Christian Wiman on poetry

Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry, published by The Poetry Foundation, was recently interviewed by Books & Culture. In the interview, he said: “…I believe very strongly that poetry exists for the sake of life in general, exists to help people, all people willing to work at it, live their lives.”

Interviewer Aaron Rench asked about Wiman’s book Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet: “In the chapter on poetry and religion you start off by saying, ‘Art is like Christianity in this way: at its greatest, it can give you access to the deepest suffering you imagine.’ Would you say this is why art resists sentimentalism?”

Wiman replied in part, “Well, the adjective is important there: greatest. I was trying to point out how the highest moments of art can at once enact our deepest sufferings and provide a peace that is equal to them, and how this is similar to (though lesser than) what I understand to be the deepest truth in Christianity. The peace does not eliminate the sorrow or the tragedy: great art acknowledges intractable human suffering, and Christianity’s promise of the resurrection is empty without a clear, cold sense of the cross.”

I also liked a quote by Wiman that appeared in direct-mail solicitations for Poetry magazine — I was unable to subscribe, but I kept the card on which the quote appeared and taped it to a mirror in my office. On the card was a brief statement that seemed to explain the highest and best uses of art, literary and otherwise. Wiman wrote, “Let us remember…that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.”