Long love and constant spirits: an interview with Richard and Charlee Wilbur - Interview

Literary Review, Summer, 2002 by Jeffrey S. Cramer

RW: I'm wanting very much for Charlee to say, "This is a good poem." There have been cases when she didn't say that. I know I suppressed one poem at least because she hadn't said that, and I've worked a bit on others as a result. I'm looking for her reaction, not as an academic critic, but as a very sensitive human being who loves poetry, and, of course, I want praise, but I am also braced for the other thing. I'm braced for the possibility that what I've shown her won't please her very much, which will disappoint me, or that she will point out some flaw that might be tinkered with.

CW: I feel that there's something else that he is looking for and that is honesty. His colleagues who, from time to time, show poems to each other often have ambiguous feelings about it--their own fragile egos, maybe, somewhere in the picture. Largely they respect each other's suggestions, but sometimes it is resented. I don't pose any threat to Dick. I am the person who can tell him something that I feel is true, and I think that honesty is important.

RW: Well, that's right, what Charlee says. I expect and get honesty from her. I think that there are some fellow poets from whom I've gotten quite a bit of honesty. William Meredith, for example--I think we're not very envious of each other and we're able to be straightforward. The late John Malcolm Brinnin was always a very good critic of my work and a very good advocate of it. I suppose one thing that simplified it in John's case was that at a certain point he stopped being a poet and became a man of letters, so that there was no possibility, no great possibility of competitive feelings there.

Sometimes, of course, the praise sought may never come, or may be slow in coming. When he first showed the poem, "Lying," to his wife, she responded, "Well, you've finally done it: you've managed to write a poem that's incomprehensible from beginning to end." "That's right," he says, confirming the story, but Charlee quickly corrects the impression, "On first hearing." Asked to read it again, to spend fifteen minutes with it, her opinion changed, but this effort on the poet's part to redirect his reader is uncommon.

RW: That's fairly rare, I think, and I think part of it is that most of my poems are not so full of riffs and rapidity as that poem is and was. Mostly, I think, my poems strike you as fairly open, don't they?

CW: Yes.

Turning to Charlee, he asks, "Now, you read everything that I write, don't you?" and then continues:

RW: Charlee was very well educated in French at Dana Hall, and Smith, played all sorts of roles in French plays, and so when I'm translating from Moliare, Racine, or some other French writer, she is of great help in telling me what the words mean, or telling me whether the lines feel right to her. In any case, she hears every line that I translate and passes on it or helps me to make it better.

There can be at least one danger in this level of familiarity, in using your wife always as your first critic, a danger, as Richard says, "of my feeling good about a poem which should not please me, if she weren't as honest as she is. At need, she can be very blunt about something that doesn't seem to her to be up to standard."