David Remnick
AN INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES WRIGHT
David Remnick:
I think most readers will be surprised to
learn you didn't start writing until you were twenty-five years
old.
Charles Wright:
That's true. I was in the army in Italy in
1959 and I was given a copy of Ezra Pound's
Selected Poems.
The poems had many references to places in Northern Italy
where I was stationed, so I started reading them and going to
places that he mentions. One place, Lake Garda, was one of
Pound's sacred places. He met Joyce there for the first time; and
Catullus supposedly had a villa there. I was stationed only
fifteen miles away, in Verona, and I would go out to the ruins–
very romantic with all the beautiful leaves and trees-and I
would read Pound's poems. And naturally, once you start
liking something, whatever it is, you try to do it. I started trying
to imitate him and that's how I got into writing poems. I would
also go to the army base library which had Eliot, e. e. Cum–
mings, Robert Frost, and the usual five or ten books of poetry,
and that's what I read for two years until I got out of the army.
Then I went to a graduate writing program at the University of
Iowa. I kept my mouth shut there, listened for a couple of years,
and I've been writing ever since, or trying to.
Remnick:
Don't you remember having read poetry before
then?
Wright:
Only to a certain extent. One has to read poetry if
one goes to school and takes English courses. I never studied
poetry at all in college other than in the regular freshman
English course. My mother had gone to the University of Mis–
sissippi, was interested in writing and, at the time, used to date
William Faulkner's brother, which made for a literary aura
around my house. It was never poetry, though, it was always
fiction. There was always good fiction around the house. My
mother was a great admirer of Jane Austen, Eudora Welty, and
people like that, and so, even in high school, I was reading
Thomas Wolfe and had read all of Faulkner before I graduated.
In college, I read all of Dylan Thomas's prose, like
Adventures
