kte1226's review against another edition
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
5.0
ben_smitty's review against another edition
4.0
Enjoyable though quite dense and will likely require a re-read.
lukenotjohn's review against another edition
4.0
Wiman's previous book, [b:My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer|15793626|My Bright Abyss Meditation of a Modern Believer|Christian Wiman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344319638l/15793626._SY75_.jpg|21515600], features some of my all-time favorite writing on faith, so the expectations were high going into this...and not necessarily met. I felt underwhelmed comparing the two, but after pausing to try considering this on its own accord, I have to credit it for still being a beautiful little book of sharp and stirring insight. Whereas the former was primarily a meditation on faith by a poet, this is mostly a reflection on poetry by a person of faith. And, of course, Wiman's faith is particular, complicated, and searing; he is a modern mystic for whom poetry seems to often by the only language capable of transcending the apophatic, and so fittingly he is also inclined towards poets that are not overt in their belief –and even overt in their disbelief– of a transcendent.
My biggest complaint against the book (which could be more so a reflection of my own failings as a reader) is that at the end and all the way through, I struggled to articulate the specific point(s) Wiman was making. Obviously this is a "love letter to poetry" as the blurb describes before it's anything else, but it's also certainly something else. Probably a meditation on the way that reality is elusive, with a fleeting perceptability, and that poetry and faith are simultaneously means of glimpsing it and refractions of that notion in and of themselves. (Maybe feeling like I can't fully grasp the point was the point, then?) And yet, my pages are marked up with underlinings and margin notes –– I was often moved by the reflections here and certainly the language, even if they're proving a bit evanescent for me. I think that experience would be a lot more frustrating with a longer book; the conciseness here serves Wiman well.
It was also a clever move to orient nearly all of his reflections around the work of poets he had personal encounters with. This helped give focus to the sort of meandering ideas, and grounded the philosophical musings with stories of surprisingly stark clarity in contrast. The anecdote about [a:Mary Oliver|23988|Mary Oliver|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1634180145p2/23988.jpg] alone just about made the entire book feel worth it, and I was surprised to find myself near tears at the end of the chapter describing [a:Craig Arnold|288021|Craig Arnold|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1239380935p2/288021.jpg], a poet I'd never heard of but who Wiman described so vividly and lovingly that his tragic end really choked me up. Ultimately, I'm definitely glad to have read this (honestly I'm excited to add it to my bookshelf for the cover alone), but I'm hopeful that Wiman will write more material with a clearer focus on faith again –– his perspective and articulation is both unique and intimately resonant for me.
My biggest complaint against the book (which could be more so a reflection of my own failings as a reader) is that at the end and all the way through, I struggled to articulate the specific point(s) Wiman was making. Obviously this is a "love letter to poetry" as the blurb describes before it's anything else, but it's also certainly something else. Probably a meditation on the way that reality is elusive, with a fleeting perceptability, and that poetry and faith are simultaneously means of glimpsing it and refractions of that notion in and of themselves. (Maybe feeling like I can't fully grasp the point was the point, then?) And yet, my pages are marked up with underlinings and margin notes –– I was often moved by the reflections here and certainly the language, even if they're proving a bit evanescent for me. I think that experience would be a lot more frustrating with a longer book; the conciseness here serves Wiman well.
It was also a clever move to orient nearly all of his reflections around the work of poets he had personal encounters with. This helped give focus to the sort of meandering ideas, and grounded the philosophical musings with stories of surprisingly stark clarity in contrast. The anecdote about [a:Mary Oliver|23988|Mary Oliver|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1634180145p2/23988.jpg] alone just about made the entire book feel worth it, and I was surprised to find myself near tears at the end of the chapter describing [a:Craig Arnold|288021|Craig Arnold|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1239380935p2/288021.jpg], a poet I'd never heard of but who Wiman described so vividly and lovingly that his tragic end really choked me up. Ultimately, I'm definitely glad to have read this (honestly I'm excited to add it to my bookshelf for the cover alone), but I'm hopeful that Wiman will write more material with a clearer focus on faith again –– his perspective and articulation is both unique and intimately resonant for me.
eely225's review against another edition
4.0
The goal here, it must be noted, is narrower than in My Bright Abyss. Wiman focuses on poets he has known, most of whom have died, and how their experience in poetry challenged them to engage with the balance of poetry as an act toward faith in something outside one's self, or poetry as a faith in itself. Additionally, Wiman details some of the experiences that led him into the editorship of Poetry, as well as what led him out of it.
Poetry is at its best when it shows rather then tells, so the reader cannot expect clearly delineated conclusions. Wiman shows something of the nature of the professional pursuit of poetry, how it relates to everyone, and then the book is over. It's a question he makes no attempt to answer. If you're up for ambiguity and appreciate his voice, you'll likely not be disappointed. But it's bound to provoke variable reactions.
Poetry is at its best when it shows rather then tells, so the reader cannot expect clearly delineated conclusions. Wiman shows something of the nature of the professional pursuit of poetry, how it relates to everyone, and then the book is over. It's a question he makes no attempt to answer. If you're up for ambiguity and appreciate his voice, you'll likely not be disappointed. But it's bound to provoke variable reactions.
leerazer's review against another edition
4.0
Reading Wiman, former editor of Poetry magazine, on poetry and faith is always a pleasure. Here he argues that poetry, or art generally, cannot be an end. The hunger that gives rise to art cannot be satisfied by it. But experiencing or creating great poetry, or art, I think he is saying, functions to quiet the incessant chatter and cacophony in one’s head (what I think Buddhism calls the “monkey mind”) forming a “spot in time” to quote Wordsworth, in which faith is present, before, inevitably, it slips away again in the currents. In this it is similar to being confronted with the hard fact of one’s imminent death, which also serves to still the mind. Wiman, a poet and rare cancer survivor, at least argues from firsthand knowledge.
Interestingly Wiman believes that even great poets who reject theistic faith - Ammons, Oliver, Larkin - express these spots of time in their works. They express the divine order in their poetry while rejecting it everywhere else, and indeed, this is a feature of modern artists. Even Larkin’s famous and possibly terrifying poem Aubade, reading in part, “The sure extinction that we travel to / And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, / Not to be anywhere, / And soon: nothing more terrible, nothing more true.” does this. The dark night of the soul, the scouring of the ego, is no stranger, no unknown companion, to faith. Larkin himself could not accept the signs of faith in his own work, but they are present.
What eternal outcome faith points to Wiman cannot say. He discounts the traditional Christian conception of the continuation of self in another form as a mere dream and fantasy, granting Larkin and other critics of religion a point when they say it is all about fear and trying to avoid death, though Wiman still identifies as Christian. Many believers would say his own faith is therefore weak, though it reminds me of Nabokov, writing in his fiction of how unoriginal and uncreative the human imagination is, that all we can envision eternity being is basically more of what we already know. We can’t know.
Wiman quotes Rabbi Heschel’s definition of faith as faithfulness to a time when we had faith. It’s a slippery thing, coming and going, impossible to pin down, but at times glancingly accessible. Great art being one of those times, capable of emerging even through persons who posses no faith at all, who may not recognize it in their own work. Poets treat their art as an ends rather than a means of expressing the greater order at their own peril, however, for “Understand that there is a beast within you / that can drink till it is / sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied... / It does / not wish you well.” (Frank Bidart)
Interestingly Wiman believes that even great poets who reject theistic faith - Ammons, Oliver, Larkin - express these spots of time in their works. They express the divine order in their poetry while rejecting it everywhere else, and indeed, this is a feature of modern artists. Even Larkin’s famous and possibly terrifying poem Aubade, reading in part, “The sure extinction that we travel to / And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, / Not to be anywhere, / And soon: nothing more terrible, nothing more true.” does this. The dark night of the soul, the scouring of the ego, is no stranger, no unknown companion, to faith. Larkin himself could not accept the signs of faith in his own work, but they are present.
What eternal outcome faith points to Wiman cannot say. He discounts the traditional Christian conception of the continuation of self in another form as a mere dream and fantasy, granting Larkin and other critics of religion a point when they say it is all about fear and trying to avoid death, though Wiman still identifies as Christian. Many believers would say his own faith is therefore weak, though it reminds me of Nabokov, writing in his fiction of how unoriginal and uncreative the human imagination is, that all we can envision eternity being is basically more of what we already know. We can’t know.
Wiman quotes Rabbi Heschel’s definition of faith as faithfulness to a time when we had faith. It’s a slippery thing, coming and going, impossible to pin down, but at times glancingly accessible. Great art being one of those times, capable of emerging even through persons who posses no faith at all, who may not recognize it in their own work. Poets treat their art as an ends rather than a means of expressing the greater order at their own peril, however, for “Understand that there is a beast within you / that can drink till it is / sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied... / It does / not wish you well.” (Frank Bidart)
naoms's review against another edition
3.0
(basically: I adore Wiman at his most winsomely didactic—shown by the quotations below—but my theo-ethicist-brain is not trained to appreciate his more meandering style of poetic rumination. we do always share a love of em dashes, though.)
"—like life, like love, like any spiritual hunger— thrives on longings that can never be fulfilled. . . no respite from the calling that comes in the form of a question. . . Still, there are moments in any writer's life when the movement away from one kind of silence—the kind that keeps your soul suppressed—is decisive. . . . It's almost the definition of a calling that there is strong inner resistance to it."
"The great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel once defined faith as primarily faithfulness to a time when we had faith. We remember these moments of heightened awareness in our lives, these clearings within consciousness in which faith is self-evident and God too obvious and omnipresent to need that name, and we try to remain true to them. It's a tenuous, tenacious discipline of memory and hope."
"That we might be remembered. . . 'I want my life,' he writes in a poem from that time. 'I demand my / own life back. My past. You!' This is not what one expects from a man confronting his own death. It's not the future that Bonhoeffer feels slipping from him, but the past; not some totality of existence he fears losing—he still believes in salvation—but its molecular singularity, all the minute perceptions and sensations, retained by the body if not the mind, that comprise one particular human consciousness. This is an abstract articulation of a reality that is gloriously, excruciatingly concrete. What is it we want when we can't stop wanting? 'Lord,' prays a character in Ilya Kaminsky's Dancing in Odessa, 'give us what you have already given.'"
". . .the past so immanent in objects that it seemed as if the right touch, or maybe the wrong one, would release it into immediate being again."
". . .because I have required great order in my habits to counteract the great disorder in my mind."
"Once, in the other order our best creations conjured, we sensed a mystery that enlarged our existence. Now we reach for an explanation and secure a despair. For that's what it is, to lower one's god to the level of one's need, to be the wizard of one's own Oz: despair."
"Resurrection is a fiction and a distraction to anyone who refuses to face the reality of death. But to really see this despair clearly. . . is the first step to being out of it."
"I think it's dangerous to think of art—or anything, really—as a personally redemptive activity, at least in any ultimate sense. . . . At some point, you need a universally redemptive activity. You need grace that has nothing to do with your own efforts, for at some point—whether because of disease or despair, exhaustion or loss—you will have no efforts left to make."
"The thing I felt slipping from me was faith—and slipping from me not like a proposition to which I could no longer assent, but like a life force, the very engine and aim of being."
". . .when one is truly confronted with one's end, everything goes very quiet. . . . You don't turn to God in a crisis because you are afraid, at least not primarily. You turn to God because, for once, all that background chatter in your brain, all that pandemonium of blab, ceases, and you can hear—and what some of us hear in these instances is a still, small voice."
". . .there may be some pride at work in that austerity as well. . . Oblivious is one truth. It is devouring us and everything we love. Heaven is the same truth, seen by the light of timelessness that our spots of time, however fugitive or rare, have opened."
"—like life, like love, like any spiritual hunger— thrives on longings that can never be fulfilled. . . no respite from the calling that comes in the form of a question. . . Still, there are moments in any writer's life when the movement away from one kind of silence—the kind that keeps your soul suppressed—is decisive. . . . It's almost the definition of a calling that there is strong inner resistance to it."
"The great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel once defined faith as primarily faithfulness to a time when we had faith. We remember these moments of heightened awareness in our lives, these clearings within consciousness in which faith is self-evident and God too obvious and omnipresent to need that name, and we try to remain true to them. It's a tenuous, tenacious discipline of memory and hope."
"That we might be remembered. . . 'I want my life,' he writes in a poem from that time. 'I demand my / own life back. My past. You!' This is not what one expects from a man confronting his own death. It's not the future that Bonhoeffer feels slipping from him, but the past; not some totality of existence he fears losing—he still believes in salvation—but its molecular singularity, all the minute perceptions and sensations, retained by the body if not the mind, that comprise one particular human consciousness. This is an abstract articulation of a reality that is gloriously, excruciatingly concrete. What is it we want when we can't stop wanting? 'Lord,' prays a character in Ilya Kaminsky's Dancing in Odessa, 'give us what you have already given.'"
". . .the past so immanent in objects that it seemed as if the right touch, or maybe the wrong one, would release it into immediate being again."
". . .because I have required great order in my habits to counteract the great disorder in my mind."
"Once, in the other order our best creations conjured, we sensed a mystery that enlarged our existence. Now we reach for an explanation and secure a despair. For that's what it is, to lower one's god to the level of one's need, to be the wizard of one's own Oz: despair."
"Resurrection is a fiction and a distraction to anyone who refuses to face the reality of death. But to really see this despair clearly. . . is the first step to being out of it."
"I think it's dangerous to think of art—or anything, really—as a personally redemptive activity, at least in any ultimate sense. . . . At some point, you need a universally redemptive activity. You need grace that has nothing to do with your own efforts, for at some point—whether because of disease or despair, exhaustion or loss—you will have no efforts left to make."
"The thing I felt slipping from me was faith—and slipping from me not like a proposition to which I could no longer assent, but like a life force, the very engine and aim of being."
". . .when one is truly confronted with one's end, everything goes very quiet. . . . You don't turn to God in a crisis because you are afraid, at least not primarily. You turn to God because, for once, all that background chatter in your brain, all that pandemonium of blab, ceases, and you can hear—and what some of us hear in these instances is a still, small voice."
". . .there may be some pride at work in that austerity as well. . . Oblivious is one truth. It is devouring us and everything we love. Heaven is the same truth, seen by the light of timelessness that our spots of time, however fugitive or rare, have opened."