A Conversation with Robert Wrigley
Rent from DeepDyve- A Conversation with Robert Wrigley
Robert Wrigley was born in East St. Louis, Illinois, and grew up not far away in Collinsville, a coal mining town. He is the first member of his family ever to graduate from college and the first male in many generations never to work in a coal mine.
Wrigley attended Southern Illinois University and the University of Montana, where he developed an abiding love for the Western wilderness. Since 1977 he has lived in Idaho, teaching first at Lewis-Clark State College and, since 1999, at the University of Idaho, where he teaches in the MFA program in creative writing.
He has published seven books of poetry, including In the Bank of Beautiful Sins (Penguin, 1995); Reign of Snakes (Penguin Putnam, 1999) and Lives of the Animals (Penguin, 2003). His most recent book is Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006). He is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts as [End Page 79] well as two fellowships from the Idaho Commission on the Arts. In 1987-1988, he served as the state of Idaho's Writer-in-Residence. Among his awards are the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine, the Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America and six Pushcart Prizes. His poems have twice been selected for reprint in Best American Poetry. In 1996, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Reign of Snakes was awarded the 2005 Kingsley Tufts Award in poetry; Lives of the Animals won The Poets' Prize, in 2005. Penguin will publish his new book, Beautiful Country, in late 2010.
Your first book, The Sinking of Clay City, revolves around the disabling affects of deindustrialization on your hometown of Collinsville, Illinois, a small mining town fifteen miles east of St. Louis. Six collections of poetry and thirty years later, you are one of America's most prolific poets. While your work has dramatically changed and improved over that time, your poems still emanate from a desire for story and from your love of the natural world. Being the first male in your family not to earn his living in the coal mines and to graduate from college, you haven't forgotten where you come from. How have you done it?
If you don't love stories, then what takes the place of that desire? We live by stories; they are the bedrock of articulate human existence. It's not possible to imagine a world in which there are no stories. The problem comes in the telling, of course. In my family, stories were a kind of spendable currency, and everyone told them. I suppose if one were determined to forget where he came from, that would require a kind of militant denial of one's own past, and while such a denial might be effected, it's really a species of pathology.
The fact is, everything about existence offers up to us story after story. Many are incomplete or false or unfathomably complex, but that's just part of what it means to be alive. We hear stories, we tell stories. The primary function of language seems to me to be the telling of stories or participating in the creation of story. And the natural world is itself a kind of relentless, ongoing story. There's a story in the way the deer regarded me this morning on my walk. There's a story in the elaborate spiderweb I noticed yesterday on the patio table, in the way the clouds moved by last week. Stories are everywhere. If there's something I haven't forgotten, it's just the absolute necessity—and joy—of being receptive to the stories existence offers. [End Page 80]
Beautiful Country is a book that examines the United States through the lenses of war (past and present), politics and its many natural and social landscapes. It's an interesting convergence of your interest in nature poems and a Wrigley we don't know quite as well: the CO, the politico, the personae poet. It's also the first book you...
