Prizewinning poet sticks to basics

Hush.

It’s a loud world out there, a brash and frantic and unruly one, and if you don’t pause every once in a while, if you don’t shut off the cellphone or power down the BlackBerry, if you don’t cease your own antic yammering over something-or-other, you’ll miss it.

Miss what?

Miss, for instance, this musing on icons -- on people such as Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts:

They are one answer to the

human need

For a second life, and they exist

for us

In the secular heaven of

photography

Safe in emulsion’s cloud

Through which we glimpse them,

knowing them as we know

The angels, by report and

parched surmise.

You’ll miss the elegant and incisive ruminations of Richard Wilbur, whohas long been one of America’s foremost poets.

His work is a chief reason to stop what you’re doing and lean forward, listening.

On Thursday, the 85-year-old poet received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation. The Chicago-based organization has been handing out the lifetime achievement award -- and its not-too-shabby $100,000 purse -- since 1986, honoring such stellar poets as Anthony Hecht, Adrienne Rich and John Ashbery.

“I had no idea about it at all until they telephoned me and gave me the happy news,” Wilbur said in a phone interview from his home in Cummington, Mass. “It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder whether I was in the running. At 85, you kind of think of yourself as out of the running for a lot of things.”

The modesty is no put-on. Wilbur is a gracious man, on the page and on the stage, and while his achievements are in the stratosphere -- two Pulitzer Prizes, a National Book Award, a stint as America’s poet laureate -- his demeanor is refreshingly down-to-earth.

“You’re always starting over,” Wilbur said of the writing process. “You’re not sure you have any brains or talent. You have to prove it all over again. The only thing I have confidence in is my ability to recognize a decent line when I’ve written it. But the ability to write it -- that’s always uncertain.”

Yet write them he has, poem after poem describing with precision and passion his observations of the world, especially nature. In his poem “Crow’s Nest,” Wilbur writes:

That lofty stand of trees beyond the field

Which in the storms of summers stood revealed

As a great fleet of galleons bound our way

Across a moiled expanse of

tossing hay....

He grew up on a farm outside New York City, he said, an experience that continues to beat like a pulse in his poetry.

“In writing about the natural world, I like to get the facts right. I like to find the precise word. I like to be unfashionably exact in my observations about nature.”

That exactness carries over into the form of his poetry, which is strict and austere. He has been criticized over the years, in fact, for sticking with the stark beauties of meter and rhyme even as poetry kicked over the traces and went prancing on its free-verse way.

“When free verse became dominant, he was often attacked,” said Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry Magazine and chairwoman of the committee that picked Wilbur. “But readers of poetry who aren’t specialists love rhyme and meter. They don’t mind the artifice of poetry.”

Wilbur, he added, has “absolute mastery of technique. No other living poet can compare.”

Yet the poet had to overcome a certain reluctance to even call himself that.

“I began to feel that I could say ‘I am a poet’ only when people began to publish me,” Wilbur admitted. “Robert Frost always said, ‘You know you’re a poet when somebody gives you $10 for a poem.’ Ten dollars is a lot of money. It makes you feel that what you write may be diverting for some people and, in some cases, emotionally useful. ‘Useful’ -- that’s not a word typically used about poetry, but I think it’s important.”

How does he write a poem?

“It’s still the same process that it always was. The best I can say is, some material seems to be forming in a subverbal sort of way. I have a feeling of potentiality. I sit down and find out what the subject is. If I can find an interesting few words to get going on, then I’m off and away. But the experience feels to me very passive -- as if the subject is saying, ‘Come on, write me up, get going!’ ”

“I sometimes look catatonic” when working on a poem, Wilbur said. “I’m an awfully slow writer. Sometimes it’s rather painful to take so much time away from everything else in life in order to write three or four lines, but that’s the only way I can do it.”

His books include “The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems” (1947) and, most recently, “Collected Poems: 1943-2004,” and between those volumes, other compilations of his works, including verses for children and translations of his favorite international poets, such as Charles Baudelaire and Valeri Petrov. Wilbur’s poems have a musical quality, a lilt and a swing, that makes them easy to read even as they’re dispensing sometimes difficult knowledge.

Asked if age has brought wisdom, Wilbur replied, “I really think it has. There are more things I know now, more human things I understand. With age, you become on better terms with your own emotions and readier to find words for them.

“When a word comes along and convinces me that that’s what I am trying to say, I feel it very strongly. And very gratefully.”

Julia Keller is cultural critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.