A moving meditation on memory, oblivion, and eternity by one of our most celebrated poets
What is it we want when we can’t stop wanting? And how do we make that hunger productive and vital rather than corrosive and destructive? These are the questions that animate Christian Wiman as he explores the relationships between art and faith, death and fame, heaven and oblivion. Above all, He Held Radical Light is a love letter to poetry, filled with moving, surprising, and sometimes funny encounters with the poets Wiman has known. Seamus Heaney opens a suddenly intimate conversation about faith; Mary Oliver puts half of a dead pigeon in her pocket; A. R. Ammons stands up in front of an audience and refuses to read. He Held Radical Light is as urgent and intense as it is lively and entertaining—a sharp sequel to Wiman’s earlier memoir, My Bright Abyss.
A moving meditation on memory, oblivion, and eternity by one of our most celebrated poets
What is it we want when we can’t stop wanting? And how do we make that hunger productive and vital rather than corrosive and destructive? These are the questions that animate Christian Wiman as he explores the relationships between art and faith, death and fame, heaven and oblivion. Above all, He Held Radical Light is a love letter to poetry, filled with moving, surprising, and sometimes funny encounters with the poets Wiman has known. Seamus Heaney opens a suddenly intimate conversation about faith; Mary Oliver puts half of a dead pigeon in her pocket; A. R. Ammons stands up in front of an audience and refuses to read. He Held Radical Light is as urgent and intense as it is lively and entertaining—a sharp sequel to Wiman’s earlier memoir, My Bright Abyss.
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
A moving meditation on memory, oblivion, and eternity by one of our most celebrated poets
What is it we want when we can’t stop wanting? And how do we make that hunger productive and vital rather than corrosive and destructive? These are the questions that animate Christian Wiman as he explores the relationships between art and faith, death and fame, heaven and oblivion. Above all, He Held Radical Light is a love letter to poetry, filled with moving, surprising, and sometimes funny encounters with the poets Wiman has known. Seamus Heaney opens a suddenly intimate conversation about faith; Mary Oliver puts half of a dead pigeon in her pocket; A. R. Ammons stands up in front of an audience and refuses to read. He Held Radical Light is as urgent and intense as it is lively and entertaining—a sharp sequel to Wiman’s earlier memoir, My Bright Abyss.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374717810 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 09/11/2018 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Christian Wiman is the author, editor, or translator of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose, including two memoirs, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer and He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art; Every Riven Thing, winner of the Ambassador Book Award; Once in the West, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and Survival Is a Style—all published by FSG. He teaches religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and at Yale Divinity School.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
I stayed up late last night reading the letters of A. R. Ammons, who for years sowed and savored his loneliness in lonely Ithaca. "Keep Ithaka always in your mind," wrote Constantin Cavafy, "Arriving there is what you're destined for." And he did, Ammons, keep that mythical Ithaka in his mind, which is to say in his poems, decade after decade of diaristic ramblings that are as flavorless as old oatmeal this morning, as null and undifferentiated as deep space — then lit up suddenly by a meteoric masterpiece that must have surprised the workaday writer as much as it does the fatigued reader. It is heroic and it is pathetic, like the life of any real writer, I suppose, all the waste space one fills as one can, some with silence, which is often excruciating for the writer, some with noise, which passes that agony along to the reader. And all for what? Those moments of mysterious intrusion, that feeling of collusion with eternity, of life and language riled to the one wild charge:
THE CITY LIMITS
When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold itself but pours its abundance without selection into every nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider
I met him once, thirty years ago. I was an undergraduate at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, where I was a member of the last all-male class in the school's two-hundred-and-fifty-year history. (It was also, I later learned, the worst class in the school's two-hundred-and-fifty-year history.) I had arrived alone from far West Texas in my midnight-blue T-topped screaming-eagle Trans Am, which would hit a hundred and thirty miles an hour for anyone young enough or fool enough to do it, and which I sadly but promptly sold to pay for books, boxer shorts (I'd never seen such a thing before), booze, food.
That was always an urgency then: money. I delivered the Richmond Times-Dispatch on foot, 6:00 a.m., seven days a week. I worked in the university news office and in the dining hall, served as food manager for a fraternity, strung tennis rackets many evenings in the gym. In one particularly needy season, together with another student who had the means to be the bank (I was the muscle — or, more accurately, the nag), I ran a gambling line for professional football, posting our hieratic odds on the doors of dorms and fraternities and sitting all afternoon dipped in a sort of existential ant bed, feeling the stings of defeat in every other play. It was mortifying at times, but in the way of American intellectuals whose accomplishments are rooted in real dirt, I have made a badge of my embarrassments, and any shame of monetary or mental unfitness — I vividly remember the vertiginous instant that a dean with a patrician mane and mien pointed out to me that my beloved Robert Ludlum books were not "literature" — has faded into an ironic attribute, like "distressed" furniture.
I was a virgin when I heard Ammons read. A virgin of poetry readings, I mean, though the experience was probably more memorable and momentous than the other one. It occurred to me that Ammons might have been equally innocent, and equally confused, as ten minutes into his reading he suddenly stopped and said, "You can't possibly be enjoying this," then left the podium and sat back down in the front row. No one knew what to do. Some people protested from the pews — we were in a place that had pews — that they were in fact enjoying it, though the voices lacked conviction and he didn't budge. Finally the chair of the English Department (another mane, another mien) cajoled the poor poet into continuing. Ammons mumbled on for another fifteen minutes before the cold mortification of the modern poetry reading, and the beer-lacquered bafflement of press-ganged undergraduates, did him in. "Enough," he muttered finally, and thudded his colossal body down beside his wife like the death of faith itself.
* * *
WHEN I LEFT COLLEGE and set out to be a poet I thought of nothing but writing a poem that would live forever. That's just how I phrased it: live forever. It seemed to me the only noble ambition, and its fumes were evident in my contempt for the lesser aims I sniffed out in other writers. It was, I suppose, a transparent attempt to replace the soul with the self — for all the talk of the "extinction of personality," I suspect there is no artist who does not cling to the belief that something essential of himself inheres in his art — and it was the first casualty of Christianity for me. People tend to think that Christians feel rescued from death, and perhaps some do (I don't), but first there comes the purge. Nothing survives, I suddenly realized. Dante, Virgil, even sweet Shakespeare, whose lines will last as long as there are eyes to read him, will one day find that there are no eyes to read him. As a species, we are a microscopic speck of existence, which, I have full faith, will one day thrive without us.
Still, abstract oblivion is a small shock as shocks go. When over lunch one day my friend and then poet laureate Donald Hall turned his Camel-blasted eighty-year-old Yeti decrepitude to me and said as casually as he bit into his burger, "I was thirty-eight when I realized not a word I wrote was going to last," I felt a galactic chill, as if my soul had chewed tinfoil. I was thirty-eight. It was the very inverse of a calling, an ex post facto feeling of innocence, death's echo. In a flash I knew it was true, for both of us (this is no doubt part of what he was telling me), and yet the shock was not in that fact but in the nearly fifty years of further writings Don had piled on top of that revelation. "Poetry abandoned me," he writes in his little masterpiece Essays After Eighty, the compensatory prose of which is so spare and clear it seems inscribed on solitude itself. If there were any justice in the world, this book would be read by my great-great-great- granddaughter as she gets ready to die. But of course there is no justice in the world.
They will put my body into the ground.
— JACK GILBERT
What is it we want when we can't stop wanting? I say God, but Jack Gilbert's greed may be equally accurate, at least as long as God is an object of desire rather than its engine, end rather than means. Gilbert's poem amounts to a kind of metaphysics for materialists. Something survives us, the poem suggests, some cellular imperative ravening past whatever cohesion kept us, us; some life force that is suspiciously close to a death force: it's winter, after all, and not any ordinary winter but one from which even Puccini and Pittsburgh have vanished, an ur-winter, you might say, even a nuclear one. Of course on the literal level the poem is referring to the way information dies out in one man's brain — Gilbert was actually from Pittsburgh, and I assume he loved Puccini — but the end of the poem reverberates in a way that is both beautiful and terrible. When you are ending, it can seem like everything is, and the last task of some lives is to let the world go on being the world they once loved. But what song — or what but song — can contain that tangle of pain and praise?
A.M.
... And here the dark infinitive to feel,
— MARK STRAND
Poetry itself — like life, like love, like any spiritual hunger — thrives on longings that can never be fulfilled, and dies when the poet thinks they have been. And what is true for the poem is true for the poet: "No layoff from this condensery," as Lorine Niedecker says, no respite from the calling that comes in the form of a question, no ultimate arrival at an answer that every arrangement of words is trying to be. Perhaps only bad poets become poets. The good ones, though they may wax vatic and oracular in public, and though they may even have full-fledged masterpieces behind them, know full well that they can never quite claim the name.
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. I remember sitting in an empty classroom at Washington and Lee late into the night, working on a poem instead of studying for an exam on international trade. I had spent three years as an economics major: endless afternoons in dead-aired classrooms from which I can't remember a thing in the world except that I wanted, wanted, wanted something so vague it might as well be money. By the time of my last class in the "C-School" I was so hungry for meaning that everything was instantly allegorical — the blind professor who taught international trade, the desk he clung to like a life raft, the random dog that sauntered into that third-floor classroom one afternoon as if he owned the place. He stopped right in front of my desk, turned around twice before taking a disconcertingly deliberate shit, then trotted lightly out like an ironic angel.
Not that the true path was by any means clear. I still had twenty years to writhe on the high hook I knew only as Ambition. It's almost the definition of a calling that there is strong inner resistance to it. The resistance is not practical — how will I make money, can I live with the straitened circumstances, etc. — but existential: Can I navigate this strong current, and can I remain myself while losing myself within it? Reluctant writers, reluctant ministers, reluctant teachers — these are the ones whose lives and works can be examples. Nothing kills credibility like excessive enthusiasm. Nothing poisons truth so quickly as an assurance that one has found it. "The impeded stream is the one that sings." (Wendell Berry)
In 1992 I found myself in Northern California. It was my first year on a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and it was Denise Levertov's last year of teaching. She had recently been diagnosed with lymphoma, which I did not realize at the time, and which at any rate would have meant nothing to me aside from the muted and momentary flash of foreboding that you yourself might feel if I told you how that same word — lymphoma — would ravage my own life fifteen years later. This is as it should be. Promiscuous sympathy is pointless and damaging for all concerned. That little shiver of pleasure-horror that goes through your spine when you read about someone else's suffering, that quick metaphysical incision like a bone marrow biopsy of the soul: it's for yourself. It is your self soundlessly screaming: I'm going to die! There's nothing wrong with this — it's one of the functions of literature, to wake one up — but if you mistake this reaction for action; if you confuse this shadow sympathy for the kind of real feeling that operates in the world with risk and agency and perhaps even grows cold to survive (bless you, my many marmoreal oncologists); if you mistake love of literature for love — well, dear reader, read on, read on.
Denise had recently converted to Catholicism. This I also did not know, though her Christian sensibilities seemed obvious enough. Here is "A Cure of Souls" from 1963:
The pastor of grief and dream s
This is not one of Denise's well-known poems, but it does have its own solid muscle movement and inner necessity: it stakes a credible claim on the final silence that is the measure of all made things. And that, finally, defeats all made things? The poem is aimed at this ultimate question. That valley in the last line calls to mind the valley of the shadow, and no bell can "toll" without waking the ghost of John Donne. The title, too, splits itself between the here and the hereafter, the literal and the figurative. The cure of souls is one of the offices of Catholic and Anglican priests. It means, literally, care of souls — all the day-to-day ministering that priests do for their congregation. Levertov changes "the" to "a," though, and thereby suggests one of those oddities of biological nomenclature like a shrewdness of apes or a crash of rhinos. A cure of souls is this group of people the pastor is shepherding through their fear of death ("fear no evil," as Psalm 23 has it), or perhaps even through death itself, as they are "souls" after all, and there is an eerily permeable solidity to the poem, as if it were ghosted by itself.
Levertov's gift was for a certain subdued urgency. (It's why an immediate and obvious urgency — like the Vietnam War — just crushed her.) A charitable critic would say that Levertov's language is shorn of ornament and refuses to call attention to itself; it is both aerated and animated by the silences in which it claims its own existence. A less charitable critic would say the language is often dull and/or hortatory. At times Levertov rises above both of these readings with forms that seem to merge the mind and its perceptions, as if a very particular world came to life by means of the gaze that was cast upon it. That's not a bad definition of all durable poetry: a world becomes real only as it is realized in these particular words:
I have
The way the rhymes and near rhymes stitch the perceptions together; the way those perceptions are both discovered and fulfilled by the form ("It speaks of" — then the little abyss while we wait — "eagerness"); the way a consummate articulation includes an irreducible silence, an extreme intimacy, an inevitable "distance"; and, finally, the way the human heart and the heart of matter have something to say to each other: this seems to me a great piece of writing.
Denise was obsessed with form when I knew her, as was I, as is every serious artist I have known. ("All arts are concerned only with form in the end," said Basil Bunting — an overstatement, but still.) Form for her meant attending to the life or spirit or essential being of the object — a flock of sheep/parishioners, the bodies of lovers — to such an intense degree that that life and the energy of inspiration become coextensive. Word and world are, for a moment, one thing, and for Denise the variety and volatility of contemporary life was such that only an exquisitely independent free verse could manage this marriage. The belief is reminiscent of Hopkins's ideas about "inscape," though it never would have occurred to Hopkins to assume that given forms couldn't be expressive in this sense, and it amounts to a metaphysical aesthetic. You have to believe that an object or person has some "essential energy," first of all, and, secondly, that language can share it.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "He Held Radical Light"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Christian Wiman.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Begin Reading,
Acknowledgments,
Also by Christian Wiman,
About the Author,
Copyright,