Today's poem, Every Riven Thing, was written by Christian Wiman, a former editor of Poetry magazine and a current professor at the Yale Divinity School. In addition to the book of the same title, Every Riven Thing, which the poem comes from, I highly recommend his other spectacular books of poetry and prose, including My Bright Abyss, in which he explores his relationship with disease and faith.
Every Riven Thing is a poem that sees God's presence in everything God has made—all that is riven (broken, sundered, torn apart). A quote from Wiman's 2009 interview with The American Scholar, after a diagnosis of incurable cancer of the blood, exposes how Wiman sees the world—a point of view that is reflected in the poem.
I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be leaving the earth sooner than I had thought. Quite the contrary, I find life thriving in me, and not in an aestheticizing Death-is-the-mother-of-beauty sort of way either, for what extreme grief has given me is the very thing it seemed at first to obliterate: a sense of life beyond the moment, a sense of hope.
Wiman wrote the poem Every Riven Thing after a very long dry spell (three years) from writing and has said that the poem came to him all at once. The poem looks on this world, illuminating the bond between Creation and Creator through this lens of being riven, or broken. Reading the poem, I am left with the conviction that although the world is "riven," it is also filled with beauty and meaning...and God's presence.
Wiman can be an intimidating poet, because of his sometimes-complicated language and the depth of his thinking. But he encourages readers who are intimidated by poetry to approach it without feeling the pressure to completely understand it intellectually. As he says, some of his favorite poems are poems he doesn't completely understand. He suggests readers approach poetry with a more intuitive approach and I pass this advice along to you readers: If you can learn to let poetry happen to you like music happens—not all poetry, but some—and not think that it is simply rational discourse prettied up, you know, made sort of prettier, that can free you.
Every Riven Thing has lovely rhythm and sounds which make it amenable to this type of reading, particularly when read aloud, which highlights the clever movement of phrases Wiman plays with throughout the poem. As phrases are bumped from one line to the next, the meaning of the phrases expands; images are turned so that they can be seen from new angles. The world is an ever-changing and miraculous thing, and the poem reveals this.
Notice the movement in the poem as well as the stillness. Notice the images that make up the poem. Do you hear the singing being referred to? Do you feel the connections that make up the world?
After you have read through the poem yourself, I invite you to listen to the soundtrack included in which Wiman reads his poem aloud himself.
I hope you enjoy the poem, and that it helps you see the world differently.
Every Riven Thing
by Christian Wiman
God goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made
sing his being simply by being
the thing it is:
stone and tree and sky,
man who sees and sings and wonders why
God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he’s made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into a stillness where
God goes belonging. To every riven thing he’s made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to see
God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,
God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.
“Every Riven Thing” from the book Every Riven Thing by Christian Wiman. Copyright © 2010 by Christian Wiman.
Listen to Christian Wiman read the poem here:
Christian Wiman
The On Being Project did an interview with Christian Wiman that is well worth listening to and I invite you to find and read more of Christian Wiman's work, which can be found in libraries as well as bookstores.
Christian Wiman
Feel free to leave a comment below (you can sign in through your email) or contact me directly at louise.conner@circlewood.online.
Louise