DAVID REMNICK
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us it seems too contorted. But I would still be more in the line of
Pound, Crane, and Stevens than Williams and Creeley.
Remnick:
"The New Poem," which is the first poem in your
trilogy of books, is, at least in part, a very political poem.
Wright:
To a certain extent it mirrors or echoes W.H.
Auden's statement that " poetry makes nothing happen,"
which I think is both true and untrue. It makes nothing happen
in the world but it can make a lot happen to you and your inner
life. That poem was written in 1970 toward the end of the
Vietnam War. It's a political poem, and while poems against
the Vietnam War were a big thing at the time, I thought that no
matter how many poems you write against the war, it's not
going to help
us.
It's not going to stop anything because politi–
cal poetry only encourages people who think the way the poem
thinks. It does not affect anyone who does not think the way the
poem thinks.
Remnick:
Do you ever feel any kind of burden as a poet?
Wright:
I've only felt the burden once in my life. One wants
one's poems to be important to other people. One is writing for
oneself-I am talking to myself-but I want to be overheard.
One time I got a letter from a young man after I had given a
reading in California. I had read from
China Trace,
which is a
book that is about spiritual anxieties and spiritual hopings for
the future. He said he had decided to change his religion, to
give up Christianity, because he felt I had thought so much
about my own exposure
to
Christianity for so long and had
come to such a reasoned renunciation of it and expressed it to
him in such a reasonable way that he had been thinking about
it for two months and had decided to do the same. That was a
terrible burden. You want poems to change your life and per–
haps to change other people's lives but that's a huge change. It
was, at the same time, the most frightening and uplifting letter
I've ever received. But that doesn't happen very often.
Remnick:
You've written a trilogy of books,
Hard Freight,
Bloodlines,
and
China Trace,
and you 've written long poems
within those collections, most notably "Skins" and "Tattoos."
I think it's fair to say that the trilogy is not one poem in the way
that Dante' s
Commedia
is, but it is still very unusual in our
times to a ttempt anything so comprehensive. Why do you
think so few long poems are written now?
Wright:
It's too hard and it takes too long; the novel; the
