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...
genius artistic produce
Mandelstam was an artistic genius, the sort that any century produces only a handful of.
art pain believe
I suppose I do believe that the greatest art consoles a wound that it creates, that art can give you the capacity to endure and respond to the pain it forces you to feel. Psychological pain, I mean.
art believe past
I don’t believe in “laying to rest” the past. There are wounds we won’t get over. There are things that happen to us that, no matter how hard we try to forget, no matter with what fortitude we face them, what mix of religion and therapy we swallow, what finished and durable forms of art we turn them into, are going to go on happening inside of us for as long as our brains are alive.
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.
art theology art-is
Art is so often better at theology than theology is.
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.
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.
good hundred living money poet richard whose work
If you had to put all your money on one living poet whose work will be read in a hundred years, Richard Wilbur would be a good bet.
perception different demand
It's just that different emotions and perceptions demand different frequencies and intensities.
thinking smell tests
I think of translations as passing some scholarly smell test: you can read the words of the translation and be reasonably sure of what the words are in the original.
country thinking missing
I can't think offhand of any American poets who have Mandelstam's urgency, but it's a different country and a different time, and I don't think it would make much sense to say that this is something that's "missing" from contemporary American poetry.
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.
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.
wonder
Wonder is the precondition for all wisdom.