Word: wilbur
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...Sleds are equally determined. When they moved into their $250-a-month apartment in Melrose Park, they were welcomed by Donna Wilbur, a widow who lives downstairs with her teenage son. But two days later, a car nearly knocked the Sleds' 14-year-old nephew off his bike. "Nigger, what are you doing around here?" the driver shouted. A week later, two wooden fence posts crashed through Wilbur's dining room window, the penalty for welcoming the Sleds to the neighborhood. "It doesn't seem like America with people acting like this," she says...
This view of nature sounds anthropocentric and hence, by most contemporary creeds, hopelessly old-fashioned. But Wilbur's poems always allow the animal and vegetable kingdoms their tumultuous integrity. Their energy is a cause for celebration, and so, equally, is the power of the human mind to absorb, assimilate and assort all these phenomena. "Odd that a thing is most itself when likened," writes Wilbur, extolling the ability of language, metaphors, similes to capture the spectacle of reality. Even then, abstractions can be unsettled by the tug of the here and now. A bluefish swims beneath...
...words prove equal to this primordial plunge. Wilbur's poetry offers, before anything else, the pleasures of craft. "All That Is" conjures an urban evening scene populated by people working on newspaper crossword puzzles and described in the lingo of standard solutions...
...office of poet laureate carries no expectation that its occupant will produce verse commemorating important events. In a way, this freedom is ironic, since Wilbur is a master of the occasional poem. Reminiscing in his office in the Library of Congress, he observes, "I suppose, more than most poets of my generation, I've written public poems and direct communications." These include "Speech for the Repeal of the McCarran Act" (1956), an oblique critique of U.S. immigration law, and "For the Student Strikers" (1970), a cadenced plea for moderation during a time of trouble at Wesleyan University. Still, Wilbur likes...
...looks back, Wilbur acknowledges that he often worked at odds with evolving fashions. He did not pick up the rhythm of the Beats or the lacerating self-display of such confessional poets as Sylvia Plath. "It just comes naturally to me to work in meters, rhyme, stanza forms. There were times when it seemed dreadfully stuffy, in some sense reactionary, to write in that manner. I have no case against any other way of writing. I did what I could...