Poetry, a Matter of Life and Death

“I’VE RECEIVED SOME LETTERS asking me to state publicly my editorial position so that writers will have a sense of whether or not to submit their work,” wrote Christian Wiman in the November 2003 edition of Poetry magazine. The issue was the second of his tenure as editor. In his two-page statement, Wiman claims he would rather not articulate an editorial position “partly because I suspect that most editors who have an editorial policy” are “bores,” but he then proceeds to unpack his own: “The poems I respond to most deeply,” he writes, “are those that emerge out of some passionate tension between life and language, poems in which you feel—not always in equal measure—life and language trying to be each other.” These are not the words of a bore.