Know Your Enemy: Against Despair, with Christian Wiman

Matt and Sam talk to the poet Christian Wiman about his recent book, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair.

Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.

This conversation is a little different. We wanted to take a break from the election-year political jousting to talk to the poet Christian Wiman about Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair, one of the most singular books published in recent memory—part memoir, part commonplace book, part poetry collection. As with his previous My Bright Abyss, Wiman, more than any other contemporary Christian writer, manages to shake off our culture’s desiccated religious tropes to write and talk about matters of ultimate concern in ways that are bracing, even exhilarating. How does poetry tap into reality, or, even better, what does poetry reveal about it? How does he think about the relationship between “life and art”? Why does he resist “Saul on the Road to Damascus”-style accounts of religious conversion? Why did he almost not write about his cancer diagnosis in My Bright Abyss? Why might postmodernism be good for religion, actually? How does the love of another person connect to the love of God? And how does any of this matter for how we live? We take up these questions and more.

Further Reading:

Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair (2023)

My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer (2013)

Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (2004)

Every Riven Thing: Poems (2014)

The Preacher Addresses the Seminarians in Once in the West (2014)

Matthew Sitman, Finding the Words for Faith: Meet America’s Most Important Christian Writer, The Dish (2014)

Casey Cep, How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith, New Yorker (2023)

Andre Dubus, A Father’s Story in Selected Stories of Andre Dubus (1996)

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (1947)

Robert Bringhurst, These Poems, She Said in The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972-1982 (1982)

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