Christian Wiman - Ambition and survival: becoming a poet

W hen I was twenty years old I set out to be a poet. That sounds like I was a sort of frigate raising anchor, and in a way I guess I was, though susceptible to the lightest of winds. When a visiting poet at the college I attended said offhandedly that he thought young poets should travel rather than go to graduate school, I spent four years dragging my big ambitions and bigger ignorance from one impermeable place to another. When I read Samuel Johnsons comment that any young man could compensate for his poor education by reading five hours a day for five years, thats exactly what I tried to do, practically setting a timer every afternoon to let me know when the little egg of my brain was boiled. Its a small miracle that I didnt take to wearing a cape.

I regret none of it, or at least not the iron aim of it. There are always casualties of mastering passions, casualties deep within oneself if not of others (though all too often of others, too). These one does regretor, hopefully, grievea topic that some of these essays explore. But the ambition and fierce focus, the hunger of it, the sense of a life shaped by some strong inner imperative: all of thiseven the moments easy to mock, even the years when I wrote only bad poems, or no poemsI find myself cherishing. I still believe that a life in poetry demands absolutely everythingincluding, it has turned out for me, the belief that a life in poetry demands absolutely everything.

This book is a record of that belief, and shaped by its evolutions and confusions just as surely as I am. The oldest essay here is Finishes: On Ambition and Survival, which I wrote twelve years ago when I was just beginning to have some conscious sense of the tension between life and death that can be played out within a single poem. The most recent essay is Love Bade Me Welcome, in which issues of life and death are considerably more literal and personal. The essays could not be more different, but they are so intimately related that I think of them as parts of a single work. Indeed, I have had this book in mind for so long, have for so many years meant it to be a book rather than simply a collection of miscellaneous prose pieces, that I am relieved now not to have published a selection of exclusively critical work or woven the personal pieces into a memoir, both of which I have been on the verge of doing at one time or another.

I dont mean to suggest that there is no difference between critical and personal writing. There certainly is, and I have tried in my critical writings to get at truths that transcend my own creative urges and anxieties. But I do believe that a reader should feel the pressure of the personal even in essays from which an author is scrupulously absent. A critic for whom literature is not rooted deeply in life, whose ideas seem to have no relation to lived experience, doesnt hold much interest for me. By the same token, any writing that is merely personal, that does not manage to say something critical about life in general, is equally inert. Our own experiences matter only insofar as they reveal something of experience itself. They are often the clearest lens that we can find, but they are a lens.

In 2003 I took over the editorship of Poetry magazine. Its taken some getting used to. Not only had I grown accustomed to constant itinerancy and gentle poverty, but I had just begun to accept the fact that the only responses I would get to even the most flagrant things I said about poetry would be either absolute silence or some lone gleeful approval scrawled on bark and ornamented with the hair of the yeti. How things change! Ive now lived in Chicago longer than Ive lived anywhere in my adult life, and for most of that time Ive been at a magazine and foundation that, thanks to Ruth Lillys gift in 2002, has an endowment of almost two hundred million dollars. That last fact has created a lot of media interest around Poetry, and part of my education as an editor has been to watch some of my offhand and illconsidered comments to reporters ricochet around the Internet with alarming speed. Theres nothing I can do about that at this point, but I am including three essays that originally ran as editorials in the magazine, which I hope speak in a more considered way to some of the questions about the public life of poetry that get posed to me all the time.

For a few years I reviewed new books of poetry regularly. The bulk of those reviews seem either too superficial or too callow to reproduce, but Ive included a handful here (Eight Takes) whose judgments I can still stand behind, and which are focused on poets whose work has continued to exert some hold on me. For the most part, though, I have not been comfortable as a reviewer, and most of the essays in this book were not written on assignment or were the result of assignments that some very generous editors allowed me to manipulate for my own immediate purposes and interests. A Piece of Prose, for instance, began as a review of a whole box of books (listed in the Notes) and ended as a general meditation on the prose of poets. It is itself a kind of preface, I guess, in that it offers definitive criteria by which to judge a poets prose. I hope I havent simply woven the rope for my own hanging.

Finally, this book begins with an essay on homelessness and unbelief and ends with an essay on rootedness and faith, begins with health being taken for granted, ends with it being taken away. It is at once assuring and eerie to me how utterly the first essay points toward and even foreshadows the later one: assuring because such symmetry suggests that what I have experienced as random and chaotic movement has in fact had a coherent course; eerie because I have no sense of having been in control of that course. So many poets deprecate their prose, relegate it to a sort of adjunct status with regard to their poems. I myself have done this at times. What I have come to realize, though, is that prose is absolutely integral to my life in poetry, and not simply in an intellectual sense of working out ideas or staking positions. It has helped me to stay alive to all the buried impulses and impressions out of which poems are made. Which is to say: it has helped me to stay alive.

2006

AMBITION AND SURVIVAL: BECOMING A POET