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David Wright wears the bottoms of his trousers rolled, but the similarities between Wright and T.S. Eliot's Prufrock end there. As PWLF members who attended his reading at Barnes and Noble on November 29th learned, the 34 year-old poet, husband, father and professor from Champaign is anything but languid or complacent. In his denim shirt and black turtleneck, winter beard taking shape, Wright's casual presence puts me at ease, despite the fact that my only experience with interviews involves worrying about whether or not the shoes I'm wearing will help me land the job. Breathless with coffee nerves, I confess my inexperience. Like a good teacher, he reassures me that an interview is simply a conversation. With this, the conversation begins and already, I am simultaneously envious of and flattered by his confidence in dialogue. David Wright is an Assistant Professor of English at Richland Community College in Decatur, a career that is not unusual for a writer, but a detail that will prove significant in his performance and subsequent interview. At the beginning of his reading, I am struck by the attentiveness of his audience. We turn ourselves toward his voice, his confidence, his authority at the microphone, like small children hushed around a storyteller. I look around and expect to see mouths agape in fascination, and would have had my own jaw loose and open, were it not for the constant grin on my face. Attendance at this reading was tremendous, and yet there was a stillness and attentiveness rarely felt in the noisy chaos of Barnes and Noble. Wright is a natural performer, peppering his readings with
anecdotes, humor, asides, and stories about his poems. He is
never condescending in his role of teacher or writer, casually
and charmingly assumes we understand precisely what he is saying,
often touching the audience with nods and raised eyebrow of acknowledgement,
as if to say, "You see?" And of course we do. We adjust
easily into our places, as both students and audience. We are
lectured and entertained simultaneously and it is evident
that there is much we can learn from David Wright. David Wright wrote his first poem at age six: "I love the wind, do you know why? / Because the wind goes whistling by." His poetry still captures that same innocent delight, even shares a similar softness, despite Wright's claim that he wrote really bad love songs in high school -- and didn't begin writing seriously until college. Comparing his poetry on the page with his performance, the two seem juxtaposed. What first strikes me about his written work is its quiet intensity. What strikes me about his performance, as well as his personality, is his animated, hyperactive glee. Regardless of the circumstances surrounding the experience of Wright's poems, it is hard to avoid the sheer pleasure of reading or hearing them. Perhaps it is Wright's love and knowledge of music that makes his poems so easy to read. In college, Wright minored in music after realizing that he would rather spend his time reading in the library than practicing his instrument, alone in his room. Wright gratefully acknowledges the usefulness of studying music, "I don't think my poetry would be the same if I hadn't studied music, and if I didn't love music. Poetry is a kind of embodied music." The self-described social creature chose to pursue his music through poetry, and consequently, evolved into a performer, as well. When asked about his own writing habits, Wright doesn't offer any profound insights or secrets to writing rituals that will lead to profound poetry. Darn. He prefers to "let poems work mentally first" and claims he "broods on things." When he is ready to work, he enjoys the white noise provided by coffee shops, despite admitting it smacks of cliché. He carries a notebook, drafts by hand, and transfers his poems to his computer later. "I write a lot of things in the margins of books, because I think one of the most important things a writer can do is read." Wright says he is often struck by how many beginning writers don't read the works of writers preceding them. "There are a lot of reasons to read the best of which, of course, is to steal. But the other one is just common courtesy! Poetry is a kind of ongoing conversation. If you don't know what people have already said, you can't engage in the conversation. Bobby Burns did 'love like a rose' better than anybody's going to. You're not going to do that better than he did. And you ought to, if you're in the conversation, at least know you're quoting him." In his poem, "Those Skilled in the Art," Wright refers to William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens as "real poets," capable of surviving dull careers while still managing to write great poetry. In this way, he pays tribute to the poets preceding him, acknowledging and celebrating that ongoing conversation: "Eliot slotted safely in the bank. / Williams filling out his physical forms. / Stevens selling insurance, for God's sake." David Wright is not afraid to defer to the judgement of other writers and poets. He shares a philosophy with poet Scott Cairns, that writing is "generative." "Poetry generates things, and if writing shuts down possibilities, it's not very good." So what's the difference between a poem generating other poems and just plain stealing? And how does Wright find his own voice, without relying too heavily on voices of the past? "I used to worry about it a lot more than I do now." Once again, he borrows from another writer. "Eliot says that no writer lives by himself that he's always part of the tradition. So if you view yourself as extending that tradition, you can continue to write. If you view yourself as having to imitate or equal that tradition, you'll never keep writing." Wright warns against trying to say everything in one poem. "Beginning writers often choke poems to death. They take a poem and try to say everything they've been thinking for months or years in that first poem. The poem becomes an excuse to argue for their ideas as opposed to being something else." He reminds us that we have our whole lives to write and that what we have to say will often change with time and age, and that the most important thing is to write. Wright has dealt with what critics often refer to as "Shakespeare Syndrome" and doesn't appear to be bothered by Will's ghost. "If you read Shakespeare's sonnets, not every sonnet is as good as every other sonnet. His clunkers are better than my best, but, you know, not every sonnet is perfect." At this point in the interview, we are stopped by yet another audience member who congratulates David on a job well done. I wonder about the first "audience members," and the experiences that formed his interest in writing.. He recalls poignant "spaces" in his writing career: his first creative writing class with Dan Guillory at Millikin University, when he recognized the idea of poetry as conversation; the first time he had a mentor critique a poem and realized the mentor was wrong. He notes that mentors usually aren't wrong, but in this case, he knew his mentor was wrong. "I was beginning to find my own ear. I wasn't beginning to find my own voice I was beginning to find what the poem needed me to do. It happened just enough..." He began to expand and find other mentors and other people who could take his work seriously. David Wright has developed his ear, and his eye as well. When asked about his ability to write about personal experience without imposing on the reader, or the poem, David offers, "There were two tricks I learned. The first was writing dramatic monologues, deliberately stepping into the voice of a third party. What it allows is the freedom not to be yourself, and you begin to play with language and sound and perspective and imagery." "There's this perception that poetry is all about self-revelation, but if you don't take that self-revelation and do something with it, you haven't made a poem. Poems that are pure striptease don't last. They tend to be wonderfully shocking, at first, but they don't have any kind of music or any kind of insight. It's Oprah. You take the risk, when you reveal yourself, that the poems become so tied to you that they have no life. If you're going to have one poem that makes it past the day you die, you've got to have some vision and some music." And the second "trick?" "The Chicago poems
were a real breakthrough because I began to start paying more
attention to what I observed and less to my own presence in the
observation. Most of those poems were initially written without
the 'I' in them at all and then I went back and said, 'That's
okay.' But the first two or three of those were a deliberate
effort to pull the 'I' out." In "Addison Street," Wright tells us of a woman on Chicago's L train, eating sunflower seeds: "She fills her hand/then fills her mouth, the entire handful at once. She cannot / contain them all in the gathers and folds of her pleated cheeks. / She coughs. Seeds scatter from her lips. A shower of shells splatters my arm. / She reaches her slim fingers towards me, without hesitation and picks a/seed from my skin. / She licks off the salt and flicks the seed back into her mouth." Did that really happen? "The poem is true whether it's true or not. Something kind of like it happened." But what about those awful love songs? David Wright claims he writes bad poetry every day, but better yet, "I wrote a lot of really awful love songs in high school. Just sat down and played my four chords and wrote bad, bad love songs. No shame in it at all." In Lines from the Provinces, the most significant influence on his poems was setting. "It became, literally, a ground for the other things. Marriage became about making a place in the world. Death became attached to place. Those kinds of things." The next book? "Music and language are the two concerns right now that are really animating me the most." I wanted to know what David Wright, the poet and teacher, would recommend we do to improve our own practice of the craft? David becomes thoughtful for a moment, then punctuates each directive with an open palm to the table. "Read. Don't be afraid to write when the writing is lousy. Don't be afraid not to write for awhile. Don't be afraid of audiences, though they will misunderstand you. Don't buy the crap that to be a poet you have to be a dysfunctional pain in the butt. Go ahead and live a real life in a community with other people, and chances are, that will be more generative of encouragement and ego and the kinds of things that feed poetry than being a misanthrope. Don't become a cliche." "Don't buy the beret and the black turtleneck,"
Wright says, while pulling at his own black turtleneck and grinning,
"or hang out solely with the melancholics of the world."
Despite his taste in clothes, Wright is neither Prufrock nor melancholic beatnik. David Wright is a refreshing and welcome addition to the PWLF community. |