Clearing the Sill of the World

A Celebration of 60 Years of American Poetry
In Honor of Richard Wilbur

The 28th Annual Key West Literary Seminar
January 7 - 10, 2010

Sixty years ago, the work of the young poet Richard Wilbur caught the attention of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, two of that century’s now-undisputed masters. Stevens and Frost were profoundly different poets, and in Key West, where both men wintered during the 1930s, they quarreled. For the modernist Stevens, Frost was “too academic.” For Frost, Stevens’s “poetry of the mind in the act of finding” was mere “bric-a-brac.” But the two agreed about Richard Wilbur, in whose work each recognized the promise of a major American poet.

The basic debate between Frost and Stevens remains vital to our arts, culture, and politics. Simply put, how much should one honor the traditions of the past, and how much should one look toward the future? In a letter to Wilbur in 1952, Stevens wrote that “the right spot is the middle spot between the polar and the anti-polar,” while acknowledging that this “true center” is “extremely difficult to approach.” As a poet, translator, and dramatist, Wilbur has deftly balanced fidelity to tradition with a powerful imaginative philosophy. The recipient of nearly every major literary prize and a former United States Poet Laureate, his well-balanced and rigorously optimistic work is emblematic of poetry itself– “Beating a smooth course for the right window / And clearing the sill of the world.”

In Key West January 7-10, 2010, we celebrate 60 years of American poetry with compelling discussions, candid conversations, and insightful readings. For four days in the island city that Wilbur, Frost, Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill have all called home, we explore Wilbur and his influences, peers, and heirs. Joining Wilbur are many of the preeminent poets of our time, including his fellow U.S. Poets Laureate Kay Ryan, Billy Collins, Maxine Kumin, Rita Dove, Mark Strand, and Robert Pinsky, and his fellow Pulitzer Prize winners Natasha Trethewey, Yusef Komunyakaa, and James Tate.

Download a complete .pdf schedule here.




The Writer

by Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.




The 2010 Key West Literary Seminar is now sold out. Please email mail@kwls.org to add your name to the waiting list.