Christian Wiman
Christian Wiman Poems
What words or harder gift
does the light require of me
carving from the dark
...
Then all one day because of ice
they couldn't make it down the hill.
Or up, James says,
...
But the world is more often refuge
than evidence, comfort and covert
for the flinching will, rather than the sharp
...
1. deathbed
There is a word that is not water,
has nothing to do with heat or light,
is unrelated to any one pain
...
Do you remember the rude nudists?
Lazing easy in girth and tongue,
wet slops and smacks of flesh as they buttered every crevice.
...
A town so flat a grave's a hill,
A dusk the color of beer.
A row of schooldesks shadows fill,
A row of houses near.
...
A shadow in the shape of a house
slides out of a house
and loses its shape on the lawn.
...
No remembering now
when the apple sapling was blown
almost out of the ground.
No telling how,
...
Lord is not a word.
Song is not a salve.
Suffer the child, who lived
on sunlight and solitude.
...
Love's last urgency is earth
and grief is all gravity
and the long fall always
back to earliest hours
...
I have no illusion
some fusion
of force and form
will save me,
bewilderment
...
Brachest, she called it, gentling grease
over blanching yolks with an expertise
honed from three decades of dawns
at the Longhorn Diner in Loraine,
...
Christian Wiman Biography
Christian Wiman is an American poet and editor born in 1966 and raised in West Texas. He graduated from Washington and Lee University and has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College in Virginia, and the Prague School of Economics. In 2003, he became editor of the oldest American magazine of verse, Poetry, a role he stepped down from in June 2013. Wiman now teaches literature and religion at Yale Divinity School. His first book of poetry, The Long Home (Story Line Press, 1997) and reprinted by Copper Canyon Press (2007), won the Nicholas Roerich Prize. His 2010 book, Every Riven Thing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), was chosen by poet and critic Dan Chiasson as one of the best poetry books of 2010.[6] His book Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) reviewed by The New York Times Sunday Book Review, is "a collection of personal essays and critical prose on a wide range of subjects: reading Paradise Lost in Guatemala, recalling violent episodes from the poet's youth, traveling in Africa with an eccentric father, as well as a series of penetrating essays on poets, poetry, and poetry's place in our lives. The book concludes with a portrait of Wiman's diagnosis with a rare cancer, and a clear-eyed declaration of what it means — for an artist and a person — to have faith in the face of death." His poems, criticism, and personal essays appear widely in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. Clive James describes Wiman’s poems as being “insistent on being read aloud, in a way that so much from America is determined not to be. His rhymes and line-turnovers are all carefully placed to intensify the speech rhythms, making everything dramatic: not shoutingly so, but with a steady voice that tells an ideal story every time.)
The Best Poem Of Christian Wiman
Hard Night
What words or harder gift
does the light require of me
carving from the dark
this difficult tree?
What place or farther peace
do I almost see
emerging from the night
and heart of me?
The sky whitens, goes on and on.
Fields wrinkle into rows
of cotton, go on and on.
Night like a fling of crows
disperses and is gone.
What song, what home,
what calm or one clarity
can I not quite come to,
never quite see:
this field, this sky, this tree.
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5/13/2024 1:23:38 AM # 1.0.0.1119
what publishing house do u recomend for someone who is looking to get my poems published if they are good enough or could i send a few 0of them to see what you think.we are from the same town good olesnyder tx if u could see if you think they are worthy thank you very much