Robert Wrigley . . . Talking Sense (To Me)

I remember the first time I read a Robert Wrigley poem. I was amazed to find a poet working with narrative. In almost all of Wrigley's poems something happens. A story's revealed in the context of a poem. 

Not a lot of poets are interested in narrative, it seems to me. The lyric remains predominant. I'm not necessarily bemoaning this, but it's what makes someone capable as Wrigley is with narrative poems that much more intriguing. 

In an interview that Poetry Daily has from Sou'wester on its site, Wrigley also makes a case for the role of the line in poetry. The line often gets ignored. I've heard a number of wise practitioners argue that lines are to be read through, that they are in essence unimportant to the poem.

Wrigley's emphatic: "Either the lines matter or the poem doesn't. More specifically, I can say this: The line must have integrity. It must have a life of its own. The line must say something within and beyond the sentence of which it is or may be a part. The line must be integral, not just another course of bricks, another piece of lapped siding."

I concur. I'm not sure that I practice this very effectively, but I do think that lines are critical elements to a poem's success. 

And from what do effective lines arise? Wrigley offers the following, "First comes music. The sound of things. One word, one sound may bring on another word, and thus a concept, a direction, entirely unforeseen by the poet, who trusts that the ear never lies, that hearing is believing."

I've been considering the idea of the imaginative, the poetic ear that each poet spends such effort to coax and nurture. From this place comes what makes effective poems possibly transcendent: passion. Wrigley speaks to the passion he finds in Plath, which transmutes to energy for the reader . . . which perhaps allows the poem to translate something essential and universal that's buried within each of us.