How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith

For The New Yorker, Casey Cep profiles Christian Wiman, the former editor of Poetry magazine who has been battling lymphoma for nearly 20 years. Cep’s deep research and care for her subject are on bold display here, chronicling how Wiman became a poet and why he turns to verse while in “the cancer chair,” despite the fact that poetry is useless against physical pain.

It seems to have worked: it’s difficult to square Wiman’s history of aggression and dysfunction with the man he is today. Still, he retains some of the intensity of his youth, especially in his sky-blue eyes, which he sometimes closes to think. His childhood wasn’t all violence, he feels the need to say—there was beauty, too. The beauty of language; dialects he pocketed like coins, then spent in poems about home like “Five Houses Down,” with a neighborhood junk collector whose “barklike earthquake curses / were not curses, for he could goddam / a slipped wrench and shitfuck a stuck latch.” And the beauty of mesquite trees, tumbleweeds, and dust devils, the last of which he re-creates in a narrow wisp of a poem: