A Conversation With James Matthew Wilson—Ben Palpant

An Interview by Ben Palpant | Words Under the Words No. 10

This post belongs to a series of interviews between Ben Palpant and important contemporary poets.

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There's little room left in this house for poetry,
Or in this world for any lasting language.
The managers and sales reps in the office
Who've ticketed their holidays are childless,
And looking toward five days of sun and liquor.
They care for neither old books nor a young daughter.
But somehow near me sleeps an infant daughter
Who grows still to the cradle sounds of poetry.

—from "A Prayer For Livia Grace" by James Matthew Wilson

I suppose now is as good a time as any for this confession: I read book prefaces. Not all prefaces, perhaps, and not even the entire preface every time, but most of it. The reason is simple. Sometimes the author lets you in on a secret, provides a key that unlocks the rest of the book, and gives you a glimpse behind the curtain. This happened to me when I read the preface to The Fortunes of Poetry In An Age of Unmaking, by James Matthew Wilson. In it, he describes a crisis that launched him on a life-changing journey. That journey and its genesis moment are part of the reason why I decided to interview him and so I asked him to tell that story to begin our conversation. 

"Like many graduate students in the humanities, I had fallen in love with the two great, conspicuous qualities of the arts and literature. First, that form matters, that it's not primarily what a work of art says but the way in which the saying is formed. And, second, that it matters because a work of art can change your life. Those are the two convictions that I had as an aspiring artist in Ann Arbor in the 1990s. And they're probably the familiar convictions of every artist at every point in human history. Then I went to graduate school and found those instinctive convictions looked upon with the ‘bemused scorn of a philosophical smile,’ to borrow a line from Foucault."

"These fundamentals were viewed as, what, naive convictions? That you hadn't quite grown up yet?"

"Yes. Later, after I entered a doctoral program, I encountered the word beauty and sighed like some disillusioned critic whose cold eye could see through everything. And I remember thinking there's something wrong with this response. And, sure enough, the more I read the great works of the Western tradition, the more uncomfortable I grew with that posture toward beauty. The word beauty doesn't appear there as some sophomoric, superficial, naive, or sentimental term, it appears as probably the most mysterious term, a term that points us toward the ineffable mysteries of the world. To paraphrase Hans Urs Von Balthasar, why is it that the truth excites us with wonder and that when we know the truth, we feel bound to it, we abide in it, and we don't want to turn away from it? Even when it can be a painful truth? Because we feel the truth calling us. The Greeks suggest that truth's attraction is its beauty. That's why, when we finally understand something, we say, I see what you mean. So there I was, some twenty-three years ago, giving that contemptuous smirk at the word beauty, and twenty-three years later, I am convinced more than ever that thinking about beauty is our highest achievement."

"That pursuit runs contrary to many of your peers in the academy."

"When I attended academic conferences, I was surrounded by people who, at some point, with all the unselfconscious enthusiasm of youth, said that they loved books, but who had found that their love could only be justified on terms that are rather loveless. They found that they could only sustain love for a certain author as long as they were sniffing out the ideologies and the political webs of power that gave shape to the work. If you had read to them the final paragraphs of The Great Gatsby and said, 'Aren't those lines just beautiful?' They would have given that philosophical smirk as if to say, 'Well, that’s how I used to think.'" I suppose there's a dualistic consciousness at play in most of the people who enter the academy. They came for the joy, but then they were taught that their joy was only justified if it broke forth, not in continuous contemplation, but in some kind of tributary of a more serious mode of analysis that was not merely aesthetic, it had to be political."

"In one sense, you would say that they're correct, that the aesthetic isn't the end, but the beginning of contemplation."

"Yes, the aesthetic, as the modern person might conceive it, where it's just looking at the form of a work of art in isolation from everything else, can't be an end in itself. But lacking the transcendental language to explain why, they have to engage in a practice that reinterprets the aesthetic form in terms of a political form. What we're actually called to do and what our nature wants to do is to be awestruck by the appearance of a form which leads us, then, to the contemplation of form itself and to the divine and eternal forms. That's just how the human mind works. That's what Plato was describing in his work; namely, that we encounter appearances and the soul immediately springs up to seek what the apparent form conceals within itself, and what it conceals is form’s depth, or simply the interior form. Not only that, but it wants to discover what lies beyond the form, that to which the form points. That's the essence of life for rational animals, for humans who have been endowed with a spiritual intellect. If you can't look at something, stare at it in awe, and then see how it leads you up to the eternal, then you're not just selling the work short, you're not just selling your profession short, you're selling yourself short. So, going back to that personal and professional crisis, that's why I started writing what became The Fortunes of Poetry In An Age of Unmaking. It was my way of working through where things went wrong and, more importantly, what could go right again, if we had a decent literary culture and a decent intellectual life."

"The poet, Malcolm Guite, was sharing that he got weary of emails the other day and decided to go on a walk, simply to enjoy the early spring air. While he was walking, he had this sense that he was doing something older than himself, something in the fabric of the world and when he returned home, he remembered the opening to Wind In The Willows. Mole is spring cleaning and gets weary of the work. He decides to go on a walk and this is the line that Guite recalled: 'When tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.' Guite just delighted in the beauty of those lines without unpacking them, even though there's plenty to unpack. There's a childlike ability to sit in the moment, to acknowledge the beauty without bringing the intellect immediately to bear upon it, without deconstructing it, but seeing how the beauty of the passage carries the soul up to God."

"Exactly. The important thing here is that the first experience does not justify itself on other terms. It's justifying itself on its own terms, which then leads us deeper  in: we're just entering it more fully because we've come to see it in light of  its foundation. That's what the intellect is called to do in every situation—to pursue beauty as it points to the divine."

"I heard someone say that the ordering of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty is an evangelical error that focuses on morality first, leaving Beauty to show up, as it were, late to the party. He suggested that the proper order of the great triumvirate is Beauty, first, then Truth and Goodness. Is that a helpful distinction?"

"The ordering of the transcendentals is an interesting question and a conversation for when we have more time together, but my abbreviated answer is that Beauty is first and also last. That's one of the Ancient Greek insights, being gives itself first in the form of beauty. That is to say that it is an appearance that attracts. So, to use Aristotle's language, we begin with wonder, with a sudden awe before the wonderful in the world. Some people have said that Aristotelian psychology is about the reduction of wonder to science, that is to say, that we go from wondering about things to knowing about them to knowing their causes. To them, that's mere science. But that's not the whole picture because when you get to the far end, when you finally get knowledge, the wonder kicks up all over again and carries you to the next discovery. True science understands that wonder leads to knowledge which opens once more onto wonder, and so on and so forth."

"We're living in an age of not only anxiety but a lack of wonder. And yet it's so much deeper than that. The opening poems of your book, Some Permanent Things, describe our societal state of ennui, or acedia, which I believe the monastics used to mean listlessness or torpor of the spirit."

"Joseph Pieper got to me early. I love his book, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, in which he uses the word acedia, which is translated as sloth, but it's not the sloth of mere laziness or lassitude, it's the sloth of unsettledness with one’s own existence. For years, I read and re-read Leviathan, by Hobbes, because he captures the typical modern condition in a way that people live out even if they haven't read the book or heard his articulation of it. The first thing he does is reduce everything to matter and matter's motion. To Hobbes, life is nothing more than a motion of limbs. It's mechanistic. It keeps going and people try to keep it going—hence, our activities—until it stops. In several different ways, he manages to give a whole account of human life without any need to use the language of goodness. It's impossible to call something intrinsically good on his terms. Or to say there is Someone Good, a Summum Bonum, toward which all things aim in an enduring sense. That aimless business, to Hobbes, is the totality of our existence."

"That's not much of a life."

"He goes on to say that most of us live in fear. We fear anything and everything we do not know. Human life, for Hobbes, is characterized not by our affirming that our lives are good, but that we have our lives and we fear the alternative. We fear death. That allows us to live lives that are, in the words of my friend R.J. Snell, ‘jealously guarded and absolutely worthless.’ People are anxiously trying to get ahead, but they're not trying to get ahead because they seek some ultimate good, only because they feel death at their back. They're trying to keep death at bay for as long as possible. Other than that, we're nothing more than windup toys gradually winding down until we finally stop. Hobbes was trying to hang the corpse of the world up on a hook, to cut it open and bleed out all the wonder. That was absolutely necessary to him if there was to be political order. He was trying to eliminate everything but the fear of death in order to create a rational society that would keep death at bay for as many people as possible for as long as possible. In that circumstance—which I believe is our circumstance—the very act of wonder is a threat because, in the first place, wonder says there are things you should love for their own sake and, second, because wonder says there are things you should love more than life itself. Wonder becomes an anti-social public enemy."

"And yet, perhaps, the job of a poet is to awaken us to wonder."

"I was just reading a book by Charles Taylor in which he describes those who awaken us to the eternal as hors du monde, 'outside the world.' Those individuals in history who were outside the world—like Christ, like Socrates—call society to account. In one sense, every person has the capacity to do that. I think it was John Paul II who said that humans are culture transcending animals. History seems like a train of necessity, but at every moment, we are capable of a freedom that is fruitful and will shape the world around us. That's how culture and civilization are built. We have a God who transcends all of this and who has called us to love the highest things. That's the subject of the title poem in my book, Some Permanent Things. That poem  describes those occasional citizens who realize that there's more to this world, who know that somewhere in the collective attic of civilization there's an old battle flag, a symbol of the things that people have known that transcend the world. The defense of permanent things becomes more costly when the one who knows those things experiences isolation and understands the need to stand athwart his age. We're living in an age when the love of what is genuinely permanent seems unintelligible to other people. You may talk about it, but you become like the clown in the town square whom everyone looks at but nobody understands so they laugh at him. They may not understand him, but he's still telling the truth."

"The arts seem primed by God's design for this very thing, for transcending culture and creating a new thing. But when we look at the decay around us in this age of identity crisis, at the literal self-destruction of our sons and daughters, I wonder what the arts—what poets in particular—can actually accomplish to point us back to the permanent things."

"The best response to a culture of death is not to offer another salient critique of the impoverishment of contemporary reality, but to live good lives and to make new work. The intrinsic fruitfulness of reality is such that it's always waiting to be reformed, to be renewed and cultivated. Rooted in natural being is a desire to be fruitful, to multiply, to make new things. Even when we despair, life goes on. People who accept the natural fruitfulness of being have the capacity to make something new and good. As long as we are not totally dead to wonder, small communities have the possibility of renewing things and starting over. It's so deep in us because it's not just in our human nature, it's actually ontological—it's deeper than anything peculiarly human. It's so deep that we can't actually get away from it."

"That's very interesting. I'm always amazed at how quickly my work on the property gets overgrown. Life burgeons up. It's an unstoppable force despite obstacles, despite hardship."

"In my most recent book of poems, Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds, there are two poems that address what you're describing. In one poem called “Waking in Dresden,” I talk about this remarkable thing, that even the victims of the Dresden bombing, when they woke up to a city bombed almost to an unfathomable ruin, they were beginning to think about the new life they would build—not out of hope, per se, but out of their nature. There's another poem called "Seeds" that describes a lilac bush that planted itself within the divided trunk of a maple tree. New things just spring up, that's the order and nature of things. People are very unhappy leading atomized, mechanized, Hobbesian lives. We hear the language of despair and mental illness, but we're all seeking actualization, to become more fully real. According to Aquinas, that's what it means to talk about goodness. One of the important mysteries of being an artist is that I get to make forms that help us to think about other forms. This artificial form called a poem gets to open up onto and speak of the other forms that are in nature and the form that is beyond all forms, the divine mystery. Everything draws us up to the divine, but the fine arts have a special privilege because they are made specifically to draw us to contemplation, to lead us to the heart of things and beyond the heart of things."

"One of the temptations for artists is self-expression as an end in itself, which has given rise to a dismissive posture that discards any and all critique and, more than that, discards the older ways in favor of the new and novel. The goal seems to have become self-actualization, but that's not the actualization that you're talking about. You're calling us to a more humble posture that doesn't say, 'I'm the final reality,' but that points to something higher, something greater than self and greater than the common good. You're suggesting that if we bow the knee, then we can call ourselves and others to a transcendent life that begets beautiful art, a life that points us upward and onward."

"The language of self-actualization, as it was popularized in the 1970s, led to a culture of narcissism. We have that with us today as expressive individualism, but that language doesn't acknowledge that human nature seeks to be more fully human. They’re not describing real actualization. Real actualization speaks to the potential within the thing itself which assumes both a limit, a determination, and a direction, but also the possibility of those things being actualized as a fullness of being. So a giraffe wants to become more giraffey. Humans want to become more human, not more like a giraffe or something arbitrary. The story of Frankenstein reminds us that when we try to deny limits, we end up creating monsters. We live, of course, in an age where we seem to think that our technologies liberate us from every finitude that our forms naturally give to us. I direct a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, but I'm not a huge advocate of the word 'creative.' I prefer words like discernment, discovery, invention, synthesis, and reformulation because we are always taking existing things to make new things. We're not making things ex nihilo."

"My friend, Andrew Peterson, has said that he's not a fan of the term 'creatives' because every person is made in the image of God and is, therefore, creative. He hopes that term goes away soon, because calling ourselves creatives makes it sound like artists are unique, as if our actualization will be different than everyone else's, but that's simply not true."

"Absolutely. At best, we're doing sub-creation, as Tolkien put it. The value of the arts is not that they bring something outright new into being. By making some new thing, we actually reveal to each other something fundamentally old, something that transcends time altogether. The need for incarnation is important here. It's a Christian term that speaks into every intellectual tradition. We want to see transcendent things incarnated in concrete form. We want to see the truth and the truth has to have a form in order for us to see."

"And it requires that we not only know God's word but that we accept what God says about us and about ultimate reality. Those are the limits within which we work. It seems that we're trying to break free from those limits maybe, in part, because we don't necessarily know what God actually says, but also because we don't want to know."

"Indeed."

"I would like to shift the conversation here to talk about one of the key aspects of your poetry—an aspect I really enjoy—which is relationship. Your poems talk about real people in your life, not simply philosophy."

"I would love to talk about that. One of the drawbacks of being the kind of writer I have been is that people are eager to discuss the philosophical side of things, which I'm happy to talk about..."

"But it's not the whole picture."

"It's really not. What's most important to me is not the philosophy, it's the poems."

"In 'Verse Letter to My Mother,' you describe an interaction in the car with your mother that addresses a struggle that many artists feel. Can you tell us about that?"

"As a teenager, I was declaiming the kind of writer I was going to be and my mother said you really don't have a lot of experience to write anything good yet. At sixteen years of age, I was adolescently upset at her response. I probably had a 'creative' understanding of the arts. I didn't understand that the arts really do come to us from without, that the task of the artist is not to create something new out of whole cloth, it's not mere creativity, it's reception, discernment, invention. It's about incarnation. What my mother was doing in that moment is an ancient practice associated with mothers that goes back to Plato's Republic, if not earlier. Mothers give us the traditional thoughts and stories, the myths and aphorisms and dispositions that shape how we see the world, our worldview, as some people would call it. What mothers seem to do is teach us how to read the world. Fathers tend to show us how to make things, how to cut a figure in the world. Mothers tend to teach us how to interpret that figure. All the way back to when we are in the womb, a mother's heartbeat is actually helping to regulate the child's heartbeat. The little ways in which our mothers move through the world are often the way in which we come to perceive the world. From an early age, because we're in their arms or following them around, what they see is what we see and how they see things is how we see them. We may resent it later on, but it's how we begin to read the world."

"That has profound ramifications on how we value the office of motherhood and the office of fatherhood over and against the many offices we tend to pursue. Part of building a good life, it seems to me, requires valuing the home. Married or unmarried, the habits built in the home are inextricable from what we make."

"Yes, these are the foundational offices, the fundamentals upon which we stand. Poets are tempted to think that we have to be inventive, to surprise readers with a new metaphor or a new image that will strike us anew. I was talking to someone the other day who said rather banally that we can't understand Christ as the good shepherd because we hardly have any shepherds anymore. Well, no, I think we do understand the metaphor."

"Maybe we should have more shepherds."

"I wholeheartedly agree, we should have more shepherds."

"Is there any place for poets to shock us into an awakening?"

"Certainly. I think of Hopkins as one of the great artists in that vein who is trying to shock us with the pied beauty, with the unusual and the grotesque, in order to help us to see the mystery of being and Christ born within it."

"In fiction, Flannery O'Conner would be one of those, too."

"Yes. She's practically my favorite, as far as writers of fiction go. Joyce, maybe Willa Cather, is up there, too. But one of the things I've tried to do is to show a convincing representation of what it means to genuinely live a religious life—with all of its mundane and domestic aspects—in an age like ours. That pursuit has required that I actually live in a way that embraces those forms in light of eternity and for the sake of others. When we live in a trivial and evanescent way that values the self over everyone else, that thinks only of the present moment and of personal satisfaction, we destroy the form of the family and deprive ourselves of the examples that would help us build a life. In my book, The Strangeness of the Good, the entire second half is called Quarantine Notebook, fifteen poems in iambic pentameter that recount the first two months of the Coronavirus. At the time, I was trying to remind us of the permanent forms, to show what Christian family life is like, to show what contemporary life can look like if we actually live with the transcendent things in mind, to represent domestic life and the way in which the eternal, the evanescent, and the historical all interweave around the dinner table. Leon Kass talks about this in The Hungry Soul. The kitchen table is a place where all the necessities and the freedoms of human life tend to convene and circulate."

"Which is why we must value them all the more."

"Yes. I hope we can reclaim these ancient practices, these permanent things that point us to God and give meaning to life. I think we can."

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Ben Palpant is a memoirist, poet, novelist, and non-fiction writer. He is the author of several books, including A Small Cup of Light, Sojourner Songs, and The Stranger. He writes under the inspiration of five star-lit children and two dogs. He and his wife live in the Pacific Northwest.

James Matthew Wilson is the Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature and the founding director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Saint Thomas. The author of thirteen previous books, his collection of poems The Strangeness of the Good (2020) won the Catholic Media Awards prize for poetry. The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture awarded him the Hiett Prize in 2017; Memoria College gave him the Parnassus Prize in 2022; and the Conference on Christianity and Literature twice gave him the Lionel Basney Award. He serves as poet-in-residence of the Benedict XVI Institute, Editor of Colosseum Books, and Poetry Editor of Modern Age magazine.