What do you think?
Rate this book
Poets on Poetry
Halflife: Improvisations and Interviews, 1977-87
"I myself am interested in a kind of structural investigation of the line, an attempt at some kind of harmonics involving new patterns and new designs using a long image-freighted line (the odd marriage of Emily and Walt) that can carry information (and 'sincerity' and a lyric intensity at the same time. Not only will it sing, but it will tell time too. Or as Fats Domino once observed, 'I don't want to bury the lyrics, man; I want 'em to understand what I'm saying.'"
Halflife is captivating. Charles Wright, in disclosing the contents of his journal, reveals the influence of Ezra Pound, Eugenio Montale, Emily Dickinson, Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, and country music legend A.P. Carter.
Halflife is captivating. Charles Wright, in disclosing the contents of his journal, reveals the influence of Ezra Pound, Eugenio Montale, Emily Dickinson, Italian painter Giorgio Morandi, and country music legend A.P. Carter.
- GenresPoetryNonfiction
185 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1988
1 person is currently reading
29 people want to read
About the author
Charles Wright
247 books110 followersCharles Wright is an American poet. He shared the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for Black Zodiac.
From 2014 to 2015, he served as the 20th Poet Laureate of the United States. Charles Wright is often ranked as one of the best American poets of his generation. He attended Davidson College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; he also served four years in the U.S. Army, and it was while stationed in Italy that Wright began to read and write poetry. He is the author of over 20 books of poetry.
Charles Wright is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and the Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His many collections of poetry and numerous awards—including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize—have proven that he is, as Jay Parini once said, “among the best poets” of his generation. Yet Wright remains stoic about such achievements: it is not the poet, but the poems, as he concluded to Genoways. “One wants one’s work to be paid attention to, but I hate personal attention. I just want everyone to read the poems. I want my poetry to get all the attention in the world, but I want to be the anonymous author.”
From 2014 to 2015, he served as the 20th Poet Laureate of the United States. Charles Wright is often ranked as one of the best American poets of his generation. He attended Davidson College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop; he also served four years in the U.S. Army, and it was while stationed in Italy that Wright began to read and write poetry. He is the author of over 20 books of poetry.
Charles Wright is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and the Souder Family Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. His many collections of poetry and numerous awards—including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize—have proven that he is, as Jay Parini once said, “among the best poets” of his generation. Yet Wright remains stoic about such achievements: it is not the poet, but the poems, as he concluded to Genoways. “One wants one’s work to be paid attention to, but I hate personal attention. I just want everyone to read the poems. I want my poetry to get all the attention in the world, but I want to be the anonymous author.”
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 31, 2020
Lucky to find a copy of this book of essays on poetry:
(From) "Improvisations on Form and Measure"
P3: . . . The line must be strong all the way through and not finish in a dying fall. This sort of sloppy thinking and practice is what leads people to dwell on, and work toward, line breaks in free verse instead of imagining the line as a whole, a unit. It leads to the anemic an careless practices we see executed in most free verse poems today, where the accent is on the free and not on the verse, as it should be.
P4: What you have to say--though ultimately all-important--in most cases will not be news. How you say it just might be.
P5: All great art has line--painting, poetry, music, dance. Without line there is no direction. Without direction there is no substance. Without substance there is nothing.
There is an organization to the universe, but it's not personal.
One has to learn to leave things alone. It's best to keep unwritten as much as possible. Poetry is just the shadow of the dog. It helps us know the dog is around, but it's not the dog. The dog is elsewhere, and constantly on the move.
The poem that is spatially tight and formally loose is what we have had too much of lately . . .
Each line should be a station of the cross.
If the true purpose and result of poetry is a contemplation of the divine and its attendant mysteries, as I believe it is, then content is a constant and a given: only the proper subject matter, and the innovative presentation of that subject matter, becomes, then, a concern.
P6: . . . You just can't not know the traditions of English verse if you expect to write in English. You have to know why you don't write--if you don't--in traditional meter. As Philip Johnson has said about architecture, you cannot not know history. If you write in a free verse line, you'd better know why you do so. Merely because it's in vogue is not enough. Your line has to be as good as the traditional one, and you'd better have a reason for using it.
(From) "Half Life: A Commonplace Notebook"--Many quotes. With no name are Charles Wright.
P20: Joan Didion on James Jones: A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image. . . .
My poems are put together in tonal blocks, in tonal units that work off one another. [Like] Cezanne's use of color and form. I try to do that in sound patterns within the line, in the line within the stanza, and the stanza within the poem. Tonal units of measure, tonal rhythms in time.
P21: Leonard Michaels: The great ones always speak from the other side.
Gowing on Cezanne: The move toward the disintegration of the object in some of the most memorable works of a painter so passionately attached to objects is the attraction and the riddle of Cezanne's last phase. The element that usurped its place, the patch of color in itself. . . .
The primary level of the poem is bread mold. The secondary meaning, the resonance, is the mystery that heals, the penicillin.
Georges Braque: The recourse to talent shows a defect in the imagination.
Pure technique is the spider's web without the spider--it glitters and catches but doesn't kill.
P22: The ultimate duty and fate of the poet is visionary. . . .
One is always three lines away from getting it all said, once and for all.
P23: Wallace Stevens: The poet is the priest of the invisible.
What do I want my poems to do? I want them to sing and to tell the story of my life.
Wallace Stevens: A poem need not have a meaning, and like most things in nature often does not.
Actually, I usually write about whatever swims into my mind. And since I am always, unlike Heraclitus, sinking in the same water, it's usually the same fish that swim in--ghostfish, deathfish, firefish, whatever can rise to the top.
All of us have a desire to say something, but few of us have something to say.
The poet is engaged in re-creating the familiar through introducing the unfamiliar.
Poetry doesn't lie in stating facts. It lies in making images.
All art is reminiscence. The best art reminisces about the future.
Their worst is the best that some people have to offer.
P24: Eight riffs on the image.
1. The image is always a mirror. Sometimes we see ourselves in it, and sometimes we don't.
2. Images are the wheels of the poem.
3. The image, like the water drop, contains its own world, and flashes its own colors.
4. The image is always spiritual, as it is beyond us, and analogous and seditious.
5. The image is what connects us to What's-Out-There.
6. If the "line" is what separates us from the beasts, then the "image" is what keeps us apart.
7. The image is how we say it when we're too embarrassed to say it.
8. An image went out for a walk and met itself when it got there.
Unless you love the music of words, you are merely a pamphleteer.
If you can't be the genius, be the one the genius admires.
I like to think the absence of people in my poems enhances their presence in the objects and landscapes. . . .
People go to poetry readings for the same reasons they go to church--they think they should and they hope they'll learn something. One writes the poems for the same reasons.
. . . the most condensed image possible that will still carry the necessary information.
"It either adds or it takes away; nothing is ever neutral in poems."
P25: Poems are made up of details; good poems are made up of good details; great poems are made up of "luminous" details.
Mark Strand: The point of truth comes when a poet goes from writing private poems in a public language to writing public poems in a private language.
P26: Hemingway on Stein: She started taking herself seriously rather than her work seriously.
The longer you write, the diviner the inspiration gets.
More often than not, the title is all a poem needs of narrative structure.
P27: Poetry is an exile's art. Anyone who writes it seriously writes from an exile's point of view.
We write approximations.
Josef Sudek: Theory is all right, but it is like eating; when you overeat you get sick.
Josef Sudek: I like to tell stories about the life of inanimate objects, to relate something mysterious: the seventh side of the dice.
P28: The parts are always more than the sum of their wholes.
P29: All my long poems are short poems in disguise.
Not to the world, perhaps, but to yourself you're only as good as your last poem. Or you should be, if you're serious.
One reason so many of us like Hart Crane, and place him high, very high, in our American Pantheon, is because he, like Hopkins, did what he felt like doing with language in his poems, as we, on the contrary, are very timid to do. We admire their audacity and sense of self. Or aspirations to a sense of self. In any case, they heard their own solo, and they took it.
P30: One should write with a kind of meticulous abandon.
Sometimes we think we're this, or we think we're that, but we're never more than servants of the language. Never.
A metaphor is a link in the long chain which leads us to the invisible.
I want nothing for myself. I want everything for my poems. . . .
P31: The love of God is the loneliest thing I know of.
Four approaches to the poetic line:
1. Music
2. Imagination
3. Storyline
4. Structure
P33: If you can't sing, you've got to get out of the choir.
All poems are translations.
P34: One must write words not language.
The main aim is toward beauty and clarity of line and structure.
Poems should be written line by line not idea by idea.
The measure is the meaning.
In poems, all considerations are considerations of form.
P35: Describe, but don't be descriptive.
P36: If you can tell the dancer from the dance, one of you isn't doing his job.
You can't take a poem apart until you are able to put one together.
P37: There is a sequence and consequence to all things.
[From] the essay "Improvisations on Montale"
P42: No matter how well a poem is written, it always comes down to the same thing: is it a telegram or is it a recipe? Is it something I didn't know, or does it tell me what I do know in a different combination? Both are appealing, but only the first is truly revelatory.
[From] the essay "Two Explanations"
P48: Two untruths, two impossibilities make a possible truth. And that's what I want in my poems, possible truths.
P49: After many additions and subtractions, I decided, whatever its value, the two lines needed no more explanation . . . . I had always wanted to write a two-line poem, and here I finally had one and was trying to load it under with trappings and filigree. So I left it where it began. I also liked the idea of a poem, no matter how short, ending in two consecutive prepositions.
"Death" by Charles Wright
I take you as I take the moon rising,
Darkness, black moth the light burns up in.
(Wright goes on to explain every syllable and accent.)
[From] an interview with Charles Wright "At Oberlin College" (1977)
P65: Everyone knows what dishevelled means so shevelled would mean the opposite. That's the kind of word I'm interested in making up.
[From] an interview "With Sherod Santos" (1981)
P112: Emily Dickinson (upon being asked whom he regarded as the last great poet in America).
[From] Interview with Carol Ellis (1986)
p153: Philip Larkin's comment was "Form means nothing to me. Content is everything." My comment would be that content means nothing to me. Form is everything. . . . From lies at the heart of all poetical problems. I don't mean "forms"--I don't mean sonnets, sestinas, rondeaus, quatrains, triplets. I mean Form. UFO--Ultimate Formal Organization. . . . I'm one of those people who think content has nothing to do with subject matter. I think there's form, there's subject matter, and then there's content. Content is what it all "means," somehow. Subject matter is what it's "about." Form is how you organize it. . . . I write only in free verse . . . : my life is dedicated to it.
[From] interview With Sherod Santos (1987)
P173: In fact, all the great masters of free verse, Pound, Williams, Eliot, Stevens, Whitman himself, came to it from a background of metered verse. There's a cautionary tale in there somewhere. . . . Donald Justice was and is a master of the meters . . . He has the finest metrical ear I know.
P177: Mark Strand once said . . . "The point of truth comes when a poet goes from writing private poems in a public language to writing public poems in a private language."
P179: Emily Dickinson is the "What." The others are the "How." She was never a technical influence on me, other than in the idea that shorter is just as good as, if not better than, longer. . . . She allowed me to write what was in my heart and not just what was on my mind. . . . I like that she wrote about big things in a short space. Her heart is on her sleeve, but her sleeve is rolled up. . . . In her individual poems, she wrote less and said more than anyone in the history of American poetry.
(From) "Improvisations on Form and Measure"
P3: . . . The line must be strong all the way through and not finish in a dying fall. This sort of sloppy thinking and practice is what leads people to dwell on, and work toward, line breaks in free verse instead of imagining the line as a whole, a unit. It leads to the anemic an careless practices we see executed in most free verse poems today, where the accent is on the free and not on the verse, as it should be.
P4: What you have to say--though ultimately all-important--in most cases will not be news. How you say it just might be.
P5: All great art has line--painting, poetry, music, dance. Without line there is no direction. Without direction there is no substance. Without substance there is nothing.
There is an organization to the universe, but it's not personal.
One has to learn to leave things alone. It's best to keep unwritten as much as possible. Poetry is just the shadow of the dog. It helps us know the dog is around, but it's not the dog. The dog is elsewhere, and constantly on the move.
The poem that is spatially tight and formally loose is what we have had too much of lately . . .
Each line should be a station of the cross.
If the true purpose and result of poetry is a contemplation of the divine and its attendant mysteries, as I believe it is, then content is a constant and a given: only the proper subject matter, and the innovative presentation of that subject matter, becomes, then, a concern.
P6: . . . You just can't not know the traditions of English verse if you expect to write in English. You have to know why you don't write--if you don't--in traditional meter. As Philip Johnson has said about architecture, you cannot not know history. If you write in a free verse line, you'd better know why you do so. Merely because it's in vogue is not enough. Your line has to be as good as the traditional one, and you'd better have a reason for using it.
(From) "Half Life: A Commonplace Notebook"--Many quotes. With no name are Charles Wright.
P20: Joan Didion on James Jones: A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image. . . .
My poems are put together in tonal blocks, in tonal units that work off one another. [Like] Cezanne's use of color and form. I try to do that in sound patterns within the line, in the line within the stanza, and the stanza within the poem. Tonal units of measure, tonal rhythms in time.
P21: Leonard Michaels: The great ones always speak from the other side.
Gowing on Cezanne: The move toward the disintegration of the object in some of the most memorable works of a painter so passionately attached to objects is the attraction and the riddle of Cezanne's last phase. The element that usurped its place, the patch of color in itself. . . .
The primary level of the poem is bread mold. The secondary meaning, the resonance, is the mystery that heals, the penicillin.
Georges Braque: The recourse to talent shows a defect in the imagination.
Pure technique is the spider's web without the spider--it glitters and catches but doesn't kill.
P22: The ultimate duty and fate of the poet is visionary. . . .
One is always three lines away from getting it all said, once and for all.
P23: Wallace Stevens: The poet is the priest of the invisible.
What do I want my poems to do? I want them to sing and to tell the story of my life.
Wallace Stevens: A poem need not have a meaning, and like most things in nature often does not.
Actually, I usually write about whatever swims into my mind. And since I am always, unlike Heraclitus, sinking in the same water, it's usually the same fish that swim in--ghostfish, deathfish, firefish, whatever can rise to the top.
All of us have a desire to say something, but few of us have something to say.
The poet is engaged in re-creating the familiar through introducing the unfamiliar.
Poetry doesn't lie in stating facts. It lies in making images.
All art is reminiscence. The best art reminisces about the future.
Their worst is the best that some people have to offer.
P24: Eight riffs on the image.
1. The image is always a mirror. Sometimes we see ourselves in it, and sometimes we don't.
2. Images are the wheels of the poem.
3. The image, like the water drop, contains its own world, and flashes its own colors.
4. The image is always spiritual, as it is beyond us, and analogous and seditious.
5. The image is what connects us to What's-Out-There.
6. If the "line" is what separates us from the beasts, then the "image" is what keeps us apart.
7. The image is how we say it when we're too embarrassed to say it.
8. An image went out for a walk and met itself when it got there.
Unless you love the music of words, you are merely a pamphleteer.
If you can't be the genius, be the one the genius admires.
I like to think the absence of people in my poems enhances their presence in the objects and landscapes. . . .
People go to poetry readings for the same reasons they go to church--they think they should and they hope they'll learn something. One writes the poems for the same reasons.
. . . the most condensed image possible that will still carry the necessary information.
"It either adds or it takes away; nothing is ever neutral in poems."
P25: Poems are made up of details; good poems are made up of good details; great poems are made up of "luminous" details.
Mark Strand: The point of truth comes when a poet goes from writing private poems in a public language to writing public poems in a private language.
P26: Hemingway on Stein: She started taking herself seriously rather than her work seriously.
The longer you write, the diviner the inspiration gets.
More often than not, the title is all a poem needs of narrative structure.
P27: Poetry is an exile's art. Anyone who writes it seriously writes from an exile's point of view.
We write approximations.
Josef Sudek: Theory is all right, but it is like eating; when you overeat you get sick.
Josef Sudek: I like to tell stories about the life of inanimate objects, to relate something mysterious: the seventh side of the dice.
P28: The parts are always more than the sum of their wholes.
P29: All my long poems are short poems in disguise.
Not to the world, perhaps, but to yourself you're only as good as your last poem. Or you should be, if you're serious.
One reason so many of us like Hart Crane, and place him high, very high, in our American Pantheon, is because he, like Hopkins, did what he felt like doing with language in his poems, as we, on the contrary, are very timid to do. We admire their audacity and sense of self. Or aspirations to a sense of self. In any case, they heard their own solo, and they took it.
P30: One should write with a kind of meticulous abandon.
Sometimes we think we're this, or we think we're that, but we're never more than servants of the language. Never.
A metaphor is a link in the long chain which leads us to the invisible.
I want nothing for myself. I want everything for my poems. . . .
P31: The love of God is the loneliest thing I know of.
Four approaches to the poetic line:
1. Music
2. Imagination
3. Storyline
4. Structure
P33: If you can't sing, you've got to get out of the choir.
All poems are translations.
P34: One must write words not language.
The main aim is toward beauty and clarity of line and structure.
Poems should be written line by line not idea by idea.
The measure is the meaning.
In poems, all considerations are considerations of form.
P35: Describe, but don't be descriptive.
P36: If you can tell the dancer from the dance, one of you isn't doing his job.
You can't take a poem apart until you are able to put one together.
P37: There is a sequence and consequence to all things.
[From] the essay "Improvisations on Montale"
P42: No matter how well a poem is written, it always comes down to the same thing: is it a telegram or is it a recipe? Is it something I didn't know, or does it tell me what I do know in a different combination? Both are appealing, but only the first is truly revelatory.
[From] the essay "Two Explanations"
P48: Two untruths, two impossibilities make a possible truth. And that's what I want in my poems, possible truths.
P49: After many additions and subtractions, I decided, whatever its value, the two lines needed no more explanation . . . . I had always wanted to write a two-line poem, and here I finally had one and was trying to load it under with trappings and filigree. So I left it where it began. I also liked the idea of a poem, no matter how short, ending in two consecutive prepositions.
"Death" by Charles Wright
I take you as I take the moon rising,
Darkness, black moth the light burns up in.
(Wright goes on to explain every syllable and accent.)
[From] an interview with Charles Wright "At Oberlin College" (1977)
P65: Everyone knows what dishevelled means so shevelled would mean the opposite. That's the kind of word I'm interested in making up.
[From] an interview "With Sherod Santos" (1981)
P112: Emily Dickinson (upon being asked whom he regarded as the last great poet in America).
[From] Interview with Carol Ellis (1986)
p153: Philip Larkin's comment was "Form means nothing to me. Content is everything." My comment would be that content means nothing to me. Form is everything. . . . From lies at the heart of all poetical problems. I don't mean "forms"--I don't mean sonnets, sestinas, rondeaus, quatrains, triplets. I mean Form. UFO--Ultimate Formal Organization. . . . I'm one of those people who think content has nothing to do with subject matter. I think there's form, there's subject matter, and then there's content. Content is what it all "means," somehow. Subject matter is what it's "about." Form is how you organize it. . . . I write only in free verse . . . : my life is dedicated to it.
[From] interview With Sherod Santos (1987)
P173: In fact, all the great masters of free verse, Pound, Williams, Eliot, Stevens, Whitman himself, came to it from a background of metered verse. There's a cautionary tale in there somewhere. . . . Donald Justice was and is a master of the meters . . . He has the finest metrical ear I know.
P177: Mark Strand once said . . . "The point of truth comes when a poet goes from writing private poems in a public language to writing public poems in a private language."
P179: Emily Dickinson is the "What." The others are the "How." She was never a technical influence on me, other than in the idea that shorter is just as good as, if not better than, longer. . . . She allowed me to write what was in my heart and not just what was on my mind. . . . I like that she wrote about big things in a short space. Her heart is on her sleeve, but her sleeve is rolled up. . . . In her individual poems, she wrote less and said more than anyone in the history of American poetry.
January 16, 2008
Recent amazon purchase.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews