No Useless Clichés Here

Christian Wiman may be our greatest living faith-saturated poet. His meditations maintain a kind of worshipful posture, even has he express shatteringly human doubts and emotion. These notes only intensify in his prose, especially the 2014 My Bright Abyss, in which he laments and wonders at his newfound life with a rare cancer diagnosis. A decade on, his newest book is Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, in which the celebrated professor at Yale Divinity School pushes back against not life with sickness, but a lifestyle of sickness. In December 2024, he spoke with Common Good’s editor.

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You’re a writer of both poetry and prose, as well as a teacher and editor. How do you relate to these different activities?

I’ve always thought of poetry as my primary calling. I couldn’t not do it when I was young, and to this day my mind starts to fall apart if I am not in some way living poetry. (I phrase it carefully, as there are many different ways of “working” on poetry, some of which don’t include actually writing something down.) Teaching and editing are callings I’ve had to learn, you might say, and earn. Neither came naturally to me, and I resented both at first for the time they took from writing. But that has changed over the years, and now I feel very committed to, and enlivened by, both of those activities as well.

Related to teaching, you’re at a divinity school, which presumably means you’re often (mainly?) training clergy. What are you teaching clergy to do or to know?

About a third of the students at YDS are becoming clergy. The others will be teachers, writers, chaplains, nonprofit workers, etc. I teach one course that’s designed specifically for clergy — Poetry for Ministry — but the others have to accommodate all the students.

But ministers need to know poetry. A third of the Bible literally is poetry, so if you don’t know how to read poetry, you’re not going to know how to read the Bible. It really is that cut-and-dried. But a knowledge of poetry can help a minister in other ways, everything from sermons to pastoral care to their own spiritual lives.

Do you teach through your poetry?

My own poetry? Certainly not, at least not in my own classes. That would be weird. Maybe some of my readers learn from my poems — I hope so — but it’s not something I would ever set out to do.

Again, you write both poetry and essays. Do you approach the two differently?

They are very different. Poems begin with sound for me, some rhythm in my head for which I must find words. I often don’t know what I’m writing until I’m halfway through a poem, and I sometimes finish a poem without fully understanding it. There is an element of mystery in poems (including the poetry in the Bible) that is essential to their vitality.

Essays are different. I usually have a subject and a sense of what I want to say, though the writing process is still pretty mysterious for me here too. Inevitably, if the piece is any good I discover all kinds of things that I didn’t even know were in me or needed to be said.

Do you think you’re improvising as a writer? Is getting better something you try to do or even have a category for?

Seems like two different questions. Writing poetry is certainly improvisational; moment by moment you are listening to the sounds, picking your way through them toward whatever unity they suggest. As to the second question, I’m always trying to get better, and always finding ways to improve. You have to pay attention to writing at the most granular level — syntax, transitions, verb choice, that kind of thing.

Obviously, your own cancer story forms My Bright Abyss, but I’m curious about the extent to which you find resonance with the pop-culture versions of the “live like you were dying” story.

As I say in that book, my first experience of God was through love, not suffering. The suffering made me seek a church and some form for what I was feeling, but the feeling was already there. No one lives as if they are dying, unless they really are. It’s just a useless cliché. Once that ice enters your spine, you realize just how far you were from imagining your own death or living in the moment or any of the other carpe diem bromides.

And of course such a traumatic experience is going to shake up your life and mind. We live such muffled, buffered lives; it takes a real blow to break through to us. A healthy spiritual existence would be one in which such devastation wasn’t required, and probably there are a few people out there enjoying such immediacy (and unity) of essence and existence. But I’m not one of them.

To your new book, why not despair?

As I say in the book, there are times when one should despair, when it’s a perfectly appropriate response to circumstance. But it can’t be a permanent response. “To make injustice the measure of our attention is to praise the devil,” as Jack Gilbert says. “We must risk delight … If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, / we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.”