turn into an essayist, because I can’t keep the
thoughts straight. If I’d had a life, I could have
written a memoir. I never got a life; it’s all in my
poems.
Or all you’re willing to show.
Well, yes.
One can’t help but notice that you’ve appeared
uncomfortable at times this spring, especially at the
Pulitzer reception.
Well, one wants one’s work to be paid atten-
tion to, but I hate personal attention. I just want
everyone to read the poems. I want my poetry to
get all the attention in the world, but I want to be
the anonymous author ofBlack Zodiac. That’s
impossible to do, I know. Some people love the
spotlight; I like the shadows. I like the spotlight
on my work, because that’s what’s important.
It’s better-looking and younger and wealthier
and more articulate. No, I never have liked the
spotlight. I have friends who love it and are great
at it. Not me. The attention for the book is
wonderful. I’m not sure it’s gotten me more
readers, but I’ve got more buyers, and that’s
good. So keep those cards and letters coming to
the bookstores. Not me.
Source:Ted Genoways, ‘‘An Interview with Charles
Wright,’’ inSouthern Review, Vol. 36, No. 2, Spring
2000, pp. 442–52.
David Garrison
In the following excerpt, Garrison discusses
Charles Wright’s poetics. He makes a case that
Wright in his poems is providing artistic examples
of human feeling, human feeling about death, and
the importance of human feelings.
Perhaps first among the handful of projects
available to the lyric poet is the effort to uncover
and bring to light that which usually remains
dark or unformed in our passing experience, to
bring into language the feel of life.... That ‘‘expe-
rience,’’ that ‘‘consciousness,’’ may be understood
as the recurrent but always local and historical
theme present in the rag-and-bone shop of the
heart: that is, how to translate visceral and emo-
tional knowledge, felt thought, into language,
and how to make the unseen, that ordinarily
invisible backdrop of eternity, seen.
The work of contemporary American poet
Charles Wright struggles explicitly with this
attempt at translation and imagination. His
poems are examples of an artistic representation
of human feeling, especially human feeling about
death and about feeling itself, what Mary Kinzie
refers to as ‘‘the real content of the inner life’’
(63). His work articulates the idea that human
feeling is available to knowledge both as an
impression made upon the poet’s sensibility
and as an impression made by the poet, through
the ‘‘architectural’’ construction of texts, upon
the world. The study of Wright’s work reveals
the role of the image in this translation of emo-
tion into language, and the conceit that image,
shaped by the architecture of lyric, may come to
function as declarative statement in the explora-
tion of the metaphysical, especially what Wright
terms ‘‘the metaphysics of the commonplace, the
metaphysics of the quotidian’’ (Halflife, 22).
Wright’s imagery illustrates one technique by
which the poet may articulate ‘‘the anarchic
prodigalities of consciousness and subconscious-
ness.’’ Poems selected from among his early
work help unpack the construction and signifi-
cance of Wright’s attempt to translate feeling
into form by way of the image.
Wright began publishing in literary magazines
in the 1960s, and his first book,The Grave of the
Right Hand,appeared in 1970. Since then he has
published an additional nine books, including the
recentChickamauga (1995) and two collections:
Country Music(1982) andTheWorldoftheTen
Thousand Things(1991), which together include
almost every poem published in book form during
the previous twenty years. In 1993 he was awarded
the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize, and was hailed at the
time byPoetryeditor Joseph Parisi as ‘‘one of the
most distinctive voices in American poetry’’ and as
a ‘‘master image maker’’ (qtd. in ‘‘News Notes,’’
246). Helen Vendler, one ofthe first critics to take
note of Wright’s work, has said of his image-packed
poems that they ‘‘cluster, aggregate, radiate, add
layers like pearls’’ (1). This creation of images
is at the heart of Wright’s poetic practice, of his
style. This image-making power—imagination—is,
according to Wright, ‘‘closely allied to intelligenceTHE LANDSCAPE IS THE HIEROGLYPH OF
THE SELF INSCRIBED ON THE BACKDROP OF
ETERNITY. IT NUDGES ITS TRUTH TOWARD US IN
THE LANGUAGE OF THE POEM.’’Words Are the Diminution of All Things