On “The Strangeness of the Good:” An Interview with James Matthew Wilson
“Of our living poets—to my mind—no greater one exists than James Matthew Wilson.”
—Bradley J. Birzer, The Imaginative Conservative
Interviewer’s Note: James Matthew Wilson is considered by many to be one of the finest poets of his generation. I’m delighted to be able to interview him about his latest poetry collection, The Strangeness of the Good.
RTMS: I want briefly to revisit and expand on your answer to one of Brad Birzer’s interview questions from his interview with you at The Imaginative Conservative, James Matthew Wilson’s “The Strangeness of the Good.” It is a fitting question for a book entitled The Strangeness of the Good: “What do you mean by the good?”
Your answer is, in part, “To affirm the goodness of being is to accept that however strange, however awful in appearance things seem at times, there is an abiding mystery that calls for our steady contemplation and discernment. It calls for that especially when we do not initially feel it.”
Later in that conversation you add, “Attention to being seems to be the fundamental job of the poet.” And you say that there can be an “ascent from being to being itself,” and there is such a thing as a “fullness of being.”
You use the word being in a way that signifies way more than the simple dictionary definition of being as existing; that makes me wonder if I’ve missed a more cosmic definition along the way. I ask because perhaps other readers may wonder the same thing.
How is being always good? How can being have “fullness”? How there is one type or aspect of being that can be ascended from to “being itself”?
JMW: In the Christian tradition, and in its philosophical tradition in particular, being is the principal term of reality. It is the coin in which reality deals, and it accepts none other. God is referred to as Being Itself, by which we mean he is the uncaused cause of all existence who is eternally existent. Many people still take being for granted, despite two thousand years of Christians noticing that God created all things, all beings, ex nihilo, from nothing. To be attentive to being is therefore to be attentive to things in their fundamental existence, in their deepest mystery, their intelligibility, and in their relation to everything that has been created. It also entails attending to them in that first relation: the relative being, which is created, as it is in relation to the one who made it.
Nothing is except being, and things, as Thomas Aquinas tells us, are real to the extent that their being is in act. To speak of a fullness of being therefore can mean a number of things: it could refer to God whose being is self-created and therefore, absolutely speaking, fuller than any other being’s act of existence; and it can also refer to the actuality of this or that particular being. When something is good, it exists with a greater fullness of being. The title of my book is intended to draw attention to goodness as more than a mere moral mystery or a sentimental conviction about something. The subject proposed for our attention is the goodness of being per se: the goodness that abides at the heart of things as created and existing, rather than in this or that passing, more superficial dimension.
RTMS: In a Catholic Humanist podcast, you said “I started as a writer writing short fiction and novels and had what seemed like some very promising success. I was runner-up for GQ magazine’s annual fiction prize when I was still a student in college, and they asked for more work, and I started sending them stories. . . . But something went out of the heart of my desire to write fiction.”
Can you tell more about your change of heart from fiction to poetry?
JMW: It happened gradually, but in two stages. First, while I was still writing prose fiction, I became fascinated with poetic meter. Poetic meter was the one thing a poem obviously did that prose fiction did not do. I began practicing writing lines of pentameter, but I also began reading poetry seriously. The poetry I read was in meter, because that was the strange new thing I wanted to understand and enjoy, but which I could only find in poetry.
Several years later, second, another thing happened. I’d had some grounds for hope that I might succeed as a fiction writer, but the whole occupation had come to feel like an empty exercise. I didn’t enjoy reading prose fiction anymore; or, rather, when I read it, I could feel the inner critic scrutinizing everything for what might be of use to me as a fiction writer. That is an unpleasant way to read! So, I abandoned all that, and decided only to read what I enjoy because I enjoy it. That was poetry. I decided to write poetry, because I enjoyed the challenge. I never expected it to lead to a professional investment, which is something I had assumed impossible in any case. Knowing one will never be, by definition, a professional makes it so much the easier to maintain an amateur’s interest at heart. I never want to lose that. The literary world is a small one, and its rewards are also generally small. It’s not a great place for people who are driven by ambition. Let those persons go cause trouble someplace else, and let those of us who enjoy the arts shepherd them with care and love—and, let me repeat, an amateur spirit!
RTMS: Your transition to poetry has been remarkably successful, especially in a culture that doesn’t value poetry all that much.
Dappled Things published many of your poems in the print magazine over several years. Then, starting in March 2020, the poems in the “Quarantine Notebook” poetry cycle—which makes up Part III of The Strangeness of the Good—were published serially online at Dappled Things’ “Deep Down Things” blog as you wrote them.
In your Introduction to the first of the “Quarantine Notebook” poems, you wrote that you usually revise your work many times, but in these poems, you wanted to “capture the partiality, the uncertainty, the experiential dimension of things as much as, perhaps more than, to record any kind of seasoned reflection.” To me, the poems have benefited from having been freed from what you called “seasoned reflection.” It may be analogous to how a sketched line that comes from an artist’s free gesture often has more appeal than when the line is carefully worked. Looking back from about a year’s perspective, which do you prefer, the careful or the gestural? Or both/and?
JMW: The “Quarantine Notebook” poems came out of me in a different way than anything I had written before, that’s for sure, and yet there remain a great number of similarities to how I write other poems and other works in general. Only weeks before I wrote the first Notebook poem, I published my regular Catholic Thing column, one called, “Eyes to See.” It was an essay about seeing what Christ wishes to communicate to us through natural signs, or rather, it tells the story of discerning those signs, sometimes well, sometimes poorly, and puts the reader through the paces of that act of discernment. I kind of think the poems just continue that basic energy: I was trying to note down the larger conceptual “rhymes” that I was perceiving between my family life, the news, what was happening in the country and in the neighborhood, and what was happening in my heart or in the liturgical calendar of the Church. I think the final poems were always many, many times revised; they are not somehow more raw or less reflective than my other poems. But I was alert to include the incidental moment and to record the moment in that moment’s perspective. Just to offer one example, in the first one, I was pretty grouchy at all the hoarders who cleared all the shelves at our grocery, including fresh foods that would go bad in just a few days. I describe my response to them with the unmediated contempt I felt in the moment; I wanted to get the actual grouchiness and was not concerned with the final justice with which I might judge such people. The poems were often written with help from the family, as my wife is my first reader, and we’d discuss them while in the kitchen or the car with the kids. I recall, for instance, one of the poems culminates, by a funny misunderstanding of my daughter Cecilia’s, with a reference to Alice in Wonderland. Earlier in the poem, I describe the experience of wearing masks to the grocery store. Well, the whole family was out for ice cream, talking about the poem, and one of the kids blurted out, regarding the masks, “like the Cheshire Cat, but in reverse!” That ended up anchoring the final published poem.
RTMS: Two of your poems, “After the Ice Storm” and “Those Days of Weighted Solitude,” are being published in this issue of Dappled Things along with this interview. “After the Ice Storm” is the first poem in The Strangeness of the Good. “Those Days of Weighted Solitude” is the second. Is there a special significance behind their position at the start of the book? What would you like Dappled Things readers to know about these poems? And about how you framed the book in general?
JMW: Yes, my books unfold like sonatas; that is, I introduce themes or melodies, and then have them repeat and develop in waves. “Ice Storm” is an image of What if? What if the world were not created, but just a dull, mute hunk of rock and ice? We had the sensation of what that would feel like, years ago, when an ice storm knocked out the power for days and days and for miles and miles. It is the antithesis, the vision of darkness, from which the rest of the book departs. So also, “Those Days” is a vision of an individual, insecure religious faith, one not yet capable of abiding in God as Being Itself, because feeling too-left-to-itself, too individualistic—and, it occurs to me to add, too full of angst. At some point such interior spiritual dramatics came to seem unreal to me, unimaginable because so far from what the virtue of faith had become, and unimaginable, because Christianity was no longer a mere question of what I might believe, but rather was the question of how my entire family was to live.
RTMS: You are a busy man, an associate professor, a philosopher, a husband, and a father of five, the founder of the Colosseum Institute, and I’m leaving out a lot. Also, you continue to publish many articles and books about poetry and about other topics besides your books of poetry. How do you do it all?
JMW: I’m not sure. Something must be being neglected! It’s not my family, though; we have a great life together. My curse in life is that I am a slow reader. It is compensated for, in part, by my being a fast writer. I guess I’m just at that age where, slow-going reader that I am, I’ve finally managed to read a lot and now have the speed to write out all I want to say. I have Auden’s collected works on my shelf, so I know what the really prolific writers of history look like; I’m far from there, thank goodness.
RTMS: “First Day of School After Christmas” is about a father and his adolescent daughter walking together to her school with a recent psychological distance between them. Others of the poems are populated from time to time with a toddler, and two teenagers with other children of in-between ages. How does being a father and a husband contribute to the theme of this book?
JMW: Although my family is far from always the central theme in my poems, they do give form to each of my books. In Some Permanent Things, the best poems are about the discovery of being a father and husband as de-centering moments. In The Hanging God, the final section of the book shuts “a door against the dark,” meaning, it turns away from the various metaphysically grand themes of the book’s first five parts and turns inward to home life and home terrain, in the sixth. In Strangeness, one of the central concerns was to take a steady look at things from the perspective of middle age, when the first dramas of discovering marriage and fatherhood have long faded, and new challenges and disappointments emerge, including, of course, having to accept that children have a being all their own and are thus like strange satellites that go whizzing where we do not always expect them. T.S. Eliot spoke unironically about the gifts of age, even though, if you were to read the passages where he discusses them, a young person at least would definitely think he was being ironic. Montaigne does much the same: following nature, for Montaigne, involves, among other things, just riding the rhythms of natural decay so that one’s life will not “crash” because it simply, slowly, comes to a settlement of its own. Some of that unveiled wisdom I wished to explore in the book. Life reveals new dimensions as it mellows and matures. It does not get old. When a certain kind of dramatic wonderment passes away, a new sort of depth comes into appearance, and that’s the vision I was trying to describe in this book.
RTMS: On the book flap, I saw that poet, literary biographer, and professor Paul Mariani wrote a laudatory blurb about this collection. And I chanced upon a review you did last January about Mariani’s work. You and he have some things in common; although you are of different generations—he is in his 80s and you are in your 40s—you both are family men and poets of deep Catholic faith with “day jobs” in academia. Can you speak about any ways that Paul Mariani’s poetry and perhaps other writings of his have influenced you? In what ways have you crossed paths with him? In what ways do you think you differ, and in what ways are you similar?
JMW: I have been so grateful for Paul’s support of my work. I met Paul while I was a poetry student at UMASS, Amherst. I met him just before he walked out the door to take his endowed chair at Boston College. My parish priest was always trying to get us together. I never got to take a course with him. But I did get to say hello. At the time, his departure was painful, because I was not sure literature was how I wanted to spend my life. I wanted to serve the Church. He left for Boston College with a similar sense of serving the Church, but the path that was open to him seemed unlikely to be open to me. I could not guess, when we met briefly in the year 2000, that we would eventually become quite close or that he would wind up being one of the great mentors of my life. In 2005, the day after Pope John Paul II died, I met Paul for the second time; I introduced him when he came to give a reading at Notre Dame. Some years after, we hosted him at Villanova. And then, still later, he and I began appearing on stage together, as it were, at various literary conferences. He and I have a lot in common, including that we both think of the vocation of the poet-critic as a distinctive way of life, a good way of life, wherein you are in constant conversation with the literary tradition that has made your life and speech possible. I have been very fortunate in my mentors.
