Five Questions for Poet Christian Wiman

The writer returns to Trinity Talks on July 8 to launch his new poetry collection, The Dance. We spoke with him about what it means to seek God and beauty in a world that feels increasingly fragile. 

The poet and professor Christian Wiman has spent years wrestling with the idea of God. He grew up immersed in what he calls the “easy devotion” of an evangelical Christian community in rural West Texas, then became an “ambivalent atheist” in college. In 2005, at age 39, Wiman was beginning to consider the possibility of God again when he was diagnosed with a rare and incurable cancer.  

Through multiple rounds of chemotherapy and a series of experimental drugs, Wiman asked questions that became more insistent and elemental: How do we seek the divine from within the limits of our own bodies? How do we stay awake to the world’s radiance when so much around us feels uncertain?

Wiman returns to these questions with renewed urgency in his new collection, The Dance. The book’s 54 poems address the ache of longing for the divine, the loneliness that shadows modern life, and the interplay between the ordinary and the eternal, all of it encircled by, Wiman writes, “the slow dance of grace and circumstance.”

On Wednesday, July 8, Wiman returns to Trinity for his second Trinity Talks event and the official book launch for The Dance. He’ll be joined by Summerlee Staten, Trinity’s executive director of Faith Formation and Education, for a conversation about poetry, faith, and the paradox of finite beings trying to be in relationship with the infinite. 

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Ahead of his visit, Wiman spoke with us about how poetry can point us toward God and beauty.

The Dance is your first book of poems in six years. What changed for you during this time?

I had an experimental transplant therapy in 2023. I was sick for a year and a half and for extended periods mostly stayed in bed. Almost all of the poems in The Dance were written during that time. I have always experienced long silences with poetry, but not prose, at times lasting years. The past six years were no different. There is a particular urgency to a lot of these poems, though only one poem in the book is directly about my illness.

I was conscious of wanting to get consistently beyond the self, to speak about the experiences of other people. I also wanted to write passages that made music of abstract statements, as writers like Wordsworth and T. S. Eliot accomplished so beautifully. 

In The Dance, you return again and again to the human longing for God and being “kindled and haunted by some clearer love.” When you visited Trinity in 2025, you said, “There isn’t one thing I know for certain about God.” But it seems a part of you yearns, as Job says, to see God with your own eyes. Do you feel closer to knowing God with some degree of certainty?  

No, I feel no closer, and I think there is no such thing as certainty with regard to God. Even the great mystics often came to doubt the visions they had been shown. The line “kindled and haunted by some clearer love” is accurate to my own experience of God, but that poem is not about me. I’ve never been a fire watcher. Imagination itself is kindled and haunted by some clearer love. It’s always an act of faith, and I think there is no such thing as a faithless poet.   

Several poems in The Dance gesture toward the loneliness of modern life. Yet you also suggest that within hardship there can be a “solidarity of solitudes.” How do you understand that paradox — being alone but united in our experience of solitude?  

It is a powerful paradox that a poem of great loneliness can bring us great consolation. And more than that: solidarity, kinship, something that eases that original loneliness. I think the great battle of our time is the struggle for consciousness, both individually and collectively. But no collective consciousness can occur unless and until it is firmly rooted in many, many coherent and vital individual minds. Poetry can be a powerful aid to this, both for the individual and the collective. 

In the last entry of the book, you write, “the poems are a balm … a substance fragrant, resinous, effective, for a time, against decay.” What role do you think poetry can play right now for someone who feels exhausted, restless, or numb?  

Check out the poem “There Are Mornings” by the late poet Liesl Mueller. She writes, in part, “Even now, when the plot / calls for me to turn to stone, / the sun intervenes.”

This seems to me a perfect answer to your question, and in fact Mueller once wrote (speaking of this poem in particular) that poetry was how she kept her soul alive when she felt overwhelmed by the pressure of current events. Luckily, we don’t have to actually write the poem that rescues us. I read this poem and feel my own soul given back to me, a momentary stay against confusion, to quote Robert Frost.

As you return for this upcoming Trinity Talk, what are you most looking forward to exploring with our community?

I loved being at Trinity last time. The audience was so attentive and hungry for God in ways I recognized, and the questions were great. I hope we can talk more about poetry, loneliness, and existential panic — and what all those have to do with faith. I hope people leave with a jolt of hope!  And a determination to read more poetry, of course. 

Reserve free tickets for Trinity Talks: A Conversation with Poet Christian Wiman on Wednesday, July 8, at 6pm in St. Paul’s Chapel. Books will be available for purchase and signing after the talk.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.