I've never been able to write poetry without having vast tracts of dead time. Poetry requires a certain kind of disciplined indolence that the world, including many prose writers, doesn't recognize as discipline. It is, though. It's the discipline to endure hours that you refuse to fill with anything but the possibility of poetry, though you may in fact not be able to write a word of it just then, and though it may be playing practical havoc with your life. It's the discipline of preparedness.
Christian WimanI can't think offhand of any American poets who have Mandelstam's urgency, but it's a different country and a different time, and I don't think it would make much sense to say that this is something that's "missing" from contemporary American poetry.
Christian WimanOne of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise. Itโs easy to become so mired in our likes or dislikes that we can no longer recall that person who once responded to poemsโand to peopleโwithout any preconceived notions of what we wanted them to be.
Christian WimanI think of translations as passing some scholarly smell test: you can read the words of the translation and be reasonably sure of what the words are in the original.
Christian WimanI am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? (I know, I know: he was quoting the Psalms, and who quotes a poem when being tortured? The words arenโt the point. The point is he felt human destitution to its absolute degree; the point is that God is with us, not beyond us, in suffering.)
Christian Wiman