Human imagination is not simply our means of reaching out to God but God's means of manifesting himself to us.
mind way weakness
I honestly don’t know whether I am describing something essential about the way we know God or merely my own weakness of mind.
self giving doubt
What we call doubt is often simply dullness of mind and spirit, not the absence of faith at all, but faith latent with the lives we are not quite living, God dormant in the world to which we are not quite giving our best selves.
brain
Mandelstam - his gift and the untamable nature of it - was like a thorn in Stalin's brain.
ideas musical style
Mandelstam's style is not singular. He could be stately and traditional, ribald and funny, hectic, elegiac. He could handle abstractions and ideas as well as Pope or Browning but then be so musical that other poems approach pure sound.
spiritual pain loss
Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.
genius artistic produce
Mandelstam was an artistic genius, the sort that any century produces only a handful of.
two poet anna
Mandelstam is the sort of poet who comes along very, very rarely. Even the two Russian poets whose work is often linked with his - Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva - though their work is more "urgent" than most American poetry, seem to me to operate at a lesser charge than Mandelstam.
competition emerged expect fiercely hearing high poets readers winners
This year's competition for the Lilly Fellowships was fiercely competitive, and the two poets who emerged as winners are already writing at an extraordinarily high level, ... I expect readers will be hearing a lot from these two poets in the years to come.