conversational as they are complex. Though he
eschews conventional narrative, the forward tug
of time dominates. The quotidian acquires its
own transcendence; he remains ever mindful of
Dante’s assertion that ‘‘the true purpose of and
result of poetry is a contemplation of the divine
and its attendant mysteries.’’ Without fanfare or
pretension Charles Wright addresses those mys-
teries. Though soft-spoken, his voice is singular
and unmistakable.
TG: Talk a bit about what drew you to poetry.
CW:Well, I had no interest at all until I
graduated from college and realized I wouldn’t
be able to write prose, because I had tried to
write stories and they had all ended up purple:
you know, no storyline, no action, no definition
of any kind. And I can remember sitting in the
Bachelor Officers’ Quarters at Ft. Holleburg,
Maryland, and being very proud of myself one
evening, because everyone else had gone to the
bar and I sat home drinking wine and reading
a book of Chinese poems—translations I had
found somewhere. And I don’t know whether I
liked the poems so much or whether I liked the
idea of myself staying away from the riffraff and
reading a book of Chinese poems as a twenty-
two-year-old second lieutenant. Right after that,
I remember going to New York on leave for the
weekend and buying—since I was interested in
poems by that time (in the abstract)—a copy of
The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound.When I went
out to California to the language school, I didn’t
have time to do that sort of business. I was
studying every night for hours and every week-
end, but I still had Pound’sSelected Poems,and I
took that to Europe. When I got to Italy, the
book of Chinese poems, somewhere in the mists,
got lost.
In March 1959, two months after I got to
Verona, where I was stationed, a friend of mine
had borrowed—when he found out that I had
it—theSelected Poemsof Pound, and he gave it
back to me. I told him I was going one afternoon
to Lake Garda, and he said, ‘‘Read this poem,
‘Blandula, Tenulla, Vagula,’ because you will be
sitting at the end of Sirmione Peninsula on Catul-
lus’s supposed villa.’’ And I did, and I thought
it was fabulous. And it didn’t have a storyline; it
was a lyric poem. It worked by accretion—it
described the landscape; it had interior questions
that were unanswerable, the rhetorical questions
one tends to ask in one’s life. I thought this was
pretty much it, and from then on I got very much
interested in trying to write poems. Or what I
thought were poems. I didn’t know what a
poem was. Of course, I’d taken English courses
in college, but I never paid much attention to
poetry... but I started hearing something, and I
continued to hear it as I moved through the rest
of theSelected Poems.
There was an old bookstore on Villa Maz-
zini where Arni Schweiwiller published fine-
press books.Al’insignia del Pesce d’Oro:at the
sign of the golden fish. That was his logo. Pound
was so weird at that time—just one year back
from St. Elizabeth’s and living up in Milano—
that he would let Schweiwiller, who had a little
press in Verona, have the first editions of his
poems; then they would go to Faber & Faber,
then to New Directions. This little bookstore
had these editions of cantos, of odd poems and
translations, and it also had commemorative
items. So there was access to some Pound mate-
rial. That was basically how I came to it, and that
was the only thing I knew about poetry—which
wasn’t enough, of course, but it was a start. I got
a tune in my head.
And from there I went to Iowa, where I was
never officially admitted. I just sort of walked in
and started taking classes. No one knew any
different, because there were two teachers [Don-
ald Justice and Paul Engle], and each thought the
other had taken me in over the summer. It was
very loosely run in those days. I think it was
actually much more interesting, and I can say
that, because I’ve taught in the current one. I
realized from the first day that The Selected
Poems of Ezra Poundwas not going to get me
very far in the workshop, and so I had better
start reading something else.
When you got to Iowa, you began schooling
yourself in and writing a lot of formal poetry.
Yes, well...It wasmostly during the three
years afterward—two in Italy and then the third
year back at Iowa—that I was writing in pen-
tameter and rhyme and meter, trying to get that
under some kind of control. At least get a handle
on it. I did experiment with that some at Iowa in
the first two years, but since everybody else was
doing syllabics, hey, why shouldn’t I? I didn’t
know anything; I was doing whatever was
happening.
I was very lucky to be there during the
breakup of the ’50s glacier of strict formalism
that Iowa had had. There was still enough of that
ice around so that I could find out what it wasWords Are the Diminution of All Things