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."
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