Richard Wilbur Interview

Arlo Haskell, Media Director for the Key West Literary Seminar, was kind enough to send me a link to his wonderful interview with Richard Wilbur. I blogged a couple of months ago about three new poems from Wilbur in The New Yorker, and I am delighted to learn from the interview that they will appear next year in a new collection, along with 37 riddles from Symposius and a translation of Mallarmé’s “For the Tomb of Edgar Poe.”

In addition to bearing good news, the interview is delightful, full of talk about literary life in Key West – no Bass Ale before two rounds of Anagrams were done, played with the likes of John Ciardi and “Jimmy” Merrill – of of Wilbur’s relationships with Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens, and of the forms of poetry – he’s not interested in them per se, though he’s “only written and published one free verse poem.”

My thanks to Mr Haskell, and you’ll thank yourself for reading the interview.