My first encounter with Richard Wilbur’s poetry came in 1983. I was nineteen, visiting my grandmother and uncle in New York, when I happened upon a volume of his poems at a Barnes & Noble in midtown. I had been writing almost exclusively metrical verse since age thirteen (to the faint embarrassment of several of my teachers), but all the contemporary poetry I read in school was free verse. Opening Mr. Wilbur’s poems at random and beginning to read, I was immediately electrified. Here were the poems I had been longing to read, beautiful, graceful poems that moved and inspired me like the great poems of the past. I remember thinking, wonderingly and with a kind of triumph, “So poets still write this way!” I would soon figure out that nobody else wrote like Richard Wilbur; nevertheless, with his work as an introduction I became aware of a revival of interest in traditional verse. My feelings of isolation receded, and his example heartened me in my early attempts to learn the craft.
I owe my opportunity to meet Mr. Wilbur and his wife, Charlee, to Tim Murphy. In the winter of 2001, after I had published a chapbook with R.L. Barth, Tim urged me to send a copy to the Wilburs, to whom he had already mentioned me. My husband Jeremy and I were then living in Miami. Tim instructed that I should, in the letter accompanying my chapbook, offer to take the Wilburs to lunch or dinner on a visit to Key West. Without Tim’s insistence that I make this overture, I would never have had the courage to do it. Soon, I received a charming note from Charlee, asking me to call them to arrange a date for the meeting. Being pregnant at the time, I couldn’t fortify myself for the call with a shot of whiskey, and I was dumbstruck when a mellifluous male voice answered. Somehow I managed to stammer out my name, and somehow everything was arranged.
On St. Patrick’s Day, 2001, Jeremy and I met the Wilburs at Louie’s, a wonderful old seafood restaurant on the water. What struck us most strongly about both of them was their charm, geniality, warm affection for one another, and utter lack of pretension. Charlee had undergone knee surgery not long before, and Dick (for so he introduced himself) was sweetly solicitous of her. For about two hours we had a wide-ranging, general conversation in which Charlee and Jeremy were fully included. We talked about poetry, but also about politics (the 2000 election still being fresh on everyone’s minds), living in Florida, their children and grandchildren, and our coming new arrival. We found ourselves telling them that we were thinking of giving the baby my surname, since I am one of four daughters and there are already several grandsons on Jeremy’s side to carry on his name. Dick and Charlee were immediately receptive to the idea and, once we had explained our reasoning, warmly approved it. They reminisced with obvious pleasure about their own early years of marriage and parenthood. Then, well into the lunch, Charlee suddenly announced that she wanted to drink to something, and told us that it was, that very day, the sixtieth anniversary of their first date, when they were both college students. Jeremy and I had the privilege not only of sharing that anniversary with them, but of hearing the story behind it. Finally, when lunch was over, Dick signed the copies of his books I had brought, and before we parted Charlee made me promise to send them a birth announcement. As soon as we returned home, I wrote down everything I could remember about the day.
Exactly four months later, our daughter Sophia was born. As promised, I sent the Wilburs an announcement and a photo. A week or two later, when Sophia was in the throes of colic, my haze of exhaustion lifted with the arrival of a neatly typed postcard. My favorite living poet pronounced the birth “wonderful news,” thought that our daughter looked “goodnatured and sapient,” and added, “I have found myself singing, ‘For she’s a jolly good fellow, For she’s a jolly good fellow, Sophia Rose Tufariello, Which nobody can deny.’” Of course it got pride of place in Sophia’s baby book. And what a story to tell her someday!
I join the chorus of voices warmly welcoming Richard Wilbur to Eratosphere. And Tim, a heartfelt thanks–-for everything.
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