James Matthew Wilson

Lately it is rare to discover a contemporary poet who engages with the verse of the past not to simplify or upend tradition, but to discover authentic connections. James Matthew Wilson’s chapbook The Violent and the Fallen (Finishing Line Press) is fueled by tradition but not bound to it. Rather, Wilson deftly moves between retail bankers, public pools, and the “darkened panes of auto dealerships” to more eternal concerns. He’s a poet who recognizes we can turn from right to wrong in a single moment, when we encounter “that long caress / Toward which we’re pulled and which we can resist?” In addition to a high level of technical skill and sharp language, Wilson is gifted in finding poetry in family life, and particularly documenting the life of an artist as father. When he ends “A Prayer for Livia Grace” with the line “May I have more of this child, less poetry”, it sounds like the words of a mature writer whose work is worth sharing.

I’m proud to present his articulate thoughts, ranging from the importance of poetic first lines, the state of Catholic poetry and literary criticism, and being a father on the literary page.

1. Could you talk about how The Violent and the Fallen became a chapbook? What led you to bring these poems together and arrange them in this particular order?

My first book, Four Verse Letters, comprises, as the title indicates, four letters in verse to members of my immediate family and, in each, explored dimensions of living and making, of art and nature.  It took me nearly a decade to write, off and on, but I had a sense of the theme of each from the start and had only to wait until I had the power and insight to tackle them.

The poems collected in The Violent and the Fallen were written over roughly the same course of time, longer actually, but with far less conscious attention to the whole they might someday form.  That said, there was always a desire to attend to a concentrated handful of aspects of the human person, and to come to some understanding about them.  I wrote “Their Time Up at State College” when I was myself less than a month out of school; while the most recent of these poems, “A Note for Ecclesiastes,” I wrote as a married father of two, while mourning the death of my mother-in-law and anticipating the birth of my first son, James Augustine.

Taken together, I think the poems tell a story—not my story, but a human story—about the anxieties of youth, the flailing and violent will that grips us and with which we are born, long before we have any idea what it really means or how it ought to be directed.  They document the violence of desire in a number of ways and through several personae, and lead the reader through them to that more mature perspective that often becomes ours through marriage, through responsibility, through the growth of the mind in the contemplation of the permanent things, and above all through the grace of God.

The book may be a collection of lyrics, but it finally does tell a story that follows closely—sometimes very closely—the progress of St. Augustine through his Confessions.  Hence, late in the book, I summarize the lesson of self-discovery that redeems our youth in the intellectual command of maturity, by observing, after a reference to Augustine,

            The past had little purity to lose;

            And we have only discipline and desire.

From desire without to with discipline, that is the story I tried to tell.

2. There’s much to appreciate in this collection, but I particularly love your engaging opening lines. “Their Time Up At State College” begins “It’s hard to get your married brother drunk.” “There’s little room left in this house for poetry” is the opening to “A Prayer For Livia Grace.” How do you craft a poem? Do you have a particular awareness of opening lines?

Long before I started writing poetry, I wrote prose fiction, and though I never started writing a story without having a sense of plot and meaning in mind, I would always spend a long time waiting for that first sentence that would set the voice for the story to crop up.  Narrative voice, even in a third person story, always seemed of consummate importance, as well it might seem, because writers like Hemingway and Raymond Carver had so shaped how I understood fiction writing to work.  I’m told that Ford Maddox Ford once said of his work as an editor that “It only takes one line” to know whether a writer is good or not, so getting the first line right seems rather important—especially if one cannot count on a patient editor or reader.

In poetry, first lines have a distinctive importance, because they set the limit of possibility for the form the poem might take.  When one hears the initial voice of a poem, one has to think also of what meter, what stanza, will be most suitable.  The lines you mention are from a blank verse poem and a sestina respectively, both of which register rhythm primarily in the unit of the sentence rather than in the end-rhymed line.  Attending to the metrical substructure of lines was no doubt essential in giving them what memorability they have.

Nowadays, I tend to let a poem or an image simmer for a long time before I try to start writing, but in times when I have a bit more leisure, I’ll often just start playing with words and find my way into a poem.  In that case, the first line becomes all the more powerful a force in composition, because it effectively knows more about where the poem can possibly go from there than I do.

I’ve never heard a metrical poet not say that he lets the content and voice of the poem determine the form rather than vice versa; I’m no exception there.  That said, often enough I’ve started a poem specifically because I wanted to practice a certain form.  “A Prayer for Livia Grace” is one such instance.  I probably never would have written it, had I not been irritated by the loose and senseless exploitation of the sestina showcased in the work of other contemporary poets.  I just wanted to get the form right, including the hendecasyllabic line length and feminine endings; I wanted to make reparations for the bowdlerization of a coherent set of conventions.  What I ended up writing was no formal exercise, but perhaps my best lyric; it’s certainly the one that has most affected my readers.  Most of what I know is in that poem.

3. One poem in the collection with directly Catholic subject matter is “At Father Mac’s Wake.” And yet I think your entire collection is suffused with a particularly Catholic worldview. This, of course, is an outside interpretation. Do you feel a Catholic sense permeating your poetry?

A poet can furnish his stanzas with all kinds of Catholic ornamentation and still not really be writing a Catholic poem, though, if it is crudely formed, it may be of interest only to those who take, as it were, an anthropologist’s interest in Catholicism.  I believe, as most writers and readers believe, that literature can speak comprehensively about human experience and deepen our understanding of reality in distinctive ways.  It follows the way of imagination, but also the way of form, the penetrating vision of the shape of things that sometimes stands apart from, even above, our knowledge of what things mean.

If formal and imaginative comprehensiveness is a feature of all good literature, then it’s going to be the case that a great deal of poetry attends directly to the sacred, to the mind at prayer, and to the beauty, the life, and the saints of the Church.  I try always to be at prayer, whether walking down the street, eating dinner, or playing with my kids, and so I’m bound to be especially attentive to those explicitly Catholic moments of daily life.

But, generally, it is not in the furniture that my poems are Catholic.  They are thematically so: as T.S. Eliot once observed, a Christian has to be more attentive to the ethical, metaphysical, and spiritual aspects of reality than a non-believer; a Christian has an obligation in this.  And these thematic attentions are only possible if you can at least strive after that universal viewpoint, that vision from the absolute that Catholicism offers in its knowledge of reality.  I presume this is what Flannery O’Connor meant in speaking of the “realism of distances,” a realism that is not enclosed—stunted—by the horizon of the senses or of the temporal.

The poems in The Violent and the Fallen, as I have mentioned, offer a fragmented narrative that can only hold together if you know what sin is, if you know what redemption is, and, further, if you can envision the shape the human drama takes even after we have accepted the reality of an intelligible order of truth and love.  It’s worth saying, though, that other poems I have written, including some of those that will appear in my next book, Some Permanent Things, will be more directly devotional and explicitly Catholic.  It took me a long time to figure out how to write directly about religious truths.

“Father Mac’s Wake,” incidentally, was inspired by the work of another native Michigander—the great poet L.E. Sissman.  His flat, classical, but slightly confessional style provided a way for me to talk about my own life as a Catholic.  My poem finds perhaps more thematic completion at the end than would a Sissman poem, but I tried to honor his practice of concealing the influence of theme on a poem’s form by admitting as much significant, incidental detail as I could, for instance those regarding the parish church that the real Father Mac founded:

       The Church he built

In the brute modern style of a time

When everyone knew the face of Pius XII

And Paul VI was newly vilified,

Projected a wall of stained glass, with Christ,

Scientist, scholar, artist, engineer

Radiant in mosaic.  The rising light

Would hit upon the cut shards, beaming inward

A sanctified view of American progress

Upon the sanctuary.  

4. One of the writers to blurb this collection--Dana Gioia--recently published an essay, “The Catholic WriterToday,” which has since been reprinted as a single edition by Wiseblood Books. I consider Gioia's essay to be essential reading for Catholic literary critics, and think it will spur some much needed debate and reflection. What is your reaction to this essay?

I count it one of the greatest honors I have been accorded that Dana asked me to criticize drafts of that essay while it was in composition.  Apparently, that was not enough for me, because I also published a letter in First Things responding to it.  It is a great essay, one that does not call for some kind of unionization of Catholic writers, but merely observes that writers and readers alike are seriously impoverished by a literary landscape where Catholic authors do not offer the riches of their voice, and where readers can be reasonably well read and not encounter any of the great themes Catholicism makes possible in good literature.

As a literary critic, I find the way literature is written and discussed in our day to be barbaric.  “Advanced” writing is almost invariably ugly and nihilistic, as it perhaps inevitably must be if its writers can trust in neither the integrity of story-telling to get at the truth nor of artistic form to manifest beauty.  Most critics corroborate this doubt by depredating art for the advancement of one form of identity politics or another; they act as if to say “all literature has designs on its reader” were all that needed to be said, and to say it is to liberate us.  The point was never even in question: of course literature has designs on us.  What we need to know is whether those designs will bring us into the presence of truth and beauty or not.  But a critic needs to know what truth and beauty are in order to make that judgment.

Truth and beauty are real whether one believes in them or not, of course, but sophistication in our day seems to consist merely in the violent denial of these things, a petulant irritation at their persistence despite our all being too smart to believe in them.  Dana’s call is primarily one that asks us to accept that, if a morbid vacuity is going to remain for the time being the dominant sensibility of artists and writers, a profound metaphysical realism and penetrating Christian vision ought also to be afforded a place.

Dana was a good person to write this essay.  I first encountered his work because he was one of the handful of contemporary poets who wrote—and wrote well—in real verse.  From the time I began reading poetry, I was primarily interested in what it could do that prose fiction could not—namely it was speech measured, speech rhymed, speech with all the subtlety and variability of the idiomatic, but also speech that could rise up to song at the turn of a phrase.  Dana’s poems exemplified this to me, and helped teach me the craft.  Their influence had nothing to do with religion—but with art.  In retrospect, it seems logical that a poet who is exemplary in the practice of his craft should be one who already believes that formal accomplishment can reveal something deeper than the order of speech.  Ordered speech can reveal the order of things.  It attunes us to the Logos.

5. You're written for Dappled Things about the Catholic literary imagination as it relates to Modernist poetry, and have examined that lineage as it continues to the present. Who do you consider to be some of the essential Catholic poets in recent memory? 

I suppose I have already put my two-cents in for Dana’s work.  In my work as a critic, I have spent many hours, indeed many months at a time, studying the brilliant poems of Helen Pinkerton.  I think a great deal of the work of Bill Baer, Frederick Turner, the late John Finlay, and Ned Balbo, as well; their work is suffused with Catholicism, though in very various ways.  My book The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry, which will follow Dana’s essay in the Wiseblood series, will at least provide short discussions of their work.

That said, my interest in poetry is rooted in the convictions of craft at least as much as it is in any kind of visionary or moral concerns.  Other Catholic poets of undeniable talent, such as Franz Wright, Paul Mariani, and David Craig, mean a great deal to me.  In some ways, though, they have a different sense of what the art of poetry essentially does than I have; it took me longer to come round to some aspects of their work—with the exception of Wright, whose poems held me with a fixed stare from the moment I first opened Ill Lit.

One of the greatest poets of our day is, of course, not a Catholic but an Anglo-Catholic: David Middleton.  His work mines the regional traditions of the Fugitives, but with a clearer eye for quotidian life, including religious life, and with a far less belabored, but still intense, style.

6. One of my favorite poems in your new collection is "A Prayer for Livia Grace," a sestina about fatherhood. I think the sestina is a particularly apt form for such a subject: being a father means living in a world of recursive thoughts, where actions need to constantly reconsidered. Fatherhood also contributes to the poetic tension of "At The Public Pool."

How has being a father affected your poetry?

Alasdair MacIntyre once said that all politics begins with children.  We only know things, really know them, when we know what they are for, what their purpose is.  If goodness were not a reality present in things, then the universe would be utterly opaque to us.  Getting married and having children bore this in to me with immense force.  A father’s life is immanently ordered to the good that is his children; they make visible the stakes of our choices and actions in a way little else can.  “Prayer” satirizes those who think of their lives as private, self-contained little monads whose only good is their own interior perfection.  Life teaches us that our own self-fulfillment is rooted in living for another.  We are most ourselves in giving ourselves away.  Blessed Pope John Paul II taught this in his theology of the body: down to the very shaping of our bodies we can only discover who we are in discovering how we are ordered to another, as a man is to a woman.  Children are proof positive of that fact.  “Prayer” goes on to dramatize how difficult it is to find oneself so de-centered, but also how joyful:

Now she’s born, we have little time for liquor

And my desk’s crammed in a corner of the office,

My papers lost beneath the brighter language

Of cardboard colored alphabets for my daughter.

I’m sure I wrote a different kind of poetry

When all my hours were filled though I was childless.

“Public Pool” complicates that picture.  Being a father and a husband may help make visible the always present, but invisible, meaning of our natures, but just because you know something does not mean you can live it out.  The spirit may be willing, but the flesh is weak.  And that weakness, “Pool” tries to show, can drag us down into the depths.  The poem is about a father at a pool with his little girl.  She has fallen face-down into the water and become terrified.  He, meanwhile, has let his eyes linger on the beautiful body of a lifeguard.  That sensation of lust, like the sensation of drowning, is one that pulls us toward death.  The poem ends,

    Did she, a moment, feel that long caress

Toward which we’re pulled and which we can resist?

    The tanned, bikinied lifeguard stared at me,

     The soft dark of her thigh another lure

Into another kind of fatality.

    I clutched my daughter, but my eyes searched her,

    And dreaded what, a moment, I could wish.

A poem like that only makes sense if you understand what sin really is.

7. What critical or creative projects are you working on now?

The Violent and the Fallen is just out—it hasn’t even been reviewed yet—but I am preparing my next collection of poems and also the short critical book I mentioned, both for Wiseblood books.

My main focus at present is on a work of philosophy and cultural criticism called, The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition.  That is a book that I hope will give people in our age, so despoiled by a kind of consumer’s hell of relativism, the confidence to believe in reality in all its richness and heights.  Whether we like it or not, truth, goodness, and beauty are the terms that govern our lives, but if we’re racked with doubt day-in-day-out that those terms really signify something, then we come to think reality is one thing—something sorry, poor, and bare—and our experience, however rich it feels, something else, something that doesn’t “count” as real.  This book will offer an account of these terms that, I hope, will help us all to reground our thinking in that trinity of transcendental properties of being—and to good effect.

***

James Matthew Wilson is the author of two chapbooks of poems, Four Verse Letters (Steubenville, 2010) and The Violent and the Fallen (Finishing Line, 2013), of Timothy Steele: A Critical Introduction (Story Line Press, 2012), and of many poems, essays, articles, and reviews.  This year will see the publication of his first full length collection of poetry, Some Permanent Things (Wiseblood, 2014) and of another small monograph, The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry (Wiseblood, 2014).  An award-winning scholar of philosophical-theology and literature, he is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University and lives in the village of Berwyn, Pennsylvania, with his wife and children.