Poetica: "Obsessed" by James Matthew Wilson

Note from the editor: Shadowlands Dispatch is pleased to announce Poetica, our monthly poetry column! Each month, we will feature a poem and its author along with an accompanying analysis. This may be either a new poem by a current poet with an interview, or one already in print that we believe our readers would benefit from reading and reflecting upon.

For our inaugural column, we are honored to feature Dr. James Matthew Wilson, an accomplished poet, essayist, and Founding Director of the M.F.A. in Creative Writing program at the University of St. Thomas, Houston. Read on for his new poem, “Obsessed,” followed by a written interview with Dr. Wilson. There, he explains its inspiration, his technique and craft, and how poetry can re-enchant the world by revealing God’s order in the cosmos. Finally, don’t miss a concluding brief analysis of “Obsessed” from Editor-in-Chief Megan Rials.

Without further ado, Shadowlands Dispatch is pleased to present “Obsessed” by James Matthew Wilson:

“Obsessed”

On Reading the 2024 Lake Superior State University Banished Words List

    Before the news was all catastrophes,

We pricked our ears each year and waited for

The annual list of vulgar, hackneyed words.

From “hack,” to “impact” as a verb, of course,

“End of the day” (Oh, yes, it is “cringe-worthy”),

And down around the finish — “wait for it” —

The newsprint serves up one more shameful item.

We may be interested, but not “obsessed.”

   I’ve noticed this one, how it crept in slowly,

Slithering like the serpent in the garden.

One day it was the righteous accusation

Of those who were — “shocked, shocked” (that must have made

The list another year) — at sordid vices.

As in, I mean, when someone says of someone

That he behaves immorally or just

In some way that seems gross, and at such judgment

The table silences, the air grows thick,

And she — whoever she is — whose breast swells

And makes reply, not for herself (no, never),

But on behalf of some grand faceless class

That cannot speak because it’s “marginalized,”

She says, voice rising with each syllable,

“Why are you so obsessed with people’s lives?

What is it in your own that you’re repressing?”

She really “slays,” and in “iconic” fashion!

   Now, everyone’s obsessed who shows an interest,

However modest, that lasts for a minute.

You search the internet a couple times

For articles on Nazi submarines,

Victorian houses, gangland shootings, stink bugs,

Or how to make alfredo sauce, and, lo,

By your own self-description, you’re “obsessed.”

    But, just the other day, my little boy,

At breakfast, told me how he dreams and dreams

Again of wandering through the lurching hallways

At school, those long, extending passages,

Vanishing farther with his every step,

Forest green lockers shut up like a trap,

And tube-bulbs flickering above his head.

He’s looking for his class, his classmates, but

He can’t move anywhere, ask anyone.

    And there, I see my own repeated dream.

I’m set to teach a class. It’s my first day.

I wander through the long and bright-lit halls,

The white walls and beige carpet fresh and hopeful,

But every passageway runs to another,

And angles left, then right, against my shoulders,

So that they’re never straight, but never turn.

Tucked in more shaded corridors, I find

Great stairwells with dark metal railings, old

It seems — so, these were here? — but new to me.

They only lead however to half-floors

Between the floors I’m trying to reach, I need

To reach. I need. Where is the room I need?

    That’s how the dream ends, but it doesn’t end.

How could it end, this anxious endlessness,

Which, yes, might hide itself for months or years,

But then comes back immuring me in sleep?

    No wonder, in our waking voice, we speak

The same small set of phonemes far too often.

No wonder we’re obsessed with saying we’re

Obsessed, until to say that we’re obsessed

Becomes itself a kind of dispossession,

The word, from over-usage, drained of meaning.

And when we find ourselves in that strange dream,

Once more, we are forbidden by desire

Not to be left behind, and also by

An annual survey, and the painful thought

That, at our speech, some eye and chin recoil,

To use the only word we know that might

Do justice to the length of our fixations.

            — James Matthew Wilson

Shadowlands Dispatch interview with James Matthew Wilson

Shadowlands Dispatch: For our readers unfamiliar with your work, tell us a bit about your background: your education, what you teach, and what you’ve written in the past (especially the work you’re most proud of and feel represents you best).

James Matthew Wilson: Three years ago, I co-founded and began directing, at the University of Saint Thomas, the first MFA program in creative writing in the world that takes the Catholic intellectual and literary tradition as its formative principle. Our aim is to restore to the center of literary culture a sense of both the integrity of the beautiful work and also the intrinsic spiritual horizon proper to works of art. We want to help reestablish an artistic culture at once serious about and concerned with the well-made thing and also attentive to the way every individual good thing speaks of, or at least intimates, a larger order. Day to day, then, I get to help apprentice a new generation of writers.

The program comes out of an early intuition I had. As a student at the University of Michigan, two decades and more ago, my fellow writers and I agreed on two things — and two things alone. Craft matters, first of all, and, second, works of art can change your life. Why those two things should be true we didn’t know. I’ve spent the better part of the time since trying to explain it to myself. But, in any case, those are the ideal beginning principles for any artist. They ensure that, on the one hand, you will not allow yourself to be sloppy and, on the other, that you also will not consider form an absolute and final end, simply because form always re-echoes beyond itself. I later studied at Notre Dame, and while my directed studies didn’t help me as much as I wish they had, the experience of having for friends and my daily company philosophers and theologians helped me gain some of the orientation and sense of how the Church’s tradition, in philosophy and theology, gives a satisfying and articulate account of the world writ large and, within that, the particular kind of knowledge that aesthetic form constitutes.

I’ll mention three of my works in passing that I think give a clear picture of what I have been trying to do as a writer. First, my book, The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition is my attempt to provide a thorough answer to the puzzle introduced a moment ago. My book-length poem The River of the Immaculate Conception, I hope anyway, offers an account of American history and culture from the perspective of its Catholic origins. It is a poetic sequence that includes both lyric and narrative poems and, I think, draws story and prayer, history and liturgy, into communion with one another. Finally, in my book The Strangeness of the Good, the second half of that book comprises a single long poem in fifteen parts, called “Quarantine Notebook.” Few of us really want to spend any more time thinking about the debacle of the last three years. But, when the quarantine first went into effect in March 2020, I decided to document in blank verse the personal and the public dimensions of those early months. I wanted to give permanent form to events that were passing so swiftly; I wanted to do so in a way that would help those enduring the hour along with me to make sense of it all. The poem became, I think, a historical epic of sorts akin to Wordsworth’s Prelude as an attempt to interpret the events and the spirit of an age.

SD: Tell us about your development as a poet — what were your pivotal moments of development (during your education and during the practice of your craft) and how did they shape you? What are your abiding themes and concerns as a poet and a writer more broadly?

James Matthew Wilson: I began writing with the intent to be a short-story writer and novelist. I got quite far down that path before I realized, one morning, that all my joy was in counting syllables to make metrical feet and in searching out sounds to make rhymes. Rhyme and meter are the two things that poetry has that prose fiction, by definition, does not, but those two things, which sound so trivial to most of us, struck me as gateways to mystery.

Once I wrote my first line of iambic pentameter, I never looked back. I realized just by writing verses in that manner, I was coming to participate in a conversation that goes back to Homer and the Psalmists and continues across our history and into the present. It may sometimes sound like cant to speak of art and culture as a “conversation,” but in one sense it most certainly is. When you apprentice yourself to a craft, you become the heir of all that has come before you, you enter into commerce with it, you receive it with reverence, but also with the impetuous possibility of drawing on the conventions of the old in order to rearrange them, however slightly, and make something new.

In my work, I attend to the way being itself begets order. Poetry is a form of writing in verse, in meter and sometimes rhyme, that takes the wild stuff of speech and deepens it by giving it order. But it is also a means of our becoming perceptive of the order of the real as such. The way the everyday stuff of the world rhymes with the interior concerns of our soul or the transcendent order that God has made and — amazingly — even the order interior to the perfect society of the Trinity — most of my work simply tries to perceive those rhymes across the different levels of being — language, created being, the divine — and to spell it out a bit for the reader.

SD: “Obsessed” contains the following epigraph:

“On Reading the 2024 Lake Superior State University Banished Words List”

Would you elaborate in more detail on how reading this banished words list inspired the poem?

James Matthew Wilson: I’d always been aware of this annual list and enjoyed reading about it in the newspaper, year after year, though it’s certainly not something I ever sought out. One of the pleasures of reading a newspaper is of course to see the little stories of interest that get inserted in various crevices alongside all the major catastrophes that are now a routine part of our everyday life. When I began writing the poem, I wanted mostly to explore the way the words on the list worked — for cliché and for ill, as it were. I was just trying to make myself laugh. But then, as I entered more deeply into the word “Obsessed,” I realized not only how its contemporary usage distorts a perfectly common phenomenon — taking an interest in something — so as to make it sound like some grand passion, but also how the word expresses a particular reality. The poem itself takes a more serious turn about midway through, as the comic observation about the word gradually leads to a kind of unveiling, where something greater is at stake.

SD: The main theme of “Obsessed” is language and its power to shape the way we perceive reality. Our main theme at Shadowlands Dispatch is to seek the re-enchantment of the world through God’s glorious and pervasive presence. To that end, as a Christian poet and a writer, how do you believe we can avoid the deadening use of language that you describe in chilling detail in “Obsessed” and instead use language as an instrument of re-enchantment?

James Matthew Wilson: This has been on my mind of late. I just reviewed a new book of poems, where the author frequently made use of everyday words, often cliché ones, in an attempt to enter into the ineffable mystery of God. My complaint in the review was that the author’s use of the familiar was too inert; it is a good, even a great, thing to take the familiar and make it strange so that that which is absolutely strange can be made, however slightly, a little more familiar. But in the case under examination in the review, that just wasn’t happening. So, I suppose it was on my mind how deadening some uses of language can be, and it was also on my mind that the antidote to the inert use of words I was studying is not simply using unusual or elevated or highly ornamental and difficult language — though all those things are good things in their proper place. Rather, the difficulty seems to lie in how we use language that otherwise feels hackneyed or debased. We wouldn’t over-use words if they didn’t express something, but how can we make them express their meaning once more in a vital way?

What a gift of providence, then, that I should happen upon the annual list of overused words and find myself exploring them in iambic pentameter. The great poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the first poets of modern English, saw verse as a place to explore the universal by way of the strange, startling, and often strained figure of speech. While this was a general practice, it became best known in its radical form as the “metaphysical conceit.” The metaphysical poets loved to use their faculty of wit to draw seemingly unrelated things into strange relation. In so doing, they revealed the underlying spiritual order and dimension of reality and so opened the mind to mystery, including religious mystery.

A century on, through the influence of John Locke and other philosophers of “the way of ideas,” (from which we get the word “ideology”), Romantic poets came to think of poetic wit as the finding of uncanny associations between unrelated thoughts or events. Exemplary in this regard is Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight.” There, the poet spies a “stranger,” that is to say, a flickering ash in the grate of his fireplace. This little thing reminds him of his childhood in the crowded city and the superstitions of youth that such a setting bred in him; it also reminds him of his son Hartley, who lies in a cradle next to his father, and of the childhood in the countryside that will teach Hartley a more profound kind of mythology. If the older Coleridge grew up with a series of urban myths, as it were, Hartley will grow up more heartily and healthily because Nature will teach him natural religion.

That association of superficially unrelated ideas lies at the heart of Coleridge and other Romantic poets’ theory of the imagination. They let the mind wander to see if it might stumble onto revelation. In the two centuries since, poets have often tried to be even more radical, where the most capricious and arbitrary coincidence of one idea and another begets a whole new vision of things. I was just reading the contemporary English poet John Ash, and his poems do this with a wonderful, flighty imagination, where one odd detail leads to another and gradually a whole mythical world unfolds. Most poets in our day do this merely for the sake of sounding absurd, but fundamentally, what they are exploring, or what they could be exploring if they were willing to be a bit less superficial, is the way the details of the world constellate together to make a total, intelligible, but mysterious order — and it is usually some strange incidental detail that first leads the mind down the path. Hence, the famous story Chesterton tells us of Charles Dickens, who saw the word “Coffeeroom” on a glass door from the wrong side and was awakened to mystery. And hence, the way in Lewis, a wardrobe leads to an enchanted world — and a grass hut into heaven.

That’s what I found myself doing in this poem. I began with what the newspaper proclaimed a scattered pile, a half-random list, of linguistic garbage, and I found that by exploring it without any ordination except the desire to make good metrical lines, I was led, in zig-zag fashion into one of those enduring mysteries about reality. What in particular? In this case, that our dreams which are so random and associative on one level also express enduring concerns, anxieties, or even “obsessions” on another level. Nothing could be more capricious, nothing could be more dogged, insistent, and purposeful, than a dream, especially a dream that repeats itself, at unpredictable intervals, across years.

I think the language of “enchantment” and “re-enchantment” a very helpful one. After all, the reductive modern thinkers, including Thomas Hobbes, thought of themselves as packing off all superstitions, sacred or profane, at once. They really wanted to create a school of disenchantment. But it’s worth reminding ourselves that the true meaning of that language is simply the recovery of the intrinsic intelligible significance of things. If truth is a property of being, then Truth with a capital t stands under everything. Just as we gradually become literate and so can read a book, so also most of us need remedial education in learning to read the Book of Nature, and to see the way reality as such is an ordered whole, an intelligent whole, and also a dramatic whole — all of it founded upon the Logos.

Most of human life consists of learning to read reality whole. The school of disenchantment is more or less simply a way of helping people to feel justified in their illiteracy of the deep intelligible mystery of being. One of the things that poetry and the arts do is remind us that we should not feel so justified, we should not feel so comfortable, in being reductive or small minded. In “Obsessed,” the particular pleasure for me in writing the poem was beginning with such beaten-to-death material and discovering that, yes, even here, there are abysses of light waiting to be discovered.

SD: Tell us about your current projects and when they will be available! What are you most excited to share with readers this year? Where is the best place for our readers to find your work and keep up with you?

James Matthew Wilson: Through a series of misfortunes, I’ll be publishing four, even five, books this year. My long scholarly book Catholic Modernism and the Irish “Avant-Garde” comes out this week. Later this year, I’ll publish two very small books on poets who converted to Christianity: one on T.S. Eliot, the Anglo-Catholic, and another on the American poet John Finlay, who converted to Catholicism in 1980. Very late in the year, a new and expanded edition of the essays of the great American poet J.V. Cunningham will be brought out, and my introduction (which constitutes a small book in itself) will lead off that volume [editor’s note: this volume will be published by Wiseblood Books, although a page for the volume is not yet available].

A Reflection on “Obsessed”: Language as the Instrument of Re-enchantment

By Megan Rials, Shadowlands Dispatch Editor-in-Chief

The list of words warped almost beyond recognition by our culture’s current use—or, more accurately, misuse — is staggering. In “Obsessed,” Wilson identifies a number of them — “hack,” “slay,” “cringe-worthy,” and my personal pet peeve, “impact” as a verb — but focuses his attention on “obsessed,” that all-too-familiar term now deemed fit to describe any fleeting fancy that catches our eye. Certainly, there is always a time and place for well-placed hyperbole, but to apply a word to any circumstance that comes within its ambit of meaning, however slight, is to commit what literary scholar Holly Ordway calls “verbicide.” To label any interest requiring a bit of research (such as Dr. Wilson’s examples of Nazi submarines or the making of alfredo sauce) as an “obsession” is, first, to distort the definition of the word, and second, to strip it of meaning, as people slowly realize the misuse, no longer trust its meaning, and eventually stop listening.  

How can we break free from this degradation of warped words? Wilson offers us a glimpse through the discussion of his and his son’s recurring nightmares. As revealed through these dreams, Wilson delves into the chokehold our lifelong preoccupations have on us. These highly personal, yet relatable examples invite the reader to reflect on his or her own fears and preoccupations (theological, philosophical, or otherwise). The accompanying realization that these questions are our actual obsessions — not passing interests in hundred-year-old military watercraft or Italian food — in turn restores to our minds the true meaning of the word, for naming things properly helps us understand their true nature. In this case, the current misuse of “obsessed” results in a category confusion. The actual meaning describes a necessarily negative, unhealthy experience, but our culture now applies the word to positive experiences. This verbicide belittles the gravity of an obsessive state by placing it on equal footing with a passing, innocent interest with a trifling subject. The awareness that “obsessed” is an improper label for positive trivialities frees us in two key ways. First, it allows us to give serious issues their due consideration without the faux-cute baggage of popular usage. Second, by extension, giving important issues the weight they deserve equips us to evaluate how we might positively address and work toward solving them.

The microcosmic example of “Obsessed” thus beckons us to consider the greater project before us: the rediscovery of meaning through the recovery of words so that we may understand reality again. As Wilson explains so beautifully in his interview for Shadowlands Dispatch, God has embedded meaningful patterns and order into the world. Because language is the medium by which we name things, it shapes our perception of truth and therefore helps us excavate and identify that meaningful design, both at the personal level of individual lives and the cosmic level of salvation history. Words and language, then, equip us to pursue re-enchantment’s core aim: the recovery of the meaning that suffuses God’s entire creation. In seeking re-enchantment, let us consider carefully the words we choose as we work to halt the ongoing onslaught of warped words and restore discernment of God’s truth to our culture.

Shadowlands Dispatch would like to express its gratitude to Dr. Wilson for taking time from his busy schedule to chat with us and participate in our inaugural Poetica column.