This interview was conducted by Plough’s Joy Clarkson on January 24, 2025.

Plough: You’ve written more than a handful of books of poetry. What is the work of the poet?

Christian Wiman: That depends on the poet. But if there’s a unifying task it is to enable and advance consciousness. R. P. Blackmur once wrote of John Berryman’s metaphors that they “enlarged the scope of available reality.” The observation can be generalized: a true poem makes reality more available to us, and makes us more fit to inhabit it. I also believe, with everything in me, that poetry is a “foretaste of truth,” as Anna Kamienska wrote: “It is the vestibule of faith.” A deep response to the mysterious life of poetry, even secular poetry, can make an even deeper response to life itself seem suddenly tenable.

What does a day of work look like when you are writing poetry?

Chaos. I move around, mutter, curse, stare at the sky for an hour, occasionally stop all this to hastily scribble a flurry of words down (which I often have a hard time reading later). But then sometimes – the best times – it’s quite swift and gifted, and I write a whole poem at one go. After forty years of it, I find the experience more rather than less comprehensible. I do believe God is in it, both the source and the aim.

Yulia Brodskaya, Jungle Bird, paper quilling, 2009. Used by permission.

What nourishes your capacities as a poet?

Time and silence. As I’ve written before, I find I can write prose in just about any circumstance, but poetry requires a lot of empty space and time to emerge. Which is why I pretty much never write a poem when I am teaching. Reading, too, can be very generative. Sometimes someone else’s phrases seem to cast me out of their words and into my own. That, too, is very mysterious to me and utterly unpredictable.

Who are the poets and writers who have inspired you in your work as a poet?

Too many to name. But the first living poet I responded to was Seamus Heaney, whose work remains deeply important to me. Wordsworth and Herbert are abiding presences. Among contemporaries, there is my wife, Danielle Chapman, who not only reads everything I write but whose words (written and spoken) often trigger my imagination in saving ways. I would also mention the work of Atsuro Riley, which is marked by a true sacramental imagination and which I return to regularly for consolation and inspiration.

Read a new poem by Christian Wiman.