You’re a regular visitor to Hillsdale College. What do you enjoy about coming here?

I have had an enduring admiration and affection for Hillsdale for decades. This will be my third formal visit to the college. All told, there are few places in the world for which I harbor warmer affections. I’m a native Michigander and Hillsdale represents the best aspects of the Midwestern liberal arts college. The specific occasion for my visit this fall is the release of my fourth full-length book of poems, “Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds.” I’ve been giving readings around the country, but I had wanted to do an event in Michigan that would be, however informally, the real launch celebration for the book. Hillsdale was the natural place.

You’ve written about your aversion to free verse poetry, which is what many contemporary poets cling to. In your years of teaching, especially at traditionally oriented institutions, have you noticed any shift back to form and poetic convention through your students?

Well, I would probably reverse the emphasis of that sentence. I have written about my love of meter and rhyme and have incidentally cast a few aspersions on free verse without ever actually saying (I don’t think) that it is a bad thing in itself. Free verse can be good, as can all writing that has a command of rhetoric. Alas, many free verse poets cast out the use of rhetoric and grammar along with the natural conventions of English verse. I teach a wide range of graduate students, but most of them either come to me already writing in meter or subsequently become enthralled by the art and so take it up, not to say exclusively. Despite free verse having been a well-known phenomenon for more than a century, the average person still thinks of meter and rhyme when — as they sometimes are — called upon to think of poetry at all. That common sense prejudice is well founded. Once one understands that verse is a medium that simply refines the rhetoric and rhythm of speech down to the syllable, it becomes an almost irresistible craft. In the last century, the turn against real verse was consequent to many poets coming to think of their metrical practice not as a refinement and attunement of speech for the ear but as an almost spatial, visual exercise, a sculpting of language. That was a mistake, but one already obscured to most of us by the passage of time.

Your reversion to the Catholic faith intertwined with your dedication to pursuing poetry. When you said you were reading “Purgatorio” for the tenth time on a porch in Ann Arbor and felt compelled to go to Mass shortly after, what was this moment was like to you?

The entirety of my undergraduate years might be described as the same event happening over and again under different guises. I was just a rebellious adolescent with a sense that the way most people lived was superficial and dull; I will grant myself this much, I wanted depth, even if my understanding of what depth might mean was itself pretty superficial. Life in Ann Arbor opened up new dimensions to me. I thought only modern literature had anything grand to say, and then I read Homer and Dante. I thought only a certain kind of secular and existential anguish was a sign of the lively presence of spirit and intellect, and then I saw for the first time and with clarity what the Eucharist really was. I thought reason had nothing to teach us about the real concerns of the human person, and then I read John Paul II’s “Fides et Ratio.” I thought liberation, in the Hobbesian sense, was the real calling of the soul and then I discovered what freedom meant to Saint Augustine. I thought the fragmentary and cryptic constituted seriousness in art, and then I read Pope and Tennyson and Yvor Winters. I had to learn over and over again not to take my youthful presumptions too seriously. The only thing I can say in my defense, is that if I hadn’t been so stupid, I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of discovering so many beautiful things. If I had studied at Hillsdale, such ignorance wouldn’t have been an option.

In your most recent poem, “A Crystal Wine Glass,” you describe the charm of a dinner-like setting and highlight other seemingly mundane but what you call “so designed” details of daily life. Was there a particular moment that struck you to write this piece?

I think I had come across, at the home of an acquaintance, the same faceted crystal wine glasses my own parents had received as a gift for their wedding, which was 60 years ago this year. That probably is what spurred the poem, but an ongoing fascination for me is the way in which the mind of its own volition moves toward, to repeat the word, fascination. The transcendence of the intellect that Plato describes with such extravagance in the Republic is, as he knew, just the course or movement of the mind every time it falls upon some particular thing and knows it. Here in the world, we move from the particular to the universal, from the temporal to the eternal, and back again, as a matter of course. That’s just what we do. In consequence, every resting on the eyes of the most familiar object may lead to a catching of a gleaming of divine light under the figure of light visible. It’s pretty amazing what life is like.

Many people are intimidated by poetry, or they think it’s some highfalutin academic pursuit. What would you say to someone who feels this way, and is there a poet with whom you’d recommend starting?

From the beginning of our tradition, poetry has been at least two things at once. It has been the place where our stories get told, our human ideas worked out and figured out, and it has also been the place where we go beyond the surface of experience and enter into reflection upon it. In a very, very loose manner of speaking, all of Plato is a commentary on Homer. But the first thing to see in Homer is blood and guts, amazing feats and heroic characters. All the mystery and depth can safely be postponed until after first acquaintance. Good poems have always worked that way. The reason poetry seems difficult to many now is that they have encountered it only in the classroom (if at all) where the first exhilaration is bypassed and the labor of hermeneutics (which need not be a labor, if one doesn’t bypass things) begins. Of course, there’s not a lot of such labor going on in the contemporary classroom. Most schools only introduce a poem if it is a bare statement of some branch (are there many?) of the tree of identity politics and the poem is meant merely to convey a feeling of victimhood. From the view of the present moment, the overly serious academic study of poems would be a welcome reprieve. But, in brief, people should begin reading poetry with, say, the lyrics of Longfellow. Only after reading “The Children’s Hour” should one possibly form a judgment on the difficulty of poetry.

This April you released your fourth poetry collection, “Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds.” What was the most challenging aspect of writing and publishing this particular collection as opposed to your previous releases?

In 2020, “Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds” was almost complete and I had written a few poems that were kind of “feeling around” for what themes and forms I wanted to explore next. There was a problem, however: I had in mind three more ambitious poems to round out the thematic unity of “Saint Thomas,” and I needed a lot of time for study to prepare my mind to write them. The poems are the “Maria Monk,” the “Death of Cicero,” and what became “Vanished Fire.” Those poems are among about six that provide the volume a rudder or direction. I knew I didn’t have the time I needed, and so I kept pushing them off. Meanwhile, new poems for what was to be my “next” book kept coming. And then a second problem arose, the coronavirus pandemic. The week that began, I was moved to begin recording the “news” as it were in iambic pentameter and to publish it in serial form. Within a few months I had what really was a book-length poem called “Quarantine Notebook.” My publisher asked for a new book and I quickly realized that between “Quarantine Notebook” and the other poems I’d been working on, a new book, “The Strangeness of the Good,” was completed. And then my life was changed by my being given the chance to found a new MFA program unlike any other in the world and that took a bit of my attention. Finally, two summers ago, I set everything aside to get those three poems written. It took about six months all told, and at last “Saint Thomas” was almost exactly the book I had dreamed up about seven years before.