Ramshackle Resiliency

Christ is contingency,” I tell M. as we cross the railroad tracks and walk down the dusty main street of this little town that is not the town where I was raised but both reassuringly and disconcertingly reminiscent of it: the ramshackle resiliency of the buildings around the square; Spanish rivering right next to rocklike English, the two fusing for a moment into a single dialect then splitting again; cowboys with creekbed faces stepping determinedly out of the convenience store with sky in their eyes and twelve-packs in their arms. I have spent the past four weeks in solitude, working on these little prose fragments that seem to be the only thing I can sustain, trying day and night to “figure out” just what it is I believe, a mission made more urgent by the fact that I have recently been diagnosed with an incurable but unpredictable cancer. How strange it is to be back in this place, where visible distance is so much a part of things that things acquire a kind of space, an otherness, a nowhere-ness, as if even the single scrub cedar outside the window where I’m working holds—in its precise little limbs, its assertive seasonless green—the fact of its absence.

-wonderful essay on faith and poetry by Christian Wiman, from Harvard Divinity Bulletin

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“When we think of our memories, they’re moments of intensity. Whether they were sorrowful or happy, moments of great loneliness or moments of great communion — we live for these moments in our life. And I do think poetry is a way of recognizing the moments in your life. But also a way of preserving them,” Wiman tells Moyers. “One of the ways in which I feel close to God is writing poetry.”

-Bill Moyers interviews Christian Wiman

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William Carlos Williams once wrote: “It is difficult to get the news from poems.” After my first month on Facebook, I concluded that it was difficult to get the poets from Facebook. The poet bloggers I once thought I knew were but status updates of their former selves. They were no longer espousing on the great poetic issues of our time; instead, they were posting pictures of food porn! If these were the best minds of my generation, they were destroyed by Facebook.

-via The Poetry Foundation, and a great response by Reb Livingston, here.

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Read two of Eduardo's beautiful poems at Poetry Daily!

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