Charles Wright

Biography

Charles Wright’s previous books of poetry include The Grave of the Right Hand (1970); Hard Freight (1973); Bloodlines (1975); China Trace (1977); The Southern Cross (1981); Country Music: Selected Early Poems (1982); The Other Side of the River (1984); Zone Journals (1988); The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980 – 1990 (1990); Chickamauga (1995), which won the 1996 Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Black Zodiac (1997), which received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Appalachia (1998); Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems (2000); A Short History of the Shadow (2002); and Buffalo Yoga (2004). Wright’s book Littlefoot: A Poem was published in 2007. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1975), the National Book Award in Poetry (1983), the PEN Translation Prize for his translation of the Italian poet Eugenio Montale’s The Storm and Other Things, and the 2008 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for lifetime achievement. Charles Wright is a professor of English at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville, where he also lives.

In 2013, Wright won the prestigious Bollingen Prize for American Poetry for Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems. In 2014, Wright was named Poet Laureate of the United States.

Judges’ Citation

“‘At the heart of every poem is a journey of discovery. Something is being found out,’ Charles Wright has written. In his poems, the same old world we look at every day without seeing it, be it a tree in the yard, the bird in that tree, the branch swaying after the bird has flown, is the subject of endless interest. For Wright, reality is not stable; it changes with the seasons and has to be rediscovered again and again. ‘I write out my charms and spells / against the passage of light / and gathering evil,’ he writes in his new book. The mind in the act of finding what will suffice in the face of one’s own mortality is Wright’s inexhaustible theme. His spiritual and philosophical problem is that he is a ‘God-fearing agnostic’ sure only of his need to question everything. What makes his poems memorable is his seemingly inexhaustible ability to see things with new eyes. In Scar Tissue, as in his other books, he is a poet of great originality and beauty.”

Summary

In his new collection, Charles Wright investigates the tenuous relationship between description and actuality – “thing is not an image” – but also reaffirms the project of attempting to describe, to capture the natural world and the beings in it, although he reminds us that landscape is not his subject matter but his technique: that language was always his subject – language and “the ghost of god.” And in the dolomites, the clouds, stars, wind, and water that populate these poems, “something un-ordinary persists.” – Booklist

Note: Summaries are taken from promotional materials supplied by the publisher, unless otherwise noted.

Charles Wright reads The Woodpecker Pecks, but the Hole Does Not Appear

The Woodpecker Pecks, but the Hole Does Not Appear, by Charles Wright

More about Charles Wright

The following are links to other Web sites with information about poet Charles Wright. (Note: All links to external Web sites open in a new browser window.)

• Charles Wright profile (The Academy of American Poets)
• Charles Wright profile and resources (Modern American Poetry)
• Charles Wright interview (PBS)

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Photo credit: Nancy Crampton