Christian Wiman (born August 31, 1966) is an American poet, translator and editor.
Raised in the small West Texas town of Snyder, [1] he graduated from Washington and Lee University and has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College, and the Prague School of Economics. In 2003, he became editor of the oldest American magazine of verse, Poetry , [2] a role he stepped down from in June 2013. [3] Wiman is now on the faculty of Yale University, where he teaches courses on Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School [4] and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. [5]
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 Book Review, [7] 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, Harper’s Bazaar, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker and The Sewanee Review. [8] 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.” [9]
Though Wiman does at times write in free verse, a significant enough portion of his work is written with some measure of form for him to have been associated at times with movements of New Formalism. On the topic of form, Wiman wrote in an essay called “An Idea of Order”:
Many poets and critics now almost automatically distrust any work that exhibits formal coherence, stylistic finish, and closure. Occasionally they simply dismiss such work as naive or reactionary. At other times, and probably more damagingly, they either subtly devalue or patronize the work in question, praising the craftsmanship of the poems in such terms as make it clear that this is not ‘important’ poetry. The hardcore version of this argument goes something like this: because our experience of the world is chaotic and fragmented, and because we’ve lost our faith not only in those abstractions by means of which men and women of the past ordered their lives but also in language itself, it would be naïve to think that we could have such order in our art. [In this view] A poet who persists in imposing order upon our uncertainty is either unconscious, ironic, or irrelevant.
— Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet [10]
Major critics and Wiman himself, however, have distinguished his work from neo-formalism. David Biespeil in American Poetry Review wrote, "if Wiman is a formalist, he's the kind who ditches the grandiose". [11] Wiman's poetry takes its reference points from lived experience rather than from any literary tradition. Of his own taste, Wiman writes in Ambition and Survival "more and more what I want from the poetry I read is some density of experience, some sense that a whole life is being brought to bear both on and in language". [12]
Wiman's poetry is characterized by multiple possible and intended readings, and metaphors which either are derived from an absence or space or undergo an evolution throughout the poem. One technique Wiman uses to communicate dual intended readings, is through repetition and scrupulous variation of punctuation and line-breaks. Thematic preoccupations of Wiman's poetry include the absence of God and difficulties and necessities of encountering the world whether with faith or without. Omar Sabbagh compares Wiman to Simone Weil and Jürgen Moltmann saying "Whether we call it 'affliction', 'the void', or what have you, these Christian thinkers were eminently modernist in seeing God, not as necessity, but as 'contingency'." [13]
Wiman's poetry has been compared stylistically to Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill, but in an interview on his own influences, Wiman said, "for sheer sound, though, I'd give more credit—or blame—to Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker, and Robert Frost". [14]
 |
|
Robert Stuart Fitzgerald was an American poet, literary critic and translator whose renderings of the Greek classics "became standard works for a generation of scholars and students". He was best known as a translator of ancient Greek and Latin. He also composed several books of his own poetry.
Louise Elisabeth Glück was an American poet and essayist. She won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose judges praised "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal". Her other awards include the Pulitzer Prize, National Humanities Medal, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Bollingen Prize. From 2003 to 2004, she was Poet Laureate of the United States.
Charles Kenneth "C. K." Williams was an American poet, critic and translator. Williams won many poetry awards. Flesh and Blood won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987. Repair (1999) won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, was a National Book Award finalist and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Singing won the 2003 National Book Award and Williams received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2005. The 2012 film The Color of Time relates aspects of Williams' life using his poetry.
Adam Zagajewski was a Polish poet, novelist, translator, and essayist.
August Kleinzahler is an American poet.
Gjertrud Schnackenberg is an American poet.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
Alicia Elsbeth Stallings is an American poet, translator, and essayist.
Carl Phillips is an American writer and poet. He is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. In 2023, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020.
Dana Levin is a poet and teaches Creative Writing at Maryville University in St. Louis, where she serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence. She also teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She lives in Saint Louis, Missouri.
Jean Valentine was an American poet and the New York State Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010. Her poetry collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965–2003, was awarded the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.
Chase Twichell is an American poet, professor, publisher, and, in 1999, the founder of Ausable Press. Her most recent poetry collection is Things as It Is. Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been earned her Claremont Graduate University's prestigious $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is the winner of several awards in writing from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and The Artists Foundation. Additionally, she has received fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Field, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and The Yale Review.
Geoffrey Brock is an American poet and translator. Since 2006 he has taught creative writing and literary translation at the University of Arkansas, where he is Distinguished Professor of English.
Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American poet and physician. He is the 2007 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition for his collection of poems The Earth in the Attic.
Brenda Shaughnessy is an Asian American poet most known for her poetry books Our Andromeda and So Much Synth. Her book, Our Andromeda, was named a Library Journal "Book of the Year," one of The New York Times's "100 Best Books of 2013." Additionally, The New York Times and Publishers Weekly named So Much Synth as one of the best poetry collections of 2016. Shaughnessy works as an Associate Professor of English in the MFA Creative Writing program at Rutgers University–Newark.
David Hinton is an American poet, and translator who specializes in Chinese literature and poetry.
Lucia Maria Perillo was an American poet.
Erin Belieu is an American poet.
Valzhyna Mort is a Belarusian poet who now lives in the United States.
Half-light: Collected Poems 1965–2016 is a 2017 poetry collection by Frank Bidart. It was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on August 15, 2017. Half-light is a comprehensive book of Bidart's poetry, collecting all of his previous collections as well as a new volume, Thirst (2016).
Part memoir, part statement of Christian faith, part commonplace book, this slim volume of spiritual and literary meditations unsettles more than it soothes.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
