An Interview with Charles Wright

AN INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES WRIGHT Charles Wright Charles Wright's most recent book is The Other Side of the River (Random House). A new book, Zone Journals, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux next year. His translation of the Italian poet Eugenio Móntale's The Storm and Other Things won the 1978 PEN Translation Prize. Wright was the winner of the 1983 American Book Award in Poetry for Country Music: Selected Early Poems. He currently teaches at the University of Virginia. An Interview with Charles Wright / Sherod Santos Interviewer: Would you sketch in the background that led up to your becoming a poet—when and why you first started writing? Wright: I first started writing poems—or what I thought were poems —in the Army, in Italy, in 1959, when I was 24 years old. During my college days I had tried to write fiction—stories, sketches, etc. —but they were never more than extended descriptions of landscape, both interior and exterior. In other words, I had no notion whatsoever about how to write a story. While I was in Monterey, California , in 1958, at the Army Language School, I wrote what I thought was a journal for eight months, but which was really only whining and "inarticulate pang." The magic door opened when I read "Blandula, Tenulla, Vagula" by Ezra Pound in the spring of 1959 on Lake Garda outside Verona, on the site where the poem had been composed, Catullus's "supposed" villa at the tip of the Sirmione peninsula. That was it. The continuous "desire to write" that I had had since I was a senior in high school had finally found its form: the lyric poem that was structured associationally, not narratively. The irresistible force had finally met a movable object. Interviewer: So you hadn't studied poetry while you were at college? Wright: I had been a History major in college and had never been exposed to poetry at all. It was a brave new world. So I spent the next two years in Italy reading Pound and trying to rewrite The Pisan Cantos. Unsuccessfully, I might add. It was a heady time for me, discovering painting and poetry and a new country all at once. Back in the States, I got into Iowa on a fluke as no one read the manuscript I sent in during the summer, and when the graduate school independently admitted me, I just assumed I could go into the Workshop. So I did. I registered for courses and went to them and kept my mouth The Missouri Review · 75 shut for two years, as I knew after two minutes of the first Workshop class that I had stepped into deep stuff. Interviewer: Was that a good experience for you? Wright: I probably learned more from the Iowa Writer's Workshop than anyone who has ever gone there. Boy, did I have a lot to learn. You must realize that I was someone who had never written a real poem in his life, had never been told one thing about poems in particular or poetry in general, who had read nothing but Ezra Pound, TS. Eliot, e.e. cummings and Dylan Thomas (plus a little Eugenio Móntale and Diño Campana in Italian) and who walked blithely into the furnace of the Graduate Poetry Workshop at the University of Iowa. Whew. When the first thing out of the first person's mouth was about the iambic pentameter line, you must understand they might as well have been talking in tongues. Which they were. And my heart literally sank into my boots. Fortunately, I was wearing boots at the time. Interviewer: Wasn't there a pretty talented group of young poets in your class? Wright: I think there's a pretty talented group of young poets in every class at Iowa. I was there twice as a student, in 1961-63 and again, in 1965-66. In the first group, two have become highly visible, Mark Strand and Marvin Bell. There were other extremely gifted people in that group—Al Lee, James Crenner, William Brown, George Keithley, Catherine Davis, Annette Basalyga, Christopher Wiseman, Nicholas Crome. My second time around...