I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve been reading Conversations with Richard Wilbur. Maybe I’m a little ashamed. Regardless, I will now regale you with Richard Wilbur quotes. Please don’t despise me too terribly much.

 ”The drug experience is shadow-boxing, and the business of the poet is to be confronting, with his imagination, these solid objects here.”

“[I]n the poetry of this school [the New York School] generally you find a hidden sentimentalism–they all think childhood was the best of times; there’s no sadder sound in nature than the sound of a running-down nursery music box.”

“I don’t care much for confessional poetry when it is just the sort of whining you get at a bar from drunks.”

And, of course, an obligatory quote on form, the length of which probably reveals something about my character:

“If I say hook-book to you, it’s not the same as if I said brush-stadium. There’s some kind of implicit, magical demand made on you by the fact that hook and book sound a bit alike, and your mind starts trying to pull them together in some way or the other…. There are certain kinds of control that you can’t have [in free verse]…. There’s an example–I hope I can quote it properly–a poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins’, one of his terrible sonnets. It begins, ‘No worse, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief;/ More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring./ Comforter, where, where is your comforting./ Mary, mother of us, where is thy relief?’ Notice the relationship between that ‘wilder wring’ in the second line and that ‘comforting’ in the third. The ‘wring’ is a very hard rhyme, and ‘comforting’ breaks off, and it tells you where to break your voice. It almost lets your voice crack at the end of the third line. There’s the kind of accurate music that a fine user of rhyme can force.”

Granted, I had to go through a lot of interviews to find those three gems of snark, but — oh! — wasn’t it all worth it?

“[A]s a writer, I’m very, very slow. I’ll take any excuse whatever to get away from writing, because I’ve made it so painful a process. Between picking it up and laying it down, it sometimes takes me five years to finish off a poem. And whenever I go back to work on an unfinished poem, I do what Dylan Thomas used to do; I have to write it all out from the very beginning, and come up to where the next line is going to be, providing I can think of it. I never do leave any gaps to be filled in later…. I write so horribly slowly that by the time I do advance, by the time I do go on ahead in the poem, I’m satisfied with what I’ve finished so far…. [I]t’s far from being automatic, which isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot of the irrational in my writing, just as there must be in everybody’s. I think that one reason why I’m so slow is because I sit there half dreaming, letting rhymes suggest idiotic ideas to me, trying to stay loose and irrational.” 

— Richard Wilbur, in an interview with Gregory Fitz Gerald and William Heyen for Modern Poetry Studies (Vol. 1, No. 2 (1970), 57-67). After being so scholarly, I have to admit that I picked up the interview in Conversations with Richard Wilbur, ed. William Butts.