James Matthew Wilson

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, listening to the muse, and why each of us should learn to write a bit of poetry ourselves.

• Homepage: James Matthew Wilson
• The River of the Immaculate Conception — James Matthew Wilson's new poem The River of the Immaculate Conception is at once a commemoration of composer Frank LaRocca's Mass of the Americas and a meditation on the history and place of Catholicism in North America. Ranging from St. Mary's Cathedral, in present-day San Francisco, back to the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe to Juan Diego, and on to the conversion of Elizabeth Seton, Wilson's poem speaks of a land with a sacred mystery at its heart.
• Some Permanent Things, Second Edition, Revised and Expanded — In this Second Edition, Revised and Expanded, Wilson has completely revised the poems to attain a more classical perfection and restored their original published ordering as four sequences, beginning with "The Violent and the Fallen," "Four Verse Letters," and "La Rochefoucauld's Ghost," and culminating in the new poems collected as "The Christmas Preface."
• Fall Conference 2019: Love and Friendship in the Films of Whit Stillman — A conversation with Whit Stillman and James Matthew Wilson from the de Nicola Center's 20th Annual Fall Conference.
• Theme Song: "I Dunno" by grapes — I dunno by grapes (c) copyright 2008 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. Ft: J Lang, Morusque