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.
reading people quality
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. It’s easy to become so mired in our likes or dislikes that we can no longer recall that person who once responded to poems—and to people—without any preconceived notions of what we wanted them to be.
alive existence feels
To be truly alive is to feel one's ultimate existence within one's daily existence.
artist people mind
There are dangers for an artist in any academic environment. Academia rewards people who know their own minds and have developed an ironclad confidence in speaking them. That kind of assurance is death for an artist.
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.
soul poet stakes
I'm drawn to this range, that's for sure, but I suppose the thing that most appeals to me about Mandelstam is the sense you get from every poem that everything - the poet's very soul - is at stake.
order may sometimes
Sometimes God calls a person to unbelief in order that faith may take new forms.
christian jesus drinking
I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? (I know, I know: he was quoting the Psalms, and who quotes a poem when being tortured? The words aren’t the point. The point is he felt human destitution to its absolute degree; the point is that God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering.)