Interview with Carolyn Wright

Carolyn Wright is an influential American poet who teaches at Brown University and has been the recipient of such accolades as a Guggenheim Fellowship, MacArthur Fellowship, and has been the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island. She has published 14 books since 1977 and as one follows her career, they can read from her pages the evolution of her poetry in content and style.

SoR: While much of your poetry has a sense of where you came from, what inspires you to write, and especially poetry as the medium of choice?

Wright: Poetry was an accidental choice. Maybe it's more accurate to say that after a riddled path, poetry chose me, as in, "it" let me stay. 

SoR: What is your editing process like for a poem?

Wright: Painful. But there's pleasure in the pain. It's not a "method" and no one else could or would want to

duplicate it. I would imagine everyone's editing processes are their own, and for some editing is

too outside the process to engage. I am co-teaching a course on Creeley this term. Editing is

not his creed.  

SoR: In the beginning of your career, you wrote more narrative style poetry and then shifted a bit to the experimental. Most poets gradually grow their style over the years. Was this shift conscious or not and what do you think caused it?

Wright: I think moving around the country stimulated stylistic changes. I picked up things as I moved. I left some things behind as I moved. Other elements of my earlier writing found their way back into the writing at an angle.

SoR: With Twitter requiring people to communicate in 140 characters or less, Facebook offering short statements about oneself as their status, and so forth, one would think that poetry would begin a sort of resurgence. As a poet and teacher at Brown University, what are your thoughts on the state of poetry today?

Wright: Poetry is always changing, otherwise, there would be no poetry except what is already in the historical record. Poetry is mutable and expansive. There is much fine writing no one else can claim because

the borders of the genre are held to with such conventional thought as to what constitutes this or that.

When a designation is purely a market decision, poetry usually gains ground.

SoR: As a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, former Poet Laureate of Rhode Island, and MacArthur Fellowship recipient to name a few of your accolades, what would you consider to be the high and low points of your writing career and likewise, the high and low points of simply writing poetry?

Wright: Getting a life was the most important. Getting a job was next. A good life and a good job, those made a ginormous difference in my own psychic ability to stick with it. The awards are wonderful of course, but they are not a reason to write or a reason to stop writing. I was out of my twenties by the time my first full-length book came out, before I was the recipient of any accolades. I've stopped worrying about the isolation of poetry from the larger cultural conversation. I've even come to the conclusion that

there isn't a larger cultural conversation, and that most artist mediums, especially those with considerable capital attached, are brutal affairs. "Only emotion endures...only the quality of the affection matters."

There are plenty of disappointments and plenty of exceptionally sweet moments. I don't think I want to single them out.

SoR: Many poets today submit their work to literary publications and publishers. Rejection is a reality all writers face at some point or another. What advice would have to a poet experiencing that obstacle in their writing career?

Wright: That rejection is a reality all writers face. Write if you must. Don't write if you mustn't.

SoR: What inspired you to teach writing at Brown University and what are the challenges and rewards of such a role?

Wright: It is not that I was inspired to teach, I was permitted to teach. I learned to teach by flailing around at it. Sometimes I still flail around. When that happens I've learned the next class meeting can be better. It's on me.

SoR: When I read your poem “Lake Echo, Dear,” the first stanza -

“Is the woman in the pool of light
really reading or just staring
at what is written...”

- made me think about the reader-writer relationship. What do you feel is the responsibility of the poet to the reader and vice versa, the reader to the poet?

Wright: It is a private engagement.

SoR: You are the daughter of a judge and a court reporter. I thought about how factual and concrete those professions are and drew a connection with the clear and distinct imagery you use in your poetry. This could just be my interpretation but I have to ask: what effect did growing up with a judge and court reporter as parents have on their poet child?

Wright: Word love. A high value placed on personal integrity.

SoR: What is the best piece of advice you could give to a budding poet?

Wright: Read. Read the ones who you want at your back. Read the ones with whom you want to go forward in your life. Create opportunities for an ongoing exchange. Never stop learning something that challenges who you already know.