“I don’t give a lot of readings, to tell you the truth,” said Christian Wiman, at the end of one of those rare occasions. “I find them a bit difficult. I’ll probably go out and exercise a lot after this.”
It is not that Wiman has any qualms about a life in letters: He’s been poet, memoirist, teacher (now at Yale), and, for 10 years, the high-achieving editor of Poetry, the most prominent periodical of new verse in the U.S.
And if he’s not confessional, he’s not coy, either: Readers know about the rare blood cancer that was expected to kill him 14 years ago, and the spiritual searching of a onetime “ambivalent atheist.”
The problem with readings may be that his chosen craft remains mysterious: subject to long droughts, punctuated by bursts of inspiration that seem inevitably to come from elsewhere.
For all that, Wiman reads well. It’s a tribute to his conception of poetry as, first and foremost, “structured sound,” with a note of the oracular: to preserve and share of the self, to channel the divine, and ideally both.
