This week during The Write Question, Lauren returns to her 2021 conversation with Idaho-based poet and essayist Robert Wrigley, author of Nemerov’s Door (Tupelo Press). Robert talks to trees—and to Lauren! About the difference between poetry and prose, about Richard Hugo, about music, and more!
About Robert:
Robert Wrigley has published eleven books of poetry, including In the Bank of Beautiful Sins, which won the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award; Reign of Snakes, which won the Kinglsey Tufts Award; Lives of the Animals, which won the Poets’ Prize; and Anatomy of Melancholy & Other Poems, which won a Pacific Northwest Book Award. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Idaho Commission on the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. A former Distinguished Professor at the University of Idaho, he lives in the woods near Moscow, Idaho, with his wife, the writer Kim Barnes. His twelfth book of poetry, The True Account of Myself as a Bird, is forthcoming from Penguin Random House in June 2022.
Robert Wrigley recommends:
Kings Return, an a cappella group that sings in stairwells
The music of Bill Evans
The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing by Richard Hugo (W. W. Norton & Company)
“My Mother’s Lips” by C. K. Williams, published in The New Yorker
The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht (Penguin Random House)
Fates & Furies by Lauren Groff (Riverhead Books)
Lauren Korn recommends:
The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing by Richard Hugo (W. W. Norton & Company)
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott (Anchor Books)
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (Scribner)
Artful by Ali Smith (Penguin Random House)
Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson (University of Iowa Press)
The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr (HarperCollins)
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The Write Question team is Lauren Korn, host and co-producer; Peter Hoag, co-producer and editor; and Tom Berich, sound engineer.
The Write Question logo and brand (2022) was designed by Molly Russell. You can see more of her work at iamthemollruss.com and on Instagram @iamthemollruss. Our music was written and recorded by John Floridis.
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