Book note: Ambition and Survival
Friday, May 14, 2010 at 09:18AM Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet
By Christian Wiman
Because I spent my adolescence as a particular kind of Baptist, I have a lot of skepticism about conversion narratives. Whenever someone tells a story about religious transformation, my radar goes up; my nostrils expand as if I am trying to detect the scent of falseness. Even so, the question of transformation—how and why and when people really change—is central to me. It's probably why I choose to go to church with a lot of recovering alcoholics. I am constantly searching for ways to understand transformation better.
Christian Wiman’s book of essays Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet is one of the most important books for me personally that I have encountered in years. Wiman is the editor of Poetry magazine. This collection includes personal reflections on growing up in West Texas and becoming a poetic nomad, as well as critical reflections on particular poets and poetic experiences. But the entire collection is channeled through the experience of Wiman’s recent conversion to Christianity. That gives every essay in the book—written over a period of eleven years—a particular charge. In each one, I found myself looking for signs and wonders, hints of the transformation that was occurring, a transformation that Wiman describes as “color slowly aching into things, the world becoming brilliantly, abradingly alive.”
As a young poet, Wiman set the world and poetry at odds with one another. His essay “Milton in Guatemala” is about his time, at age twenty, reading Paradise Lost while living on the roof of a house in the jungle. As he struggled with the difficult poem and imagined Guatemala as a place where he could gain the EXPERIENCE he would need as a poet, he used poetry as a defense against life, as a way to avoid the problem of living. (“I haven’t altogether outgrown these ideas and impulses,” he writes, “though I am less inclined now to go around in my daily life talking in capital letters.”)
After many years of wandering, the combination of writer’s block, falling in love and being diagnosed with incurable cancer guided Wiman to a perception of the divine and toward a religious conversion. Unlike the religion of his childhood where he was taught to renounce the world for God, Wiman now inhabits a God-infused landscape, where word, world and Word sometimes find a common resonance.
Wiman articulates the anxieties of the world that I live in--its restlessness and homelessness. He finds a language for my own struggle to fully feel and participate in the world. Wiman’s honesty and vulnerability takes me close to the possibility of my own ongoing transformation.
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