[Tim Murphy]

Reflections on Wilbur and Anterooms

I have two publisher’s proofs of Anterooms, Dick Wilbur’s new book. One of them I am mailing to my twenty-four-year-old friend, Nicholas Friedman. I want to see a bright boy go nuts over a volume of contemporary verse.

Many of the poems in this small collection I have heard over the telephone. Some of them I have asked to hear two times, even three. I shall put myself on record for having rather vehemently insisted that the book should take its title from the poem A Measuring Worm.

This yellow striped green
Caterpillar, climbing up
The steep window screen,

Constantly (for lack
Of a full set of legs) keeps
Humping up his back.

It’s as if he sent
By a sort of semaphore
Dark omegas meant

To warn of Last Things.
Although he doesn’t know it,
He will soon have wings,

And I, too, don’t know
Toward what undreamt condition
Inch by inch I go.

No, the powers-that-be at Houghton Harcourt were bent on another title, and I understand the choice they made. We are all enclosed in an anteroom, nearing the place where we shall spend infinite time. Dick is now 89, so he draws very close to that final room. I called him on Holy Tuesday, 2008, to see how he was doing. “Charlee has been hospitalized. She is in intensive care. It is a very great bother.” I called him Holy Wednesday and learned that Charlotte had passed to that final room. I walked down to the beach, and Alan Sullivan took one look at my face and said “Charlee has died.” Alan and I agreed that Dick wouldn’t last a month without her. Instead he has survived and given us Anterooms. I am not surprised that so many poems are syllabic, written in the ABA CDC five/seven/five form that Dick invented. It is as though he has defeated iambic pentameter and has sought out a form that would more severely tax his gift for compression. There are ten new poems in Anterooms, and six of them are in this strophe of Richard’s invention, with which he has delighted us for some decades. Now you might think that “Thyme Flowering Among Rocks,” written fifty years ago in this form, is a very fine poem. Certainly I do. But I think that “Psalm” and “A Measuring Worm” and “Anterooms” and “Ecclesiastes 11:1” are surpassingly better poems. Wilbur began writing verse well before I was born, and he is learning to measure out his words by the inch. Lest any fool think Wilbur has turned his back on the pentameter, here is his elegy for Charlotte.

The House
Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes
For a last look at that white house she knew
In sleep alone, and held no title to,
And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.
What did she tell me of that house of hers?
White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;
A widow’s walk above the bouldered shore;
Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.
Is she now there, wherever there may be?
Only a foolish man would hope to find
That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.
Night after night, my love, I put to sea.


I’m sure my intense reaction to this poem is grounded in my knowledge that Charlee Ward grew up by the mouth of the Merrimack and my familiarity with the houses of the sea captains on the High Street in Newburyport, houses with their fourth story widow walks looking out to sea. A more exquisite, short elegy I have never read.

One has one’s favorites, of course. Hamlen Brook, Mayflies, For C, Blackberries for Amelia, Security Lights at Key West, Trismegistus and the aforementioned poems. What strikes me is that my favorite Wilbur poems are largely the work of his seventies and eighties. I was very taken with Dick’s ornate, baroque work written when he was a boy genius. But those poems for all their facility, don’t move me as does the plain speech of his seasoned age. The day I met him in 1994 I urged, “What formalism most needs is for you to write ten more great poems.” He has certainly met that challenge.

Two years ago I hosted a Frost Fest, and many of us shared our thoughts on that great master. This summer we’re according the same honor to Wilbur. I’ve asked Rhina Espaillat and Nick Friedman to open their own threads, so your hosts represent three generations of avid (rabid?) Wilbur fans.

Reviewing Wilbur for The New Criterion, an infamous Yale classmate of mine wrote a decade ago, “This is what late Frost would have sounded like if he had simply given up.” My attitude is diametrically opposed to William Logan’s. In support of my position, I’ll link two essays by Alan Sullivan, which appeared in The Sewanee Review and in Chronicles. Of course Alan and I have come to our understanding of Wilbur together, in the course of reading him together for thirty-seven years and of befriending him and Charlee. I shall also link a chapter from my forthcoming prosimetrum on our friendship, which appeared in Able Muse.

http://www.ablemuse.com/v7/essay/tim...isting-madness

http://poetry.seablogger.com/?page_id=8

http://poetry.seablogger.com/?page_id=9

Rhina’s essay from Contemporary Poetry Review, originally presented at West Chester, rivals Alan’s as the best contemporary writing on Wilbur I have seen. It distresses me to see a young poet/critic like Adam Kirsch write a major review of the recent Collected for The New Yorker in which he chiefly singles out the merits of poems from the 1950s, written before he was even born. Kirsch and Logan are missing the boat. If you want to read the important poems in Anterooms, simply go to The New Yorker site. Here is the index page for the Wilbur archive.

http://www.newyorker.com/search/quer...submitbtn.y=12