Christian Wiman
Forfatter af My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer
Om forfatteren
Christian Wiman is The author of numerous books, including two memoirs, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (FSG, 2013) and He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art (FSG, 2018); Every Riven Thing (FSG, 2010), winner of the Ambassador Book Award in poetry; and Once in vis mere the West (FSG, 2014), a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in poetry. He is also the translator of Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam. He reaches religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and at Yale Divinity School. vis mindre
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Værker af Christian Wiman
The Long Home: Winner of the 1998 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize (Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize Library) (1998) 35 eksemplarer
Poetry Magazine Vol. 194 No. 2, May 2009 8 eksemplarer
Poetry Magazine Vol. 194 No. 5, September 2009 8 eksemplarer
Poetry Magazine Vol. 184 No. 3, June-July 2004 3 eksemplarer
Poetry Magazine Vol. 184 No. 1, April 2004 2 eksemplarer
Poetry Magazine Vol. 184 No. 2, May 2004 2 eksemplarer
Poetry Magazine Vol. 183 No. 6, March 2004 2 eksemplarer
Poetry (journal) 2008, 2009, 2010 1 eksemplar
Poetry (journal) 2007 (exc. Nov.) 1 eksemplar
Poetry Magazine Vol. 183 No. 3, December 2003 1 eksemplar
Poetry 100 Years 1 eksemplar
Poetry Magazine Vol. 183 No. 2, November 2003 1 eksemplar
Poetry [Magazine] 2008-2009 1 eksemplar
Joan Mitchell: At Home in Poetry [Poetry CCI] 1 eksemplar
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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)… (mere)