Charles Wright's first book of poems, The Grave of the Right Hand, was published in 1970; his most recent volume, Sestets, appeared in 2009. Wright won the National Book Award in 1983 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. David Skeel talked with him at his house in Charlottesville, Virginia, and followed up on one question via email.

The little commonplace notebook you published in Halflife (1988), a collection of your prose, includes a striking quote by your friend Mark Strand: "The point of truth comes when a poet goes from writing private poems in a public language to writing public poems in a private language." Was there a point in your work where you made that shift, when you began writing public poems in a private language?

I know that a shift occurred. Whether they are public poems or not, the poems seemed more personal, more accessible, than the sort of public poems without a voice that I had written before. And the shift came with a poem called "Dog Creek Mainline" [in Hard Freight (1973)]. Suddenly I realized that for once in his life Rilke was right. Every writer has a subject matter: his own life.

Your poetry is surely the most dog-haunted in the long history of verse. Was there a moment in your career when you thought, Eureka!, this is my image?

No, I just used it a lot. And I think at one point I thought it was cute because it's God spelled backwards, but that's not why I do it.

I don't know. I was raised with dogs, hunting dogs—my father was a hunter. My life has always had a dog. How they keep getting into my poems, I'm not sure. But I remember writing about how the dog eats on the run and keeps moving [in "Sentences," from China Trace (1977)]. And I liked that somehow at the time. And dogs just kept appearing. And doggone it, they just kept appearing.

You've said elsewhere that "Captain Dog," the title of one of your poems, was a name your students gave to you when you were in California. Were your students inspired by reading your poems?

No, no. I got out ...

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