INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD WAKEFIELD

Winner of the Richard Wilbur Award from the University of Evansville with his book, East of Early Winter’s

Richard Wakefield lives in Washington State with his wife and two daughters, and teaches writing and American Literature at Tacoma Community College, the University of Washington-Tacoma, and writes poetry reviews for the Seattle Times. Widely published, he is one of the most accountable persons I know, in his spirit of working with other writers and with his own writing.

Richard, thank you for the interview. Is there any story to when you first knew you had interest in poetry?

As I get older I am more and more aware that my memory is malleable: it tends to reconstruct my past to make sense of my present, so in one sense it's very trustworthy, very honest, but in the strict documentary sense it's questionable.  With that caveat, here's what I recall. My father loved "noisy" poetry - Kipling, Poe, and so on - and used to read it aloud.  I quickly memorized big chunks of it and from as early as I can recall took great pleasure in the sound of it.  The first poem of my own that I can remember was a writing project in about the second grade.  I looked out the school room window onto a blustery, rainy Pacific Northwest day, and there was the shallow, reedy pond where we caught frogs in the summer time.  I wrote:

Out on the pond where the bushes grow,

Out on the pond where the wild winds blow,

Out on the pond where many ducks stray,

But you need not worry, they'll be back some day.

Really, it's not bad, and you can hear the child's pleasure in sound, meter, rhyme.

Did any poet inspire you early on? Does any poet inspire you now?

As mentioned above, any poet with lots of delicious sound was sure to find a place in my heart, and they're still there.  I soon discovered Frost and felt some kinship with him because I had family members who farmed and with whom I always spent at least part of each summer.  Frost gave me a vocabulary for what I had inarticulately loved already. That's what poets do, after all. I also identified with Frost's strangely straightforward evasiveness, and still do.  I loved Ogden Nash for his exuberant goofiness, and I eventually came to appreciate Larkin for the way he gave voice to a part of ourselves (or of myself, at least) that could be safely voiced only under the discipline of form.

How does teaching affect you? How does reviewing affect you?

Teaching gives me a chance to make a living doing something I am moderately good at.  It lets me use my talents in ways that are positive.  It allows me to proselytize on behalf of something I think is important - literature and literacy.  Sometimes, unfortunately, it also allows me to pontificate.  Reviewing also lets me share my enthusiasm.  For twenty years I have been constantly busy with writing reviews and only a couple of times have I had to write on something I didn't like.  Most of the time I find that the task of reviewing makes me find the words for my more or less vague experience with a book, and thus I am able not only to pass that experience on, but am also more able to keep it for myself. Both jobs pay me to read and to spend time thinking about what I read.  Not a bad deal.

How do you see the world today? Are there trends  you notice?

As far as I can tell the poetry world is many worlds, and not even a solar system.  If two avid poetry readers name their ten favorite poets, not only will the two lists probably have no overlap, but very likely each reader will not recognize most of the names on the other's list.  Maybe it has always been that way and the editors of anthologies have imposed an order that never really existed.

I don't doubt that poetry will do just fine as long as people have the urge to find some congruence between their inner lives and the outer world (that is, the urge to live in a world with meaning) and as long as a few people have the audacity to think they can discover, preserve, and share that congruence through words.  If the poetry universe is an expanding one, like our astronomical universe, that has its center everywhere and nowhere, so be it.

Are there any interesting controversies in poetry today? Do you think

people still turn to poetry for direction? Entertainment?

If there are controversies in poetry, they are minor in comparison to poetry's underlying cohesiveness.  The poetry universe may be wildly diffuse, but there's still that need to rework the world in words, and no matter how much poets seem at odds with another, they share that need.  Still, you can draw many different lines back into poetry's past, lines that might never intersect, and so poets can write out of a deeply felt tradition and still seem to have little in common with other poets writing out of equally deeply held traditions. 

To my ear, there's a lot of poetry that is chopped up, clever prose, prose that sometimes veers towards poetry by using figurative language, but in which there seems to be no effort to make sound and substance cohere.  Those who like that variety of poetry often seem indifferent or outright hostile to formal verse, just as I am almost always indifferent (and even sometimes hostile) toward their way of writing.  I can't imagine how these differences can be resolved.  And, really, who cares?  We're not doing each other any harm.  There's not enough at stake (commercially, that is) that we need to snarl at one another at the feed trough.

Before I ask about your own poetry, mention a couple poets you read.

I like Wendell Berry, Stanley Kunitz, Virginia Hamilton Adair.  And I am almost always wowed by Tim Murphy; he delves deeper in a few short lines than most poets do in pages.

What poets will you buy—really pay money for—a new book by name alone, sight unseen, and know you will want it on your shelf?

Any of the above, certainly.  Because I'm a reviewer I get to read dozens of new books every year - for free!  Make that scores of new books of which I at read at least parts.  Sometimes I wonder if anyone doesn't get a book published - most of it is so dreary, so much the same as the rest.  I suspect that has always been true of most art.  But those few I've mentioned keep showing me that there's always something new and alive.  I would also buy anything by Alicia Stallings.  I have made it a point to buy anything I can by Richard Moore; he can be idiosyncratic to the point where it seems like thinly veiled hostility, but he can also turn a line to dazzle the ear.

A poem of your own to talk about? Which one? Tell us what is going on in the poem.

I tend to forget my own poems pretty quickly.  I try not to keep the publications in which they appear, and I rarely revisit my notebooks or manuscripts.  There's one, however, one of my few blank verse poems, that I think has nice moments.  It's called Against the Flood, It is almost all one-syllable words.  I like the flat, indicative mood.  I like the sounds: stands-chance-against; flood-fills; the s-sounds.  The poem is an elegy to my brother, who died in 1998.  We spent a lot of time together walking the hills and woods of his ranch (where his widow still lives) in the Methow Valley of northern Washington State.  The poem distills countless such walks into one, the last one we took together, when his cancer was so far advanced that he had to stop and rest frequently and we both knew this would be our last excursion.

No one will stand a chance against
the flood that fills this gorge in spring.
Here where winter drought allows
us now among the dusty stones
whole trees are torn and tossed aside
in twisted heaps, the bluffs are sliced
and sluiced away, and boulders bounce
as if they yearn to smash themselves
at last to elemental sand. …

Have you ever coined a word?

"Pressleyphoric," which means Having a tendency to burst in an Elvis imitation.

What advice do you have for young poets?

Read, revise, revise.  Find people who will have honest reactions and who can articulate those reactions, and never be defensive.  If it's all ego and vanity, that's okay, but admit it to yourself and avoid some unpleasant confrontations with people who might think you really want to learn the craft.  And support poetry!  Subscribe to little magazines and let the editors know what you like and don't like, and write to poets you admire just to let them know they've connected with someone.

There seem to be so many new books being published, how can anyone find direction?

Let your direction find you.  You have to absorb enough poetry that it becomes part of your inner life.  Ideally, you'll absorb a great variety, but you can start anywhere and get anywhere from there.  When it comes time to try to use words to stitch a seam between the world outside and the world inside, you'll draw on that store of words you've accumulated. Then your direction will assert itself.

What advice do you have for older poets?

Find a circle and contribute.  Let your contribution be ninety percent encouragement and commentary on the other members' work, no more than ten percent work of your own submitted for their commentary.  Like any critic, learn to make criticisms that empower the artist -that doesn't mean hollow praise, but rather the criticisms that are within the artist's reach in the next few steps of his or her development.  You don't beat up an aspiring musician for not sounding like your favorite recording artist.

What really excites you about poetry?

Sometimes a moment comes when the image and the sound match up unforgettably, and some glimpse of meaning is preserved seemingly forever.  Frost has a wonderful but not widely known poem called "The Thatch" that ends,

They tell me the cottage where we dwelt,

Its wind-torn thatch goes now unmended;

Its life of hundreds of years has ended

By letting the rain I knew outdoors

In on to the upper chamber floors.

I read that and feel I've found gold that can't be obscured.

In your poem, ‘A Boy’s Work,’ the first sentence of four lines is without a
comma or break, yet the images and narrative flows continuously. Would you add a note about this sentence?

They sent the boy to build a fire beneath
the steel water trough after a week
of freezing fog had hung a hoary wreath
on every bud and leaf along the creek.

I love to make sentences sound as idiomatic as possible while still obeying the strictures of meter and rhyme, and in this case I felt pretty lucky.  I also wanted to plunge the reader into the poem without time to take a breath or any other pause, to find oneself in the midst of it as the boy finds himself (later) in the midst of his excursion.

Tell us about the narrative, a story with a boy sent to build a fire to melt
frozen water so the horses could drink, with the image of the horses coming out of the snow and fog;

And then the horses came.
From formless white in single file appeared
the thirsty horses taking living form,
condensed from cloud, more solid as they neared.

My aunt, who is now in her late eighties, went to live in eastern Oregon as a young farm wife, oh, sixty-five or so years ago.  They had no running water, no electricity, and some of the farm work on those remote farms was still done with horses.  This was her story.  I changed it to a boy's story because it reminded me so much of those stories of American Indians and their dream quests, or of the rite of passage stories that all cultures tell.  In addition, she told the story so vividly that I imagined myself into it, although for some reason I kept it in third-person.  Well, I admit that the reason is probably that I find it easier to include my own emotional involvement when I use third-person narration as a distancing device. 

The poem, 'Late' quoted here is one I buy completely, I accept it as a real event. There is a kind of humility in this poem that I find engaging. Was it a real event, and was there a letter?

Late

The neighbor man dropped dead in my front yard.

I saw him fall, I tried to think he'd tripped,

but no one tripped goes down so limp so hard,

so like a puppet when its strings are snipped.

Of course I tried my Boy Scout CPR.

I knelt, I breathed, I counted, though I could tell

the moment that I touched him I was far

too late - and he, of course, was late as well.

And later, when the ambulance was gone

and I had given his widow my sympathy,

I found within his imprint on my lawn

a misdelivered letter, late, for me,

almost directly from his hand to mine,

an invitation I could not decline.

The specifics of the poem are fictional.  However, over a period of about six years I experienced the deaths of both of my parents and of one of my brothers, and although none of them died altogether unexpectedly, I was struck by both the abruptness of death and by the way that the world more or less keeps going.  It is a humbling experience.  One realizes, albeit reluctantly, that we're all citizens sooner or later in the great democracy of death.  We can try to save others (as the man in the poem does), hoping that if we do, of course, we'll prove that we ourselves can be saved.  But the very fact that things continue in their natural course tells us that we, too, will go down limp and hard sooner or later.

I wanted the voice in this poem to be stoic but not cold or disengaged.  I wanted him to play with the ironies of the word "late."  I wanted to convey his sense that in a way the joke is on him.

After I wrote and published this poem a friend of mine died almost exactly this way, out for a walk when he keeled over and was probably dead before he hit the ground, according to witnesses.  I like to think the poem was in no way prophetic.

This one was picked up for an anthology called One Hundred Contemporary Sonnets, due out in the spring by the publisher is the University of Evansville Press, same people who published The Formalist, where this poem first appeared, if memory serves.

Do you use the art for humor, satire, comment of some sort?

I love to use verse for humor, and probably the largest part of my reading of poetry is humorous or light verse. Poetry can be especially devastating for satire because it is, after all, the art of turning, and satire involves multiple, subtle turns. It also seems to me that we are misguided in imagining that all poetry should be elevated, should somehow speak to the great eternities, and that it is our duty as critics or teachers or just general readers to guard the "great" from the leveling forces of the mediocre. Better, I think, to view poetry as a pyramid in which the tiny topmost part rests upon a broad foundation, and must do so. For me, this is partly a practical matter. I can't read at the highest pitch of emotional receptivity all the time. I try to read up and down the pyramid, and I feel no loss in often directing my attention to the solid but less spectacular parts.

If we may, what do members of you family have to say about your work and life in poetry? Any pearls for poets and their families?

From my childhood everyone around me has been very encouraging about my writing, sometimes to a fault. My wife has encouraged me all along and continues to do so. My children are less enthusiastic, but not negative. The greatest negativity comes from me. I feel that poetry takes up too much of my inner life, a mental and emotional energy that should be directed outward, to family and job and church and friends, instead turned inward, focused on verse. There's a kind of selfishness in being a writer that I don't like in myself. So my advice to poets is the same as it is for anyone, and it's a truism: Put first things first. The people you love and who love you are more important than the greatest sonnet ever written. If you believe differently, you're practicing a variety of double-mindedness; you are helping to create a world in which great poetry is meaningless, a world where things outweigh people.

Apart from Robert Frost, already mentioned, could you elaborate on two or three contemporary poets you like?

Philip Larkin has (had) a way of making a turn that can make me sweat. In "Church Going" he has a tone of distance, skepticism, that seems utterly modern, and then he offers these little glimpses of loss and regret for the older ways of believing -- that regret may also be modern, but it's not the facile cynicism that pervades much contemporary art.
Richard Wilbur seems almost incapable of writing a bad line. I sometimes think that the most definitively human thing we do is make meaning; we look not at the literal world but at a world infused with significance because of what we bring to it. In Wilbur, that meaning is never the easy or obvious meaning, but it is almost always at least a little hopeful, as if merely the experience of making (and discovering) significance in the world is itself an uplifting thing.

Do you have any memorable guidelines you keep in mind when you write? Such as, don’t be didactic, clarify an image, watch adjectives, etc. Do you read aloud what you are working on?

Some technical matters: don't crowd the lines, that is, don't use extra syllables. Try to put the accents (and especially the last of a line) on content words, not on articles or prepositions unless they really ARE content words. Try to make end stops and enjambments meaningful. Use simple, Anglo-Saxon words whenever possible, rather than Latinate, abstract words. Put in lots of stuff and let the ideas take care of themselves. Try never to name a feeling – no words for emotions, but rather the images that evoke the emotions.
I usually read my poems aloud but I find it's so much fun that the purpose – critical scrutiny – gets pushed aside. On the other hand, I dislike reading my poetry in public.

Have you ever done what I might call a Poetry Franklin List? Sit and write down all the subjects of your poems down in a list and see if there are any patterns of subject? Is the individual you of the poet discernable?

 
I've never made a list, but there are certainly patterns. The rural imagery is hard to miss, poem after poem. I think, though, that not much of me is directly discernable in the poems, maybe as much as the seed is discernable in the fruit.

The quiet pool of poets has turned into a rampage. A good thing?

I think it has always been chaotic, teeming with renegades or self-styled rebels. The world is too much with us at any given time, though, and only when editors and teachers have made their selections do most of us feel comfortable. Poetry is a way of expressing love for the world, even if the love is disillusioned by the world's worldliness, so if that expression finds outlets in countless books and magazines and websites, all the better. If only a few get rich and famous, so what? I don't express my love of my family because I hope to get something by doing so. Love for ulterior purposes is mercenary.

For a living, you are teaching writing and American Literature at Tacoma Community College, the University of Washington-Tacoma. Is it possible to say that everyone knows what writing poetry is, fewer know what teaching poetry is, and fewer yet know or write criticism. You do all three. Elbow room there is tight. What are the saving graces of each?

A wonderful teacher of mine once told me, "Words is words."  Any careful, self-conscious use of words feeds into any other use of words.  As good citizens of our time, we are subject the plague of haste and superficiality, in language no less than in love and every other important part of our lives.  Teaching, if you're lucky, involves slowing down and getting below the surface.  In a composition class I might easily spend fifteen minutes on one seemingly modest sentence: what are the modifiers, where do they belong, what compromises do we have to make between euphony and sense, between colloquialism and strict grammar?  How literally can we take these words, and if not literally, then do they create a coherent figure?  As you can see, these questions apply no less to poetry than to prose.  I have a handful of basic rules for sentence writing:

1) Put main ideas in main clauses.

2) Turn supporting ideas into modifiers: subordinate clauses, phrases, or even single words.

3) Put modifiers as close as possible to the things they modify.

4) Use active verbs whenever possible.

5) Turn nouns into verbs whenever possible.

6) Use big words only when they more precisely name the things you're talking about.

Well, that's how I write articles on poetry, criticism for the Sunday paper, poems, letters to friends...

‘What is poetry?’ is a lost question, but sometimes it is a story, a wisdom, a meditation, a perusal. What makes it work for you, what do you appreciate in the art form?

Poetry is the record of an experience, and it's also an artifact that's trying to BE that experience.  Most often the experience is a moment of congruity, say, between the inner and outer worlds, an instant of coherence or completeness (or nearly so); the poet tries to make words do what the world did.  My love of formal poetry arises from the way that meter and rhyme create—or discover—a coherence in language that somehow feels like the moment of coherence that gave rise to the poem. 

When a poet writes, one imagines the poet thinks or feels there is something important to be expressed, otherwise the poet would do something else. Why do they take this effort, what drives them?

In my case there's a strange balance of arrogance and selflessness.  There's a genuine desire to share the moment that gave rise to the poem, and there's the egotism of believing I can fashion words into a fair recreation of the moment.  I'm saving something.  If nothing else, the moment remains mine forever.  If I'm really lucky, other people get a glimmer of it as well.  I might add that there's a bit of faith involved, an underlying belief that there really is a connection among the disparate things of this world.  That's a belief that can't be finally proved, and yet a good poem feels like proof.

And then there is the issue of morality. I think poetry does relate somehow to the idea of order, harmony, coherence.  I can't claim that my own ideas on this are coherent, but it seems to me that any notion of a moral order has to depend upon that second word, order.  If all is chaos, then morality is meaningless –  and so is evil.  Those glimpses of order and harmony, then, are affirmations that the universe is at least possibly moral.

You are in your early fifties, now? Can I ask how many totally new poems you think you will write by the time you are sixty?

I'm not writing any poetry right now.  For all its joys, poetry takes up an enormous amount of my inner life, and I've recently decided that my students, colleagues, family, church, and friends deserve more of my attention.  Still, I'm saving lines and images.  I can't say what might come of them.  It's unlikely that there'll be anything totally new, but insofar as I'll be a different person tomorrow and next year, the poems will be different.

What do you do for fun outside poetry?

I love to tramp in the woods and mountains in search of wild flowers, which I often photograph and then try to identify.  I also run a lot, usually sixty to sixty-five miles a week.  Of course, I read a great deal, and I make it a point to read things that don't have any obvious connection to my work. I drive an older Lexus SUV, the perfect car for getting up muddy, rutted logging roads to remote trailheads and also a good way to haul my two daughters' many belongings for their many activities.

Thank you for the many interesting thoughts to think about.