Charles Wright

• Born: August 25, 1935
• Place of Birth: Pickwick Dam, Hardin County, Tennessee

Biography

Charles Wright was born in a rural section of northeast Tennessee, not far from the city of Kingsport near the Virginia state line. His family lived in Oak Ridge during World War II, where his father worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority as a civil engineer, then settled in Kingsport during Wright’s primary school years. Wright attended a school with eight students in Sky Valley, North Carolina, prior to graduating from the Episcopal Boarding School in Arden, North Carolina, in 1953. Wright recalls that “both of these schools made a profound impression on me, and gave a lot to write about later, mostly in Hard Freight (1973) and Bloodlines (1975).” He enrolled in Davidson College intending to major in history and spent what he describes as “four years of amnesia, as much my fault as theirs, probably more,” trying to write fiction during that time, “sketches . . . which were never more than extended descriptions of landscape.”

Wright joined the Army for four years after graduating in 1957, training at the Army Language School in California where he wrote “what I thought was a journal . . . really only whining and inarticulate pang.” In Verona, Italy, where he was stationed in 1959, Wright read Ezra Pound’s poem “Blandula, Tenulla, Vagula,” an evocation of the supposed place of Catullus’s villa on the tip of the Sirmione Peninsula, a place “more beautiful than Paradise,” and he felt that at that moment, “My life was changed forever.” What Wright calls “the continuous desire to write that I had since I was a senior in high school had finally found its form: the lyric poem.” Wright regards Pound as “a tremendous influence, the first poet I ever read seriously,” and would follow Pound, who had just returned to Italy following his incarceration in St. Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C., through the streets of Venice without feeling able to actually introduce himself.

Following four years in the army’s intelligence division, where he “drifted into the Italian landscape, and was never the same again,” Wright entered the Graduate Poetry Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1961, explaining with wry humor that he was admitted since he “applied in August and no one happened to read my manuscript.” He felt that this was the first time that he truly began studying poetry, by being involved with the distinguished Iowa faculty, including writers such as Donald Justice, the director of the program, who Wright feels “had a major effect on my life.” Wright remembers the atmosphere in class as “electric, insatiable, the feeling that you were at the center of the most important thing going on anywhere on earth.” Although the poets Wright was encouraged to concentrate on at Iowa were well-known American modernists such as Robert Lowell and John Berryman, he also discovered Chinese poetry though Pound’s Cantos, leading toward the ideogrammatic imitations of China Trace (1977) and other Asian-oriented poems such as his versions of Han Shan and the Zen stylings of poems such as “Looking Outside the Cabin Window, I Remember a Line by Li-Po.”

Wright had translated Eugenio Montale’s motets while in Iowa, where he earned an M.F.A. in 1963, and his application for a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue this interest was successful. He spent the next two years at the University of Rome, studying with Maria Sampoli, an expert on Montale’s work, leading to his 1978 translation of Montale’s La bufera, e altro (1956; The Storm, and Other Poems) which then won a P.E.N. Translation Prize. Wright taught at the University of Iowa in 1965 and 1966 and joined the faculty of the University of California at Irvine in 1966. He traveled to Europe periodically while living in California, returning to Italy as a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Padua in 1968 and again in the summer of 1985—a trip that inspired “Journal of the Year of the Ox” in Zone Journals (1988)—and visiting London in 1983, which became the subject for “A Journal of English Days.” Wright remained in Irvine until 1983, where he and the photographer Holly McIntire were married in 1969. They have lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, since 1983, when Wright accepted a position at the University of Virginia; here he was named the Souder Family Professor of English.

Wright began to publish poetry at Iowa when his first small volume, The Voyage, was issued by the Patrician Press in 1963. His first major publication was The Grave of the Right Hand (1970) from the prestigious Wesleyan University Press poetry series. His next book, Hard Freight, was nominated for a National Book Award, leading to a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1974 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976. Bloodlines won the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Academy of American Poets, and with China Trace, the three books formed what David Young, who with Stuart Freibert interviewed Wright at Oberlin College in 1977, called a “carefully planned trilogy (dealing roughly with past, present and future).” Country Music: Selected Early Poems (1982) won the National Book Award in 1983. The Southern Cross (1981) is a single, sustained poem in twenty-five sections, while The Other Side of the River (1984) follows “the Pilgrim” from Laguna Beach, where Wright lived while he taught at Irvine, backward toward the past (the American South and Italy) and onward to parallel places (Montana) in the present. Zone Journals dealt with close examinations of places (England and Italy) where Wright spent extended periods of time. Wright’s work has continued to receive national honors, notably the Ruth Lilly Prize in 1993, the Lenore Marshall Prize for Chickamauga (1995) in 1996, and the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Black Zodiac (1997) in 1997. Chickamauga and Black Zodiac, paired with Appalachia (1998) constitute another trilogy. Wright was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999. In 2002, Wright published A Short History of Shadow, a collection that includes poems that address some of his prior themes of transience and the landscape of Appalachia. Wright continued to publish prolifically from 2002 to 2014. Wright assumed the post of the poet laureate of the United States in 2014 and left the position a year later. In 2014, Wright published a new poetry collection, Caribou, and followed that up with Oblivion Banjo: The Poetry of Charles Wright (2019), a collection of some of his previous work.

Analysis

It is both a testament to the originality and power of Wright’s poetry—as well as its singular peculiarities and distinctive features—that fellow poets and serious critics have strained to describe and define its qualities and characteristics from its initial appearance. The elements that account for Wright’s voice and that make up his primary fields of interest seem too disparate to allow for an ultimate coherence. His language ranges from the invitingly colloquial to the formidably classic in ways that provide jolts of energy that are intriguing and startling, and his employment of a wide range of formal arrangements has not provided any specifically Wrightian structure that can be easily identified. Inspired by the infinitely fascinating aspects of landscape viewed and recorded with evocative images, Wright stubbornly resists the understandable temptation to turn the terrain into a pantheistic source of comfort and persists in an extensive and extended meditation on the mysteries of an indescribable and elusive deity who is, nonetheless, for the poet, a distant but discernible presence in human endeavor.

Particularly articulate about his work, Wright stated some of his core principles concerning composition in an essay titled “Improvisations on Form and Measure,” the title itself proclaiming his commitment to a thoughtful, carefully constructed poetic design. His observation: In poems, all considerations are considerations of form, the fundamental principle from which all others follow. Proceeding in this fashion, Wright insists “The line is a unit of Measure: measure is music: the line is a verbal music,” a direct exposition of the approach to poetry that he learned from his reading of Pound. Pound’s utilization of a lyric mode is the grounds for Wright’s determination to maintain a verbal music in his poems, a strategy built on the query-response: “Do poems have to sing? No. Do good poems have to sing? Probably. Do great poems have to sing? Absolutely.” However, in an apparent contradiction to Pound’s well-known definition of literature as “news that stays news,” Wright observes, “What you have to say—though ultimately all-important—in most cases will not be news. How you say it just might be.” It is an indication of his respect for, but not slavish devotion to, Pound, or any of the other historical figures (including painters Paul Cézanne and Giorgio Morandi, author Thomas Hardy, or Chinese poet Han Shan) who Wright regards as so crucial to his work that he has said they are “great ghosts we need to seance with.”

Regarding the “great ghosts” from his personal pantheon, Wright told Calvin Bedient that “I always thought that what I wanted to be was Walt Whitman in Emily Dickinson’s house, but now what I see I really want to do is be Emily Dickinson on Walt Whitman’s road,” explaining that he aimed for Whitman’s “length of line and expansiveness of life gusto with her intelligence walking along, and her preoccupations, which are my preoccupations.” To order the line, Wright has worked with a number of structuring possibilities, using what he calls “a tight free verse off an iambic base,” and stating that he counts “every syllable and every stress in every line I write” to make sure “that they differ.”

As important as form is for Wright, it does not take precedence over his frequent reference to John Keats’s comment that poetry is about “soul making,” and one of Wright’s more revealing comments about poetry is his insistence that “the destination is the cross, and all that implies.” His use of familiar Christian terminology is a conscious choice, but Wright’s religious focus has always been a search unconstrained by any kind of doctrinal certainty. Instead, it is a spiritual journey born of an unusual geographic juxtaposition, linking Wright’s upbringing where “I was formed by the catechism in Kingsport, the evangelical looniness at Sky Valley Community in North Carolina, and by country songs and hymns,” with the historical and theological depth of Dante and the Italian Renaissance. This linkage is described by Wright in metaphorical terms as “a connection, a lushness, in my mind between my east Tennessee foliage and the Venetian leafage that keep coming out in my poems,” and is exemplified by Wright’s frequent use of the language and rhythms of country music pioneers such as his neighbors from childhood, the famed Carter family, whom he calls the “all-time great American poet-singers” and whose “song lyrics themselves (are) traditional and oddly surreal at the same time.” This inclination toward the vernacular is Wright’s way of maintaining a close contact with the region that left an indelible imprint and which, in the mountains of the Blue Ridge near his home in Charlottesville, continues to offer what seems like an infinitely varying landscape and skyscape for contemplation and rumination.

“Blackwater Mountain”

First published: 1973 (collected in Hard Freight, 1973)

Type of work: Poem

“Blackwater Mountain” is a vivid lyric, drawing on a memory of an experience with someone who the poet wished to understand and impress, and who is now recalled and revived in poetic time.

“Blackwater Mountain” begins with a powerful evocation of a landscape recalled and reconstructed from memory, the setting heightened and deepened by the play of the poet’s mind on the elements of the natural world and on his relationship with an important person in his life. Like many of the poems in Hard Freight, “Blackwater Mountain” is rooted in a relived past, built on an autobiographical impulse that depends on a kind of memory that Wright has defined as “the invisible end of a vanishing rope” and an autobiography which develops through “fragmental accretions.” The first of three stanzas—“This is what I remember”—presents the phenomena of the natural world as a display of sensory excitements, a tableau of sound (“When the loon cries”) and light (“when the small bass/ jostle the lake’s reflections”), which transforms the terrain into almost a sentient entity (“When lily and lily pad/ Husband the last light”) that the poet responds to with a deep sense of pleasure.

Then, shifting the focus toward a distinctly personal perspective, the poet addresses his companion, continuing to use details to make the person real (“The moon of your face in the fire’s glow”) and his own reactions poignant (“Young,/ Wanting approval, what else could I do?”) both in recollection and in recreation. The frustration of his inadequate response is emphasized by his thoughts of a “thicket as black as death,” where he struggled “Without success or reprieve” to act in accordance with some expectation he could not satisfy. The final stanza is a drawing back from the immediacy of the moment, recapitulating an important event now shadowed by the passage of time, with the details of the present establishing the link to the past, “a black duck” which “shows me the way to you,” and then “shows me the way to a different fire,” symbolized by the “black moon” that illuminates a dark vision fusing eras that overlap in the poet’s consciousness.

“Homage to Paul Cézanne”

First published: 1981 (collected in The Southern Cross, 1981)

Type of work: Poem

This poem serves as a meditative exposition on one of the poet’s central concerns, wherein the style of Cézanne’s painting is examined in terms of the poet’s relationship to the past.

In the pantheon of great artists who Wright admires, Paul Cézanne has a primacy of place. “I’d like to be able to write poems the way he painted pictures,” Wright says, and Cézanne is most prominent among the “great dead” with whom Wright feels he must converse in his work. Eight pages long, a section per page, and sixteen lines per section, “Homage to Paul Cézanne” opens The Southern Cross, establishing an elegiac ethos that permits Wright to interweave the ghostly and the tangible (as David Walker puts it). The separate sections of the poem are not numbered, but are not “haphazard or substitutable,” Wright explains, their order “accumulative,” thus functioning like brushstrokes or the layering of paint on a canvas, a technique which Wright likens to his poetic method and which he illustrates in action with an image like “The dead are a cadmium blue/ We spread them with palette knives in broad blocks and planes.”

As the poem opens, Wright states one of his essential themes, a proposition that is a factor in his work even when it is not directly addressed. Speaking of “the dead,” the poet states, “Like us, they refract themselves. Like us/ They keep on saying the same thing, trying to get it right./ Like us, the water unsettles their names.” This direct correlation removes a barrier, mingles modes, and leads to a series of propositions that David Young describes as “triggers, opening moves” in a “painterly succession of meditative stanzas.” Each section is an enlargement of the concept that “the dead” are telling, “through clenched teeth,” their story, “Remember me, speak my name.”

For Young, this means that “the dead are of course finally us,” although one could also follow Edward Hirsch’s formulation that “the dead are always with us, an ancestral presence—refracted and transfigured,” or Bruce Bond’s suggestion that throughout the poem, “the dead, as emissaries of the unseen, emerge incarnate in an archetypal, ’primitive’ world.” These interpretive conceptions are necessary because the effect of Wright’s approach is to avoid the too-specific while reaching for the tangible, and through the eight sections of the poem, an alteration between an exterior essence and an interior dimension prevents the poem from becoming too programmatic or in any way rephraseable. As Cézanne worked with his materials, Wright depends, with relish, on words, and thus it is the language and its forms that constitute the homage.

“Apologia Vita Sua”

First published: 1997 (collected in Black Zodiac, 1997)

Type of work: Poem

“Apologia Vita Sua” is the first poem in Wright’s Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, Apologia Vita Sua, providing a balancing frame for the book with “Disjecta Membra” (scattered parts), the final poem.

Apologia pro vita sua literally implies “the explanation of life,” a paradoxical use of the familiar phrase since in Wright’s cosmos, such an explanation must be incomplete and finally frustrating if certainty and closure are sought. The poem is divided into three sections: a philosophic excursion recapitulating ideas and insights from the past, a recollection of moments of intense being in Wright’s life as autobiographical fragments organized in terms of places of consequence, and a third section that attempts to penetrate as deeply as possible into a Self that is revealed through constant questioning, with an occasional assumption of insight that requires further qualification and testing. Tentatively, but not without some confidence, the poet is ready to present a few thoughts that he can rely on:

Affection’s the absolute

everything rises to,

Devotion’s detail, the sum of all our scatterings,

Bright imprint our lives unshadow on.

However, even this lyric effusion is followed by the observation, “Easy enough to say now, the hush of late spring/ Hung like an after-echo,” to emphasize how the temporal splendor of the landscape—very prominent element of all of Wright’s work—can momentarily distract or disarm doubt. The “after-echo” testifies to the persistence of this feature while acting as a commentary on the perceptual aspects of the poet’s mind.

“Stray Paragraphs in February, Year of the Rat”

First published: 1998 (collected in Appalachia, 1998)

Type of work: Poem

This poem serves as a reaffirmation of the continuing importance of terrain for the poet.

In “Stray Paragraphs in February, Year of the Rat,” the third line, “A love of landscape’s a true affection for regret, I’ve found,” conveys Wright’s characteristic contradictory vision of landscape as a tableau of endless fascination as well as a source of discontent—“outside us, yet ourselves” as Wright sees it. The pattern of counterstatements continues: “Renunciation, it’s hard to learn, is now our ecstasy,” with Wright’s doubt-driven faith operating as a foundation for some deep-winter expressions of yearning and uncertainty. As in many later poems, Wright’s sense of a deity is darkened by an almost existential mood of resignation. “[I]f God were still around,” Wright poses, “he’d swallow our sighs in his nothingness.”

Following four stanzas in this fashion, Wright directly addresses the season as if it were a manifestation of divine power: “February, old head turner,” he implores, “cut us some slack,” his use of a vernacular making the plea personal. The “melancholy music” of the season (and the era, significantly the “Year of the Rat”) is pervasive, but Wright hopes that some force, internal and/or external, will “Lift up that far corner of the landscape,” which he now designates as “toward the west” where the “deep light” of day’s end might provide some reason for hope and the revival of life—“the arterial kind”—that the advent of spring promises.

The following poem, “Stray Paragraphs in April, Year of the Rat,” augments this expectation with its conclusion that “The soul is air, and it maintains us.”

Summary

The process of the poem “Black Zodiac” is an illumination of Wright’s practice, testing, measuring and searching, always with an attitude of awareness and curiosity. “Unanswerable questions, small talk,/ Unprovable theorems, long abandoned arguments—” are the elements of a poetic journey, and the poet knows he “has got to write it all down.” After a series of images that convey the feeling of a vast field for contemplation, the poet muses about the difficulties of reaching any kind of conclusion, calling himself and his company “Calligraphers of the disembodied, God’s word-wards”—as close to a compliment to his profession as he will allow himself. His task is to “Witness and walk on,” remaining modest with respect to a muse or deity that is called upon to “Succor my shift and save me . . . .” This is the poet’s creed, and his faith, as in all his work, is in his power to see and say something about the ineffable. “Description’s an element, like air or water” he asserts, and concludes the poem with an echo of the most powerful of biblical utterances: “That’s the word.”

Bibliography

Andrews, Tom, ed. The Point Where All Things Meet: Essays on Charles Wright. Oberlin, Ohio: Field Editions, 1995.

Bedient, Calvin. “Tracing Charles Wright.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 10, no. 1 (1982): 55-74.

"Charles Wright." Poetry Foundation, 2024, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/charles-wright. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.

Costello, Bonnie. “Charles Wright, Giogio Morandi, and the Metaphysics of the Line.” Mosaic 35, no. 1 (March, 2002): 149-171.

McClatchy, J. D. White Paper: On Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

McCorkle, James. “Things That Lock Our Wrists to the Past: Self-Portraiture and Autobiography in Charles Wright’s Poetry.” In The Still Performance: Writing, Self, and Interconnection in Five Postmodern American Poets. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.

McIntyre, John. "Reconsidering Charles Wright." Brick: A Literary Journal, June 2012, no. 89, pp. 135–8, Literary Reference Center Plus, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=76151818&site=lrc-plus. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.

Santos, Sherod. “A Solving Emptiness: C. K. Williams and Charles Wright.” In A Poetry of Two Minds. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000.

Stitt, Peter. “Charles Wright: Resurrecting the Baroque.” In Uncertainty and Plenitude: Five Contemporary Poets. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997.

Turner, Daniel Cross. "A True Dead Ringer for Something Like You Ain't Never Seen: Subrealisim in the Band and Charles Wright." Five Points, 2015, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 117–45, Literary Reference Center Plus, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lkh&AN=108457100&site=lrc-plus. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.

Turner, Lindsay. “Keeping an Accent: On Charles Wright’s “Oblivion Banjo”." Los Angeles Review of Books, 2 Apr. 2020, lareviewofbooks.org/article/keeping-an-accent-on-charles-wrights-oblivion-banjo/. Accessed 9 Oct. 2024.

Upton, Lee. The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery, in Five American Poets. London: Associated University Presses, 1998.