~ Delta Poetry Review ~

- Interview and Book Review -

 William Wright Interview by Dixon Hearne

Thank you for taking time from your busy life to share your thoughts, interests, and insights with DPR readers—we will be the wiser for it. You have an impressive collection of well-deserved honors and accomplishments.

DPR: Several poets have likened your poetry to that of Theodore Roethke. Who has influenced your writing through the years?

WW: The first poem I read that influenced me directly was Robert Penn Warren’s “Tell Me a Story,” the seventh and final section of Audubon: A Vision. The second was James Dickey’s “The Strength of Fields.” I read the Warren poem at about thirteen and the Dickey around sixteen, and their work was like a summoning, an invitation. Later on, Theodore Roethke became a major “silent mentor,” as did Pattiann Rogers, James Wright, Charles Wright, and Richard Hugo. Many other poets have become helpful for me.

          Roethke’s The Lost Son and Other Poems was immensely influential to me during my undergraduate years.

          Like Roethke, I’m fascinated by plants, and so they do sprout up in lots of my poetry. I began to realize that poetry of the late 50s (particularly Dickey’s) and the early 60s (particularly James Wright’s) hit me more forcefully than much contemporary poetry. Somebody once said my poems reflect an “old soul,” and I’ve chosen to take that as a compliment.

DPR: What, in your own mind, qualifies as “poetry”?

WW: Writing in which the metaphorical dynamism, along with imagistic richness, creates such a vivid or otherwise profound experience for any distinct reader that said reader—with her distinct epistemology and life experiences—can draw something from that writing. Poetry is a carefully built verbal sculpture in which all elements prove important: stanza formation, enjambment, diction, metaphorical unity, etc.

         For me, poetry must have the “right words in the right order”—particularly imageries that can build a bridge of empathy to the reader, even if that reader is half a world away.

         One of the nicest surprises I’ve had in the last few weeks is that one of my poems from Grass Chapels, “To a Minor Chinese Poet of the Kunlun Mountains,” was translated by an Indonesian writer for Indonesian readers. I appreciate that gesture more than I can articulate.

DPR: What guiding principles inform and influence your poetry writing? What themes and topics (psychological, philosophical, emotional) appear most often in your writing? What literary devices and/or approaches do you favor, if any?

WW: It must be unique. It must be rich, deeply textured, with diction that not only sounds good—but that marries “meaning” not only coherently, but metaphorically. Like many poets before me, I suppose I focus mostly on death and resurrection. My poems are meant to be “quiet” pieces that keep a reader’s interest through mounting tension—or at least a coherent series of metaphors—that “resolve” at the end, even if that resolution results in “dissonance.” My hope is that some part of the poem, even a word or phrase, stays with the reader for years, if not for the rest of their lives—and, I guess, for that reader to revisit the poetry at some point (and ideally, several times).

DPR: How important do you think it is to experiment with form, or to at least have background knowledge of the way certain forms of poetry work?

WW: I think it’s very important to have a knowledge of form—and to have practiced writing poems in form. Even if I at first label my any of my poems as “free verse,” I’m often told how closely they align with one or more forms.

          As I write a poem, and as its crux takes shape, I begin to include “nonce” form elements, such as the contrapuntal “micropoems” that are a result of staggered lines. For example, in the first poem of Grass Chapels, “Boyhood Trapped between Water and Blood,” all of the indented lines can read as their own poem. After writing plenty of sonnets, terza rima pieces, ghazals, and (bad) villanelles, I feel equipped to play around with my free verse such that it integrates formal qualities.

DPR: When and where did poetics take root in your creative life? Were you immediately consumed with desire?

WW: Yes. I knew at around thirteen that I wanted to be a writer. At sixteen, I knew that I wanted to be a poet.

DPR: How does your role as a teacher help your writing? How does your writing help your teaching?

WW:  Teaching fills me with joy and gives me the energy to write. When I’m teaching, I note that I need to be able to do what I assign, and so sometimes join my students in their assignments. Teaching produces in me a feeling beyond happiness—I am joyful when I help students realize their creative potential; I’m doubly joyful when they teach me something through their work. That Socratic means of exchange is what most excites me.

DPR: One of my favorite things about your writing is the incredible imagery and energy you create within the space of a single poem. Is this a natural gift, or does it require great deliberation and practice?

WW: It’s come from practicing over time, practicing more, and then practicing even more. I know I had a love for words since I was very young. On my first vocabulary test, in 1^st grade, I think, I made a story out of the words, rather than using each of them in a sentence. The teacher called by parents in and “had a word” with them about how they should encourage my writing.

DPR: Many writers have specific times and places that entice them to write. Where and when are you most creative? Does it require solitude?

WW: I know this sounds pretentious, but I speak the truth: I now write to J. S. Bach’s music. I love Baroque music to the extent that I was worried I might actually be Ignatius J. Reilly for some time, but I don’t have a pyloric valve—so all is good. Among those musicians, Bach is easily the best for me, and so I listen to him in noise canceling headphones, particularly transcriptions for piano and guitar—and, at first, I was worried it was going to corrupt my process, but it ended up helping it. I prefer to write alone in my room, yes.

          As much as I want to be a morning person and work in those pre-dawn hours, it’s become clearer and clearer that I’m a night owl. I’m still working on that, as I don’t want to live my life in diurnal/nocturnal transpositions to all whom I care about.

DPR: Being fluent in both French and German expands both your perspectives and world view. So much our lives is spent in self-imposed myopia, do you sometimes consciously enhance your work by writing in a different voice, one reflective of other cultures?

WW: Yes, I do—but I haven’t through French. German, which I’m still learning, has afforded me the opportunity to translate with my German professor friend, Martin Sheehan, a lot of Georg Trakl and Ernst Stadler, both of whom I think are extraordinarily evocative writers of the Expressionist period.

          When I lived in France, it wasn’t the language (which I find beautiful) that made me change; it was the fact that I became aware of another flux of lives. It killed in me any vestiges of solipsism, as I watched farmers and rural workers in this small town go about their lives. They were so kind to me—so very much unlike our stereotype of French people—that I learned much about my place in the world—and, in a sense, in a series of worlds after experiencing France.

DPR: Your new book is reviewed in this issue by a fellow poet, Jack Bedell. Readers would be interested in your sharing your personal thoughts on this new work in your own words. Do you view it as an evolutionary product?

WW: I very much respect Jack, and I’m biting my nails as he reads my book, as he is one of my influences! Yes, Grass Chapels, I hope, is a step up into new ways of writing poetry—and perhaps a catalyst for courage to share the fiction I’ve been working on for years now.

Book Review by Jack Bedell

Wright, William. Grass Chapels: New & Selected Poems. Mercer University Press, 2021. Pp. 184. ISBN: 978-0-88146-799-4.

For over 20 years, William Wright has been a fundamental piece of the fabric of southern literature. Through his stellar work as an anthologist, the heavy lifting he has done in his critical analyses and reviews, and in the exceptional poetry he has published over the course of his career, Wright has helped to define what is the very best of our region’s literature. His new collection, Grass Chapels: New & Selected Poems (Mercer University Press, 2021) solidifies Wright’s place in that landscape as one of the South’s finest poets, hands down.

Grass Chapels includes work from Wright’s eight previous collections alongside an extraordinary group of new poems. The book begins with new work before moving through 2018’s Specter Mountain, 2016’s Creeks of the Upper South, 2015’s Tree Heresies, 2014’s April Creatures, 2013’s Xylem & Heartwood, 2011’s Night Field Anecdote, 2011’s Bledsoe, and finally 2005’s Dark Orchard. Even given this reversed chronology, however, the collection reads like a growing dossier of skill rather than the devolution of a writing career. Page after page, these poems contain fresh innovations of technique, diverse prosodies, and an array of narrative skills present from the get-go for this poet, not built over time as work is stacked and put away.