MARK STRAND
How are you tonight?
CHARLES WRIGHT
I’m fine. I love what you read tonight.
MARK STRAND
I love what you read, too, but I’d already read it before.
CHARLES WRIGHT
This is the way people stay friends.
MARK STRAND
We can talk about the old days in Iowa City or we can talk about why Charles continues to write and why I don’t. Charles has many more ideas than I have.
CHARLES WRIGHT
That’s bullshit and you know it. I haven’t written in two years until this summer, and then I went crazy and wrote a lot of bad stuff. But it doesn’t matter.
MARK STRAND
Oh, no, but it’s good.
CHARLES WRIGHT
Well, thank you, Mark. I want to know is anyone here older than us, and I don’t think so. So we can say whatever the hell we want, can’t we?
MARK STRAND
And we can say it and get away with it. What do you want to say, Charles?
CHARLES WRIGHT
I want to say that I do love those prose pieces.
MARK STRAND
Well, some of you had heard what I read before. I haven’t written anything new. I tried, last night, but it didn’t turn out well. I should say that if I thought what I am about to read was poetry, I never would have written it. I thought I was writing prose. But then people keep talking about “those prose poems.” They used the word “poem” so often that now I’ve begun to refer to them as poems, although I’m going to try not to tonight. I’m going to refer to them as prose pieces. I had fun writing them. I should talk about myself, or what was myself, when I was writing the prose pieces. But of course I’m entirely different now. So many changes. My hair is getting red again. I’m getting shorter. But I had so much fun writing the prose pieces, the kind of fun I never really had writing poetry. Well, I did when I first started writing poetry, and the poems came easily. But then, as the years went on, they didn’t come so easily, and when they don’t come easily, you begin to wonder, “Am I really a poet?” Because poets should be able to write poems. I would have these periods of two to three years when I didn’t write. This caused a degree of anxiety in me, so that whenever I did sit down to write a poem there was an enormous amount of pressure on me to succeed. I would feel that I was on to something some of the time, but after I’d been writing for a while, I’d begin to see the limitations of what I was writing and lose heart. Sometimes I was able to sustain the illusion that this was a valuable poem I was writing.
So, the writing of the prose pieces, because I thought they were prose—and I still believe they are prose—liberated me from that kind of pressure. It also allowed me to be funnier—because I think I am terribly funny—than I would allow myself to be in a poem. I’ve always thought poetry was a serious business. And I shouldn’t say business, because you don’t make any money from poetry. If it’s a business, it’s a bad business.
The difference is the prose pieces don’t have the weight, the words don’t have the specific gravity. There’s a lightness about that book. I wish it were more leaden and heavier! In other words, I don’t want you to feel disappointed, because even though I say that about the book, it is a totally brilliant effort. No one else could have done it. Nobody else probably would want to do it. Anyway, that’s the story of my writing life. Now, Charles, tell us the story of your writing life.
CHARLES WRIGHT
Fair’s fair. I can’t write prose, so I don’t have the escape Mark has. I can’t paint. I used to play golf.
MARK STRAND
You were good.
CHARLES WRIGHT
I was good, but I’m not anymore. So poems are the only thing I have. And since they don’t tell stories, they’re mostly meditations about what I want to think is going on in my head and in my life at any given time. And so I write that down. There was always a sense of urgency about writing poems, about trying to get said what you felt should be said about things and yourself and your relation to them, and your relation to what is there and is not there. The urgency always held sway. Two years ago, the urgency took a hike. And that’s okay, but urgency is really important in poetry, to feel that you have to write it. If you don’t feel that, then don’t write poetry. There seems to be no reason to write poetry if you don’t have to, or want to. There are plenty of other people doing it. You can’t walk down the street without getting hit with fifteen poets, even on the cross streets.
Just to drop a name, I once read that Seamus Heaney said that poems should not come out of habit, but out of necessity. But after a certain period of time, after you’ve said the one or the four or five things that you probably have to say in your life, and you’ve said them five or six different ways, over forty years—you ought to, as my wife says, lay your pen aside. You ought to shut up.
Then, this summer, I picked it back up again after two years, and wrote the apocrypha to my last book, which has just been finished. I’m sort of like Mark, I don’t know if I’ll ever write a poem again. But then I can’t write essays, I can’t write short stories, I can’t even write letters anymore. It bores me to death to write letters, though I used to write them all the time. That leaves me high and dry, sitting on top of my fifty published books, so water can stay down there.
When we started out, it was fun, Mark. We used to take our poems into the bar every night, and show them to everybody, as if everybody cared about them, but no one would care about what they said. Then after a while, after about twenty years, I never showed them to anybody, ever again. Even my publisher, he wouldn’t look at them. He’d just put them into covers. I probably could write something else, but I won’t, because I’m lazy.
MARK STRAND
Well, there’s the other thing. We are lazy. I am lazy. And now I know that you may be lazy in the future.
QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE
I’d like to ask you both, if you had decided you were not becoming a poet, what else would you have done in life?
CHARLES WRIGHT
Well, everybody always says that at an early age they had this great ambition to do this or that. But I had no ambition in my life whatsoever, except for the next beer and the next girl. That’s all I cared about. And the next golf game. That was really all I had. It wasn’t until I was twenty-three years old, and in the Army, when I was stationed in Italy, that I read this poem. I’d always sort of wanted to write, but that’s not wanting to do anything. But then I read this poem, and it really got to me. I thought maybe I could do something like that. It wasn’t narrative, and it was beautiful. Only years later I found out that it was in iambic pentameter, which is why it sounded so good. I tried imitating that, and that’s how I got going.
I guess I wanted to be a journalist, originally. To get out of the Army early, I applied to the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, uptown, and lo and behold, I got in. But I really got caught by the throat with poetry. And it was fortunate that it was something I could write, since I didn’t have to tell a story. Southerners are supposed to be able to tell a story, but I can’t, my father couldn’t, my brother couldn’t, my mother couldn’t … Actually, nobody in my family could tell a story, and so I’d never heard them.
There I was, floating around in the Army, having the time of my life in Italy, a country that blew me away, because I came from the hills of east Tennessee and had never seen anything except a postcard before. It was great. I wrote to the famous Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and had turned in my manuscript in August for September acceptance. I got accepted and went there.
The first word out of the first person’s mouth was from Dr. Strand, here. He talked about the first poem on the first worksheet, and said the iambic pentameter was not working. Strand was pissing on the post, establishing himself, which he did, immediately. I thought I was dead meat, because I did not know what iambic pentameter was. Later I found out the reason I got in was because nobody had read my manuscript. They’d just sent my manuscript over to the graduate school. So there I was, floating around again. I attached myself to Strand. I knew I had a lot to learn, and I kept my mouth shut for two years and learned something, not enough.
They taught us in Iowa never to use an abstract word like “unseeable.” But that was fifty-one years ago. I don’t think it makes any difference now. You go to graduate school, learn a lot of stuff, and spend the rest of your life getting rid of it. It’s fun, playing cards above the bar.
MARK STRAND
Well, I wanted to be a painter and went to art school. Everybody there seemed to have much more talent than I had. Then I read poetry and I established myself as a loudmouth. The teacher would talk about our paintings, and I would say, “Well, Hazlitt talks about gusto in these terms.” And the poor professor didn’t know what to make of that. I was a pretentious little twit, a show-off, all because I knew deep down I just didn’t have that much talent. I had to do something to make myself present. I really loved what some of my fellow students were doing, and after my first year, I just settled for peaceful anonymity, a kind of narcosis of the spirit. I slept through the last couple of years of art school. I then went to Italy on a Fulbright in Literature, and I started writing. I woke up when I was forty and realized I couldn’t be a waiter in a restaurant anymore, as my feet would hurt. I had to keep writing, because I could sit down and do it. Now I’m … forty-four. That’s my story.
This is a question initially for Mr. Strand, but I think it applies to Mr. Wright, too. I’ve always felt there is a really strong narrative component in your poems. I always thought your poems come from a certain idea, and that you start developing it into the depth that you were talking about. I would like to ask if in your recent works you show a bit of that procedure.
MARK STRAND
This is another way of putting that it, that they’re not finished poems.
But they’re finished prose.
MARK STRAND
You’re absolutely right. It’s easier to write these because I don’t have to carry them to the next stage. Although a few of them were written from rough drafts I had of poems that I knew I couldn’t finish. I used some of those rough drafts of poems that had been around for years, in some cases, and I just wrote them as prose, in a paragraph. I could live with that, because my expectations for prose aren’t what they are for poetry. Simple as that.
CHARLES WRIGHT
There is a little darkness running under all of these prose pieces, like a little stream running, and you shouldn’t discount that. Yes, they’re funny; yes, they’re sometimes amazingly funny and gross at the same time. But there is a seriousness under all of these things. From that point of view, don’t discount this, Almost Invisible. My next book is going to be Long Gone.
MARK STRAND
Oh, I thought it might be Invisible, like mine.
CHARLES WRIGHT
No, I’m not coming back.
MARK STRAND
We’re both valedictory poets. We’ve been waving goodbye for a while, Charles.
When you look at a poem and thought it had value, what made you feel that way?
MARK STRAND
Do you mean my poems or anybody’s poems? In the case of mine, it’s when they wanted a certain magic, a certain element that you could feel was there but you couldn’t really put your finger on it. You look for a poem that had a life that was present, but at the same time was unreachable. That it existed in this world but had a foot in the other world, whatever that other world is. That there was something in the poem that drew you in to another level of knowledge, but you didn’t quite know what that was.
CHARLES WRIGHT
Or that you didn’t know that you knew.
MARK STRAND
Or that you didn’t know that you knew. I think that’s one of the things about writing. You write, and you wonder, “Did I write that?” Or, “Wow, I didn’t know I could say that.” When you write you sometimes follow formal imperatives, you feel the rightness of what you’re doing even though you don’t understand it. You really can’t paraphrase. You just feel the weight of it. You feel its presence.
CHARLES WRIGHT
I feel the same way. That magic, what you say is magic, is also magic to me. But it’s also an entrance point to something beyond what I’m able to say. What I’m always trying to do is to get to it in the most interesting way that I can. I want to get to that point, that still point that’s beyond what I know, and where I’ll never see, but I like to know I’m looking for it.
Mr. Strand, when I read your prose pieces, I wondered whether they would lean towards poetry or towards prose. Today, when you read, I thought you were reading poetry, because there was one very strong element of rhythm.
MARK STRAND
If you’ve been writing poetry for fifty years, it’s hard to shake it. My prose is rhythmical because it’s the way I think. I can’t help it.
CHARLES WRIGHT
The difference between Mr. and Mrs. Baby and Almost Invisible, the prose is quite striking. These pieces are short, which gives to them the idea that the compression is a poetic compression. I’ve known Mark a long time, and these are prose pieces, no matter how he reads them. Except that one about the Spanish poet, which is a poem.
MARK STRAND
There is a poem in that. I wanted to write something that sounded like a translation of Lorca. I can’t read that poem in Spain, because in Spanish it just seems like a lousy poem. The horrors of translation.
How many of you were in Iowa in those days? Was Paul Engle doing the workshops? What was the atmosphere? Was it very competitive? Was it when he was doing the workshops?
MARK STRAND
Yes, Paul was the king.
CHARLES WRIGHT
Well, he ran it out of his back pocket. He raised all the money that he used to get the talented people there. Those of us just out of the Army after three years had a lot of money, so we paid our own way, but Paul would go over to Cedar Rapids, and go to the Quaker Oats Company and get money for this. He didn’t really run the workshops. Donald Justice did. Paul would come in from time to time, but he was too busy raising money, keeping the thing afloat. He did establish the international workshop, which was a big thing. It was a big deal. We both got there from Italy at the same time, fall of … 1961? I was so smitten with Italy and I knew Mark had just been there. So I just introduced myself. I think there were thirty poets and thirty fiction writers. Now there are sixty of each.
MARK STRAND
Yes. We stayed in a barracks. It was simple in those days. We all lived for poetry. We would drink in the same bars, play pinball, play cards, and we all talked about poetry all the time.
CHARLES WRIGHT
Yes, that’s all we talked about, and all you lived for. I’m sure they still do it.
MARK STRAND
Those were the good old days.