Christian Wiman, Ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. $25.00
In 2014, I started two adventures which have shaped me significantly in the past four years: medical school and reading contemporary poetry. As a physician-in-training, I’m often invited to participate in moments of other people’s lives I wouldn’t otherwise be a part of, and because of the nature of illness and health, many of these moments can be emotionally charged. I have seen individuals and families deal with stress, despair, and difficulty, but have also been gifted with opportunities to witness gratitude, beauty, and joy. Poetry can and often does provide a way for processing many of these emotions and experiences, and as I read contemporary poetry, Christian Wiman has been one poet who has put these complex emotions and experiences into words for me. Wiman compels me with his finely-tuned ear, his sharp language, and his ability to write easily and beautifully of difficult topics, including topics many would not dare cover due to their complexity. In the new anthology Joy, he does just that: he offers a brief essay on joy and then presents one hundred poems on that singular but elusive subject. Between the poems are excerpts from essays, letters, and novels which offer additional insight and thoughts on the topic, so the book, despite being compiled from a wide variety of voices, can be read as a unified whole.
I am always impressed with Wiman’s breadth of knowledge of other writers, even beyond other poets. Some of that knowledge must come from the decade Wiman spent as the editor of Poetry magazine, and it gives me confidence that his selections were well-considered. This is not the first anthology which Wiman has edited, nor his first use of the number 100—when Poetry magazine turned a century old in 2012, he helped edit and introduce The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine. Wiman was the editor of Poetry for ten years, so the his collaboration with Don Share (the current editor) was essentially a professional undertaking; Joy, on the other hand, feels like a much more personal project.
The opening essay “Still Wilderness” serves to introduce and contextualize the project, but, as Wiman writes, it is “not meant to be an argument, but an experience.” Part of the experience is reading Wiman’s delightful writing; it is the prose of a poet and is a real pleasure. He quotes from a diverse group of thinkers: Dickinson and Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Moltmann, Augustine and C.S. Lewis. His descriptions can be scathing or tender, sometimes in the same sentence, and his vocabulary and word choice are not just precise but aesthetic. (It’s like reading poetry.) He writes of a poem’s “implicit metaphysical resonances” and their “vertiginous precisions,” identifies a text as “scrupulously plainspoken,” and says that “language drapes the world like dew.” Of the book itself, he writes: “[this book] is aimed against whatever glitch in us or whim of God has made our most transcendent moments resistant to description.” Beyond this book, Wiman might say that poetry itself is aimed against that very thing.
Wiman’s beautiful writing serves as an appropriate vehicle to ask some central questions surrounding the topic of joy: what is it? Is joy distinct from happiness? Is joy appropriate when there is so much sadness in the world? What are the limits of language in describing something such as joy? Does joy matter, and why? Wiman writes that for him, “the best way of thinking through any existential problem is with poetry, which does not ‘think through’ a problem so much as undergo it.” Thus the reason for this book: he has selected poems which “answer” these questions. He again emphasizes that his selection of poems may serve as a guide, but the reader should not (and maybe cannot) get caught up in specifics, because “poetry does not refine philosophical definitions so much as weakens one’s need to see them.”
So the poems themselves. This is an anthology with a focused topic, and as with all anthologies the selections are biased toward the editor’s voice. Wiman’s opening note explains some of his choices, which he mostly limited to modern poets in an attempt make the collection relevant in our current cultural and intellectual context. The consistency of sound in these poems is remarkable, despite major differences in the subject matter: a summer day, a sick child, a lemon orchard, a dog. There are poems by men and women, by young and old, and seventeen are translated from other languages. The effect of reading such different poems which get at the subject of joy from various angles is surprising: joy is just what I felt. Whether that is because these poems are about joy specifically, or because these poems are just really good, I’m not sure.
The crisp language and syncopations of the (mostly) free verse poems moved me, occasionally to tears, as I read through the collection. “Joy’s trick is to supply / Dry lips with what can cool and slake, / Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache / Nothing can satisfy.” This stanza from “Hamlen Brook” by Richard Wilbur (included in the anthology but also isolated by Wiman in the opening essay) is one of many which articulate what I felt reading through the book. Halfway through I gave up flagging the poems I liked; I liked all of them. The book included several poems already on my list of favorites, including “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” and “Meditation on a Grapefruit,” as well as several that now easily make the same list, including “Summer Kitchen” by Donald Hall and “Joy” by Lisa Mueller. Further, it confirmed my love for several poets I was already familiar with (Kay Ryan, Seamus Heaney) while introducing me to several whom I will be pursuing further (Sarah Lindsay, Grace Paley). My one and only criticism of the anthology is Wiman’s exclusion of his own poem “From a Window,” which kept returning to my mind as I read the collection. The opening essay provides a glimpse into Wiman’s thoughts on joy, but it would have been nice to include his perspective on joy in the form of a poem, since his claim is that poetry is how we might really understand such a subject.
As a subject for a collection of poetry, “joy” works surprisingly well; it allows for very different poems about a word with many different connotations. These connotations are explored and expressed in beautiful ways, with a diversity of styles and voices that make it exceptionally balanced. Most of the poems included don’t explicitly use the word joy; as I read, the poems which did almost startled me, as I had almost forgotten the topic because I was swept up by the feeling itself. If the question is, “what is joy?”, then Joy: 100 poems contains over a hundred incarnations of the answer: joy is real, and it can be found in many places, including poetry.
