Christian Wiman was born and
raised in West Texas. He is the editor of Poetry magazine and the author of two previous collections of
poems, Hard Night (2005) and The Long Home (2007), and one collection of prose, Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (2007). His new book of poetry, Every Riven
Thing, is a November 2010 publication
from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He lives in Chicago with his family.
On your nightstand now:
Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope Against Hope, a crisply written, devastating account of Osip Mandelstam's last years. Hounded by Stalin, half-destroyed by torture, he wrote his finest poetry in a final blaze of defiance, derangement and pure genius.
Favorite book when you were a child:
All of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan books, no question. Not only did I read them all multiple times, I often did so while wearing a loincloth. I don't actually remember this aspect of the obsession, but my mother swears it's true and, alas, has the much-tattered but lovingly sewn evidence to support her case.
Your top five authors:
George Herbert: a contemporary of Shakespeare (who isn't on my list only because it seems so obvious) who wrote poems of such devotional intensity and questioning clarity that they come right through the centuries to speak to our times.
Marilynne Robinson: a genius of prose (see especially Housekeeping and Gilead), and a genius at assimilating huge masses of material either to distill (see her essay on the Gospels) or destroy (see the wonderful Absence of Mind).
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: mostly for Letters and Papers from Prison, which was written during the last year of World War II, before Bonhoeffer was shot by the Nazis.
Zbigniew Herbert: most great poets are ruined by translation, but even in English Herbert is a master of carefully modulated tones, historical tragedies and ironies, and just plain old-fashioned insight about what it means to be alive.
Fanny
Howe: I'm astonished by her scope, her depth, and the scalding intensity of her--there's
no other word for it--vision. For the novels, see Radical Love. For the
poetry, see Selected Poems. And for the essays, try either The
Wedding Dress or The Winter Sun.
Book you've faked reading:
Dickens! I've tried mightily, I've burrowed into one damn book after another, but there's nothing for it: he bores me. The fault is mine, I'm sure, but eventually one has to admit the fault is there for good, and move on.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Atsuro Riley's inventive, eccentric, sui generis new (and only) book of poems, Romey's Order. It's the sort of book you can feel the future reading in.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Well, my wife and I recently had twin girls, so we've bought about a thousand books with rainbow-clad covers promising peaceful sleep and stress-less days. We burned them in our fireplace, so they weren't completely useless.
Book that changed your life:
Simone Weil's Gravity and Grace. It seems a bit willful and austere to me now, but it gave me a language for a whole dimension of intellectual and spiritual experience through which I was desperately fumbling.
Favorite line from a book:
"Time rends the soul. Through the rent, eternity enters."--Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Robert Frost's Collected Poems. I have many of these by heart, which is wonderful in that they're always there for me and deeply embedded in my own history and experience. But they're so familiar by now, and I would love to have that first thrill (which I can't even recall) of coming across a poem like "To Earthward" or "The Most of It."