By Mike Cummings
Nearly two decades ago, the poet Christian Wiman was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma. Doctors told Wiman, who was 39 at the time, that he likely had five years to live.
In the ensuing 19 years, Wiman, the former editor of Poetry magazine, has experienced dire times when he was too sick to leave bed. But he’s held on, and after undergoing a series of treatments, has defied the odds. Today, his cancer is in remission.
Wiman, who teaches literature at Yale Divinity School and the Institute of Sacred Music, has published a new book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (Macmillan), that weaves poetry, essays, memoir, theology, and literary criticism into a unique and meditative examination of various kinds of anguish and the roles of faith, family, literature, and love in overcoming them.
Wiman, the Clement-Muehl Professor of Communication Arts at YDS and ISM, recently spoke to Yale News about his family, his approach to writing, and his experiences teaching at Yale. The interview has been edited and condensed.
How did the idea for the book emerge?
Christian Wiman: I had the idea for the book several years ago. I realized that everything I was writing was circling around some sort of idea of despair and how to counter that. At the same time, I was wrestling with my frustration with genre and the expectations of the publishing industry. I write poetry, personal essays, critical essays, theology, and even some things that don’t fall easily into any of those categories. I have also spent a great amount of energy editing magazines and books. All of this appears discretely, but I don’t experience it that way. I wanted a form that let me include all the facets of my work and mind. Once I committed to the form (or the formlessness?), I began to write in earnest toward the title.
The book includes elements of memoir. Your wife and two daughters occasionally show up in its pages. How does your family serve as inspiration for your work and as a bulwark against despair?
Wiman: My family is everything to me. My relationship with my wife, Danielle Chapman, is the greatest gift of my life. We’re about to celebrate our 20th anniversary, and we didn’t think we were going to get five years when I got diagnosed. Danielle’s a poet and an essayist, too (and has just written a brilliant memoir called Holler: A Poet Among Patriots), so a huge part of our relationship is sharing our work with each other as well as things we’re reading. And I’m also very focused on being a father. I love being involved in my daughters’ lives — when they let me in, that is — they’re 14, after all. They come into my poems periodically, but they’re a lot more of my life than the poems would indicate.
Read this profile in The New Yorker: “How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith”
Kids are amazing because when they’re young they have such an unmediated relationship with the world. In some ways, they’re like pure poets. Like so many parents, I was often amazed at the perceptions they’d have and the metaphoric leaps they’d make, which weren’t even metaphors, really, but sort of unconscious collusions with reality and language. It’s like they have their little fingers on the pulse of the origins of language and perception.
The book is infused with poetry, including poems that are meaningful to you and your interpretations of their meaning. Again, how can a poem counter despair?
Wiman: I think a poem is always an act of faith, even when it’s articulating despair. Pure despair is mute. So simply at the most basic level, writing or responding to a poem is a step forward.
But it’s often much more than that. Keats once said that good poetry strikes us like a “fine remembrance.” The critic R.P. Blackmur spoke of poetry enlarging our sense of available reality. Sometimes the world goes grey, or we just get so locked into habit that we can’t see it. Poetry is very good at jolting us back, at refreshing the world and our ability to see it.
Listen to the interview on NPR: “After 18 years living with cancer, poet offers Fifty Entries Against Despair”
I’ve also found poetry to be a great help communally — in classrooms, churches, even individual relationships. It can enable a kind of impersonal revelation and candor: People can talk about their feelings without having to talk about their feelings.
One of the entries, “Kill the Creature,” is an essay concerning your lifelong fascination with snakes. It combines anecdotes, including a story of your father suffering a rattlesnake bite, with poetry and theological discourse. In a way, it felt like a microcosm of the book’s structure. What was your approach to writing it?
Wiman: You’re right, it is a kind of microcosm. I never have some clear throughline when I’m writing. I’m halfway through a project — even a whole book — before I realize what I’m doing. And sometimes prose is like poetry for me: I follow the associations, the cadences of the sentences, and gradually some kind of whole emerges for me — or it just falls apart. That happens, too. In that particular essay, I guess I was trying to capture the state of mind I was in. No, that doesn’t sound right. It wasn’t that deliberate. It’s more that the state of mind infiltrated the form, demanded the form. It ends with a woman who was “going mad,” and maybe I was feeling a bit of that in myself as well.
You mention in one chapter that as a child you disliked school and church and now you teach at “church school.” What has your role at YDS and ISM meant to you?
Wiman: They have been very kind and welcoming to me. I originally thought to come to YDS because of a lecture I gave there, I think it was in 2012. I had such great exchanges with some of the students, who talked about art and faith in ways I hardly knew I craved. I was editing Poetry magazine at the time and was ready to make a life change. Yale created this position for me, and it’s been transformative for me.