From an interview with Richard Wilbur

This year I managed to memorise one of Richard Wilbur's longer poems, Lying. Not only one of his longer poems, but also the one to which his wife at first responded, “at last you’ve written a poem that’s unintelligible from beginning to end." She came to change her mind, and though I must admit I still don't understand all of it, it became clearer as I learned it. 

Here are a couple of paragraphs from a 1977 interview with Wilbur, who died in October this year [2017]

INTERVIEWER

How do you compose your poems? Do you write in long hand or on the typewriter? Do you write in bursts or long stretches, quickly or laboriously?

WILBUR

With pencil and paper and laboriously, very slowly on the whole. I do envy people who can compose on the typewriter, though I reject as preposterous Charles Olson's ideas about the relation of the typewriter to poetic form. I don't approach the typewriter until the thing is completely done, and whatever margins the typewriter might offer have nothing to do with the form of a poem as I conceive it. I write poems line by line, very slowly; I sometimes scribble alternative words in the margins rather densely, but I don't go forward with anything unless I am fairly satisfied that what I have set down sounds printable, sayable. I proceed as Dylan Thomas once told me he proceeded—it is a matter of going to one's study, or to the chair in the sun, and starting a new sheet of paper. On it you put what you've already got of a poem you are trying to write. Then you sit and stare at it, hoping that the impetus of writing out the lines that you already have will get you a few lines farther before the day is done. I often don't write more than a couple of lines in a day of, let's say, six hours of staring at the sheet of paper. Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia.

INTERVIEWER

What is it that gets you started on a poem? Is it an idea, an image, a rhythm, or something else?

WILBUR

It seems to me that there has to be a sudden, confident sense that there is an exploitable and interesting relationship between something perceived out there and something in the way of incipient meaning within you. And what you see out there has to be seen freshly, or the process is not going to be provoked. Noting a likeness or resemblance between two things in nature can provide this freshness, but I think there must be more. For example, to perceive that the behavior of certain tree leaves is like the behavior of birds' wings is not, so far as I am concerned, enough to justify the sharpening of the pencil. There has to be a feeling that some kind of idea is implicit within that resemblance. It is strange how confident one can be about this. I always detest it when artists and writers marvel at their own creativity, but I think this is a very strange thing that most practiced artists would have in common, the certainty that accompanies these initial, provocative impressions. I am almost always right in feeling that there is a poem in something if it hits me hard enough. You can spoil your material, of course, but that doesn't mean the original feeling was false.

Red, and Rothko

I went to see the pensioner, John Bach, in John Logan's play Red last night, at the Fortune Theatre.  I mention Bach's age only because I see that he's just one year younger than me.  The physical and mental challenge of his role in Red would be a challenge to any actor, let alone someone who's verging on 66.

Red would have to be one of the best plays I've seen at the Dunedin's Fortune Theatre, not just because the play itself is great, but because of the energy and focus and interplay between the two actors who inhabit the stage for the entire ninety minutes duration.  Neither of them gets more than a minute's break.  The other actor, the much younger Cameron Douglas, is more than a match for Bach's many years of experience in the theatre, movies and television.  He has the advantage, perhaps, of playing someone close to his own age, so can identify with the young man's thinking and behaviour.  Nevertheless, the role requires considerable work, and never lets him off lightly.

Red explores everything that can occur between two artists of different ages: experience, philosophy, the old giving way to the new, the thought of death when life seems abundant, the contemplative versus the active, the selling-out of the soul; whether art is for all time or merely to be hung on the walls of an expensive restaurant - and ignored.  And why we should produce art at all...

There are wonderful moments of confrontation, with either one or other of the actors going full blast at his counterpart.  There are some wonderful moments when a mere look changes how you feel about one of the actors.  There are sudden moments of humour.  And there are sections of deep emotion, especially when the young man, known only as Ken (and never actually called by name during the play, as far as I can recall) gradually reveals the horror of the day he woke up to find his parents had been murdered in their beds.

Rothko, by contrast, barely mentions his past: he throws off a horror moment in his own life as something he's not sure whether he actually remembers or has just been told about.  His Jewish name has been discarded long before.  We know nothing about his private life outside the studio, so it's ironic that Ken angrily tells him at one point that Rothko knows nothing about his life outside the studio, and isn't interested in finding out.  The two men exist inside the room.  We know of only two other characters: both of them are spoken to on the telephone (which never rings), and the first of these, the one Ken is conversing with briefly in one scene, is anonymous.

And the room is wonderful: it threatens to spill out into the audience; it's untidy, yet it's always being tidied; its walls are covered with paintings from the series of murals Rothko is painting (or canvases in various states of preparation) - and there's another one we never see that's hanging on the 'fourth wall'.  The sink down in one corner is the sort of sink you see in a mechanic's workshop: except that this one is covered in paint that will no longer wash off.  In that curious and slightly unusable space that the Fortune is 'blessed' with (to the audience's left) there are shelves stuffed with items that are ignored, forgotten.  There are high windows way above the reach of the actors through which light barely penetrates (Rothko doesn't like natural light); there is pale ceiling lighting in the room, and there are lamps that shine throughout one or two scenes on the enormous prepared canvas at the back of the stage, a canvas that the actors actually prepare in tandem at one point, working under and over and in front and behind each other in a passionate and energetic sloshing on of yet more red paint.  No doubt Peter King, the set designer, had ideas from other productions of the play to work from, but he's converted the Fortune stage into something that no longer seems a stage, and done it marvellously.  

The play is based on events in Rothko's life though the character of Ken is fictional.