TOKENS PODCAST: S4E3
Poet and memoirist Christian Wiman discusses doubt and faith; the role of poetry “when the world is burning”; ways in which being raised in west Texas made him the poet and person he is; how “destitution and abundance are two facets of the one face of God”; along with four poem recitations. Taped live at the Historic Paramount Theater in Abilene, Texas as a part of the Thomas H. Olbricht Christian Scholars Conference.
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ABOUT THE GUEST
Born on August 31, 1966, in West Texas, poet, editor, and essayist Christian Wiman earned his BA from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, in 1988.
Wiman has authored four books of poetry: Once in the West (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), Every Riven Thing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), Hard Night (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), and The Long Home (Story Line Press, 1998). He has also published a memoir, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013); a collection of Osip Mandelstam translations, Stolen Air (Ecco, 2012); and a collection of essays, Ambition and Survival: On Becoming a Poet (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), and most recently Survival is a Style.
In 2005, on his thirty-ninth birthday, Wiman was diagnosed with Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia, an incurable form of blood cancer. Wiman’s poetry and prose frequently address the disease and his response to it, as well as questions of theology and faith, life and death.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson writes, “[Wiman’s] poetry and his scholarship have a purifying urgency that is rare in this world. This puts him at the very source of theology, and enables him to say new things in timeless language, so that the reader’s surprise and assent are one and the same.”
A noted essayist and editor, Wiman is also widely known for his tenure as editor of Poetry magazine, from 2003 to 2013.
Wiman’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ruth Lilly Fellowship, Wallace Stegner Fellowship and an honorary doctorate of humane letters from North Central College. He has taught at Stanford University, where he served as Jones Lecturer of poetry; Northwestern University; and the Prague School of Economics. He is currently a senior lecturer in religion and literature at Yale University and lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
ABOUT TOKENS SHOW & LEE C. CAMP
Tokens began in 2008. Our philosophical and theological variety shows and events hosted throughout the Nashville area imagine a world governed by hospitality, graciousness and joy; life marked by beauty, wonder and truthfulness; and social conditions ordered by justice, mercy and peace-making. We exhibit tokens of such a world in music-making, song-singing, and conversations about things that matter. We have fun, and we make fun: of religion, politics, and marketing. And ourselves. You might think of us as something like musicians without borders; or as poets, philosophers, theologians and humorists transgressing borders.
Lee is an Alabamian by birth, a Tennessean by choice, and has sojourned joyfully in Indiana, Texas, and Nairobi. He likes to think of himself as a radical conservative, or an orthodox liberal; loves teaching college and seminary students at Lipscomb University; delights in flying sailplanes; finds dark chocolate covered almonds with turbinado sea salt to be one of the finest confections of the human species; and gives great thanks for his lovely wife Laura, his three sons, and an abundance of family and friends, here in Music City and beyond. Besides teaching full-time, he hosts Nashville’s Tokens Show, and has authored three books. Lee has an Undergrad Degree in computer science (Lipscomb University, 1989); M.A. in theology and M.Div. (Abilene Christian University, 1993); M.A. and Ph.D. both in Christian Ethics (University of Notre Dame, 1999).
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TRANSCRIPT
Lee: This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
Chris: The opposite of faith is not doubt it's certainty.
One of the greatest gifts that God has given us is his unknowability.
Lee: That's Chris Wiman, poet and senior lecturer at Yale Divinity School, and former editor of Poetry Magazine.
Chris: So I went a long time without being able to write a poem or write anything. I mean, three years actually, which is kind of eternity for a writer. And, one day my wife was walking out the door and I said, where are you going?
She said, I'm going to church. And and so we went to this little church down the corner and I came home and wrote this poem.
Lee: A few years ago we held a live Tokens Show out west in Abilene, Texas, in the beautiful and historic Paramount Theater. Chris was our featured guest that night. His life and poetry are testaments to the fact that joy and sorrow are not opposites; that doubt and faith are not incompatible; and that, as he puts it:
Chris: Destitution and abundance are two facets of the one face of God.
Lee: Today, a special episode comprising some of Chris's most moving stories, most beautiful poems, and most challenging words of wisdom from that night in Abilene - coming right up.
Interview
Lee: Welcome tonight, Mr. Chris Wiman. Chris is a native of West Texas, currently a senior lecturer in religion and literature at Yale Divinity School. He's a former editor of Poetry Magazine, I believe the United States longest poetry magazine. Wiman has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College, and the Prague School of Economics.
He's published four collections of original poetry, two memoirs, and has edited or translated multiple additional works. Please make welcome Mr. Chris Wiman.
Your uh, one of your recent books too, 2013, My Bright Abyss is this beautiful reflection on the intersection of faith and doubt and life and art, and is a beautifully provocative ways. And at one point in that book you asked the question, what is poetry's role when the world is burning and I'd ask too, what do you think since you're thinking so much about theology what's theology's role when the world is burning or the life of the mind when the world is burning?
Chris: Well, I think, to give us some way of arresting the fires, bearing the fires and arresting them. Somebody was talking to me today about whether theology could speak to the church and the church could speak to theology. What do these two things have to do with each other? And it seems to be a symptom of our illness that we even have to ask that question that thinking about God would be somehow separate from the, from the action of worshiping God that these things would be separate. Poetry for me has always been a way of unifying those things, unifying thinking about God and praising God. Or cursing God, if it comes to that, the Psalms are full of instances of that as well.
Lee: Why do you think in the modern age that poetry has been so divorced perhaps from theological inquiry or theological pursuit?
Chris: Well, I think, I guess I have a couple answers. I think in one sense it looks like that because it looks like all of the arts became secularized after modernism.
I really, in, late Victorian Age. And so in one sense, it looks like the artists turned away from the church. The church also turned away from artists and, and became afraid of the imagination. The imagination seemed to threaten doctrine, dogma, ways that people had of understanding their faith and suddenly they were being overturned by the modernist writers. That's one way, but I think you can look at it another way. Somebody asked me the other day, why are no poets, why is there no Christian poetry, what's going on in Christian poetry? And I said, well, I don't really think of Christian poetry as something worth thinking about having a category like that, but I can name you a great poet alive today, still alive Richard Wilbur, in his nineties, up in, Massachusetts who considers himself a Christian guy. One of the best Canadian poets Anne Carson
considers herself a Catholic. Uh, Les Murray's best Australian poet, Christian. Jeffrey Hill, many would argue the best, English poet, Christian. So we've got a lot to, we've got a lot to claim out there.
Lee: When you, uh, when you talk about this need for a poetics of belief, or you talk about this need to kind of grasp some sort of new forms of knowledge, talk to us a bit more about what that means and what that looks like in your, in your work.
Chris: I think a lot of people that I meet, and I don't know if it's true of everyone here, but I bet I'm speaking to some people for whom it's very true here. A lot of people are frustrated with the language of faith that they have inherited and they find that it doesn't quite match up with or articulate their experience, particularly when they have experience of great suffering or great joy.
Those things tend to make our language waver and can be problematic when we think of words like redemption or grace or forgiveness, these words that we've heard all of our lives. And I think there are a lot of people who are looking for new ways to say these things and both theology and poetry have to address this.
Lee: There's a beautiful passage from the book where you say you're quoting a student, the student says if that's what he means, says the student to the poetry teacher, why doesn't he just say it? And then the parishioner says, if God is real, says the parishioner to the preacher, why doesn't God simply storm into our lives and convince us?
And then you say the questions are vastly different in scale and relative importance, but their answers are similar. What, what, tell us what you mean by that?
Chris: Well, I, I think with poetry, people do often do have that response. You know, they think that there's some clear thing that you're trying to say, or that you're putting in this code that they can't quite figure out.
And so you gotta figure out what a poem means, but a poem means itself in a way a dream means itself. You talk around it and it's reductive. You're, you're stripping it of its meaning. Frederick Beuchner has a great little essay, I think it’s from a sermon actually, wonderful writer, a Presbyterian minister, where he says, you know, what if, it is from a sermon, he says, you know, what if, what if God just suddenly appeared in the sky one day and God was this big balloon.
And it said, it said, you know, it said, I am real. And there it was, we could all see it and, and, uh, finally our prayers had been answered. Uh, and he says, well, you know, that'd be interesting for a couple of days. And the third day, we'd probably just not notice and go on about our business and all our people would think, you know, that balloons a little silly, right?
What's it doing up there? The point being that one of the greatest gifts that God has given us is his unknowability. It’s the very mystery of existence that it keeps opening and opening and opening and will not be answered.
Lee: There's this beautiful phrase where you say art is better at doing theology than theology is.
Chris: That's gotten me in some trouble.
Lee: Yeah. Yeah. I can imagine that it would. But I find it quite provocative and helpful in opening up, vistas.
Chris was raised in West Texas, raised a Southern Baptist, and as I recollect at least, that heritage was admixed with watching charismatic sorts of Christian expression in his youth. He once described his child-hood as "saturated with religion." But with college and then subsequent experience in various travels, grad school, and becoming the editor of Poetry Magazine, his faith became rather non-existent. In time, he fell in love and married at age 38. On his 39th birthday, he was diagnosed with a rare and incurable cancer.
Chris, you left West Texas, wandered somehow away from faith, whatever term you want to use for that. And then, uh, in some way in, uh, dealing with illness and dealing with finding love, you also, I liked the way you, you put it, you say that this latent faith, began to be made manifest in you again.
How do, how do you think the, uh, soil and culture and, uh, the very stuff of West Texas found its way back into you in this sort of highfalutin Northeastern poetry intellectual.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. You know, people ask me that sometimes they learn that I'm from, I grew up in Snyder, Texas, West of here.
And, I was born right here at Hendrick Medical Center here in Abilene. They sometimes ask me and how in the world does a poet come from Snyder, Texas. And we certainly didn't grow up reading poems, but, it actually seems to me quite a rich place to grow up as a poet in a lot of ways. There’s a Wisconsin poet named Lorine Niedecker who was forever finding herself reduced to poverty.
And then she writes at the end of one poem about her experience of living among the very poor, and she says for 14 years, I worked right down among them, the folk from whom all poetry flows and dreadfully much else.
I haven't read that to my mom, but I probably should. Let me read, let me quote you a poem. Oh, I forgot to bring my most recent book. And so, but I think these are still in my head. But if I should mess up, you'll forgive me. This is a poem about, working on a construction crew, near Abilene. We were on a job near Abilene.
I must have been 15, 16, 16 years old. It says in the poem, 16 years old and, you know, my East Coast counterparts were learning the violin and ancient Greek, and I was driving a steamroller. And the, one of the most exciting things that you could do when you were on this steam roller is to see a snake.
I see you understand. This is a poem about that. And it's about, it's about growing up in a place. I mean, my, all of my work is saturated with the landscape of West Texas, the grandeur of it, and the sort of vertigo of it, both of those things at once. It's called “Native.”
“At 16, 16 miles from Abilene, Trent to be exact, hell bent on being, not this. Not that I drove a steam roller smack dab over a fat, black snake. Up surged a cheer from men so cheerless, cheers were grunts, squints, whisker twitches. It would take a lunatic acuity to see. I saw the fat black snake smashed flat as the asphalt flattening under all 10 tons of me flat as the landscape I could see no end of, flat as the affect of distant killing vigilance. It would take a native to know it was love.”
Lee: Another phrase that’s particularly provocative, I think from your book is you speak of devotional doubt. What does devotional doubt look like to you?
Chris: I don't think we're asked to turn away from doubt. I think we're asked to go into it and I don't think, as someone quoted Paul Tillich today, and I think quite rightly, that the opposite of faith is not doubt it's certainty.
That's the opposite of faith. If you're certain about what God is, if you're certain about what God wants for your life, I think you've got a problem. I think you're, you've got an idol, you’re worshiping an idol. So I think devotional doubt is, is a kind of doubt that, in which we give the same kind of energy that we give to faith.
And I don't know I know how to explain that, except, except by saying, you know, I have a friend, I have a good, a good friend of mine, who, whom I admire very much as a Christian and as a writer, and a person. She raised her three kids by herself, I mean her husband left when she was very young. And she raised these kids by herself.
She wrote schlock novels and, and she's been very important to me. And she says, you know, I can, and she's in her, she's probably 75 now. She says, you know, I can wake up as a believer and go to bed as an atheist. And I thought, you know, if she believes that if that, if that happens to her well, that, that's, that's hopeless. That means there's no hope for any of us. I mean, if she believes that. But then on the other hand, I thought, well, if she believes that and she seems to me so exemplary, then maybe that's okay. Maybe that's a way to live. Maybe that living with that kind of vertigo in your life is something you're supposed to do.
Lee: There’s this, uh, quote you again. If grace woke me to God's presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe. So it's remarkable that unbelief is not a status in that, in that line at least, prior to belief, but it's a status as part and parts of belief.
Chris: I think that's right. I mean, I, I heard a famous novelist on the radio the other day, telling, saying someone had criticized his book for not having any religious dimension and it wasn't Christian. I mean that, wasn't the nature of the criticism. The nature of the criticism was that it simply had no notion of there being any other kind of existence, any transcendent experience at all.
And he took that as a compliment. And he said, he said, well, of course not, I might as well have talked about, you know, fairies or so I don't, I don't go around during my day thinking about that either. And it seemed to him self-evident that his book wouldn't wouldn't address these things. And I thought that they had diagnosed the, the reason that his books never succeeded, they were shallow was right there was, was that he had, no, it simply didn't occur to him. That experience might reach beyond itself. That experience that reality, the world around us might not be the world around us until it's more than the world around us. We're not ourselves until we somehow recognize ourselves as being more than ourselves.
Lee: You, uh, you speak at one point related to that, is this notion that you believe that God may call some people to unbelief. Why, and for what?
Chris: Well in that line, I say, God may call a person to unbelief so that faith can take new forms. You know, sometimes what looks like unbelief, I mean, Jesus Christ looked a lot like unbelief to the people around him.
And faith was taking a new form. I think sometimes what looks like impiety or, heretical sayings from within is actually a way of extending face, uh, extending the reach of faith to include more of reality, more of human experience.
Lee: Chris Wiman. Chris will be back with us in the second part of our show. Thank you, Chris.
Chris: Thanks.
Lee: You're listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, and the good life. We’re most grateful to have you joining us.
If you've not yet done so, subscribe today to the Tokens podcast on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.
We do love hearing from you, and are always pleased to hear some of the things you'd like to hear more about. You can email us at podcast@tokensshow.com. Also remember you can sign up for our email list, or find out how to join us for a live event, all at tokensshow.com.
This episode was taped before a live audience at the Historic Paramount Theater, in Abilene Texas, built in 1930. That Tokens Show was part of our many years partnership with the Christian Scholars' Conference, and was also sponsored by Abilene Christian University. In the early years of our married life Laura and I were poor-as-church-mice graduate students in Abilene, me working on my M.Div., and she on her M.B.A., and it was a wonderful time in our lives with wonderful friends, and all manner of growth and challenges and wonder. We'd go watch the old classic movies they'd show at the Paramount Theater; and so it was special fun to go back to Abilene and stage a Tokens Show.
Coming up, we'll hear more stories and poems from poet Chris Wiman, about the ways in which grief and joy, despair and hope, may not be opposites, but two halves of grace.
Part two in just a moment.
SECOND HALF
Lee: You're listening to the Tokens podcast and our episode featuring poet Chris Wiman.
We're picking back up in the interview that was taped during a live Tokens Show in Abilene, Texas. I had just performed Randy Newman's heart-wrenching song "Losing You."
That song was written by Randy Newman after he heard his brother tell a story about an old man who had been through concentration camps with his wife and they made it through, but his son who also went to the camps, didn't make it through. And the man said, I don't have enough time to get over loosin’ my boy.
You, uh, you talk a lot about holding together, both despair and hope, grief and joy. And I think that song is a beautiful depiction of this kind of pain of holding together. This attempt to try to hold together the deep griefs that we carry around. And also the deep acknowledgement of the graced existence of our lives.
And I hear you trying to do that same sort of beautiful, terribly necessary thing for us. How do you see your work doing that sort of thing?
Chris: I, I have a line in that book where I say destitution and abundance are two facets of the one face of God. And it may be that the most authentic spiritual existence is being able to perceive the other when we are standing in one.
So if you're in the midst of destitution, being able to remember what hope feels like, if you're in the midst of great hope and joy, being able to remember what destitution is like. I, when you mentioned the concentration camp, right thought immediately of a poet that I write about in that book, Osip Mandelstam.
I spent a big part of my life at one point, thinking about Mandelstam and Mandelstam was, one of the Russian poets, Russian artists during the Russian revolution, he supported it, and then he got caught up in it and eventually was hounded to death by Stalin. At the end of his life, he knew he was about to die. He was way out in his town, in the middle of nowhere. And he was walking the streets and he would memorize these poems, composed them in his head. He couldn't write them down because it was too dangerous for any of his family members, if they were his friends, if they were found to have these poems. And so his friends memorize these poems and that's how they've been handed down to us.
And the last day that Mandelstam was alive, that we know of, he wrote this poem. And it's like a piece of music. It's a little short poem. It's, it's really just like a piece of sound pure sound. And it's a moment of destitution, complete destitution and complete abundance. And it's full of all these things.
These opposites, apparent opposites, that he makes unified in some way in this poem. And the poem goes, “And I was alive in the blizzard of the blossoming pear. Myself I stood in the storm of the bird-cherry tree. It was all leaf life and star shower, unerring, self-shattering power, and it was all aimed at me. What is this dire delight flowering fleeing always earth? What is being? What is truth? Blossoms rupture and rapture the air, all hover and hammer. Time intensified and time and intolerable, sweetness raveling rot. It is now. It is not.”
Imagine that being your last statement.
Lee: You, uh, one of the things that I hear you saying so often both about theology and about your poetry is you want it steeped in the real, and, uh, you keep pointing to just the very tangible ways in which all sorts of kinds of blessings, gifts, beauty, blossoms up in all sorts of ways.
And it's clear in your writing that you found that in love, which you've, found of late, and. Just share in some way you see that kind of beauty and bubbling up with your wife perhaps.
Chris: Yeah. There's a poem about Texas, as a matter of fact, another poem in which landscape plays a great part. I've been married for 11 years now.
And we have twin daughters. Five-year-old girls. My wife is home alone, taking care of them all by herself. Poor thing. My grandparents had these tools on there, on the shed, in their backyard, old tools, which my grandfather had painted red and, one of the tools they were iconic in my childhood.
And one of the tools was a raking to send a raking to there's something that removes the wood from a cut that's already been made. I've never actually seen one used. I just saw that one on the wall. I always imagined being able to bring my wife and show her this place. But by the time my wife and I got married, my grandparents were dead.
This place was leveled. It was all gone. And, uh, I wrote a poem imagining that. And a poem, which says something about how that space, the space out here begins to permeate the way that you think about everything. “Here visible distance is so much a part of things. Things acquire a kind of space. I reach right through the raking tooth. That for so long, I've longed to show you. I touch eternity in your face.”
Standalone Poem - "Every Riven Thing"
Chris: So I went a long time without being able to write a poem or write anything. I mean, three years actually, which is kind of eternity for a writer. And, I won't tell you the whole story, but I hadn't been to church in 20 years and, and one day my wife was walking out the door and I said, where are you going?
She said, I'm going to church. And a lot had happened. And I, and I said, well, I think I'll come to. And so we went to this little church down the corner just because it was down the corner and it was quite a moving experience to put it mildly. And I came home and wrote this poem after three years of silence.
And I wrote it in about an hour, which happens maybe twice in your life. If you're a poet, you get one given to you like that. It's called “Every Riven Thing.” Riven means broken open, torn open.
“God goes, belonging to every riven thing he's made, sing his being simply by being the thing it is: stone and tree and sky, man who sees and sings and wonders why God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he's made, means a storm of peace. Think of the atoms inside the stone. Think of the man who sits alone trying to will himself into a stillness where God goes belonging. To every riven thing he's made there is given one shade shaped exactly to the thing itself: under the tree a darker tree; under the man the only man to see God goes belonging to every riven thing. He's made the things that bring him near, made the mind that makes him go. A part of what man knows, apart from what man knows, God goes belonging to every riven thing he's made.”
Lee: Chris closed out that lovely night in Abilene with a reading from the final poem in his book My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer.
Chris Wiman's book My Bright Abyss begins with a poem that he could not finish. And in his tale of hope and despair, doubt and faith, he tells of many ups and downs, many questions, few answers, but the continuing move toward something beyond himself. Finding along the way signs and tokens of grace signs and tokens of that, which is real. At the end of the book, he tells about having recently received a bone marrow transplant.
Something's necessitated by precisely one of those things, which had given rise to many questions and much grappling and much struggling. And he concludes My Bright Abyss this way.
Chris: “I waste too much time in the little lightless caverns of my own mind. So much of faith has so little to do with belief and so much to do with acceptance, acceptance of all the gifts that God, even in the midst of death grants us. Acceptance of the fact that we are as Paul Tillich says accepted, acceptance of grace. Grace. It is not at all coincidentally, I now think the name of the street where my wife and I first lived together. It is the middle name of our first born child who with her twin sister has taught us so much about how to accept God's imminent presence. And it is, I am absolutely sure the fearful and hopeful state in which my wife and I lay the first night I was home from the hospital after the transplant, feeling like a holy fever, that bright defiance of not death exactly. And not suffering, but meaningless death and suffering, which surely warrants, if anything, does the name of faith. My God, my bright abyss, into which all my longing will not go once more I come to the edge of all I know and believing nothing believe in this.”
Lee: You've been listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life, and our episode featuring poet Chris Wiman.
Please remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and refer us to a fellow podcast listener. Got feedback? We'd love to hear from you. Email us text or attach a voice memo, and send to the address podcast@tokensshow.com.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this podcast possible. Executive producer and manager, Christie Bragg of Bragg Management. Co-producer Jacob Lewis of Great Feeling Studios. Associate producers Ashley Bayne, Leslie Thompson, Brad Perry, and Tom Anderson. Engineer Cariad Harmon. Music beds by Zach and Maggie White. Live performance you’re hearing now from that night was by Buddy Greene, along with Peter Wallers, Chris Brown, Chris Joslin, Larry Franklin, and Jeff Taylor. And our live event production team at Stonebrook Media led by Phil Barnett. Two special thank you's to my friend Britt Norvell for his production of that evening in Abilene, and his stellar insight into, and his giddiness at our being with, Chris Wiman; and second to David Fleer and the Thomas H. Olbricht Christian Scholars Conference along with Abilene Christian University, the sponsors of that lovely evening at the beautiful Paramount Theater in Abilene, Texas.
Thanks for listening, and peace be unto thee.
Tokens podcast is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.
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