James Matthew Wilson's "A Common Tongue"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

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4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2021

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

Wilson is a poet and critic of contemporary poetry, whose work appears regularly in such magazines and journals as First Things, The Wall Street Journal, The Hudson Review, Modern Age, The New Criterion, Dappled Things, Measure, The Weekly Standard, Front Porch Republic, The Raintown Review, National Review, and The American Conservative.

He has published ten books, including six books and chapbooks of poetry. Among his volumes are: The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (CUA, 2017); the major critical study, The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking (Wiseblood, 2015); and a monograph, The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry (both Wiseblood Books, 2014). His most recent books are The Strangeness of the Good (Angelico, 2020) and the poetic sequence, The River of the Immaculate Conception (Wiseblood, 2019).

-Bio via JamesMatthewWilson.com

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem. I'm David Kern, and today is Wednesday, February 17, 2020.
0:07.1	Today's poem is by a contemporary poet named James Matthew Wilson. He is the author of 10 books now,
0:15.1	including The Hanging God, which came out in 2018. He also serves as the poetry editor of Modern Age magazine. He's the series
0:22.8	editor of Coliseum Books and the director of the Coliseum Summer Institute. He is an associate
0:26.9	professor of humanities and Augustinian traditions at Villanova University, and he's the poet
0:31.1	in residence of the Benedict the 16th Institute. He has a new book out recently called The Strangeness
0:37.0	of the Good, which includes a section
0:39.8	called Quarantine Notebook in which he shares poems that he wrote throughout last spring, as we were all
0:47.5	quarantined. We were all stuck in place as the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic hit.
0:59.0	And I'm going to read a poem from this new book, The Strangeness of the Good.
1:01.5	It's called A Common Tongue.
1:03.5	It goes like this.
1:09.4	My family's was a plain laconic speech.
1:14.2	The sort intended never to impress, but with a grudge at broken silence,
1:18.7	reach its point and stop, if it could do no less.
1:25.9	Small wonder, then, that all extravagance should once have struck me with a blush of shame,
1:29.5	and yet still drew my eyes as radiance wielded a power I sensed, but could not name.
1:33.8	But wonderful indeed that, having known deep labyrinths and the Coliseum of Stars, and even
1:41.2	claimed their glory for my own, I feel at last how gaudy excess Mars align
1:48.6	and find a measured dignity
1:51.7	in that rude speech that was first given to me.
2:10.8	James Matthew Wilson, who, full disclosure, is a friend of mine, is one of our great formalist poets living today.
	...

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