DAVID REMNICK
573
Remnick:
Could you talk a bit about the southernness of your
voice?
Wright:
I would always like to be thought of as a southern
poet, even though I haven ' t lived there in twenty-two years.
Most of what I have written about comes out of the South, or
Italy . The emotions drawn on are out of the South. I'djust like
to have the texture and richness of language that we've come to
think of as southern.
Remnick:
Do you aim for a particular and consistent voice?
Wright:
You know, it's funny and it sounds so naive to say
this, but I really don't. I write it down the way I hear it, as it
pops into my head. I think in a metaphysical way; that's why
my poems are structured that way. That's why I can believe
Emily Dickinson thought the way that she wrote because I tend
to also. I don't think it's weird. I could write differently if I
wanted to, but that wouldn ' t be me. I think in metaphor. I
explain things in class in metaphor. So it's not a street poetry
and it's not East Tennessee hill language, which I also know. I
think it was Goethe who said "genius is only naturalness"; and
it is natural for me to write and think this way and unnatural
any other way. Now that might be because of my background,
and the level of conversation in my house, or my immersion in
the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. It's not street speech
and it's not salon speech either. It's some kind of speech on the
outside of the stained glass window looking in.
Remnick:
What does
distance
mean to you and your poetry?
Wright:
Do you remember an old Colgate commercial in
which the baseball pitcher Don Drysdale would throw a base–
ball at the announcer? He would throw the ball and it would go
right up to the announcer's face and then ... Wham! It would
hit an invisible pane of lucite and fall to the ground. Well,
that's the distance I want. You see it all but there is that invisi–
ble pane of glass.
If
it were to smash into your face, the artifice
would be lost to a certain extent. That's what rescued Sylvia
Plath. It's that one step back and making a character out of her
suffering rather than saying, "I, I, I, Me, Me, Me" all the time.
That becomes boring and merely therapy, whereas if you create
your own myth, which was what Plath did or what John
Ashbery does, you will convey yourself or your emotional sense
more believably. Of course, that distance is a matter of taste; I
