Poet Charles Wright Reinterprets Reality

Author: Sadie Hoagland

Laced with the eloquence of renowned poet Charles Wright's own voice:

I've always liked the view from my mother-in-law's house at night,

Oil rigs off Long Beach

Like floating lanterns out in the smog-dark Pacific,

Stars in the eucalyptus,

Lights of airplanes arriving from Asia, and town lights

Littered like broken glass around the bay and back up the hill.

From "Looking West from Laguna Beach at Night" (in "Negative Blue").

In celebration of Ralph Waldo Emerson's birthday, the American Literature, English and Creative Writing Departments, as well as faculty sponsor Brett Millier, Reginald L. Cook Professor of American Literature, welcomed renowned poet Charles Wright to the Chateau Grand salon last Thursday. Wright gave a powerful reading to a capacity audience of students and others present, who acknowledged that one should never miss the opportunity to hear a poet read his own words.

Wright, born in Tennessee in 1935, has received many awards for his poetry, including the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize (1993), the National Book Critics Circle Award (1998) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1998). Middlebury College's D. E. Axinn Professor of Creative Writing Jay Parini, a poet himself, introduced Wright as "among the best of this country's poets" and named him in following with Frost, Whitman, Dickinson and Emerson as an integral figure in American poetry. Wright has also translated Italian poetry and extensively studied Chinese philosophy. He currently teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va.

Though Wright's poetry often reverberates with a more pessimistic tone, he surprised his listeners with a sharp sense of humor when he asked how loud he should speak, joking that his poems are "best when whispered." (However, he also mentioned that he would not be held responsible for the consequences of his whispered words.)

His southern accent rolled smoothly into his poetry as he read selections from his works "Negative Blue" and "The Appalachian Book of the Dead" among others.

Wright's poetry can perhaps best be described as a presentation of the natural world. And as Parini explained, this world then becomes a vehicle for understanding the spiritual world.

Wright often describes his concrete surroundings, which in turn reflect the poetic narrative's more abstract emotion and theme. The lines of his poems balance each other across the page, breaking half way across and hugging either margin - a technique Wright employed "so the line won't break with its own weight" and tension could remain strong in both parts of the line. He then added lightheartedly that he also thought the line breaks simply "looked cool."

Wright includes in his poetry everyday colloquialisms as well as references to country songs, Chinese poetry, James Joyce and even golfer Sam Snead. He confessed he really just wanted to make a Sam Snead allusion as well as use the word "heliotrope" (though he claims to have no idea what the word means), in his poems. He succeeded in doing both.

When asked what led him to become a poet, Wright described a moment when he was in the army in Italy at the age of 23. As he sat under an olive tree in Verona reading Ezra Pound's "Blandula, Tenulla, and Vagula," he became inspired. He realized that with poetry, "I didn't have to tell a story, I could be associative."

Wright's poetry is deeply personal and tells of his experiences in Tennessee, Italy, Montana and Laguna Beach, Calif. His poems describe photographs, readings and specific people in Wright's life, "You all have the same people in your lives as I had in mine," he said. Indeed, Wright's poems evoke emotions familiar to all of us - fear of mortality, grief and loss.

His collections read almost like journals of experiences and stand as a good example of Wright's tendency to use the physical world as a reflection of the spiritual world. This tendency, as was appropriate for the occasion, reflects the influence of Emerson on Wright's poetry. Another common theme of his poetry present in "Negative Blue," as Parini pointed out, is recognition of the absolute permanency and inevitable connectedness of our world. His verse is none other than a slow melodious collection of average and unusual words.

For those interested in reading Wright, "Negative Blue" is a collection of his latest poems, including the "Appalachian Book of the Dead" (about a character approaching death).