Jonathan Chan

Jonathan Chan is a Singapore poet and translator whose second book bright sorrow has just appeared from Landmark Books. Born in Manhattan to a Malaysian father and a South Korean mother, educated at Cambridge and Yale, he was raised in Singapore and has returned there after his years at university. His first collection going home (Landmark Books, 2022). was a finalist for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2024. Part of what he explores in that book is the sense of what home is when a single locale may or may not be the home one is going to.

He is Managing Editor for the poetry archive Poetry.sg. His poetry is widely published; I personally have selected his poems for Ekstasis, and for Poems For Ephesians, as well as for a forthcoming anthology of Christmas poems in the Poiema Poetry Series.

Jonathan Chan has said, “matters of faith are integral and inherent to my writing” — while Christian Wiman has said, “Jonathan Chan’s poems are distinctively musical, acutely observed, and existentially engaged at the deepest level. They are bracing to discover.”

The following poem is from bright sorrow.

eternity

after Marilynne Robinson

and so the old man said
eternity is a thing we have

no hope of understanding.
things happen the way

that they do. a note follows another
in a song. a song is itself and

not another. a song is a song
itself. eternity holds space for

all these songs. for a song is
like a life, resounding in a kind

of tune. lives are what they were
and have been. lives are not merely

every worst thing. a mother prays
for her scoundrel son to be taken

up into heaven. Lila thinks this
an injustice to the scoundrels

with no mothers. people try
to get by. people are good

by their own lights. people take
all the courage that they have

to be good. for in eternity,
to eternity, eternity is just

a thing.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Christian Wiman*

Christian Wiman is Professor of the Practice of Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School. He has published more than a dozen books ― as either author, editor, or translator ― including his most recent poetry collection Survival Is a Style (2020, FSG), and his Hammer is the Prayer: Selected Poems (2016, FSG).

His memoirs include: My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (2013, FSG) and He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art (2018, FSG). From 2003 until 2013 he was editor of Poetry magazine.

The following poem first appeared in The New Yorker back in July, and will be included in his forthcoming book Zero at the Bone, which will include both poetry and prose in conversation with each other. It will be available in December.

After the Ballet

I in my whistling instants
sauntering the drab concourses
or thoughtless under the plebeian stars
make of myself a kind of company
that to its origin owes
only obedience to the one
injunction against despair.
O my lost dappers and sleeks,
my paragons of gunge
and scuttled luck,
all my fellow credibles,
all my little filths,
come back. Come back
from the sallowing past,
from the herd immunity
to miracles, for I have seen
a room of depilated marble
moving, a choreography of souls
that would have restored
my own even without
the demoiselle who,
in a moment so tensely silent
it seemed the soul’s nerve,
swanned her arms, torqued
her immaculate back, and executed
an improvised, exquisite, and irrefutable
toot.

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Chrstian Wiman: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Cascade) ― a book of poems written from the point-of-view of angels. His books are available through Wipf & Stock.

Danielle Chapman

Danielle Chapman is the author of the poetry collection Delinquent Palaces (2015, TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press). She served as consulting editor for Poetry magazine from 2005-2007, was the director of publishing industry programs for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs for five years, and now lectures in English at Yale University.

Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic and The New Yorker. She and her husband, Christian Wiman, have twin daughters.

The following poem is from Delinquent Palaces.

In Order

I've filled my lungs with fog.
I have sobbed in certain, familiar attics
where each fond object had been
hung or shoved away by hands
whose roughness I had loved,
and the carpet smelled of beloved dogs.

Now that that grief's gone and others come
I come back again to understand
the first one, plum blossoms brushing
the attic window as I look out upon
a yard that has been left untended
by any hand but that of God.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Osip Mandelstam

Osip Mandelstam (1891—1938) is a Russian poet, described by Ilya Kaminsky as "Russian poetry's central figure in the twentieth century." In 1911 he converted to Lutheranism, some would argue because Jews were excluded from entering the University of Saint Petersburg. Translator Christian Wiman argues that it would have been far more advantageous for him to convert to Russian Orthodoxy, if his conversion had merely been a matter of convenience.

Mandelstam himself writes that:
-----"[Christian art] is an 'imitation of Christ' infinitely various in its
-----manifestations, an eternal return to the single creative act that
-----began our historical era. Christian art is free. It is, in the full
-----meaning of the phrase, 'Art for art's sake.' No necessity of any
-----kind, even the highest, clouds its bright inner freedom, for its
-----prototype, that which it imitates, is the very redemption of the
-----world by Christ. And so, not sacrifice, not redemption in art,
-----but the free and joyful imitation of Christ—that is the keystone
-----of Christian esthetics."

In the 1930s, he and his wife Nadezhda were arrested by Stalin's government and sent into internal exile. In 1938 he was arrested again, and sent into exile in Siberia, which led to his death.

The following poems are from Wiman's translations - Stolen Air: Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam.

Cathedral, Empty

When light, failing,
Falling

Through stained glass,
Liquifies

The long grass
At the feet of christ,

I crawl diabolical
To the foot of the cross

To sip the infinite
Tenderness

Distilled
From destroyed

Hearts:
An air of thriving

Hopelessness
Like a lone cypress

Holding on
To some airless

Annihilating height.

Prayer

Help me, Lord, this night my life to save.
Hold me, Lord, your servant, your slave.
Hear me, O Lord, alive in Petersburg, my grave.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Christian Wiman

Christian Wiman is on his way to becoming a major American poet. His first significant step, after the publication of his first poetry book The Long Home (1998) was being appointed as the editor of the magazine, Poetry in 2003.

Wiman was raised in west Texas, in a family of faith. He however turned to his own way. He has recently arisen from an extended season of creative drought and an even longer period of spiritual drought to produce his latest collection, Every Riven Thing (2010). Readers of this work will see a new God-consciousness. For example, in the poem “And I Said To My Soul, Be Loud” he says,
-------------“For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things
-------------and I will ride this tantrum back to God...”
This is something he has done — recently returning to both God and the church. The following poem is from Every Riven Thing.

Small Prayer In A Hard Wind

As through a long-abandoned half-standing house
only someone lost could find,

which, with its paneless windows and sagging crossbeams,
its hundred crevices in which a hundred creatures hoard and nest,

seems both ghost of the life that happened there
and living spirit of this wasted place,

wind seeks and sings every wound in the wood
that is open enough to received it,

shatter me God into my thousand sounds...

This is the first Kingdom Poets post about Chrstian Wiman: second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca