de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  0:00  
This is Episode 40 of Ethics and Culture Cast from the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture.

Welcome to Episode 40 of ethics and culture cast from Notre Dame's de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. I'm Ken Hallenius the communications specialist at the center. In this episode, we chat with Villanova University professor and poet, James Matthew Wilson. He was with us on campus as part of our 20th annual fall conference on friendship. In our conversation, we talk about the real work of writing poetry, how to listen to the muse, and why each of us should learn to write a bit of poetry ourselves. Let's sit down for this delightful conversation.

Well, James Matthew Wilson, thank you so much for being with us. 

Jame Matthew Wilson  1:14  
Thanks for having me, Ken. 

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  1:15  
And thanks for coming to the fall conference. You know you're going to be in conversation with Whit Stillman. Tell me about that.

Jame Matthew Wilson  1:23  
Well, I'm looking forward to finding out what it's going to be. For a small but wise audience Whit Stillman is one of the great filmmakers of the last 50 years. And, and so I, like a lot of people, I'm very excited to find out what goes into his making of a film. He's made five films and one TV show and you know, the artistry of each of them is so impressive and so unusual that surely a revelation is at hand. We're going to learn what it what it takes to make a great film in an age that's known mostly for Marvel superheroes.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  2:08  
Right? Well, tell us a little bit about your own background. You know where did you grow up? Where did you go to school, these sort of things.

Jame Matthew Wilson  2:16  
So here we are sitting at Notre Dame and I'm from an old Hoosier family. I had an ancestor who studied here at Notre Dame when it was a school for boys and a great grandfather who was not college educated. In fact, he was at one point a hobo who hopped trains to go work construction out west. And eventually earned, by correspondence, an engineering degree. And went on to found a major construction company that amongst other things, built the Notre Dame retreat house. And when I say he built it, I don't mean Notre Dame contracted with this company to build it. What I mean is he showed up with a crew one day and they just put it up without – just as an act of charity. So the Midwest is deep in my veins, and Midwestern Catholicism. But, I myself grew up in East Lansing, before of course, coming here for graduate school. 

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  2:26  
Cool. And so you came for graduate school. What did you study?

Jame Matthew Wilson  3:18  
So I studied English literature, but in the best, that is to say, most unusual way possible. I had virtually nobody working with me on my dissertation who had a degree in literature. My dissertation director was the great poet and philosophical theologian, Kevin Hart, who was here with an endowed chair for several years. And I was also, I'm proud to say, I was one of Ralph McInerney's last students. And so he was some, he was mostly there just for the spirit of kinship, but it was, it was very rewarding to even have that.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  3:55  
Wow. So now what do you do as your day job?

Jame Matthew Wilson  3:59  
So I teach in a program called humanities and Augustinian traditions at Villanova University, and it's an interdisciplinary liberal arts program, where the curriculum is designed to ask and answer, every big human question that you would need to know the answer to in order to live and to die well. So we have classes called Person, God, Society, World, everything's covered. And the it's, in some respects, it resembles a program like the Program of Liberal Studies or other Great Books programs in that we try to read widely and without respect to disciplines within the Western tradition. But it does something that I think is especially invaluable. We begin with the argument that most of the most important questions that a person needs to ask and answer, are receiving very poor answers in our day. And some deeper, richer and better account of those answers or response to those questions needs to be offered. And so we genuinely begin with the current status of an argument, and then dive deep into the tradition to find out what resources might have to help us come to arrive at a more satisfactory account of what it means to be human or the nature of God or what it means to be a good citizen.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  5:34  
And then doing the syntopical reading in the tradition across... 

Jame Matthew Wilson  5:38  
Indeed, yes. 

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  5:41  
Now you mentioned poetry. And you are well known, of course, you're a member of Catholic Twitter, which I think is where, you know, one of the places where I encounter you quite regularly. And I know you as a poet. I know you as somebody who's releasing interesting Catholic poetry that is inspiring. How did you get into poetry at all?

Jame Matthew Wilson  6:04  
Well, from a very early age, I knew I wanted to be a writer. So gosh, I was probably 15 years old and I was writing an essay for an advanced English class just on Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew." And the very experience of crafting sentences to make an argument felt really constant. There was something perfect about this activity of just figuring out the way in which words have to stand in relationship to one another to make to make meaning. And so I decided while writing some, no doubt, dry and not very interesting, academic essay, that this is what I wanted to do, but I wasn't quite sure I knew I wanted to write but I wasn't sure what kind of writing I wanted to do. So naturally, but perhaps inevitably, I assumed I'll become a novelist. So I began writing short stories as a teenager, and went to the University of Michigan for my undergraduate degree purely because they had a place called the Hopwood Room, which was just a room on campus that administered series of creative writing awards, and was a place where faculty and other writers would just gather and talk about literature. So during those years, I continued to write fiction and stories. And then for novels, I wrote four novels I should say before, one day, I realized that I had just totally lost all desire to write fiction. And the reason was, that I had fallen in love with this crafting of sentences. But writing prose fiction was beginning to feel like a real professional gesture to me. So this was probably when I was 23, 24. And when that thought occurred to me, I remembered an experience I'd had some years earlier sitting in a poetry class at the University of Michigan, where the professor was trying his best to explain to us what iambic pentameter meant. You know, everybody will say, yes, Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter, but they have no idea what that means. So the professor was trying to break through our thick cranial ignorance just a bit. And I don't know how far he got in his explanation of iambic pentameter before I just stopped listening altogether because my head was bowed down, trying to write a single line in pentameter. And it took me the whole rest of the class to do it. "A sonnet every day for five long years." Not a very good line of pentameter, but a line of pentameter 

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  8:46  
And a truth. 

James Matthew Wilson  9:18  
And a truth! And I, I thought, this, this is what I want to do with my life. And so I went home that night and after dinner, sat down with that one line and wrote 13 more, and I had a sonnet. And then I didn't write a sonnet every day for five long years. But I did write a sonnet every day for a week. And each one took me about five hours to write. And it was the hardest, most grueling, but most exhilarating thing I had done. 

So some years later, when I realized I had lost the love for the kind of writing I was doing, I remembered the kind of ecstasy of that writing. And then I looked around me and I realized that when I was reading for pleasure, I was only reading poems been a long time since I picked up a novel just for the joy of it. And so I thought, This is what I'm going to do, and I had an added bonus to it. If you're a fiction writer, if you publish novels, you actually stand a scintilla of a chance of making a living at it. That doesn't happen for poets. So I thought I will always do this for the love of it because there's no other reward. And so, that's been kind of true. It's always been a joy for its for its own sake. I'll add one more sort of PostScript to this, which was, it took me five hours to write each of those sonnets. But for those of you listening, for whom that's that sounds like an occasion of despair, don't despair, it gets easier. It's kind of like riding a bicycle. And, and in fact, to I, when I was engaged to be married, I had promised my wife that I would, compose a poem to be included with the little gifts we had for guests at our wedding reception, and two days before our wedding and no such poem had arrived. And my wife was, or my then fiance, was, kept calling me on the phone and saying, "Can we have a poem now please?" And, and it just, it hadn't come. And then, but two days before the wedding, I'd spent the first night in the home that was about to become our home when we were married. And I woke up from the night's sleep early in the morning, and I had already in my head, the lines, "Though neither young or old. They're full of wine. Not blind, exactly, though my sight was poor, I crouched a beggar waiting for a sign so obvious the dead could not ignore." I just said, Oh good. In my dreams, I just wrote the first quatrain of a sonnet. So I went out to the living room and pulled up the notebook and copied that down and I just continued, "A flaneur so much as possible in a despoiled city such as this. Amid the listless crowd I casually stroll in search of one stare, not quite purposeless. A bibliographic recluse in a swoon, I mused what word could make me close my book, some old west drunk passed out by the spitoon what patient face could cure me with a look. Then you came sign, stare, cure and word and brought a new life where none was, but one was sought." And I just thought it gets easier--Went back to bed.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  12:02  
How long have you been married?

Jame Matthew Wilson  12:04  
So 14 years

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  12:06  
That's glorious. So one longer than a sonnet.

Jame Matthew Wilson  12:11  
That's right. We will pass out of a sonnet phase. We will be going for epic next. Yeah.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  12:18  
I hope you achieve it. So it's interesting, the language you use to describe that, of course, is evocative of the muse. The muse had not deigned to visit you, until it was needed. 

Jame Matthew Wilson  12:31  
Yes, 

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  12:32  
Absolutely, right at the last moment? Where does the inspiration come from?

Jame Matthew Wilson  12:37  
Well, there are many muses. One of them is deadlines.

I though I certainly couldn't feed my family on on what I earned from poetry, one of the great pleasures of the last couple years has been writing poems on commission. So this last year, I was commissioned to write a poem, for instance, to celebrate St. Philip Neri, to write a hymn to St. Philip Neri. Cardinal Newman, St. John Henry Newman, wrote some wonderful poems about Philip Neri. They're great poems, but they don't really work well, as hymns and so I wrote...

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  13:14  
Come on, he has one hymn that's really good.

Jame Matthew Wilson  13:16  
Yeah, more than one good hymn

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  13:20  
Just not the not the Philip Neri one

James Matthew Wilson  13:21  
That's right, yes. So, so and that I just I wrote two poems for the first issue of Bishop Robert Barron's new magazine, "Evangelization and Culture." And I was asked months in advance to write just one poem. And, and so the day before the deadline, I said, I'm just gonna sit around and read the poems I think I need to read in order to get inspired the right way for what I think I might want to do for this magazine. And I did, and the poems came out, and I made the deadline, with hours to spare, no less. So that's a big muse.

The best account of what inventive writing looks like, I do believe, is T.S. Eliot's very pretentious early essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." You know, Eliot was always kind of embarrassed about the sort of impertinent tone of that essay in his older years anyhow. And it's an essay that makes a lot of assertions and no supporting argument. But I think it's absolutely right, in its account of how the creative process really works. And the way he in which he describes it is that that, you simply, the mind simply acquires a series of unrelated fragments, and they just keep accumulating from elsewhere, until they reach such a pitch or depth that they begin to catalyze with one another, and to form a unity and then it's time to start writing a poem. So I'm, sort of like being a, writing poetry is a little bit like being a junk collector. And then you accumulate things until it's time to make something new out of all the junk.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  15:07  
Yeah. And you've sat with that and it's been percolating and fermenting.

James Matthew Wilson  15:11  
Exactly, yeah, yeah. And there's very little, as Eliot puts it there's very little of the poet in it. The poet's a little bit of filiated platinum that just causes the catalyst to begin, he doesn't actually add much himself.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  15:23  
Wow. Which is of course, even the phraseology is itself poetry. 

James Matthew Wilson  15:26  
Yes. 

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  15:28  
Unfair. Unfair. What is the relationship of your poetry to your day job? I mean, you say you're not feeding the family based on this. You may get a steak dinner every now and then.

James Matthew Wilson  15:39  
So I had these great aspirations. Oh, gosh, well, so I mentioned how I didn't study with English professors. I never wanted to be an English professor. My interest in literature came from its capacity to be a good in itself that could also change your life. And so the way in which I approach literature was always as an important element in a whole way of life. In fact, what I was probably reaching after was the ancient conception of philosophy or the medieval conception of theology, which was that contemplation, every contemplative act is not something you do that stands apart from your life, but is your life. Is the best aspect of your life. 

So, when I came to Villanova, it was primarily with the expectation that I would finally have a chance to teach not just literature, but literature fully integrated with philosophy and theology, so that the whole of the intellectual life really was just a way of life. And that's exactly how it has been. When I came however, I thought the one thing that I'm saying goodbye to that I had loved very dearly, was being primarily a poet and teaching the writing of poetry. But actually, it was only after I came to Villanova that my reputation as a poet began to grow. And with good reason because all the poetry I'd written before, that was pretty bad. And and so one day, my chairman said, How are you not teaching a class in the art of verse? And I said, because you haven't asked me to do it. 

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  17:25  
But I will take that as an ask.

James Matthew Wilson  17:27  
And I love it because I have I would have no interest in poetry as opposed to say prose fiction if it weren't for meter and rhyme because that's what poetry does that nothing else in the world does. So I teach my students the grammar of meter and the grammar of rhyme. You do not seduce a lot of students to come into your class by saying, "This is a course in grammar." But I can't help it. That's just what it is. To be, you wouldn't leave college illiterate and capable of writing essay so you're not fully literate if you can't also write a good line of pentameter. You'll need it someday to propose to your wife perhaps or for the wedding reception. 

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  18:07  
That's what you sell them on, right there. 

James Matthew Wilson  18:08  
That's exactly right. Do you want to get married? Try poetry.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  18:13  
It's worked for literally centuries.

James Matthew Wilson  18:16  
True. It's one of them. Actually. Clearly, it's like Original Sin, it's clearly demonstrated. And so we, we do the hard grinding grammatical work of mastering meter and the poetic forms. But the way in which I teach that is that this really is an activity within the context of our lives as rational beings, rational animals as contemplative creatures. And so that a lot of the students will tell me that it was the most useful class they took at Villanova, because they're used to really getting these great liberal arts classes where they're thinking about big ideas. And we talked about this big ideas in the class. And then, but we take those big ideas and in the end, there's something that stands apart from the mind and stands apart from us a poem that's been made.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  19:06  
A created thing. 

James Matthew Wilson  19:07  
Yes. And there's, that's a deeply satisfying, that's deeply satisfying for everybody. Right? 

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  19:13  
So what have you published of late?

James Matthew Wilson  19:16  
So, I had a, I had a kind of ridiculous year, in a happy way. So in 2014, I published my first full length collection of poems called "Some Permanent Things." But the poems turned out to be not as permanent as they thought they were. There are a lot of defects of workmanship and actually a sloppy use of rhyme that I thoroughly deprecate to my students, but I wasn't living up to my own example in my work. So I rewrote that book and expanded it, adding a final sequence called the "Christmas Preface" to it. With Christmas coming up, you might consider a gift of "Some Permanent Things" to someone you love.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  19:58  
This one is permanent, we promise.

James Matthew Wilson  19:59  
Yeah, and I will not make any further changes I promise you.

One of the reviewers said, "Yeah, his first 'Some Permanent Things' was carved in wood, but now they're made of stone," which is true. And so that book was released actually right before Christmas last year. And right after my second full length book of poems called "The Hanging God," which is a book of which I'm very proud. It consists of, it has a sonnet sequence called "Wiped out", which is sort of a story of sin, lust and depredation--interior wastelands. And and it's mirrored in the book by a stations of the cross that's in the meter of Jacopone da Todi's "Stabat Mater", which everybody has sung.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  20:51  
Of course, of course, 

James Matthew Wilson  20:51  
Yeah, and and then there are other poems that weave in and out of the book around those two longer sequences. Right around the time that "The Hanging God" was published, I was asked by the St. Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Liturgy of the Archdiocese of San Francisco to write a poem commemorating another project that they had commissioned, which was a musical setting of the Mass by the great composer Frank La Rocca. His Mass is called the "Mass of the Americas." So I was, so I flew out to San Francisco and prayed the Mass on the feast of the Immaculate Conception

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  21:34  
Our national feast. 

Jame Matthew Wilson  21:35  
Yes. And then, and then returned home. And I had told them that I wasn't just going to write a poem that I knew something was coming and in fact, I already knew the title of the poem. It was going to be "The River of the Immaculate Conception." And I mentioned earlier the fermentation, the slow distillation of a poem. With this commission, there were stray thoughts that had been in my mind for 10 or more years that finally, I knew it was time for them to come out into a poem. And so I wrote a long seven part poem that consists of two poems on the nature of the liturgy, two poems meditating on what it means to live in a place, and then three narrative poems that tell the lives of saints: St. Juan Diego and the revelation of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which is told in a simple ballad that mirrors the beautiful simplicity of the Aztec language, text for on which I drew. A long narrative poem, at the heart of the poem, that's about the Mississippi River which is at the heart of our country. So a long narrative poem on Father Marquette and his journey down the Mississippi. And then, and then the third saint's life is of Saint Elizabeth Seton, which, in one respect is the one I'm most proud of because it's the story of Elizabeth Seton in her her young years as a distinguished lady in New York society and then her conversion. And it's, it's told in a variant ballad form that's, that comes out of the 19th century. So it's very Victorian. And the style, the right, the voice of the poem, as it were, is told like a Jane Austen novel.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  23:26  
How Whit Stillman-esque, you know.

James Matthew Wilson  23:28  
That's exactly right.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  23:30  
Well, would you favor us with a reading?

James Matthew Wilson  23:33  
Sure. So, as I said, the poem, "The River of the Immaculate Conception" has seven parts. And, and though the poem as a whole traces the whole history of Catholicism in North America and in fact, it's dedicated to the memory of the great historian Kevin Starr, who was in the midst of writing a multi-volume history of Catholicism in North America when he was, when he died unexpectedly. Of course who expects to die, but not I. But I tried to do justice to his really global vision of what it means for America to--in a very profound way--to be a Catholic country. But the poem also follows Frank La Rocca's Mass and alludes to it at various points. And so the final part, which is a meditation on what it means to speak, to speak of poetry, to speak of music, to speak about the Mass, takes its title from one of the hymns in La Rocca's Mass. So it's Part Seven it's called "hasten to aid thy fallen people" appropriate for Our Lady of Guadalupe. 

"How does one make a song of holiness? / Or speak of music without spoiling it? / They both see more than our tongues can confess / And, born above, in our world do not fit. / What's more, those who ascend with them / Are closed in on themselves, struck dumb, / And all in ecstasy that they have heard / Seems flailing, foolish in a fallen word. 

But every rising strain must strain indeed / To lend the form to what in truth is light, / And manifest peace as if it's a deed / And give transcendence some arc of a flight. / The purity of every saint / Will be daubed on with sloppy paint, / And what no thought may comprehend or say / Must be taught in the staging of a play. 

The gift of form, because so fascinating, / As we bend down to work with knife or ruler, / Reminds us that beyond it's always waiting / Some piercing light. Consider how the jeweler / Makes every cut upon a stone / For its sake but not that alone, / His patient labor wasted if a line / Does not refract and multiply and shine. 

And, any humble implement may serve / To figure-forth and yet conceal that light, / So that high thought is felt upon each nerve / And mystery is given to our site. / Just this way things are lifted up: / A chalice rot from wooden cup; / A little dust and water, mixed to clay, / Are molded into birds that fly away. 

The Mass is first His Earth and sacrifice, / But also taste of peace and heaven's throne, / The gift that leaves behind all thought of price / Yet where, no less, we raise a plangent groan, / For at its finish we are sent / Into the world both dark and bent / That bearing out the Virgin's hastening aid / From ruined choirs some good may be remade."

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  26:50  
Amen. Wow. I... that...

James Matthew Wilson  26:58  
I just rendered Ken Hallenius speechless.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  27:02  
Beautiful. Wow. When is this volume available?

James Matthew Wilson  27:07  
So I, a week from today [ed. note: November 16, 2019], I will be in Washington DC where Archbishop Cordileone of San Francisco will say in the extraordinary form, the Mass of the Americas at the National Basilica of the Immaculate Conception. So I'm going to hear this Mass and pray it for the second time, which I cannot wait for it in a certain way, even in a better way. Just it's going to be really quite marvelous. And then the day will be followed the Benedict XVI Institute has arranged the day-long conference on Catholicism and the arts. And so Frank and I will be interviewed together at the Catholic University of America, and at the conclusion of the day's events, so at 6:30 next Saturday, if you're not watching football, here's something you could do. "The River the Immaculate Conception" will be officially launched.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  27:54  
Wonderful. Well, James Matthew Wilson, welcome back to Notre Dame. 

James Matthew Wilson  27:59  
Thank you. 

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  27:59  
Thank you much for being with us. Thank you for sharing your poetry. Thank you for listening to the muse. 

James Matthew Wilson  28:06  
Thanks, Ken.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  28:12  
Thank you to James Matthew Wilson. You will find links to books of his poetry and to the video of his fall conference conversation with director Whit Stillman in the show notes. Subscribe to Ethics and Culture Cast so that you can always get the latest episodes by visiting ethicscenter.nd.edu/podcast. We would love your feedback. Please, review the show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcasts and email your suggestions to cecpodcast@nd.edu. Our theme music is "I Dunno" by grapes, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license We'll see you next time on ethics and culture cast. Until then, make good decisions.

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