Here is an abridged version of Christian Wiman's resume: He edited the magazine Poetry for a decade. He has authored four books of verse: The Long Home, Hard Night, Every Riven Thing, and, now, Once in the West. He has, in addition, published scores of prose pieces, chief among them a spiritual autobiography named My Bright Abyss. He is, by any account, one of America's preeminent living poets.
He is also dying.
I know: we all are—but the difference is that most of us get to die unwittingly for a good long while. In fact, most of us get to die slowly enough that we can blithely call all but the last few months (or less, if we can avoid catastrophe) of our dying "living." Wiman, on the other hand, had not yet turned forty when he learned the polysyllabic label for an illness all but guaranteed to stop his pulse and breath. It is a blood cancer, and it has no known remedy. It follows no reliable program. So, while he cannot be sure that he's dying faster than the rest of us (I pray he isn't), Christian Wiman is not blithe about either life or death.
At least not in any of the poems in Once in the West, which plumb the poet's boyhood and adolescence in West Texas and survey, too, the other places, other stories Wiman encountered after he had come of age. As for the kind of things that catch his attention, they include "a pick-up / aboil / with birddogs" on one occasion and a flotilla of crocodiles on another. He writes about evocative outings: visiting a gardener who decorates with "random wall-blobs impastoed with jewels and jowls" and visiting Chicago's Shedd Aquarium with his wife, his twins. For all its everyday oddities and beauties, though, the centripetal force in this book is mortality.
And it's no wonder, of course, that Wiman is not blithe in extremis. Anyone acquainted with grave illness would expect that. As for the lucky, the uninitiated, they will find ample evidence of the automatic panic sickness triggers in a number of these poems—for instance, "Winterlude," in which a hospital's "painlady" interrupts the "mad metastasis of Now" with "morphine moon[s]."
Neither, however, is the poet blithe given the urgent joy of a toddler who, "elliptically, electrically alive," promises unbidden "I will love you in the summertime, Daddy." On the contrary, he reports that the child's lilting words unspool beneath "a moon-blued, cloud-strewn night sky / like an X ray / with here a mass and there a mass / and everywhere a mass."
What's more, Wiman's poems never sentimentalize the years when he was carefree or careless or closer to it, the years when death and heaven remained for him, each in their turn, sometimes abstract succor and sometimes abstract rot. To wit: after describing his boyhood pastime of shooting birds to the tune of a "little killing ditty," the writer states,
I felt nothing, and I will not betray those days
if days are capable of being betrayed
by pretending a pang in my larval heart
or even some starveling joy when Tuffy yelped.
I took aim at things I could not name.
And the ditty helped.
In these six lines, Wiman faults his outgrown invulnerability but also his grownup impulse to touch up the past, to paint his coolness as spoiled innocence. He blames himself, in other words, for once making carnage trivial by way of a jingle, but he also blames himself for edging his callousness toward poignancy by way of a poem.
At the same time as the poet recognizes that "little killing ditt[ies]" take death too lightly, though, he insists that triumphant hymns do, too. Therefore, he swats the glib believers for whom eternity sunnily eclipses mortality. A reluctant son of the Baptist church, the poet writes, "We lived in the long intolerable called God. / We seemed happy." The lyric continues: "I mean the always alto and surely anusless angels / divvying up the deviled eggs and jello salad in the after-rapture." Let it be said: here Wiman's disdain finds an excellent helpmate in his cleverness, just as it does in a number of his essays (see the book reviews in Ambition and Survival). To assign angels to apportion deviled eggs, to make them preside over a church potluck they can eat but never excrete, to parody those who think their pietistic gesturing toward the next world excuses their petty posturing in this one: it's shrewd enough revenge to gratify Dante.
Still, this poem, "We Lived," does not just send up the churchgoer-as-angel, whose easy sentimentality any real angel would cremate. No: the poem is almost as quick to repentance as it is to scorn. It barely finishes sketching God's trite "fervent servants" before it announces "I mean / to be mean." And then repents. Then again, this repentance is not renunciation—a pattern that holds throughout Once in the West.
Even where this collection's poems are repentant, after all, they are unapologetic. They entertain bitterness. They are quick to anger, quick to complaint, quick to sneer and to keen. But these poems also utter praise. Take "My Stop is Grand," in which one of Chicago's elevated trains "screechingly peacock[s] / a grace of sparks." The image is arresting in itself, but it's Wiman's resistance to dewy emotion that makes his awe compelling. His reverence is cauterized, stark, hard-won, and not inspired by the standard beauties. For example, the El that occasions praise with "a grace of sparks" also "shoot[s] through a hell / of ratty alleys," as the poem makes clear just lines earlier.
By the same token, Once in the West does not try to squeeze neat meanings from its wonderment, as the two poems that feature this volume's name say outright. "Razing a Tower" begins, "Once in the west I rose to witness / the cleverest devastation," and it ends
A whisper-rupture, feathery detonation,
last concussive flush of a great heart giving way
and all the outworn stories collapsed in a kind of apocalyptic plié.
Vanish the dancer and the dance remains a time, an agile absence on the air.
I cannot say what, or why, or even when it was.
I only know it happened, and I was there.
These lines, then, bear witness to an awful wonder, an "apocalyptic plié," but rather than pulling some fatal moral from it, the poet stops, dumbfounded. Moreover, taken together, Wiman's poems argue that to stop dumbfounded might be the substance of veneration—and maybe even all that worship requires.
The end of the poem "Witness" makes much the same argument. It reads:
Once in the west I lay down dying
to see something other than the dying stars
so singularly clear, so unassailably there,
they made me reach for something other.
I said I will not bow down again
to the numinous ruins.
I said I will not violate my silence with prayer.
I said Lord, Lord
in the speechless way of things
that bear years, and hard weather, and witness.
Here, too, the words of the poem draw attention to what they cannot say, defining silence as more reverent than doxology and witness as sufficient praise, trying, in the words of another of these poems "to surrender / to the wonder / nothing / means."
Such surrender—to the stunning world that does not mean but is—also plays out in Once in the West's refusal to summon up a hypothetical heaven, even one far more eccentric than the pastel version drawn for "all the good / Godcoddled children." In My Bright Abyss, where some of this volume's poems first appeared, Wiman writes explicitly that "piety forbids one to imagine any afterlife that makes this life seem altogether inferior," which means, in practice, that it "forbids one from imagining any afterlife at all." Put otherwise, we human beings cannot invent a heaven without blaspheming against the earth—both by passing over its stunning matter too casually and by overlooking the truth that the kingdom of God is already at hand.
Wiman, consequently, binds himself "to the things of this world," as Richard Wilbur named them, contending that "love calls us to the things of this world." Indeed, throughout Once in the West, Christian Wiman takes this aphorism to its extreme, for the things of this world are, as one of the poems in Every Riven Thing says, "praiseful things." And to be blithe about any of them would be to blaspheme.
Given that conviction, I think it possible that even Wiman's derision for God—as where he asks, "Lord if I implore you please just please leave me alone / is that a prayer that's every instant answered?"—is a species of devotion. This poem closes:
And there is the suffering of primal
silence,
which seeps and drifts like a long fog
that when it lifts
leaves nothing
but the same poor sod.
Dear God—
Granted, one could read these words as impious. "The same poor sod" could be the dirt that steadily waits but does not merit the planting of anything besides the eventual coffin, but it could just as easily be a slang epithet for God. But I think that reading is wrong. I think that if "poor sod" is an epithet, it's an epithet for the poet—and for the reader. I think that the slant rhyme of "poor sod" and "Dear God" is shorthand, and that what it abbreviates is the fact that we, the "quintessence of dust," are nevertheless kin to our Lord. I think Christian Wiman is right: if God and sod rhyme, that leaves no room for us to be blithe.
Jane Zwart teaches writing and literature at Calvin College.
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