September 15, 2025 • 29 mins
In this collection of conversations, Ben Palpant, author of Letters From The Mountain, has compiled his intimate, one-on-one interviews with seventeen powerful poets of the 21st century. These conversations cover an entire range of life experience, including grief, hope, culture, the writing craft, family life, and the imagination. Each poet speaks with remarkable candor and joy. Taken together, these interviews are a powerful reminder that poetry remains an essential expression of what it means to be human.
Franz Kafka famously said that "a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." And the words and thoughts contained here aim to wake up much that has become silent in each of us. They contain wisdom that may inspire, instruct, and strengthen, confronting us with the reality that words matter, that poetry matters, and that we matter.
You can purchase a copy of An Axe for the Frozen Sea in the Rabbit Room Store.
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S1 (00:00):
The following is brought to you in partnership with Oasis Audio.
Welcome to Rabbit Room Press Presents, a podcast series of
great audiobooks, one chapter at a time.
S2 (00:16):
An axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben Pallant. Read
for you by the author. Chapter 17 James Matthew Wilson
I suppose now is as good a time as any
for confession. I read book prefaces, not all prefaces, perhaps,
(00:39):
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
(01:02):
a crisis that launched him on a life changing journey.
His crisis with higher education is one that many others
are experiencing, so I decided we should start there. I
think your experience in graduate school is a point of
massive concern, I say, and it's not unique to you.
Tell me the story. Like many graduate students in the humanities,
(01:23):
he says, I had fallen in love with the two
great conspicuous qualities of the arts and literature. First, that
form matters, 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
(01:45):
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 Michel Foucault, these fundamentals were
viewed as what naive convictions? I ask, that you hadn't
quite grown up yet? Yes, he replies later, after I
(02:05):
entered a doctoral program, I encountered the word beauty and
sighed like some disillusioned critic whose cold I could see
through everything. And I remember thinking that there was 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. Beauty doesn't
appear there as some sophomoric, superficial, naive, or sentimental term.
(02:29):
It appears as probably the most mysterious term, a term
that points us toward the ineffable mysteries of the world.
To paraphrase the Swiss theologian 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
(02:50):
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.
Truth appears to the mind as a form in splendour,
and the splendour of form is the earliest definition of beauty.
(03:12):
So there I was, some 23 years ago, giving that
contemptuous smirk at the word beauty. But now I am
convinced more than ever that thinking about beauty and pursuing
beauty is our highest achievement. Your pursuit runs contrary to
many of your peers in the academy, I say. When
I attended academic conferences, he says, I was surrounded by
(03:35):
people who at some point, with all the unselfconscious enthusiasm
of youth, said that they loved books, but who had
found that their love could only be justified on terms
that are rather loveless. They found that they could only
sustain love for a certain author, as long as they
were sniffing out the ideologies and the political webs of
power that gave shape to the work. If you had
(03:58):
read to them the final paragraphs of The Great Gatsby
and said, aren't those lines just beautiful? They would have
given that philosophical smirk as if to say, well, that's
how I used to think. I suppose there's a dualistic
consciousness at play in most of the people who enter
the Academy. He thinks quietly for a moment. They came
(04:20):
for the joy. But then they were taught that their
joy was only justified if it broke forth, not in
continuous contemplation, but in some kind of tributary of a
more serious mode of analysis that was not merely aesthetic,
it had to be political. In one sense, I say,
they're correct. The aesthetic isn't the end, but the beginning
(04:41):
of contemplation. Yes, he says, the aesthetic as the modern
person might conceive it, just looking at the form of
a work of art in isolation from everything else can't
be an end in itself. Not absolutely speaking, but lacking
the transcendental language to explain why they have to engage
in a practice that reinterprets the aesthetic form in terms
(05:04):
of a political form. What we're actually called to do,
and what our nature wants to do, is to be
awestruck by the appearance of a form. Which leads us, then,
to the contemplation of form itself and to the divine
and eternal forms. That's just how the human mind works.
That's what Plato is describing in his work, namely, that
(05:25):
we encounter appearances and the soul immediately springs up to
seek what the apparent form conceals within itself, and what
it conceals is forms, depth, or simply the interior form.
Not only that, but it wants to discover what lies
beyond the form that to which the form points. That's
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the essence of life for rational animals, for human beings
who have been endowed with a spiritual intellect. If you
can't look at something, stare at it in awe, and
then see how it leads you up to the eternal,
then you're not just selling the work short. You're not
just selling your profession short. You're selling yourself short. So
(06:07):
going back to that personal and professional crisis, that's why
I started writing what became the Fortunes of Poetry in
an Age of Unmaking. It was my way of working
through where things went wrong and more importantly, what could
go right again if we had a decent literary culture
and a decent intellectual life. I'm reminded of something from
(06:28):
my childhood, so I say that makes me think of
Mole and Wind in the Willows when he takes a
break from spring cleaning and decides to go on a walk.
Kenneth Grahame writes tired at last, he sat on the
bank while the river still chattered on to him. A
babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent
from the heart of the earth to be told at
(06:50):
last to the insatiable sea. We should be able to
delight in what we read, I suggest, without bringing the
intellect immediately to bear upon it and deconstructing Constructing it,
but seeing how the beauty of the passage carries the
soul up to God. Exactly, he says. The important thing
here is that the first experience does not justify itself
(07:10):
on other terms. It's justifying itself on its own terms,
which then leads us deeper in. We're just entering it
more fully because we've come to see it in light
of its foundation. That's what the intellect is called to
do in every situation, to pursue beauty as it points
to the divine. I heard someone say that the ordering
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of the three Transcendentals goodness, truth, and beauty is an
evangelical error that focuses on morality first leaving beauty to
show up, as it were, late to the party. He
suggested that the proper order is beauty first, then truth
and goodness. Is that a helpful distinction? The ordering of
the Transcendentals is an interesting question and a conversation for
(07:54):
when we have more time together, he says. But my
abbreviated answer is that beauty is first and also last.
That's one of the ancient Greek insights being gives itself
first in the form of beauty. That is to say,
that being is first an appearance that attracts. So, to
use Aristotle's language, we begin with wonder, with a sudden
(08:15):
awe before the wonderful found in the world. Some people
have said that Aristotelian psychology is about the reduction of
wonder to science. That is to say that we go
from wondering about things, to knowing about them to knowing
their causes. To them, learning is the reduction of wonder
to science. But that's not the whole picture. Because when
you finally get knowledge, the wonder kicks up all over
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again and carries you to the next discovery. True science
understands that wonder leads to knowledge, which opens once more
to wonder, and so on and so forth. We're living
in an age of not only anxiety, but a lack
of wonder, I say. And yet it's so much deeper
than that. The opening poems of your book, some Permanent things,
(08:59):
Describe our societal state of ennui, or acedia, which the
monastics used to mean listlessness or torpor of the spirit.
Josef Pieper got to me early, he says. I love
his book Leisure The Basis of Culture, in which he
uses the word acedia, which is translated as sloth. But
it's not the sloth of mere laziness or lassitude, it's
(09:22):
the sloth of Unsettledness with one's own existence. For years,
I read and reread Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes because he
captures the typical modern condition in a way that people
live out, even if they haven't read the book or
heard his articulation of it. The first thing he does
is reduce everything to matter and matters motion. To Hobbes,
(09:45):
life is more than a motion of limbs. It's mechanistic.
It keeps going and people try to keep it going.
Hence our activities until it stops in several different ways.
He manages to give a whole account of human life
without any need to use the language of goodness. It's
impossible to call something intrinsically good on his terms, or
(10:07):
to say there is someone good, or summum bonum, toward
which all things aim in an enduring sense. That aimless business,
to Hobbes, is the totality of our existence. That's not
much of a life, I say. Well, he goes on
to say that most of us live in fear. We
(10:28):
fear anything and everything we do not know. Human life,
for Hobbes, is characterized not by our affirming that our
lives are good, but that we have our lives and
we fear the alternative. We fear death. That allows us
to live lives that are, in the words of my
friend R.J. Snell, jealously guarded and absolutely worthless. People are
(10:50):
anxiously trying to get ahead. They're not trying to get
ahead because they seek some ultimate good, but only because
they feel death at their backs. They're trying to keep
death at bay for as long as possible. Other than that,
we're nothing more than wind up toys gradually winding down
until we finally stop. Hobbes was trying to hang the
corpse of the world up on a hook, cut it
(11:11):
open and bleed out all the wonder that was absolutely
necessary to him if there was to be political order.
He was trying to eliminate everything but the fear of
death in order to create a rational society that would
keep death at bay for as many people as possible,
for as long as possible. In that circumstance, which I
believe is our circumstance, the very act of wonder is
(11:33):
a threat, because in the first place, wonder says, there
are things you should love for their own sake. And second,
because wonder says there are things you should love more
than life itself. Wonder becomes an antisocial public enemy. And yet,
perhaps I say, the job of a poet is to
awaken us to wonder. I was just reading a book
(11:56):
by the philosopher Charles Taylor, he says, in which he
describes those who awaken us to the eternal as or
du monde outside the world. Those individuals in history who
were outside the world, like Christ, like Socrates, call society
to account. In one sense, every person has the capacity
to do that. I think it was John Paul II
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who said that human beings transcend culture. History seems like
a train of necessity, but at every moment we are
capable of a freedom that is fruitful and will shape
the world around us. That's how culture and civilization are built.
We have a God who transcends all of this, and
who has called us to love the highest things. That's
(12:40):
the subject of the title poem in my book, Some
Permanent Things. That poem describes those occasional citizens who realize
that there's more to this world who know that somewhere
in the collective attic of civilization, there's an old battle flag,
a symbol of the things that people have known that
transcend the world. The defense of permanent things becomes more
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costly when the one who knows those things experiences isolation
and understands the need to stand athwart his age. We're
living in an age when the love of what is
genuinely permanent seems unintelligible to other people. You may talk
about it, but you become like the clown in the
town square whom everyone looks at, but nobody understands. And
so they laugh at him. They may not understand him,
(13:24):
but he's still telling the truth. The arts seem primed
by God's design for this very thing. I say for
transcending culture and creating a new thing. But when we
look at the decay around us in this age of
identity crisis, at the literal self-destruction of our sons and daughters,
I wonder how the arts and poetry can actually point
us back to the permanent things. The best response to
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a culture of death, he says, is not to offer
another salient critique of the impoverishment of contemporary reality, but
to live good lives and to make new work, he says.
The intrinsic fruitfulness of reality is such that it's always
waiting to be reformed, renewed and cultivated, rooted in natural
being as a desire to be fruitful, to multiply, to
(14:10):
make new things. Even when we despair, life goes on.
That's very interesting, I reply. I'm always amazed at how
quickly my work on my property gets overgrown. Life burgeons up.
It's an unstoppable force despite obstacles, despite hardship. People who
accept the natural fruitfulness of being, he says, have the
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capacity to make something new and good. As long as
we are not totally dead to wonder. Small communities have
the possibility of renewing things and starting over. It's so
deep in us because it's not just in our human nature,
it's actually ontological. It's deeper than anything peculiarly human. It's
so deep that we can't actually get away from it.
(14:56):
That's compelling idea, I say. Have you written about this
in my most recent book of poems, Saint Thomas and
the Forbidden Birds. There are two poems that address what
we're talking about. In one poem called Waking in Dresden,
I talk about this remarkable thing that even the victims
of the Dresden bombing, when they woke up to a city,
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bombed almost to an unfathomable ruin, were even then beginning
to think about the new life they would build. Not
out of hope per se, but out of their nature.
There's another poem called seeds that describes a lilac bush
that planted itself within the divided trunk of a maple tree.
New things just spring up. That's the order and nature
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of things. People are very unhappy, leading atomized, mechanized, Hobbesian lives.
We hear the language of despair and mental illness, but
we're all seeking actualization to become more fully real. According
to Thomas Aquinas, that's what it means to talk about goodness.
One of the important mysteries of being an artist is
that I get to make forms that help us to
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think about other forms. This artificial form called a poem
gets to open up onto and speak of the other
forms that are in nature, and the form that is
beyond all forms, the divine mystery. Everything draws us up
to the divine. But the fine arts have a special
privilege because they are made specifically to draw us to contemplation,
(16:20):
to lead us to the heart of things and beyond.
One of the temptations for artists is self-expression as an
end in itself. I say that has given rise to
a dismissive posture that discards any and all critique, and
more than that, discards the older ways in favor of
the new and novel. Yes, he says, the goal seems
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to have become self-actualization, but that's not the actualization you're
talking about, I add. You're calling us to a humbler
posture that doesn't say I'm the final reality, but points
to something higher, something greater than self and greater than
the common good. You're suggesting that if we bow the knee,
then we can call ourselves and others to a transcendent
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life that begets beautiful art, a life that points us
upward and onward. That's correct, he says. The language of self-actualization,
as it was popularized in the 1970s, led to a
culture of narcissism. We have that with us today as
expressive individualism, but that language doesn't acknowledge that human nature
(17:24):
seeks to be more fully human. They're not describing real actualization.
Real actualization speaks to the potential within the thing itself,
which assumes a limit, a determination, and a direction, but
also the possibility of those things coming into being as
a fullness, a full realization of being. So a giraffe
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wants to become more giraffe. Humans want to become more human,
not more like a giraffe or something arbitrary. The story
of Frankenstein reminds us that when we try to deny limits,
we end up creating monsters. We live, of course, in
an age where we seem to think that our technologies
liberate us from every finitude that our forms naturally give
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to us. We think we have creative license to do
what we want. I add, I direct a masters of
Fine Arts in creative writing, he says. But I'm not
a huge advocate of the word creative. I prefer words
like discernment, discovery, invention, synthesis, and reformulation because we are
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always taking existing things to make new things. We're not
making things ex nihilo. My friend Andrew Peterson has said
that he's not a fan of the term creatives because
every person is made in the image of God and
is therefore creative. I say he hopes that term goes
away soon, because calling ourselves creatives makes it sound like
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artists are unique, as if our actualization will be different
than everyone else's. But that's simply not true. Absolutely, he says.
The origin of that term lies in the soul deadening
wastelands of schools of business administration. It is possible to
call people creatives only in one of those pockets in
the world where nothing genuinely fruitful will ever occur. At best,
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we're doing subcreation. As J.R.R. Tolkien put it, the value
of the arts is not that they bring something new
into being, it's that we reveal to each other something
fundamentally old, something that transcends time altogether. The need for
incarnation is important here. It's a Christian term that speaks
into every intellectual tradition. We want to see transcendent things
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incarnated in concrete form. We want to see the truth,
and the truth has to have a form in order
for us to see it. And I add, it requires
that we not only know God's Word, but that we
accept what God says about us and about ultimate reality.
Those are the limits within which we work. It seems
that we're trying to break free from those limits, maybe
(19:58):
in part because we don't necessarily know what God actually says,
but also because we don't want to know. Indeed, he says,
I would like to shift the conversation here to talk
about one of the key aspects of your poetry, an
aspect I really enjoy, which is human relationship. Your poems
talk about real people in your life, not simply philosophy.
(20:21):
I would love to talk about that, he says. One
of the drawbacks of being the kind of writer I
have been is that people are eager to discuss the
philosophical side of things, which I'm happy to talk about,
but it's not the whole picture, I add. It's really not.
He says what's most important to me is not the philosophy,
it's the poems in verse. Letter to My Mother. You
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describe an interaction in the car with your mother that
addresses a struggle that many artists feel. Can you tell
us about that? As a teenager, I was declaiming the
kind of writer I was going to be, and my
mother said that I really didn't have a lot of
experience out of which to write anything good. Yet. At
16 years of age, I was adolescently upset at her response.
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I probably had a creative understanding of the arts. I
didn't understand that the arts really do come to us
from without. That the task of the artist is not
to create something new out of whole cloth. It's not, again,
really creativity, it's reception, discernment, invention. It's about incarnation. But
your mother understood, I say what my mother was doing
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in that moment is an ancient practice associated with mothers
that goes back to Plato's Republic, if not earlier. He says.
Mothers give us the traditional thoughts and stories, the myths
and aphorisms and dispositions that shape how we see the world.
Our worldview, as some people would call it. What mothers
seem to do is teach us how to read the world.
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Fathers tend to show us how to make things, how
to cut a figure in the world. Mothers tend to
teach us how to interpret that figure all the way
back to when we were in the womb. A mother's
heartbeat is actually helping to regulate the child's heartbeat. The
little ways in which our mothers move through the world
are often the ways in which we come to perceive
the world from an early age, because we're in their
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arms or following them around. What they see is what
we see, and how they see things is how we
see them. We may resent it later on, but it's
how we begin to read the world that has profound ramifications.
I say, on how we value the offices of motherhood
and fatherhood over and against the many offices we tend
to pursue. Part of building a good life, it seems
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to me, requires valuing the home. Married or unmarried, the
habits built in the home are inextricable from what we make. Yes,
he says, these are the foundational offices, the fundamentals upon
which we stand. Poets are tempted to think that we
have to be inventive, to surprise readers with a new metaphor,
or a new image that will strike us anew. I
(22:57):
was talking to someone the other day who said rather
plainly that we can't understand Christ as the good Shepherd,
because we hardly have any shepherds anymore. Well, no, I
think we do understand the metaphor. It's not very complicated.
I say you're right. But maybe we should still have
more shepherds. I wholeheartedly agree we should have more shepherds.
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Is there any place for poets to shock us into
an awakening? I ask? Certainly. I think of Gerard Manley
Hopkins as one of the great artists in that vein
who is trying to shock us with the pied beauty,
with the unusual and the grotesque, in order to help
us to see the mystery of being. And Christ born
within it. In fiction. I say Flannery O'Connor would be
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one of those, too. Yes, he says, she's practically my
favorite as far as writers of fiction go. James Joyce
certainly Willa Cather is up there, too. But one of
the things I've tried to do is to show a
convincing representation of what it means to genuinely live a
religious life with all of its mundane and domestic aspects
in an age like ours. That pursuit has required that
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I actually live in a way that embraces those forms
in light of eternity and for the sake of others.
When we live in a trivial and evanescent way that
values the self over everyone else, that thinks only of
the present moment and of personal satisfaction, we destroy the
form of the family and deprive ourselves of the examples
that would help us build a life. In my book
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The Strangeness of the good, the entire second half is
called Quarantine Notebook. 15 poems in iambic pentameter that recount
the first two months of the coronavirus pandemic. At the time,
I was trying to remind us of the permanent forms
to show what Christian family life is like. To show
what contemporary life can look like if we actually live
(24:48):
with the transcendent things in mind. To represent domestic life
and the way in which the eternal, the evanescent, and
the historical all interweave around the dinner table. Leon Kass
talks about this in The Hungry Soul. The kitchen table
is a place where all the necessities and the freedoms
of human life tend to convene and circulate. The poet
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Brian Coffey also captures this well in his long poem
Missouri Sequence. These mundane and domestic aspects of life have
fallen on hard times, I say. How many families sit
down at the dinner table to eat anymore? Even when
we know that it's important, we face a thousand activities
that can get in the way, you're nudging us to
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recover what matters most. Yes, he says, I hope we
can reclaim these ancient practices, these permanent things that point
us to God and give meaning to life. I think
we can. Here's one of my favorite poems by James
Matthew Wilson. Through the water, he introduces his poem with
(25:54):
a quote from Yvor Winters which says he must in
some way cross or dive under the water, which is
the most ancient symbol of the barrier between two worlds.
And now here's the poem. Far back within the mansion
of our thought, we glimpse a lintel with a door
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that's shut and through which all our lives would seem
to lead. Though we feel powerless to say toward what
it is the place where all the shapes we know
give way to whispers and a gnawing gut. And so
in childhood, we duck beneath the waterfall into a hidden
cove in Summer pass, within a stand of pines cut
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off from those bright fields in which we rove. Whose
needless lay a softening bed of silence. Whose great boughs
tightly weave a sacred grove. When winter settles in and
our skies darken. We take a trampled path by pond
and wood. And find beneath an arch of slumbering thorn.
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Stray tufts of fur, a skull stripped of its hood.
Then turn and look down through the thickening ice in
wonder at the strangeness of the good and Peter, Peter
falling through that plain where he had only cast his
nets before, and where behemoth stalked in darkest depths that
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sank and sank as if there were no floor. He
cried out to the wind, and felt a hand that
clutched and bore his weight back to shore. We know
that we must fall into such waters, must lose ourselves
within their breathless power. Until we are raised up, hair drenched,
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eyes stinging by one who says to us that from
this hour we have passed through. We're dead, but have returned,
and are a new creation. Come to flower. We hope
you've enjoyed an axe for the Frozen Sea, an Oasis
(28:01):
audio production directed and engineered by Adam Hassell. Text copyright
2024 by Rabbit Room Press. Production. Copyright 2025 by Oasis Audio,
under arrangement with Rabbit Room Press. Oasis audio titles are
available wherever audiobooks are sold and on our website. Oasis Audio.com.
S1 (28:33):
An axe for the Frozen Sea is published by Rabbit
Room Press. The audiobook is published by Oasis Audio. Copyright
by Ben Pallant. 2024 by Chris Badeker.
The following is brought to you in partnership with Oasis Audio.
Welcome to Rabbit Room Press Presents, a podcast series of
great audiobooks, one chapter at a time.
S2 (00:16):
An axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben Pallant. Read
for you by the author. Chapter 17 James Matthew Wilson
I suppose now is as good a time as any
for confession. I read book prefaces, not all prefaces, perhaps,
(00:39):
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
(01:02):
a crisis that launched him on a life changing journey.
His crisis with higher education is one that many others
are experiencing, so I decided we should start there. I
think your experience in graduate school is a point of
massive concern, I say, and it's not unique to you.
Tell me the story. Like many graduate students in the humanities,
(01:23):
he says, I had fallen in love with the two
great conspicuous qualities of the arts and literature. First, that
form matters, 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
(01:45):
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 Michel Foucault, these fundamentals were
viewed as what naive convictions? I ask, that you hadn't
quite grown up yet? Yes, he replies later, after I
(02:05):
entered a doctoral program, I encountered the word beauty and
sighed like some disillusioned critic whose cold I could see
through everything. And I remember thinking that there was 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. Beauty doesn't
appear there as some sophomoric, superficial, naive, or sentimental term.
(02:29):
It appears as probably the most mysterious term, a term
that points us toward the ineffable mysteries of the world.
To paraphrase the Swiss theologian 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
(02:50):
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.
Truth appears to the mind as a form in splendour,
and the splendour of form is the earliest definition of beauty.
(03:12):
So there I was, some 23 years ago, giving that
contemptuous smirk at the word beauty. But now I am
convinced more than ever that thinking about beauty and pursuing
beauty is our highest achievement. Your pursuit runs contrary to
many of your peers in the academy, I say. When
I attended academic conferences, he says, I was surrounded by
(03:35):
people who at some point, with all the unselfconscious enthusiasm
of youth, said that they loved books, but who had
found that their love could only be justified on terms
that are rather loveless. They found that they could only
sustain love for a certain author, as long as they
were sniffing out the ideologies and the political webs of
power that gave shape to the work. If you had
(03:58):
read to them the final paragraphs of The Great Gatsby
and said, aren't those lines just beautiful? They would have
given that philosophical smirk as if to say, well, that's
how I used to think. I suppose there's a dualistic
consciousness at play in most of the people who enter
the Academy. He thinks quietly for a moment. They came
(04:20):
for the joy. But then they were taught that their
joy was only justified if it broke forth, not in
continuous contemplation, but in some kind of tributary of a
more serious mode of analysis that was not merely aesthetic,
it had to be political. In one sense, I say,
they're correct. The aesthetic isn't the end, but the beginning
(04:41):
of contemplation. Yes, he says, the aesthetic as the modern
person might conceive it, just looking at the form of
a work of art in isolation from everything else can't
be an end in itself. Not absolutely speaking, but lacking
the transcendental language to explain why they have to engage
in a practice that reinterprets the aesthetic form in terms
(05:04):
of a political form. What we're actually called to do,
and what our nature wants to do, is to be
awestruck by the appearance of a form. Which leads us, then,
to the contemplation of form itself and to the divine
and eternal forms. That's just how the human mind works.
That's what Plato is describing in his work, namely, that
(05:25):
we encounter appearances and the soul immediately springs up to
seek what the apparent form conceals within itself, and what
it conceals is forms, depth, or simply the interior form.
Not only that, but it wants to discover what lies
beyond the form that to which the form points. That's
(05:46):
the essence of life for rational animals, for human beings
who have been endowed with a spiritual intellect. If you
can't look at something, stare at it in awe, and
then see how it leads you up to the eternal,
then you're not just selling the work short. You're not
just selling your profession short. You're selling yourself short. So
(06:07):
going back to that personal and professional crisis, that's why
I started writing what became the Fortunes of Poetry in
an Age of Unmaking. It was my way of working
through where things went wrong and more importantly, what could
go right again if we had a decent literary culture
and a decent intellectual life. I'm reminded of something from
(06:28):
my childhood, so I say that makes me think of
Mole and Wind in the Willows when he takes a
break from spring cleaning and decides to go on a walk.
Kenneth Grahame writes tired at last, he sat on the
bank while the river still chattered on to him. A
babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent
from the heart of the earth to be told at
(06:50):
last to the insatiable sea. We should be able to
delight in what we read, I suggest, without bringing the
intellect immediately to bear upon it and deconstructing Constructing it,
but seeing how the beauty of the passage carries the
soul up to God. Exactly, he says. The important thing
here is that the first experience does not justify itself
(07:10):
on other terms. It's justifying itself on its own terms,
which then leads us deeper in. We're just entering it
more fully because we've come to see it in light
of its foundation. That's what the intellect is called to
do in every situation, to pursue beauty as it points
to the divine. I heard someone say that the ordering
(07:31):
of the three Transcendentals goodness, truth, and beauty is an
evangelical error that focuses on morality first leaving beauty to
show up, as it were, late to the party. He
suggested that the proper order is beauty first, then truth
and goodness. Is that a helpful distinction? The ordering of
the Transcendentals is an interesting question and a conversation for
(07:54):
when we have more time together, he says. But my
abbreviated answer is that beauty is first and also last.
That's one of the ancient Greek insights being gives itself
first in the form of beauty. That is to say,
that being is first an appearance that attracts. So, to
use Aristotle's language, we begin with wonder, with a sudden
(08:15):
awe before the wonderful found in the world. Some people
have said that Aristotelian psychology is about the reduction of
wonder to science. That is to say that we go
from wondering about things, to knowing about them to knowing
their causes. To them, learning is the reduction of wonder
to science. But that's not the whole picture. Because when
you finally get knowledge, the wonder kicks up all over
(08:38):
again and carries you to the next discovery. True science
understands that wonder leads to knowledge, which opens once more
to wonder, and so on and so forth. We're living
in an age of not only anxiety, but a lack
of wonder, I say. And yet it's so much deeper
than that. The opening poems of your book, some Permanent things,
(08:59):
Describe our societal state of ennui, or acedia, which the
monastics used to mean listlessness or torpor of the spirit.
Josef Pieper got to me early, he says. I love
his book Leisure The Basis of Culture, in which he
uses the word acedia, which is translated as sloth. But
it's not the sloth of mere laziness or lassitude, it's
(09:22):
the sloth of Unsettledness with one's own existence. For years,
I read and reread Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes because he
captures the typical modern condition in a way that people
live out, even if they haven't read the book or
heard his articulation of it. The first thing he does
is reduce everything to matter and matters motion. To Hobbes,
(09:45):
life is more than a motion of limbs. It's mechanistic.
It keeps going and people try to keep it going.
Hence our activities until it stops in several different ways.
He manages to give a whole account of human life
without any need to use the language of goodness. It's
impossible to call something intrinsically good on his terms, or
(10:07):
to say there is someone good, or summum bonum, toward
which all things aim in an enduring sense. That aimless business,
to Hobbes, is the totality of our existence. That's not
much of a life, I say. Well, he goes on
to say that most of us live in fear. We
(10:28):
fear anything and everything we do not know. Human life,
for Hobbes, is characterized not by our affirming that our
lives are good, but that we have our lives and
we fear the alternative. We fear death. That allows us
to live lives that are, in the words of my
friend R.J. Snell, jealously guarded and absolutely worthless. People are
(10:50):
anxiously trying to get ahead. They're not trying to get
ahead because they seek some ultimate good, but only because
they feel death at their backs. They're trying to keep
death at bay for as long as possible. Other than that,
we're nothing more than wind up toys gradually winding down
until we finally stop. Hobbes was trying to hang the
corpse of the world up on a hook, cut it
(11:11):
open and bleed out all the wonder that was absolutely
necessary to him if there was to be political order.
He was trying to eliminate everything but the fear of
death in order to create a rational society that would
keep death at bay for as many people as possible,
for as long as possible. In that circumstance, which I
believe is our circumstance, the very act of wonder is
(11:33):
a threat, because in the first place, wonder says, there
are things you should love for their own sake. And second,
because wonder says there are things you should love more
than life itself. Wonder becomes an antisocial public enemy. And yet,
perhaps I say, the job of a poet is to
awaken us to wonder. I was just reading a book
(11:56):
by the philosopher Charles Taylor, he says, in which he
describes those who awaken us to the eternal as or
du monde outside the world. Those individuals in history who
were outside the world, like Christ, like Socrates, call society
to account. In one sense, every person has the capacity
to do that. I think it was John Paul II
(12:19):
who said that human beings transcend culture. History seems like
a train of necessity, but at every moment we are
capable of a freedom that is fruitful and will shape
the world around us. That's how culture and civilization are built.
We have a God who transcends all of this, and
who has called us to love the highest things. That's
(12:40):
the subject of the title poem in my book, Some
Permanent Things. That poem describes those occasional citizens who realize
that there's more to this world who know that somewhere
in the collective attic of civilization, there's an old battle flag,
a symbol of the things that people have known that
transcend the world. The defense of permanent things becomes more
(13:01):
costly when the one who knows those things experiences isolation
and understands the need to stand athwart his age. We're
living in an age when the love of what is
genuinely permanent seems unintelligible to other people. You may talk
about it, but you become like the clown in the
town square whom everyone looks at, but nobody understands. And
so they laugh at him. They may not understand him,
(13:24):
but he's still telling the truth. The arts seem primed
by God's design for this very thing. I say for
transcending culture and creating a new thing. But when we
look at the decay around us in this age of
identity crisis, at the literal self-destruction of our sons and daughters,
I wonder how the arts and poetry can actually point
us back to the permanent things. The best response to
(13:47):
a culture of death, he says, is not to offer
another salient critique of the impoverishment of contemporary reality, but
to live good lives and to make new work, he says.
The intrinsic fruitfulness of reality is such that it's always
waiting to be reformed, renewed and cultivated, rooted in natural
being as a desire to be fruitful, to multiply, to
(14:10):
make new things. Even when we despair, life goes on.
That's very interesting, I reply. I'm always amazed at how
quickly my work on my property gets overgrown. Life burgeons up.
It's an unstoppable force despite obstacles, despite hardship. People who
accept the natural fruitfulness of being, he says, have the
(14:33):
capacity to make something new and good. As long as
we are not totally dead to wonder. Small communities have
the possibility of renewing things and starting over. It's so
deep in us because it's not just in our human nature,
it's actually ontological. It's deeper than anything peculiarly human. It's
so deep that we can't actually get away from it.
(14:56):
That's compelling idea, I say. Have you written about this
in my most recent book of poems, Saint Thomas and
the Forbidden Birds. There are two poems that address what
we're talking about. In one poem called Waking in Dresden,
I talk about this remarkable thing that even the victims
of the Dresden bombing, when they woke up to a city,
(15:16):
bombed almost to an unfathomable ruin, were even then beginning
to think about the new life they would build. Not
out of hope per se, but out of their nature.
There's another poem called seeds that describes a lilac bush
that planted itself within the divided trunk of a maple tree.
New things just spring up. That's the order and nature
(15:37):
of things. People are very unhappy, leading atomized, mechanized, Hobbesian lives.
We hear the language of despair and mental illness, but
we're all seeking actualization to become more fully real. According
to Thomas Aquinas, that's what it means to talk about goodness.
One of the important mysteries of being an artist is
that I get to make forms that help us to
(15:59):
think about other forms. This artificial form called a poem
gets to open up onto and speak of the other
forms that are in nature, and the form that is
beyond all forms, the divine mystery. Everything draws us up
to the divine. But the fine arts have a special
privilege because they are made specifically to draw us to contemplation,
(16:20):
to lead us to the heart of things and beyond.
One of the temptations for artists is self-expression as an
end in itself. I say that has given rise to
a dismissive posture that discards any and all critique, and
more than that, discards the older ways in favor of
the new and novel. Yes, he says, the goal seems
(16:41):
to have become self-actualization, but that's not the actualization you're
talking about, I add. You're calling us to a humbler
posture that doesn't say I'm the final reality, but points
to something higher, something greater than self and greater than
the common good. You're suggesting that if we bow the knee,
then we can call ourselves and others to a transcendent
(17:03):
life that begets beautiful art, a life that points us
upward and onward. That's correct, he says. The language of self-actualization,
as it was popularized in the 1970s, led to a
culture of narcissism. We have that with us today as
expressive individualism, but that language doesn't acknowledge that human nature
(17:24):
seeks to be more fully human. They're not describing real actualization.
Real actualization speaks to the potential within the thing itself,
which assumes a limit, a determination, and a direction, but
also the possibility of those things coming into being as
a fullness, a full realization of being. So a giraffe
(17:46):
wants to become more giraffe. Humans want to become more human,
not more like a giraffe or something arbitrary. The story
of Frankenstein reminds us that when we try to deny limits,
we end up creating monsters. We live, of course, in
an age where we seem to think that our technologies
liberate us from every finitude that our forms naturally give
(18:08):
to us. We think we have creative license to do
what we want. I add, I direct a masters of
Fine Arts in creative writing, he says. But I'm not
a huge advocate of the word creative. I prefer words
like discernment, discovery, invention, synthesis, and reformulation because we are
(18:28):
always taking existing things to make new things. We're not
making things ex nihilo. My friend Andrew Peterson has said
that he's not a fan of the term creatives because
every person is made in the image of God and
is therefore creative. I say he hopes that term goes
away soon, because calling ourselves creatives makes it sound like
(18:50):
artists are unique, as if our actualization will be different
than everyone else's. But that's simply not true. Absolutely, he says.
The origin of that term lies in the soul deadening
wastelands of schools of business administration. It is possible to
call people creatives only in one of those pockets in
the world where nothing genuinely fruitful will ever occur. At best,
(19:14):
we're doing subcreation. As J.R.R. Tolkien put it, the value
of the arts is not that they bring something new
into being, it's that we reveal to each other something
fundamentally old, something that transcends time altogether. The need for
incarnation is important here. It's a Christian term that speaks
into every intellectual tradition. We want to see transcendent things
(19:37):
incarnated in concrete form. We want to see the truth,
and the truth has to have a form in order
for us to see it. And I add, it requires
that we not only know God's Word, but that we
accept what God says about us and about ultimate reality.
Those are the limits within which we work. It seems
that we're trying to break free from those limits, maybe
(19:58):
in part because we don't necessarily know what God actually says,
but also because we don't want to know. Indeed, he says,
I would like to shift the conversation here to talk
about one of the key aspects of your poetry, an
aspect I really enjoy, which is human relationship. Your poems
talk about real people in your life, not simply philosophy.
(20:21):
I would love to talk about that, he says. One
of the drawbacks of being the kind of writer I
have been is that people are eager to discuss the
philosophical side of things, which I'm happy to talk about,
but it's not the whole picture, I add. It's really not.
He says what's most important to me is not the philosophy,
it's the poems in verse. Letter to My Mother. You
(20:44):
describe an interaction in the car with your mother that
addresses a struggle that many artists feel. Can you tell
us about that? As a teenager, I was declaiming the
kind of writer I was going to be, and my
mother said that I really didn't have a lot of
experience out of which to write anything good. Yet. At
16 years of age, I was adolescently upset at her response.
(21:06):
I probably had a creative understanding of the arts. I
didn't understand that the arts really do come to us
from without. That the task of the artist is not
to create something new out of whole cloth. It's not, again,
really creativity, it's reception, discernment, invention. It's about incarnation. But
your mother understood, I say what my mother was doing
(21:29):
in that moment is an ancient practice associated with mothers
that goes back to Plato's Republic, if not earlier. He says.
Mothers give us the traditional thoughts and stories, the myths
and aphorisms and dispositions that shape how we see the world.
Our worldview, as some people would call it. What mothers
seem to do is teach us how to read the world.
(21:51):
Fathers tend to show us how to make things, how
to cut a figure in the world. Mothers tend to
teach us how to interpret that figure all the way
back to when we were in the womb. A mother's
heartbeat is actually helping to regulate the child's heartbeat. The
little ways in which our mothers move through the world
are often the ways in which we come to perceive
the world from an early age, because we're in their
(22:12):
arms or following them around. What they see is what
we see, and how they see things is how we
see them. We may resent it later on, but it's
how we begin to read the world that has profound ramifications.
I say, on how we value the offices of motherhood
and fatherhood over and against the many offices we tend
to pursue. Part of building a good life, it seems
(22:34):
to me, requires valuing the home. Married or unmarried, the
habits built in the home are inextricable from what we make. Yes,
he says, these are the foundational offices, the fundamentals upon
which we stand. Poets are tempted to think that we
have to be inventive, to surprise readers with a new metaphor,
or a new image that will strike us anew. I
(22:57):
was talking to someone the other day who said rather
plainly that we can't understand Christ as the good Shepherd,
because we hardly have any shepherds anymore. Well, no, I
think we do understand the metaphor. It's not very complicated.
I say you're right. But maybe we should still have
more shepherds. I wholeheartedly agree we should have more shepherds.
(23:20):
Is there any place for poets to shock us into
an awakening? I ask? Certainly. I think of Gerard Manley
Hopkins as one of the great artists in that vein
who is trying to shock us with the pied beauty,
with the unusual and the grotesque, in order to help
us to see the mystery of being. And Christ born
within it. In fiction. I say Flannery O'Connor would be
(23:42):
one of those, too. Yes, he says, she's practically my
favorite as far as writers of fiction go. James Joyce
certainly Willa Cather is up there, too. But one of
the things I've tried to do is to show a
convincing representation of what it means to genuinely live a
religious life with all of its mundane and domestic aspects
in an age like ours. That pursuit has required that
(24:04):
I actually live in a way that embraces those forms
in light of eternity and for the sake of others.
When we live in a trivial and evanescent way that
values the self over everyone else, that thinks only of
the present moment and of personal satisfaction, we destroy the
form of the family and deprive ourselves of the examples
that would help us build a life. In my book
(24:26):
The Strangeness of the good, the entire second half is
called Quarantine Notebook. 15 poems in iambic pentameter that recount
the first two months of the coronavirus pandemic. At the time,
I was trying to remind us of the permanent forms
to show what Christian family life is like. To show
what contemporary life can look like if we actually live
(24:48):
with the transcendent things in mind. To represent domestic life
and the way in which the eternal, the evanescent, and
the historical all interweave around the dinner table. Leon Kass
talks about this in The Hungry Soul. The kitchen table
is a place where all the necessities and the freedoms
of human life tend to convene and circulate. The poet
(25:11):
Brian Coffey also captures this well in his long poem
Missouri Sequence. These mundane and domestic aspects of life have
fallen on hard times, I say. How many families sit
down at the dinner table to eat anymore? Even when
we know that it's important, we face a thousand activities
that can get in the way, you're nudging us to
(25:31):
recover what matters most. Yes, he says, I hope we
can reclaim these ancient practices, these permanent things that point
us to God and give meaning to life. I think
we can. Here's one of my favorite poems by James
Matthew Wilson. Through the water, he introduces his poem with
(25:54):
a quote from Yvor Winters which says he must in
some way cross or dive under the water, which is
the most ancient symbol of the barrier between two worlds.
And now here's the poem. Far back within the mansion
of our thought, we glimpse a lintel with a door
(26:15):
that's shut and through which all our lives would seem
to lead. Though we feel powerless to say toward what
it is the place where all the shapes we know
give way to whispers and a gnawing gut. And so
in childhood, we duck beneath the waterfall into a hidden
cove in Summer pass, within a stand of pines cut
(26:36):
off from those bright fields in which we rove. Whose
needless lay a softening bed of silence. Whose great boughs
tightly weave a sacred grove. When winter settles in and
our skies darken. We take a trampled path by pond
and wood. And find beneath an arch of slumbering thorn.
(26:57):
Stray tufts of fur, a skull stripped of its hood.
Then turn and look down through the thickening ice in
wonder at the strangeness of the good and Peter, Peter
falling through that plain where he had only cast his
nets before, and where behemoth stalked in darkest depths that
(27:17):
sank and sank as if there were no floor. He
cried out to the wind, and felt a hand that
clutched and bore his weight back to shore. We know
that we must fall into such waters, must lose ourselves
within their breathless power. Until we are raised up, hair drenched,
(27:38):
eyes stinging by one who says to us that from
this hour we have passed through. We're dead, but have returned,
and are a new creation. Come to flower. We hope
you've enjoyed an axe for the Frozen Sea, an Oasis
(28:01):
audio production directed and engineered by Adam Hassell. Text copyright
2024 by Rabbit Room Press. Production. Copyright 2025 by Oasis Audio,
under arrangement with Rabbit Room Press. Oasis audio titles are
available wherever audiobooks are sold and on our website. Oasis Audio.com.
S1 (28:33):
An axe for the Frozen Sea is published by Rabbit
Room Press. The audiobook is published by Oasis Audio. Copyright
by Ben Pallant. 2024 by Chris Badeker.
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