For Robert Wrigley, poetry was a second choice for a career

Robert Wrigley has a confession to make. He didn’t always want to be a poet.

“Once I thought – in truth, I still do –” he says in the poem “Jasmine,” “that music might have been / the art I was better suited to.”

“When I was 17, that’s all I wanted to do,” Wrigley said via email. “I think at some point, the idea of being a musician just no longer seemed possible. What I’ve done, however, is gone and devoted my life to poetry, of all things? How that seems more possible that being a musician – well, I was young and blessed with ignorance and determination.”

Looking at Wrigley’s accolades – Pacific Northwest Book Award, Kingsley Tufts Award, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, to name a few – it’s clear that the poet’s youthful “ignorance and determination” paid off, and that his chosen art suits him quite well.

The University of Idaho professor emeritus will visit Spokane on Friday to launch his newest collection, “Box,” with a reading at Auntie’s bookstore at 7 p.m.

And while he probably won’t bring his guitar (though he still plays), the event won’t be without its own kind of music.

“I insist speech and language are musical,” Wrigley said, and the poems in “Box,” his 10th collection, testify to this belief.

Wrigley clearly takes delight in language and sound: the call and response of pay phones in the poem “Tinnitus,” the repetition of the word “Appenninica” in “Sheep in Umbria,” simply because, he says in the poem, “I just love to write and read the word.” (Appenninica, by the way, is a type of sheep found in Umbria and Tuscany.)

Among its playful music, “Box” deals with weightier themes as well. The book is dedicated to the memory of Wrigley’s father, who died in 2014, and the first poem, “My People,” has the poet taking his then-ailing father to visit the graves of family members.

“Much of literature is simply an engagement with mortality,” Wrigley said, and “Box” is no exception, suggesting in both its title and its themes “that ultimate ‘box,’ ” the coffin.

“Humans know they’re going to die, we imagine being dead, or try to. We devise myths that will allow us to imagine living on forever. But we’re going to die, every one of us, and that changes everything about how we live. It probably ought to make us kind and compassionate and generous, but you can also see how it makes us venal and greedy. … What does it mean to live? To have lived? How should life be lived? I think it should be lived making something.”

It should also be lived listening.

“It is a good thing to hear poetry, to really listen to it, to, yes, go to a poetry reading,” Wrigley said. “We get used to taking in what’s on the page and maybe we hear what we’re reading, but if we do we hear it like we hear the music playing at Walgreen’s. A reading gives you a chance to hear in a way you might have only rarely experienced. I’m half convinced that poetry readings have taught me how to hear the language, and hear the music in it.”