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Library of Congress

The new poet laureate: 'Keep your mouth half-shut'

Susan Page
USA TODAY
Charles Wright, poet laureate of the United States.

Poet Charles Wright, 79, delivered his inaugural reading at the Library of Congress Thursday night, launching his year as U.S. poet laureate. He was appointed to the loosely defined position by Librarian of Congress James Billington. Born in Pickwick Dam, Tenn., Wright, a retired professor at the University of Virginia, has won about every honor given to poets, from the Pulitzer Prize to the National Book Award. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Some of your predecessors as poet laureate have pushed projects during their one-year tenure. Do you have a plan?

A: I'm not a project-meister. I probably don't have a project except to do what I'm asked to do as well as I can, and then to sit still and let the old people be admired.

Q: Did any of your predecessors give you advice?

Robert Pinsky wrote me a little card and the last line was, 'Charles, you don't have to do anything you don't want to.' ... Rita (Dove) was the first of that group of really active poet laureates who were so good, Rita and Billy Collins and Pinsky and all those people. But they were all young and vibrant, and I'm old and vibrant. So I'm just going to sit here and vibrate and not do a thing.

Q: Why does poetry matter?

A: I knew someone was going to ask me that, and I spent all summer, three months in Montana, thinking about that, and I finally came up with an answer: I don't know. I really don't know. I know why it matters to me. I can't speak for anyone else. It changed my life. It gave me some valve for the emotional longings that I had as a young man and helped me bring together various independent thoughts that I had. It was very important to me, and I always had a love of language, which is the first thing you have to have if you want to write poems. You've got to love the language. And you've got to be good at finding new ways of using it, would be the other thing. But I don't know what I would say about their lives, because I don't presume to speak for anyone else. But I'll speak for myself, which was it was the best thing that happened to me.

Q: When you started to write poetry, did you write good poems?

A: No, I wrote terrible poems, awful poems. ... I wrote junk for a year, and then semi-junk, and then quasi-junk, and then I wrote a poem.

Q: Did your parents say, "Oh, you want to be a poet; great career choice"?

A: Well, my mother always wanted to be a writer, I think. She was from Mississippi and went to the University of Mississippi and dated William Faulkner's brother while she was there. What was his name? He was the one who was killed in a plane crash. Dean, I think his name was. She always thought it was a good thing to be a writer. My father was a civil engineer, but he was a civil person, too. He had a small construction company, and he knew that I wasn't going to go into that.

Q: When young people come to you and say, "I want to be a poet," what advice do you give them?

A: I say read everything you can. Read everything you can. That's the secret, you know. And you've got to learn to love language, and you'll learn to love it if you read all the great poems and all the good poems. No one comes to me and tells me they want to be a poet. But that's what I would say if they did.

Q: All the new technology and the rise of social media – has that affected the poetry we're producing as a culture?

A: I stopped teaching five years ago, so I'm not as aware of the social media. Look, I can't even do e-mail. I can't do computers. I don't know anything about them. My wife answers every e-mail I get, thank God. ... If Twitter affects poetry to the point that makes it shorter and more to the point, that's good. That's really good, because that's what you should do: Keep your mouth half-shut.

Q: You're 79 years old. As you've gotten older, has your poetry changed?
A: It's gotten shorter, but my concerns have not changed really. I have written less of it lately, as one tends to do as you get older. You tend to realize, God, I've written 24 books, and they're all the same. So you say, maybe you should put your pen aside for a while. But I still fiddle around with it. And the poetry hasn't really changed. It's just gotten shorter. ... I wrote 13 poems this summer, and I kept six of them, which I should probably throw away, too, but I couldn't come away with nothing.

Q: How do you write a poem?

A: I write them in pencil, No. 3 pencil, so I can erase them easily, and I write them in a little notebook. And then if I like them, I'll type them up on an old portable typewriter that I have.

Q: How long does it take to write a poem?

Who knows? The shorter the poem, the longer it takes, usually. One poem took a year to write. It's called A Journal of the Year of the Ox, and it's about the entire year. Another took six months. One I wrote through at one sitting years ago, when I lived in California. It takes as long as it takes.

Q: You've described the themes of your poetry as "language, landscape and the idea of God."

A: That's my sound bite, yeah. That's what I write about, every one. ... They're all about that.

Q: I'd like you to read a poem. First, tell us how this poem came to be.

A: I was sitting in my cabin in Montana, staring out the window as I am wont to do every day when I'm up there, and the first line came to me. Almost everything comes from looking at something that I do. The first line came, and the others sort of came after, and then my general angst entered the poem toward the end, and then my trying to be happy entered the poem at the end. So I like that.

Q: Would you please read the poem you've chosen?

A: It's called Ancient of Days.

There is a kind of sunlight, in early autumn, at sundown,
That raises cloud reflections
Inches above the pond water,
that sends us packing into the chill evening
To stand like Turner's blobbed figurines
In a landscape we do not understand,
whatever and everything
We know about it.
Unworldly and all ours,
it glides like the Nineteenth Century
Over us, up the near hill
And into the glistening mittens of the same clouds
Now long gone from the world's pond.
So long.

This is an old man's poetry,
written by someone who's spent his life
Looking for one truth.
Sorry, pal, there isn't one.
Unless, of course, the trees and their blow-down relatives
Are part of it.
Unless the late-evening armada of clouds
Spanished along the horizon are part of it.
Unless the diminishing pinprick of light
stunned in the dark forest
Is part of it.
Unless, O my, whatever the eye makes out,
And sends us, on its rough-road trace,
To the heart, is part of it,
then maybe that bright vanishing might be.

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